Columbus thought that he had discovered India and it caused con siderable confusion which persists in the European languages to this day.
Thus the German, for example, calls our county Indien, the people Inder, but another word from the same root Indianer is used to designate the Red Indians. During my stay in Germany, I had often great difficulty in explaining to elderly German gentlemen that I was an Inder not an Indianer. To them both names meant very much the same.
The French call India LInde, but the people, irrespective of the fact whether they are Hindus or Muslims, Hindou. I have often been present in scences where the young Muslim from India was indignantly maintaining that he was not a Hindu but a Muslim and the Frenchman trying in vain to explain that he was not referring to his religion but his nationality. Some Frenchmen coin a new word Brahminist to designate the Hindu by religion. The word lindien applies to the Red Indian.
The American follows the Frenchmen. He calls our country India all right but terms us all as Hindus. Thus it happened, some years back, when American papers announced that One abdur Rahman, a Hindu, was arrested for having landed in the States without a passport. When this news item was reproduced in India we had a hearty laugh at the Yankees ignorance but of course the American papers were not referring to the religion of Abdur Rahaman but to his nationality.
Will it be wise to increase the confusion at this state by giving the appellation Hindusthan to India? Already the wrong impression is Jaining ground in Europe and America that Pakistan contains only Muslims : if we start calling the rest of India by the name Hindusthan we are bound to strengthen the impression that this new Hindusthan contains only Hindus. Surely the Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, Jains and even the Hindus– barring the Mahasabha, perhaps– have no such intention. Vis-a-vis Pakistan, which is going to be a theocratic state, the raison detre of the rest of India has got to be non-religious (areligious) and anti-communal.
But before recommending Hindusthan to the rest of the world, let us consider the luck the word has had in India itself. Urdu uses only Hindustan, very seldom Bharata. Hindi, Gujerati and Marathi use both name in popular language but in their poetical flights on Sanskritic wings they shed Hindusthan. Bengali and Assamese rarely use Hindusthan, and when they refer to a Hindusthani they mean a person coming from Western India just as they use Madrasi to cover all South Indians (!) And finally the South Indian languages have been using Bharatavarsha (-Bhumi,–Mata,–Khanda,–Desha) without paying any attention to Hindusthan Whatsoever.
It is strange indeed that whereas the word Hindu which is Persian got entrance into all Indian Languages and even hybrid samasas (composites) like Hindu-dharma and Hindusamaja have become a part of the Indian Languages, the composite Hindusthan (where sthanam is a purer Sanskrit word than Hindu) was given no passport by the Bharat Government. It is like Subhadranandana Abhimanyu entering the chakravyuha while respectable elders bearing the tail fail to penetrate!
What about Bharata, then? Unfortunately the word is unknown in Sindhi, Baluchi, Poshto, Kashmiri and is very rarely used in Urdu. The rest of the world does not know it either. And surely the Congress has not given up all hopes for the return of the prodigal. Vande Bharatam (!) does not work : mataram has a better chance.
Netaji used Hind for the simple reason that he had to deal mostly with the Puanjabis- Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, to whom the word is familiar, but it does not appeal to the rest of India.
I therefore feel that there is no alternative but to maintain the status quo. We shall continue to use India when we write and speak English, and Bharatavarsha and Hindusthan according to the predilection and genious of the different Indian languages, as in the past. The man in the street would like to have one single word for India in all the Indian languages, but we must not forget the fact that India is a sub-continent and many people have many associations and many sentiments. Our attitude in this matter should be more Swiss than French. There are four languages in Switzerland : the French Swiss calls his country La Suisse; the German Swiss Die Schweitz: the Italian Swiss Svizzera- I regret I have forgotten the Roumansh word. It is true that the Swiss have another common word for their land in all the language- Helvetia, but it is used only on the postage stamp! It happens to be a Latin word too, and the Swiss have much less to do with dead Latin (Helvetia) than we have with the living English (India).
