When was the word "India" used first time.

[prasad1]

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Nivedita Kannan:
Then recently I came across that word in my spanish class. We were reading about Mexico and Latin American countries. The words like Indians, Indiana were often repeated.When I asked my Mexican teacher naively whether they are referring to Red Indians. She said, no no they are the natives of the countries. They are the people who follow the actual tradition, religion and culture of the country . But there are very very few of them .(Almost the entire American land has been converted to Christianity/Catholic by the Europeans.) So why are they called Indians I had asked. She told this word comes from the Latin root "indegena" !!

Voila !! We all know the word " indigenous " don't we? It means ,originating from a region or inherent character of a region.All the languages of the European countries, English, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Spanish etc. have Latin root. And Europeans ruled most of the world. They had already conquered the West before coming to the East. They were used to calling the natives as Indians there. So when they pitched up in Bengal , they called it the East India Company. Europeans came to India during the Mughal reign. As far as I have read no one has referred to Bharat/Hindustan as India till the Europeans came. (I keep telling 'Europeans' because there were British, Portuguese and French who came looking for us!!)

So my conclusion:

'India' has everything to do with the word 'Indigenous' and very little to do with the word 'Indus' because the Persians who came through Indus did not call it India and the Europeans in whose era the name 'India' caught up, did not come through Indus!

'Hindusthan' might be a derivative of 'Indus', but not 'India' is my strong opinion!

How and when did the name "India" come into use?

Answer (1 of 175): The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Persians uttered ‘s’ as ‘h’ and called this land Hindu. Greeks pronounced this name as Indus. A little history - Back in the days, when Sanskrit was the de facto language, this big group of rivers flowing through erstwhile...

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[prasad1]

Nishant Singh:
,

If Vedas, Geeta, Upanishads, Puranas, Ramayan, Mahabharat, or any other Sanatan dharma granths have mentioned word Hindu ?? ...No .. it is not a native word nor you can find it in Vedic scriptures. The word Hindu is found, of course, in Persian literature. Hindu-e-falak means “the black of the sky’ and Saturn.”
In the Arabic language Hind not Hindu means nation. the name Hindu was given by the Persians to the people of our country when they landed on the sacred soil of Sindhu.” [R. N. Suryanarayan, Universal
Religion, p 1-2, published from Mysore in 1952.]

“Some say that this word Hindu is a corrupt form of Sindhu because Persian people had difficulty pronouncing 'S'of Sindhu and they called people living on the banks of Sindhu river Hindu but this is wrong because Sindhu was the name of the river and not the name of the community. Moreover, it is
correct that this name has been given to the original Aryan race of the region by Muslim invaders to humiliate them. In Persian, the word Hindu means slave, and according to Islam, all those who did not embrace Islam were termed as slaves.” [Maharishi Shri Dayanand Saraswati Aur Unka Kaam, edited by Lala Lajpat Rai, published from Lahore in 1898, in the chapter of introduction.]

Besides, a Persian dictionary titled Lughet-e-Kishwari, published in Lucknow in 1964, gives the meaning of Hindu as ‘chore (thief), dakoo (dacoit), raahzan (waylayer), and ghulam (slave)’. Yet according to another dictionary named Urdu-Feroze-ul-Laghat – part 1 (p 615), the meaning of the word Hindu is as under: In Turkish: chore, raahzan and lutera (looter). In Persian: ghulam (slave), barda (obedient servant), sia faam (black color) and kaalaa (black). The hypothesis that Persians had difficulty in pronouncing Sindhu is
baseless and preposterous. For example, how do the Persians who are SHIA MUSLIMS pronounce words like Shia, Sunni, and Shariat? In Punjabi, there are many, many words of Persian origin, which start with “s” and “sh.” For example, sardar or sirdar (leader), shaheed (martyr), shhadat (martyrdom) shair (lion), sahir (town), sar (walk) shayer (poet), shakar (sugar), sja (punishment), siahi (black ink), siah(black) and so on. The word Punjab is also derived from Persian panch and aab (five waters).

How and when did the name "India" come into use?

