India is called India because of a river: the name comes from Sindhu (सिन्धु), the Sanskrit name of the Indus, which the Persians pronounced Hindu, the Greeks turned into Indos and Indía (Ἰνδία), and the Romans passed on as Latin India, the form English uses today. That derivation is not seriously disputed. What makes the question interesting is that the country carries a second official name, Bharat, which has an entirely separate Sanskrit origin, and a widely used informal third, Hindustan, which comes from the same river by a Persian route. Article 1 of the Constitution, in force since 1950, puts the first two side by side: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” Below, each layer of the name is taken in turn, from the oldest recorded form to the modern one, with the language it belongs to, its approximate date and the source that preserves it.
Sindhu in the Rigveda: Sanskrit, 2nd Millennium BCE
The oldest layer is the Sanskrit word sindhu. Its range of meanings in Sanskrit, as summarised in the Wikipedia article on the Indus, runs from “stream” and “river” through “flood” and “sea” to “the Indus” itself and “the country in the vicinity of the Indus”. In other words, it began as an ordinary word for a large body of moving water and became the proper name of the greatest river the Vedic peoples knew. The hymns of the Rigveda, composed in the second millennium BCE, call the Punjab Sapta Sindhu, “seven rivers”, and the Avesta, the scripture of the Iranians to the west, uses the matching phrase Hapta Həndu. That pairing already shows the sound change that matters for everything that follows: where Sanskrit has an initial s, the Iranian languages have h.
The river itself is enormous. By the longer of the two lengths in common use, the Indus runs about 3,180 km (1,980 mi), against a widely quoted shorter figure of 2,880 km, from its source in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, where it is called the Sengge Zangbo, through Indian-administered Ladakh and Pakistani-administered Gilgit-Baltistan in the disputed Kashmir region, and then south through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea near Karachi. Its basin covers roughly 1,120,000 km². One irony of the name is that most of the river’s course now lies in Pakistan; the modern Republic of India holds only its upper reaches in Ladakh and some of the Punjab tributaries. The full story of the river and the civilisation on its banks is told in our guide to the Indus, cradle of civilisation.
Hinduš Under Darius I: Old Persian, c. 516 BCE
The second layer is Persian. When the Achaemenid king Darius I conquered Sindh in about 516 BCE, the lower Indus basin became a province of his empire, and the Old Persian equivalent of Sindhu was used for it: Hindu, with the province called Hinduš. The s-to-h shift was regular in Old Persian, so nothing about the change implies a misunderstanding or an insult. It is simply how the word sounded in a neighbouring language.
Around 515 BCE Darius sent a Greek subject, Scylax of Caryanda, to explore the river. Scylax probably took over the Persian name and carried it into Greek, which is the hinge on which the whole Western form of the name turns. The same Persian Hindu also became, much later, the word “Hindu” for the religion, and the first half of “Hindustan”.
Indos and Indía: Ionic and Koine Greek, 5th to 3rd Century BCE
The third layer is Greek. The Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor did not pronounce an initial h, and the aspirate was dropped, so Persian Hindu became Greek Indos, used both for the river and for “an Indian”. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, uses the term in his Histories and stretches it from the people of the lower Indus to everyone living east of Persia, even though he knew very little about the geography of the region.
By the time of Alexander the Great in the 320s BCE, Indía in Koine Greek meant the whole region beyond the Indus, and Alexander’s companions knew of land as far east as the Ganges delta, which they called Gangaridai. The ambassador Megasthenes then pushed the name further. Sent to the court of Chandragupta Maurya at Pataliputra (modern Patna), he wrote a book called Indica and included the southern peninsula in his India. From his account onward, the Greek name covered most of the subcontinent rather than one river valley.
Latin borrowed the Greek form as India; the 2nd-century CE writer Lucian uses it. A word that often gets wrongly attached to this chain is Sanskrit indu, “a drop” or “the Moon”. The Wikipedia article on the names of India is explicit that it is unrelated, despite occasional claims to the contrary.
Bhāratavarṣa at Hathigumpha: Prakrit, 1st Century BCE
The fourth layer runs on a completely separate track. Bhārata is not a version of Sindhu at all. In Sanskrit it is a derivation of Bharata, originally an epithet of the fire god Agni, built on the root bhr-, “to bear or carry”, the same Indo-European root as English “bear” and Latin ferō. In the Rigveda the Bharatas are a tribe, one of the principal peoples of Āryāvarta, who fight in the Battle of the Ten Kings. The Mahabharata, composed between about 200 BCE and 300 CE, uses Bharat for a much larger region, and the Puranas call the land Bhāratavarṣa to distinguish it from the other varṣas, or continents, of their cosmology. The Vishnu, Vayu, Linga, Brahmanda, Agni, Skanda and Markandeya Puranas all use the name.
