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NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 5 The chapter in three points — Before we move on ...

Book page 84 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
India is an ancient land, which has had many names in the course of its history.
Answer

The land is far older than any of its names, and older still than the modern nation. The chapter counts at least ten names for it, spread over thousands of years.

Roughly whenNameWho used it
Several thousand years agoSapta SindhavaThe Ṛig Veda — but only for the north-west region
From a few centuries BCE onwardBhāratavarṣha, JambudvīpaThe Mahābhārata — for the whole Subcontinent
6th century BCEHind, Hidu, HinduThe Persians
After the PersiansIndoi, IndikeThe ancient Greeks
About 250 BCEJambudvīpaAśhoka, in an inscription
Around 2,000 years agoYintu, Yindu, TianzhuThe ancient Chinese
About 1,800 years agoHindustānA Persian inscription; later, most invaders of India
A few centuries after the MahābhārataBhārataThe Viṣhṇu Purāṇa — and every Indian language since
1950 onwardIndia, that is BharatThe Constitution of India
Why so many names, and why they matter: a name is a source of history. Each of these names records a real meeting — a Vedic people naming their rivers, a Persian army at the Indus, a Chinese pilgrim looking for the Buddha's homeland, an emperor carving an order into rock. Learn where a name came from, and you have learnt who came, when, and from which direction.
Q2.
The names given by the ancient inhabitants of India include ‘Jambudvīpa’ and ‘Bhārata’. The latter became widespread in time and is the name of India in most Indian languages.
Answer

These are the two great home-grown names — and they were built from very different materials.

JambudvīpaBhārata
Meaning‘The island of the fruit of the jamun tree’ — a tree native to India, also called jambul or Malabar plum‘The country of the Bharatas’ (Bhāratavarṣha), from a main Vedic group of people; later, several kings were named Bharata
Named afterA plant — something growing in the landA people — those living in the land
First found inThe Mahābhārata; then Aśhoka's inscription of about 250 BCEThe Ṛig Veda for ‘Bharata’; the Mahābhārata for ‘Bhāratavarṣha’; the Viṣhṇu Purāṇa for ‘Bhārata’
What happened to itSlowly went out of everyday useSpread everywhere and is still our name — Bharat in north India, Bharatam in south India, and one of the two official names in the Constitution
Why ‘Bhārata’ won: a name taken from the people who live in a land can be adopted by everyone who lives there, whatever language they speak — and that is exactly what happened. By the time of the Viṣhṇu Purāṇa it had a clear geographical definition attached to it (“north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains”), so it was no longer only the name of one group's country but the name of the whole land. A name with a definition attached is far more useful than one without.
Did you know? The jamun after which Jambudvīpa is named is the same purple fruit sold in Indian markets every summer. An ancient name for the whole Subcontinent came from a common village tree — not from a king, a god or a conqueror.
Q3.
Foreign visitors to, or invaders of, India mostly adopted names derived from the Sindhu or Indus River; this resulted in names like ‘Hindu’, ‘Indoi’, and eventually ‘India’.
Answer

Every foreign name in this chapter comes from one Indian word — Sindhu, the river. Follow the three chains and you can watch it change shape:

Chain 1 (page 81): Sindhu → Hindhu → Indoi / Indike → India (Latin) → India (English), Inde (French)
Chain 2 (page 81): Sindhu → Hindhu → Indu → Yindu / Yintu (Chinese)
Chain 3 (page 83): Sindhu → Hind → Hindustān (Persian, later Arabic and most invaders)

Two things worth being careful about:

  • ‘Hindu’ in ancient Persian was a place-name, not a religion. The chapter says this in so many words: “in ancient Persian, ‘Hindu’ is a purely geographical term; it does not refer here to the Hindu religion.” It meant simply ‘the land beyond the Sindhu, and its people’.
  • ‘Hindustān’ is not as old as it sounds. It first appears in a Persian inscription about 1,800 years ago — long after Sapta Sindhava, Bhāratavarṣha and Jambudvīpa were already in use.
Why a river, and not a mountain or a city: the Subcontinent's northern wall has only a few usable passes, and every one of them brings a traveller down to the plains of the Indus. The first great thing anyone arriving from the west had to cross was that river — so its name became their name for everything on the far side. Meanwhile people already living here had no need to name themselves after a border, and named the land after their own people instead.
Tip for the exam: if you are asked “which river gave India its English name?”, the answer is the Indus (Sindhu) — and you should be able to write the chain Sindhu → Hindu → Indoi → India from memory.
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