The name India is derived from Indus, which originates from the Old Persian word Hinduš. The latter term stems from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which was the historical local appellation for the Indus River. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi (Ινδοί), which translates as the people of the Indus. The geographical term Bharat (pronounced [ˈbʱaːrət̪] , which is recognised by the Constitution of India as an official name for the country, is used by many Indian languages in its variations. The eponym of Bharat is Bharata, a theological figure that Hindu scriptures describe as a legendary emperor of ancient India. Hindustan ([ɦɪnd̪ʊˈst̪aːn] was originally a Persian word that meant Land of the Hindus; prior to 1947, it referred to a region that encompassed northern India and Pakistan. It is occasionally used to solely denote India in its entirety. Persian was the official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature. Many of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianised Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkic languages as their mother tongues. The Mughals were also from Persianized Central Asia, but spoke Chagatai Turkic as their first language at the beginning, before eventually adopting Persian. Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of north India. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and Indo-Persian history, suggests that Persian became the lingua franca of the empire under Akbar for various political and social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature. The influence of these languages on Indian apabhramshas led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of todays Urdu, Hindi, and Hindustani. The Mughal Era to the British Raj: Persian persisted as the language of the Mughal regime up to and including the year 1707 which marked the death of the Emperor Aurangzeb, generally considered the last of the Great Mughals. Thereafter, with the decline of the Mughal empire, the 1739 invasion of Delhi by Nadir Shah and the gradual growth of European power within the South Asia, Persian or Persian culture commenced a period of decline although it nevertheless enjoyed patronage and may even have flourished within the many regional empires or kingdoms of South Asia including that of the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r. 1799–1837). Persian as a language of governance and education was abolished in 1839 by the British and the last Mughal emperor Bahadhur Shah Zafar, even if his was rule was purely symbolic or ceremonial, was overthrown in 1857 by the British.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 06:35:13 +0000
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