Answer (1 of 175): The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Persians uttered ‘s’ as ‘h’ and called this land Hindu. Greeks pronounced this name as Indus. A little history - Back in the days, when Sanskrit was the de facto language, this big group of rivers flowing through erstwhile...

www.quora.com

 

[prasad1]

We didn't start with the name India at all. Let's take a trip down memory lane:

1. Jambudvipa: This was used in the our ancient texts, Puranas. It literally means the Island of Jambu Trees. The descriptions of which either match prehistoric geography or mythology.
2. Bharat: This is the name described in later texts (Vedas & Mahabharat). It's probably derived from Bharatvarsha, which is the term used to refer to Earth, based on the fact that Emperor/King Bharata was the all-powerful ruler. Although Varsha or versa is literally supposed to be a continent or a separate landmass.
   This might have included countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.
3. Hindustan: Sindh, known as Hind in Persian, is the region North-West of India and also the state of Gujarat, through which the Indus River. This is the front from which India was generally invaded after the fall of the Maurya Dynasty. By the time the Mughals invaded, Hind + stan (place) became known as Hindustan.
4. India: It was used as early as 400 B.C. by the Greek, but only popularised (or asserted permanently) during the British reign. This interpretation comes from the Greek derivation of Sindh i.e. Indus which has Latin roots.

Bharat is still officially recognized along with India.

How and when did the name "India" come into use?

Answer (1 of 175): The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Persians uttered ‘s’ as ‘h’ and called this land Hindu. Greeks pronounced this name as Indus. A little history - Back in the days, when Sanskrit was the de facto language, this big group of rivers flowing through erstwhile...

www.quora.com

 

[prasad1]

(The word Sindhu, in general means 'river' and because of the 7 tributaries of the river, the region was called Sapt-Sindhu)

The name Hind is derived from the Iranian equivalent of Sindh, as, the Iranian 'H' is cognate with Sanskrit 'S'. And the persian word -stan means country or land. Thus the name Hindustan.

The Greeks, dropping the 'H' from Hindu, derived the word Indos .

The Latin form of Indos is Indus.

In Middle English (under French influence), the name was replaced by Inde.

In Early Modern English it was known as Indie.

Due to the influence of Latin, the name India came back to English usage from the 17th century onwards.

How and when did the name "India" come into use?

Answer (1 of 175): The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Persians uttered ‘s’ as ‘h’ and called this land Hindu. Greeks pronounced this name as Indus. A little history - Back in the days, when Sanskrit was the de facto language, this big group of rivers flowing through erstwhile...

www.quora.com

 

[prasad1]

The popular belief is:


From the river Indus that flows in the subcontinent. The river however flows in modern day Pakistan for a major part of its course.
Edit: The sub-continent was home to the Indus valley civilization that flourished
in the bronze age (3300–1300 BCE; mature period 2600–1900 BCE) Wikipedia

 

[Brahmanyan]

Here's a part of the article I found in the website Ancient History Encyclopedia, submitted by Sanujit , published on 13 January 2011 .

"The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Neighbouring Arabs, Iranians uttered‘S’ as ‘h’ and called this land of Hindu. Greeks pronounced this name as Indus.

Sindhu is the name of the Indus River, mentioned in the Rig-Veda, one of the oldest extantIndo -European texts, composed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent roughly between 1700-1100 BC. There are strong linguistic and cultural similarities with the Iranian Avesta, often associated with the early culture of 2200-1600 BC.

The English term is from Greek Ἰνδία (Indía), via Latin India. Iindía in Byzantine ethnography denotes the region beyond the Indus (Ἰνδός) River, since Herodotus alluded to "Indian land". Ἰνδός, Indos, "an Indian", from Avestan Hinduš refers to Sindh and is listed as a conquered territory by Persian emperor Darius I (550-486 BC) in the Persepolis terrace inscription.

The name India was known in Old English (between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century AD) and was used in King Alfred's translation of Orosius. The name was, under French influence, replaced by Ynde or Inde. It went into Early Modern English (the latter half of the 15th century to 1650 AD). Thus, Indie appeared the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare - both belong to the late phase of Early Modern English. The name India then came back to English usage from the 17th century onwards, may be due to the influence of Latin, or Spanish or Portuguese."
Brahmanyan,
Bangalore.