How did our country get the name ‘India’? This is indeed intriguing because the Constituent Assembly debates show that every member who spoke on the naming issue, including veteran members of Congress and freedom fighters who suffered long jail terms, wanted the country to be named ‘Bharat’. There was not a single speech in defence of ‘India’.
Yet, when the matter was put to vote, Article 1(1) which said “India, that is, Bharat…” sailed through probably due to the silent prodding of the drafting committee members, and an amendment moved by H V Kamath which said “Bharat, or, in the English language, India…” fell through, with 38 votes in favour and 51 against.
The issue first cropped up in the Constituent Assembly on November 15, 1948, and again two days later on November 17. Since many amendments were moved to the draft article, Anantasayanam Ayyangar suggested that the matter be postponed. However, the Assembly finally got down to discussing the article 10 months later, on September 18, 1949. The first point to note is that although the Assembly gave its consent to “India, that is, Bharat...”, no member spoke in defence of ‘India’.
The ones who spoke were effusive about the name Bharat. Shibban Lal Saksena, H V Kamath, Kallur Subba Rao, B M Gupte, Hargovind Pant, Ram Sahai, Seth Govind Das, and Kamalapati Tripathi were all in favour of ‘Bharat’. Lokanath Misra said he preferred ‘Bharatavarsha’, a variant of Bharat, but not one member insisted the country should be called India.
Dr B R Ambedkar was getting restless due to the long speeches on Bharat’s civilisation and other topics. He intervened to say that there was a long debate in the drafting committee and “it was not possible to decide as to whether Bharat should be used after the word India.”
Kamalapati Tripathi, an older statesman and a top Congress leader who later became executive president of the party in the 1980s and Union Minister of Railways, delivered the most passionate speech in defence of the name Bharat in the Assembly on September 18, 1949. Although he preferred the opposite sequence, with Bharat being ahead of India, this is what he had to say: “When a country is in bondage, it loses its soul. During its slavery for one thousand years, our country, too, lost its everything. We lost our culture, we lost our history, we lost our prestige, we lost our humanity, we lost our self respect, we lost our soul and indeed we lost our form and name.”
If “that is” was necessary, it would have been more proper to say, “Bharat, that is, India”. But the very fact that Bharat had found its place in the Constitution was enough to excite Tripathi.He added, “Today, after remaining in bondage for a thousand years, this free country will regain its name and we do hope that after regaining its lost name it will regain its inner consciousness and external form and will begin to act under the inspiration of its soul, which had been so far in a sort of sleep. It will indeed regain its prestige in the world.”
Tripathi was enamoured by the historic name Bharat, stating that it “conjures before us by a stroke of magic the picture of cultured life of the centuries that have gone by”. He said there was no other country with such a history, such a culture and such a name whose age is counted in millennia. He further said, “There is no country in the world which has been able to preserve its name and its genius even after undergoing the amount of repression, the insults and prolonged slavery which our country had to pass through. Even after thousands of years, our country is still known as Bharat.” Adding that the name Bharat is full of sacred remembrances, he said that when we pronounce the word, we are reminded of Lord Krishna, Lord Buddha, Shankaracharya and the “mighty arms of Bhagwan Ram”.
He concluded his eloquent advocacy of Bharat by saying that including and accepting this name would enable us to “give to this country a form and to give back to it its lost soul, and we shall be able to protect it also. Bharat will be a great nation and will be able to serve humanity on a worldwide scale”.There are many reasons why India should become Bharat. First of all, India is a geographical construct and a name given to this land by foreigners, be it Persians, Iranians, the Greeks or the British. On the other hand, Bharat is the civilisational name.
Many members of the Constituent Assembly spoke about the Vishnu Purana, Brahma Purana, Vayu Purana, and the Vedic age, when India was known as Bharat.Significantly, the proposed switch from India to Bharat is also in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s determination over the last nine years to reconnect Bharat with its civilisational roots. This link was lost due to Islamic invasions, the British colonisation and Lord Macaulay’s plan to impose English. Thus, renaming the nation goes perfectly with the PM’s agenda.
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The Congress’ objections make no sense. Right from Nehru’s days, we have had Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL), Bharat Earth Movers Ltd (BEML), Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), among others. Rajiv Gandhi introduced the slogan Mera Bharat Mahaan and Rahul Gandhi recently completed his Bharat Jodo Yatra.
When you read Kamalapati Tripathi’s speech today, when India has become the fifth-largest economy in the world; when several Indians head global corporate entities; when India has landed a spacecraft on the moon; and when it has found its place at the high table among the comity of nations as evidenced by the spectacular success of G20, you realise how intuitive and prophetic he had been 74 years ago.
Tripathi’s masterclass on India’s civilisational and cultural strengths and history paints the current avatar of the Congress party and the INDIA bloc in poor light. It is also a strong argument for naming the country Bharat so that the disjunction between the evocative speeches made by members of the Constituent Assembly and their final vote can now be corrected.In short, the transition to Bharat must happen quickly so that the “tryst with destiny” that happened in August 1947 also becomes a tryst with our civilisational and cultural reality.
A Surya Prakash
Vice-Chairman, Executive Council, Prime Ministers Museum and Library, New Delhi