Hindustan
Hindustan, along with its shortened form Hind, are the Persian names for India, broadly the Indian subcontinent, which later became used by its inhabitants in Hindi–Urdu.
After the Partition of India, it continues to be used as a historic name for the Republic of India.
A secondary meaning of Hindustan is as a geographic term for the Indo-Gangetic Plain in northern India.
Etymology
Hindustan is derived from the Persian word Hindū cognate with the Sanskrit Sindhu.The Proto-Iranian sound change *s > h occurred between 850–600 BCE, according to Asko Parpola. Hence, the Rigvedic sapta sindhava became hapta hindu in the Avesta. It was said to be the "fifteenth domain" created by Ahura Mazda, apparently a land of 'abnormal heat'.
In 515 BCE, Darius I annexed the Indus valley including Sindhu, the present day Sindh, which was called Hindu in Persian. During the time of Xerxes, the term "Hindu" was also applied to the lands to the east of Indus.
In middle Persian, probably from the first century CE, the suffix -stān was added, indicative of a country or region, forming the present word Hindūstān. Thus, Sindh was referred to as Hindūstān in the Naqsh-e-Rustam inscription of Shapur I in 262 CE.
Historian B. N. Mukherjee states that from the lower Indus basin, the term Hindūstān got gradually extended to "more or less the whole of the subcontinent". The Greco-Roman name "India" and the Chinese name Shen-tu also followed a similar evolution.
The Arabic term Hind, derived from Persian Hindu, was used by the Arabs to refer to the Indianised region from the Makran coast to the Indonesian archipelago. But eventually it too became identified with the Indian subcontinent.
Current usage
Republic of India
"Hindustan" is often used to refer to the modern day Republic of India. Slogans involving the term are commonly heard at sports events and other public programmes involving teams or entities representing the modern nation-state of India. In marketing, it is also commonly used as an indicator of national origin in advertising campaigns and is present in many company names. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and his party the Muslim League, insisted on calling the modern-day Republic of India "Hindustan" in reference to its Hindu-majority population.People
In one usage among Hindustani speakers in India, the term 'Hindustani' refers to an Indian, irrespective of religious affiliation. Among non-Hindustani speakers e.g. Bengali-speakers, "Hindustani" is sometimes used to describe persons who are from the upper Ganges, also regardless of religious affiliation, but rather as a geographic term.Hindustani is sometimes used as an ethnic term applied to South Asia. For example, Hindoestanen is a Dutch word used to describe people of South Asian origin, in the Netherlands and Suriname.
Language
Hindustani is also used to refer to the Hindustani language, which derives from the dialect of Western Uttar Pradesh, Southern Uttarakhand and Delhi areas.The Hindi register itself derives its name from shortened form, Hind.
Historical usages
Early Persian scholars had limited knowledge of the extent of India. After the advent of Islam and the Muslim conquests, the meaning of Hindustan interacted with its Arabic variant Hind, which was derived from Persian as well, and almost became synonymous with it. The Arabs, engaging in oceanic trade, included all the lands from Tis in western Balochistan to the Indonesian archipelago, in their idea of Hind, especially when used in its expansive form as "Al-Hind". Hindustan did not acquire this elaborate meaning. According to André Wink, it also did not acquire the distinction, which faded away, between Sind and Hind ; other sources state that Sind and Hind were used synonymously from early times, and that after the arrival of Islamic rule in India, "the variants Hind and Sind were used, as synonyms, for the entire subcontinent." The 10th century text Hudud al-Alam defined Hindustan as roughly the Indian subcontinent, with its western limit formed by the river Indus, southern limit going up to the Great Sea and the eastern limit at Kamarupa, the present day Assam. For the next ten centuries, both Hind and Hindustan were used within the subcontinent with exactly this meaning, along with their adjectives Hindawi, Hindustani and Hindi. Indeed, in 1220 A.D., historian Hasan Nizami described Hind as being "from Peshawar to the shores of the Ocean, and in the other direction from Siwistan to the hills of Chin."North India
With the Turko-Persian conquests starting in the 11th century, a narrower meaning of Hindustan also took shape. The conquerors were liable to call the lands under their control Hindustan, ignoring the rest of the subcontinent.In the early 11th century a satellite state of the Ghaznavids in the Punjab with its capital at Lahore was called "Hindustan". After the Delhi Sultanate was established, north India, especially the Gangetic plains, came to be called "Hindustan".
Scholar Bratindra Nath Mukherjee states that this narrow meaning of Hindustan existed side by side with the wider meaning, and some of the authors used both of them simultaneously.
The Mughal Empire called its lands 'Hindustan'. The term 'Mughal' itself was never used to refer to the land. As the empire expanded, so too did 'Hindustan'. At the same time, the meaning of 'Hindustan' as the entire Indian subcontinent is also found in Baburnama and Ain-i-Akbari.
Kingdom of Nepal usage
The last Gorkhali King Prithvi Narayan Shah self proclaimed the newly unified Kingdom of Nepal as Asal Hindustan due to North India being ruled by the Islamic Mughal rulers. The self proclamation was done to enforce Hindu social code Dharmashastra over his reign and refer to his country as being inhabitable for Hindus. He also referred Northern India as Mughlan and called the region infiltrated by Muslim foreigners.Colonial Indian usage
These dual meanings persisted with the arrival of Europeans. Rennel produced an atlas titled the Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan or the Mogul Empire in 1792, which was in fact a map of the Indian subcontinent. Rennel thus conflated the three notions, 'India', 'Hindustan' and the Mughal Empire. J. Bernoulli, to whom Hindustan meant the Mughal Empire, called his French translation La Carte générale de l'Inde.This 'Hindustan' of British reckoning was divided into British-ruled territories and the territories ruled by native rulers. The British officials and writers, however, thought that the Indians used 'Hindustan' to refer to only North India. An Anglo-Indian Dictionary published in 1886 states that, while Hindustan means India, in the "nativa parlance" it had come to represent the region north of Narmada River excluding Bihar and Bengal.
During the independence movement, the Indians referred to their land by all three names: 'India', 'Hindustan' and 'Bharat'. Mohammad Iqbal's poem Tarānah-e-Hindī was a popular patriotic song among Indian independence activists.
Sāre jahāṉ se acchā Hindustān hamārā
Partition of India
The 1940 Lahore Resolution of the All-India Muslim League demanded sovereignty for the Muslim-majority areas in the northwest and northeast of India, which came to be called 'Pakistan' in popular parlance and the remaining India came to be called 'Hindustan'. The British officials too picked up the two terms and started using them officially.However, this naming did not meet the approval of Indian leaders due to the implied meaning of 'Hindustan' as the land of Hindus. They insisted that the new Dominion of India should be called 'India', not 'Hindustan'. Probably for the same reason, the name 'Hindustan' did not receive official sanction of the Constituent Assembly of India, whereas 'Bharat' was adopted as an official name. It was recognised however that 'Hindustan' would continue to be used unofficially.
The Indian Armed Forces use the salutary version of the name, "Jai Hind" as a battle cry.