In nature, there are no boundaries. Humans create boundaries, hence conflict.In ancient times, the people of Persia, referred to a land called Hind in the East. It was located beyond the river Hindu. In the Hebrew language, Hindu becomes Hodu. So even today, in Israel, India is referred to as Hodu. For the people of ‘Hind’, the river ‘Hindu’ was ‘Sindhu’. The ‘s’ became ‘h’ as the words moved westwards. Hind then referred to Sindh, and beyond. Today, political boundaries have decided that Sindh is not part of the Indian republic even though our national anthem refers to Sindh as part of India, perhaps because the national refers less to geography and more to people.

The Greeks turned ‘h’ into ‘I’ and so the river became Indus and the land became India. India was often referred to plural - the Indies. Later, we had East Indies (in Asia) and West Indies (in America). Basically, India was all that was outside the Western world and the Western world was Europe and its arch-enemy, Persia and Middle East, a rivalry that has stretched over 3,000 years. In Vedic times, there is reference to the land of Arya-varta, the land where the noble people (identified as those who valued Vedas) roamed. Where was this? It is the land ‘where the black buck roamed’. Roughly, the north of India, I am told, including today’s Punjab, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.