Hindustan
Topic: India, That Is Bharat: Names of India and Unity in Diversity · NCERT: Class 6, Ch 5 "India, That Is Bharat"
Meaning
Hindustān means "land of the Hindus". In this name, 'Hindu' is used in the old Persian sense of "people of the Indus land". According to the NCERT chapter, the word first appears in a Persian inscription about 1,800 years ago (c. 3rd century CE, the time of the Sasanian kings of Persia). It later became the standard name that most invaders and Persian-language writers used for India. In the end, the name comes from Sindhu, the Indus river.
Example
Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire (1526), wrote his memoirs, the Baburnama. In them, he calls the land he conquered Hindustan and describes its people, plants and animals.
Don't confuse with
- Hindush: this was the older Old Persian name, of Darius I's time in the 6th century BCE, for the Indus region only. Hindustān is a later name for the wider land.