After a dinner invite from the Indian president’s office sent to G20 summit delegates described Droupadi Murmu as the “President of Bharat”, instead of the usual “President of India”, speculation has been rife that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to move a resolution renaming India as 'Bharat' at the five-day special session in Parliament starting September 18.
The term “India” is a name given to India by external sources.
The name originated from the Sindhu River, which is today more popularly known as the Indus River, and was used by external sources to denote the area beyond the Sindhu River. Neighbouring Arabs and Iranians uttered the 's' as 'h' and called this land Hindu.
The term “Hindu” was later translated as Ἰνδία (Indía) in Greek, which was then copied into the Latin language, from which the English term “India” is derived.
That it is Bharat, rather than India, that has always been the self-designation of the people who lived between the “Himalayas and the Indian Ocean”, can be seen even from the Malay term for the west, which is Barat.
Interestingly, the Malay words for the cardinal direction might give us an indication as to the original homeland of the Malays. It is probably located in a place where India lay to the west ( Barat), the straits lay in the south (Selatan) and an unexplored area lay in the north ( the term Uttara in Sanskrit or Pali, tends to not only mean north, but can also mean “beyond” or “further”, which is a designation that is given to places that one is not familiar with).
But coming back to India, the fact that India has decided to change its name to Bharat at this juncture in its history reveals its ambition for the future.
The name India is the name given to India by colonial forces, which had subjugated India for centuries.
That India might be discarding the name given to it by its coloniser, to embrace a name that it gave itself during its glory days, indicates that India might be entering a revivalist phase in its history.
That the term Bharat originates from a celebrated mythological emperor, Bharata, might also indicate that India might have an imperialistic desire.
In the ancient texts of India, the descendants of Bharata are said to populate “the country that lies north of the ocean (Indian ocean) and south of the snowy mountains ( the Himalaya range).”
Today, this designation includes the area occupied by present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkmenistan, North-West Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh and maybe even Malaysia and Indonesia.
That India has just last month landed a spacecraft on the moon might also be a sign of an imperialistic desire.
In the post-World War 2 era, a desire to rule mankind is usually expressed by a space program.
That last month, India landed a spacecraft on the moon while China launched a three-person crew for its orbiting space station last May in the hopes of putting astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade, might indicate that India and China are developing a similar rivalry that America and the old Soviet Union developed during the cold war.
Last week, China released a map of China that claimed parts of Sabah and Sarawak while in a couple of weeks, India might start referring to itself as Bharat, which is a designation that could be extended to include areas that include modern-day Malaysia and Indonesia, is a sign that two imperialistic superpowers might be rising in our east and west.
While the grounds shift beneath our feet in Sabah and Sarawak, we can only hope that our leaders and not just busy quarrelling amongst themselves.
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