There are two traditional explanations of whose name it is. Hindu tradition links it to the Bharata people of the Vedas, or to Bharata the son of Dushyanta in the Mahabharata. Jain tradition credits Bharata, eldest son of the first Tirthankara, Rishabhdeva, described as a universal monarch after whom the land was named. These are religious traditions rather than linguistic proofs, and both are reported here as traditions.
The oldest physical evidence for the name is carved in stone. The Hathigumpha (“elephant cave”) inscription, seventeen lines of Prakrit in Brahmi script cut into a cave in the Udayagiri hills about 5 km west of Bhubaneswar airport in Odisha, was made for the Jain king Kharavela of Kalinga. Its date is given as anywhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE; on the evidence of the letter forms, palaeographers place it between the middle of the 1st century BCE and the early 1st century CE. It mentions Bharatavarsha, but in a narrow sense: the name there covers part of northern India, the Ganges region west of Magadha, not the whole subcontinent.
Hindūstān at Naqsh-e Rustam: Middle Persian, c. 262 CE
The fifth layer returns to Persian. Probably from the 1st century CE, Middle Persian added the suffix -stān, “country” or “region”, to Hindu, producing Hindūstān. The Sasanian emperor Shapur I used it for Sindh in his inscription at Naqsh-e Rustam in about 262 CE. In Arabic the word became al-Hind (الهند), the name used in the 11th-century Tarikh al-Hind.
After the Islamic conquests that began in the 11th century, the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal emperors called their Indian dominion, centred on Delhi, Hindustan. The word entered English in the 17th century and was used alongside India throughout the British period. It survives in everyday Hindi-Urdu, in the slogan Jai Hind, and in Hind Mahāsāgar, the standard Hindi name for the Indian Ocean. In modern Arabic, al-Hind still means the Republic of India.
Jambudvīpa and Tianzhu: Names Used Further East
Two other names belong to this history even though neither survived as the country’s name. Jambudvīpa (जम्बुद्वीप), literally “berry island”, appears in ancient scriptures before Bharat became widespread, and the Maurya emperor Ashoka used it in his inscriptions for his realm. Through Buddhism it travelled into Southeast Asia, where it was the usual term for India before the English word arrived; Myanmar called it Zabudipa, and the term still occasionally appears in Thailand, Malaysia, Java and Bali.
China, meanwhile, received the Sindhu name by a Persian route and wrote it as Tianzhu (天竺). Its Sino-Xenic readings are Tenjiku in Japanese, Cheonchuk in Korean and Thiên Trúc in Vietnamese, and Buddhists across East Asia used it for the holy land of their religion. Tibetan sources used other names again: Gyagar, and from at least the 13th century Phagyul, “land of the noble ones”. The traffic in names also ran the other way: Sanskrit texts called China Cīna, a story told in our article on why China is called China.
“India, That Is Bharat”: The Constitution of 1950
English itself took a winding path to the modern spelling. India appears in Old English by the 9th century, in King Alfred’s translation of Paulus Orosius. Under French influence, Middle English replaced it with Ynde or Inde, which became “Indie” in Early Modern English. The form “India” came back into English from the 17th century, probably through Latin or through Spanish and Portuguese; the Portuguese had initially described the entire region they reached as the Indies. That broad usage is why the Caribbean islands, first thought to be part of India, became the West Indies once they were known to lie in the Western Hemisphere, and why Indonesia was once the Dutch East Indies.
When the Constituent Assembly drafted the constitution after independence, it settled the name question in 1949. It adopted Bharat alongside India as the country’s two official short names and explicitly declined to make Hindustan official. The constitution came into force on 26 January 1950, and its first article has given both names equal standing ever since. Article 300 adds a third, purely legal designation: the government may sue and be sued as the “Union of India”.
The balance between the two names has become political. In 2023 the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi used “Bharat” in connection with the G20 gathering, prompting speculation about a formal change. The Wikipedia article on the names of India notes that dropping “India” would require a constitutional amendment passed by a two-thirds vote in each house of Parliament, plus a notice to the United Nations on how to write the name in its six official languages. No such amendment has been made, and both names remain official.
Read together, the layers show two lineages. “India” and “Hindustan” are outsiders’ names for the river, Sanskrit Sindhu reshaped by Persian, Greek, Latin, Arabic and English speakers over roughly 2,500 years. “Bharat” is an insider’s name taken from a Vedic tribe and an epic king. The same doubling shows up in the country’s symbols, which you can trace in our article on the meaning and history of the flag of India.