India

India has less of a tradition of political unity than China or Japan. Indeed, most of the names for India (such as 'India' or 'Hindustan') are not even Indian.

It is not easy to find a truly native (ie pre-Hindu) name for the entire sub-continent which today is known as India, but the conception certainly existed from an early date. The name 'Bharatavarsha' is used apparently in the Puranas with something like this conception. Bharatavarsa meant the 'division of the world' ('varsa') of the Bharatas - the heroes of the great Mahabharata epic.

Naming India

An independent India in 1947 officially decided to become Bharat (the short final 'a' not being pronounced in Hindi). When a unified state has occurred in Indian history, it has had varying religious, political, and even linguistic bases: such as Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and foreign. The rule of the sultans of Delhi and the Moghul emperors was at once Islamic and foreign, since most of the emperors were of Turkic or Afghan descent, and the Moghul dynasty was founded directly by incursion from what today is Afghanistan.

The supremely foreign unification of India, of course, was by the British. Under their direction India achieved its greatest unity, although this was to a degree lost upon independence thanks to the religious division between India and Pakistan. The Moghuls and British referred to India by its name in their own languages (ie. 'Hindustan' and 'India' respectively).

In addition to these complications, Indian history is also less well known and dated than that of China or Japan. Classical Indian literature displays little interest in history proper, which must be reconstructed from monumental inscriptions and foreign references.

The dating of both the Mauryas and the Guptas displays small uncertainties (the rulers and dates for them are taken from Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India, Oxford University Press, 1989). The 'Saka Era', as the Indian historical era, significantly starts rather late (AD 79) in relation to the antiquity of Indian civilisation.

Indeed, like Greece (circa 1200-800 BC) and Britain (circa AD 400-800), India experienced a dark age period, circa 1500-800 BC, in which literacy was lost and the Harappan civilisation vanished from history altogether. With the climate-change-induced collapse of Harappan civilisation from the seventeenth century BC, India saw a new wave of arrivals enter its north via the passes of the Hindu Kush mountains - the Indo-Aryans, a grouping of Indo-Europeans who spread from the Asian steppe over much of Europe, the upper Near East, and India.

As with the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England it took a few centuries before they were able to develop their own civilisation in their new homeland. But when they did they were to dominate Indian society. They changed Indian language, leaving many similarities between it and those of Persia and Europe.

Such twilight periods between the Harappan collapse and the emergence of Indo-Aryan civilisation may enhance the vividness of quasi-historical mythology like the Iliad, the Arthurian legends, and the Mahabharata.

Language links

The first systematic theory of the relationships between human languages began when Sir William Jones, 'Oriental Jones', proposed in 1788 that Greek and Latin, the classical languages of Europe, and Sanskrit, the classical language of India, had all descended from a common source.

The evidence for this came both from the structure of the languages - Sanskrit grammar has similarities to Greek and to nothing else - and the vocabulary of the languages. Therefore 'father' in English compares to 'vater' in German, 'pater' in Latin, 'patêr' in Greek, 'pitr' in Sanskrit, 'pedar' in Persian, etc.

On the other hand, 'father' in Arabic is 'ab', which hardly seems like any of the others (although strangely, it is the same as one of the most common forms of the same word in the Welsh language).

The evidence gave birth to the theory of Indo-European languages, and today the hypothetical language which would be the common source for all Indo-European languages is called proto-Indo-European (see related links).

Words which are related to each other by descent from a common source are called 'cognates'. English 'wise' and Sanskrit 'veda' are therefore cognates. Note that descent can become confused when words are subsequently borrowed.

English has borrowed 'idea' and 'agnostic' from Greek, 'video', 'visa', and 'cognition' from Latin, 'vista' from Spanish, etc. Another striking example of cognates are all the following words for 'is' - modern French and Persian pronunciation is given in parentheses:

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Text copyright © P L Kessler. An original feature for the History Files.