New and Old Terminologies


 
 
Concept Explanation
 

New and Old Terminologies

New and Old Terminologies: Historical records exist in a variety of languages which have changed considerably over the years. Medieval Persian, for example, is different from modern Persian.

Take the term “Hindustan”, for example. Today we understand it as “India”, the modern nation- state. When the term was used in the thirteenth century by Minhaj-I Siraj, a chronicler who wrote in Persian, he meant the areas of Punjab, Haryana and the lands between the Ganga and Yamuna. He used the term in a poliltical sense for lands that were a part of the dominions of the Delhi sultan. The fourteenth- century poet Amir Khusrau used the word “hind”. While the idea of a geographical and cultural entity like “India” did exist, the term “Hindustan” did not carry the political and national meanings which we associate with it today.

Historians today have to be careful about the terms they use because they meant different things in the past. Take, for example, a simple term like “foreigner”. It is used today to mean someone who is not an Indian. In the medieval period a “ foreigner” was any stranger who appeared say in a given village, someone who was not a part of that society or culture. A city- dweller, therefore, might have peasants living in the same village were not foreigners to each other, even though then may have had different religious or caste background.

During the Vedic Age, India was called Sapta Sindhu or the Land of the Seven Rivers. These rivers were the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, Sutlej and the mythical Saraswati. In Sanskrit, the Persian ‘H’ gets replaced by ‘S’. Thus, ‘Sindhu’ or Hindu was the name for India from very ancient times. The Greeks, called this land Indica. It is most probably from Indica that the subcontinent got its modern name ‘India’.

 
 


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