Indian

‘Indian’, when referring to the Indian subcontinent and its inhabitants, derived from the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman indien. ¹ ‘Indian’ originated from the Greek name for the river Indus, which flows through modern-day Pakistan, and which specifically related India to the geographies of the East until the late fifteenth century. ² After 1492, Europeans also used ‘Indian’ to label the Indigenous peoples of North and South America, from the Iroquois of present-day Canada to the Inca of Peru. ³ As Jonathan Gil Harris has suggested, Columbus's voyages to America turned ‘Indian’ into ‘the capacious, portable, and problematic term for diverse peoples around the globe’, so that Europeans, in many ways, ‘invented “Indians”’ as a result of global expansion. ⁴ Imtiaz Habib notes that the ‘predatory impulse’ of early modern expansion meant that the descriptor ‘Indian’ often revealed more about the intent and behaviour of the English than about the societies described. ⁵