What the reproduction shows. A photograph of the first page of the original, hand-written Constitution of India, on cream parchment. A wide painted border of gold-brown lotus medallions with green centres runs round all four sides. At the top centre, inside a gilt rectangle, is a painted copy of an Indus Valley seal — a humped bull standing in profile, facing left, with a line of undeciphered Indus signs above it. Under the picture, in flowing English calligraphy, stands the heading Part I and below it The Union and its Territory. The numbered clauses of Article 1 follow in the same hand, the first of them a single line that names the country twice. Small notes in the left margin label each clause — “Name and territory of the Union”, “Admission or establishment of new States”, “Formation of new States and alteration of areas, boundaries or names of existing States”.
Yes. Look at the very first numbered line of the handwritten text, just below the two headings.
| Where to look on Fig. 5.5 | What is written there |
|---|---|
| Top of the page, inside the decorated border | A drawing of a seal from the Indus civilisation, showing a bull |
| First heading | Part I |
| Second heading | The Union and its Territory |
| First numbered clause — Article 1(1) | “1. (1) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” |
| In the left-hand margin, beside that clause | The small note “Name and territory of the Union” |
Reading the phrase carefully. It is doing two jobs in six words:
- It gives the country two official names — India and Bharat — and says they mean exactly the same thing. Neither replaces the other.
- It joins the two families of names from this very chapter: Bharat, the name Indians gave themselves (from Bhāratavarṣha, ‘the country of the Bharatas’), and India, the name that travelled from Sindhu → Persian Hindu → Greek Indoi → Latin India.
The Hindi version says the same thing the other way round. The Don't Miss Out box on page 81 points this out: the Constitution was first written in English as ‘India, that is Bharat’, and the Hindi version reads ‘Bhārat arthāth India’.