Far from being eternal, Bharat Mata is only a little more than 100 years old
It's only from the late 19th century that Bharatvarsha to refer to the subcontinent and Bharat as mother found their way into the popular vocabulary.
At a time when India is being projected as eternal, when the chanting of Bharat Mata ki jai
has become a testimony to patriotism and refusal to do so invites the
wrath of Hindutva outfits and political parties, it is pertinent to look
at the history of the country known as Bharat whose antiquity cannot be
pushed too far back in time. The earliest references
The
geographical horizon of the Aryans was limited to the north western
part of the Indian subcontinent known as Saptasindhava. The Vedic texts
do not mention the word Bharata in the sense of a country though they
refer to the tribe of Bharatas at several places in different contexts.
In Panini’s Ashtadhyayi (500 BC) we find a reference to Prachya Bharata in the sense of a territory (janapada) which lay between udichya (north) and prachya
(east). It must have been a small region occupied by the Bharata tribe
and cannot be equated with the Akhanda Bharata or Bharata of the
Hindutva brigade.
The earliest reference to Bharatavarsha (Prakrit
Bharadhavasa) is found in the inscription of the Orissan king Kharavela
(first century BC), who lists it among the territories he invaded: but
it did not include Magadha, which is mentioned separately in the
record. The word here may therefore refer in a general way to northern
India, its precise territorial connotation remaining vague. A much
larger geographical region is visualised by the use of the word in the Mahabharata (200
BC to AD 300), which provides a good deal of geographical information
about the subcontinent, but a large part of the Deccan and the far south
does not find any place in it. Banabhatta’s Kadambari (seventh
century), at one place describes Bharatavarsha as being ruled by
Tarapida, who “set his seal on the four oceans”. But since it is
referred to as excluding Ujjaini from it, the location and boundaries of
Bharat are far from clear.
Bharatavarsha figures prominently in
the Puranas, but they describe its shape variously. In some passages it
is likened to a half-moon, in others it is said to resemble a triangle;
in yet others it appears as a rhomboid or an unequal quadrilateral or a
drawn bow. The Markandeya Purana compares the shape of the
country with that of a tortoise floating on water and facing east. Most
of the Puranas describe Bharatavarsha as being divided into nine dvipas or khandas, separated by seas and mutually inaccessible.
The
Puranic conception of Bharatavarsha has similarity with the ideas of
ancient Indian astronomers like Varahamihira (sixth century AD) and
Bhaskaracharya (11th century), though in their perception it does not
seem to have included southern India. Although a 14th-century record
mentions Bharata as extending from the Himalayas to the southern sea, by
and large, the available textual and epigraphic references to it do not
indicate that the term stood for India as we know it today. A part of Jambudvipa
In
many texts Bharata is said to have been a part of Jambudvipa, which
itself had an uncertain geographical connotation. The Vedic texts do not
mention it; nor does Panini, though he refers to the jambu
(rose apple) tree. The early Buddhist canonical works provide the
earliest reference to the continent called Jambudvipa (Pali, Jambudipa),
its name being derived from the jambu tree which grew there.
Juxtaposed with Sihaladipa (Sans. Simhaladvipa=Sri Lanka), of the
inscriptions of Ashoka, Jambudipa stands for the whole of his empire,
which covered nearly the entire Indian subcontinent excluding its far
southern part. He unified the major part of the Indian subcontinent and
called it Jambudipa. But he did not use the word Bharat to denote this
vast land mass.
Despite the use of the word Jambudipa for the
whole of his empire, the ambiguity about its territorial connotation is
borne out by both epigraphic and literary sources during the
subsequent centuries. In a sixth-century inscription of Toramana, for
instance, Jambudvipa occurs without any precise territorial connotation,
and in the Puranic cosmological schema, it appears more as a mythical
region than as a geographical entity. According to the Puranas the world
consists of “seven concentric dvipas or islands, each of which
is encircled by a sea, the central island called Jambudvipa…”. This is
similar to the cosmological imaginings of the Jains who, however,
placed Jambudvipa at the centre of the central land (madhyaloka)
of the three-tiered structure of the universe. According to another
Puranic conception, which has much in common with the Buddhist
cosmological ideas, the earth is divided into four mahadvipas,
Jambudvipa being larger than the others. In both these conceptions of
the world, Bharatavarsha is at some places said to be a part of
Jambudvipa but at others the two are treated as identical. The
geographical conception of both Bharat and Jambudvipa are thus
factitious and of questionable value. Abanindranath Tagore/ ‘Banga Mata’ water colour that he later decided to title 'Bharat Mata'. 1905.Bharat as Mother
It
was only from the late 19th century that Bharatvarsha in the sense of
the whole subcontinent, and Bharat as Mother found their way into the
popular vocabulary. The anonymous work Unabimsapurana (1866), KC Bandyopadhyaya’s play called Bharat Mata (1873) and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s Anandmath (1880) were among the earliest works to popularise the notion of Bharatmata.
Its visual evocation came perhaps not earlier than 1905 in a painting
by Abanindranath Tagore, who conceived of the image as one of Bangamata but later, “almost as an act of generosity towards the larger cause of Indian nationalism, decided to title it ‘Bharatmata’”.
Far
from being eternal, Bharat mata is thus little more than a 100 years
old. Insistence on her inhabitants forming a nation in ancient times is
sophistry. It legitimatises the Hindutva perception of Indian national
identity as located in remote antiquity, accords centrality to the
supposed primordiality of Hinduism and spawns Hindu cultural
nationalism which prompts the saffron brigade to bully the Indian people
into chanting of Bharat Mata Ki Jai. DN Jha is former Professor and Chair, Department of History, University of Delhi
