NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 5 Chapter opening — The Big Questions
Book page 75 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
How do we define India?
Answer
There is no single answer — the chapter shows that India can be defined in three different ways, and all three are true at the same time.
Way of defining India
What it says
Where the chapter shows it
1. As a modern nation
India today has defined borders, defined states and a known population. Its Constitution begins: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.”
Page 77; Don't Miss Out and Fig. 5.5, pages 81–82
2. As a geographical region
The land we call the Indian Subcontinent, marked off by natural boundaries — the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush in the north, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean around the rest.
Fig. 5.2, page 76; Think About It, page 77
3. As an idea that grew over time
Ancient Indians defined it the same way the map does — the land “north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains”, and “from Cape Kumari in the south to the great mountain in the north”. The name and the boundaries have shifted again and again.
Viṣhṇu Purāṇa and the Tamil poem, page 80
Why the modern definition is not enough. The chapter's very first paragraph warns us: India “was very different 500 years ago, 2,000 years ago or even 5,000 years ago”. In Aśhoka's time, about 250 BCE, the land he called Jambudvīpa included what is today Bangladesh, Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan. So a definition made of today's borders cannot describe the India of the past.
The definition that has lasted longest is the geographical one. Here is what the Viṣhṇu Purāṇa's one-line definition actually describes:
The Viṣhṇu Purāṇa's definition of Bhārata, drawn as a north–south section: mountains above, ocean below, and the country in between.
Why all three definitions matter together: the modern definition tells you what India is now, the geographical one tells you what the land has always been, and the historical one reminds you that borders are made by people and can change. A student of history needs all three — otherwise you would read an ancient inscription about ‘Jambudvīpa’ and wrongly imagine today's map.
Did you know? The chapter's opening quotation by Sri Aurobindo defines India in exactly this geographical way — “all this great surge of humanity between the Himalayas and the two seas”. The ‘two seas’ are the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
Q2.
What were the ancient names for India?
Answer
There were many, and they fall into two families: names Indians gave themselves, and names foreigners built out of the river Sindhu.
Family 1 — names given by Indians
Name
What it means
How much land it covers
Source
Sapta Sindhava
‘Land of the seven rivers’, from Sindhu = the Indus, or a river in general
Only the north-west region of the Subcontinent
The Ṛig Veda, India's most ancient text
Bhāratavarṣha
‘The country of the Bharatas’ — the Bharatas being one of the main Vedic groups of people, named first in the Ṛig Veda
The entire Subcontinent
The Mahābhārata, written from a few centuries BCE onward
Jambudvīpa
‘The island of the fruit of the jamun tree’ — the jambul or Malabar plum tree, native to India
The entire Subcontinent
The Mahābhārata; and Aśhoka, c. 250 BCE, in one of his inscriptions
Bhārata (Bharat / Bharatam)
“The country that lies north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains”
The entire Subcontinent
The Viṣhṇu Purāṇa; still in use today
Alongside these, the Mahābhārata lists dozens of regional names that still echo in today's map: Kāshmīra (more or less today's Kashmir), Kurukṣhetra (parts of Haryana), Vanga (parts of Bengal), Prāgjyotiṣha (roughly Assam), Kaccha (Kutch) and Kerala (more or less today's Kerala).
Family 2 — names given by foreigners, all from ‘Sindhu’
Who
Name
How it came about
Persians (ancient Iran)
Hind, Hidu, Hindu
In the 6th century BCE a Persian emperor gained control of the Indus region. ‘Hindu’ is simply ‘Sindhu’ in Persian — a purely geographical word, with no religious meaning
Greeks
Indoi, Indike
Borrowed from Persian, dropping the initial ‘h’, because that letter did not exist in Greek
Romans / Latin, and after them English and French
India, Inde
The Greek forms passed into Latin as India, and from Latin into modern European languages
Chinese
Yintu, Yindu, Tianzhu
Also from ‘Sindhu’, through the steps Sindhu → Hindhu → Indu → Yindu. Tianzhu could also be read as ‘heavenly master’ — a sign of respect for India as the land of the Buddha
Persian, later Arabic
Hindustān
First used in a Persian inscription some 1,800 years ago; later the usual term among invaders of India
The whole family tree in one picture:
Every foreign name for India grows out of one Indian word — Sindhu, the river. The two chains printed on page 81 of the book are the blue and the green branches.
Why one river gave a whole country its name: foreigners arriving from the west met the Indus first. The name of the first great thing they crossed became, in their languages, the name of everything that lay beyond it. That is why our English name — India — is a foreign pronunciation of an Indian river, while our Indian name — Bhārata — comes from a people named in the Ṛig Veda.