How foreigners named India

The first foreigners to mention India were the Persians, the ancient people of Iran. In the 6th century BCE, a Persian emperor led a military campaign and took control of the region of the Indus River, which, as we saw, was earlier called 'Sindhu'.

So in their earliest records and stone inscriptions, the Persians called India 'Hind', 'Hidu' or 'Hindu': their way of saying 'Sindhu'. In ancient Persian, 'Hindu' was purely a geographical word, the name of a place; it did not refer to the Hindu religion.

From these Persian sources, the ancient Greeks named the region 'Indoi' or 'Indike'. They dropped the first letter 'H' of 'Hindu', because their Greek language had no such letter. So the chain runs: Sindhu → Hindu → Indoi / Indike. The missing letter is why the word 'India' has no H today.

The ancient Chinese also had contact with India. In several texts they call it 'Yintu' or 'Yindu', which also comes from 'Sindhu': Sindhu → Hindhu → Indu → Yindu.

Another Chinese name for India, also from 'Sindhu', was 'Tianzhu', which could also be understood as 'heavenly master'. This shows the respect the ancient Chinese had for India as the land of the Buddha.

You probably know the more recent name 'Hindustān', but you may not know that it was first used in a Persian inscription some 1,800 years ago! Later it became the name most invaders of India used for the Subcontinent.

One traveller carried India's learning home with him. Xuanzang (also spelt Hiuen Tsang) travelled from China to India in the 7th century CE. He visited many parts of India, met scholars, collected Buddhist texts, and went back to China after 17 years. There he translated the manuscripts he had taken from Sanskrit into Chinese. Several other Chinese scholars visited India over the centuries.