ABSTRACT
One is not sure when the Indians acquired the idea of India. Sudipta Kaviraj calls India an ‘imaginary institution’ (Kaviraj, 1991). ‘The word Bhārata in the sense of a country is absent from the entire Vedic literature’ (Jha, 2009: 11). The Mahābhārata, the oldest epic of India,1 is the story of the children of Bharata, a mythical king. The ever-expanding Bhārata varṣa was their home. In Buddhist literature, Bhārata varṣa is held to be a part of Jambudvĭpa (Law, 1967: 9). The Viṣnu Purāna in the third century AD described its limits as the sea in the south and the Himalaya in the north. In ancient literature, this country was divided into five regions: the Madhya-deśa (central region) from Thaneswar and Pehoa (in Haryana) to Benaras and Allahabad (in Uttar Pradesh) or even the Raj Mahal hills of Jharkhand, the Brahmarṣideśa to its west (the two regions together coming to be called Āryāvarta), Uttarāpatha or Udichya to its north (north-west India), the Pratichya to its west, Dakhināpatha to its south, and the Purva-deśa or Prāchya to its east. ‘A portion of Jambudvĭpa known as the Aṅgadvĭpa was inhabited by Mlecchas according to Vāyupurāṇa’ (Law, 1967). While Uttarāpatha (meaning ‘way to north’) had an alternative name, Dakshināpatha (way to south) had none. ‘The term Uttarāpatha was at times applied to the whole of Northern India, and Dakshināpatha was in some ancient works restricted to the upper Deccan north of the Krishna, the far south being termed Tamilakam or the Tamil country’ (Majumdar et al., 1978 4f.).2
