A land with many names

The chapter opens with Sri Aurobindo: 'In India at a very early time the spiritual and cultural unity was made complete and became the very stuff of the life of all this great surge of humanity between the Himalayas and the two seas.' Notice how he places India: not by a border on a map, but between the Himalayas and the two seas. People described it that way 2,000 years ago too, as this chapter will show.

Today India is a modern nation, with fixed borders, fixed states and a known population. But 500 years ago, 2,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago it was very different.

This part of the world, which we often call the Indian Subcontinent, has had many different names and changing boundaries. Think of how your family may call you by different names: your mother one, your father another, your sister a third. India too has been called by many names, both by its inhabitants (the people who live in a place) and by visitors from outside.

Look first at the physical map of the Subcontinent. Its natural boundaries are easy to see: the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush wall off the north and northwest, and the sea closes in the rest.

The same map shows the great rivers: the Indus and Sarasvatī, the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, the Yamuna and Ganga, the Brahmaputra, the Chambal, Narmada and Tapti, the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri.

These names reach us from ancient texts, the accounts of travellers and pilgrims, and inscriptions. Those are the sources of history you met in the last chapter, now used to answer one question: what was this land called?