INDIA is supposed to have obtained its name !from the Indus, the Sin, Sinda, or Hinda, the Abu-Sin of the Arabs, the first great river met in the routes from Western and Central Asia. It is true that so far back as the reign of Darius B.C. 521, writers placed Indians on both sides of the Indus, and made India extend westward to Kandahar (Gandhara), embracing perhaps the fourteen Iranian provinces or nations enumerated on the Naksh-i-Rustum as lying be tween Sogdiana and the Panjab, and subject to Darius. But eastward of the Indus, the country was always India. But this term seems to have been chiefly used in the south of Asia, for it first occurs in the book of Esther (i. 1, viii. 9) as the limit of the territories of the king Ahasuerus in the east, as Ethiopia was on the west, and the names are similarly connected by Herodotus (vii. 9). The term Hoddu, used by the Hebrews, is an abbreviation of Honadu, which is identical with the names of the river Indus, for to the present day all along the course of that river the letters s and li are interchanged. In the Vendidad, the l'anjab is described as the Hapta-Hindu, and the other native form, Sindus, is noticed by Pliny (vi. 23). The India of the book of Esther is not, however, the Peninsula of Hindustan, but the country surrounding the Indus,—the Panjab, and perhaps Sind, —the India which Herodotus de scribes (iii. 98) as forming part of the Persian empire under Darius, and the India which at a ' later period was conquered by Alexander the Great. The name occurs in the inscriptions of Persepolis and Naksh-i-Rustum, but not in those of Behistun. Masudi mentions that at the time of the Muhammadan conquest, the country about liaarali was called Arz-ul-Ilind, the Land of India.
There were other three names by which India was known to the western Asiatics. One of them originated from moat of the traffic with India having at one time been by way of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The Tyrians established depots on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and the course of trade being through tho land of the Cushdi, the races in India came to be included under the ethnological title of Cush (Genesis x. 6) ; and hence the Persian, Chalthean, and Arabic versions of the Bible frequently render that term by India (Isaiah xi. 11).
Another ancient but local term for India is stated to have been Kolaria, and numerous Kol tribes are scattered through the country to the present day. Bharata or Bharata-varsha is like
wise mentioned as an ancient local appellation.
In recent times success in wars and diplomacy has placed under the dominion of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, or in alliance, nearly all the territories lying between the Indus and the Himalaya on the N.W., to Cape Comorin and Singapore on the S.E., and that part of Southein Asia has come to be spoken of as British India, and the British Empire in India also as Her Majesty's Eastern Empire. But British India, Netherland India, the Spanish Indies, Portuguese and French India, are but portions of the region iu Eastern and Southern Asia known to Europe as the East Indies, and which include all the countries from Arabia and Persia eastwards through Baluchistan, Hindustan, the Malay Penin sula, Siam, the Indian Archipelago to New Guinea, China, and Japan. With the Portuguese, the northern part of Hindustan held by the Moghtil sovereigns was styled Mogor, and Goa and the western coast of the Peninsula was to them India. With the Dutch, India means Java, Sumatra, and other Netherland possessions in the Archipelago. French India is in the Western Peninsula, and in Annam and Tonquin in Ultra-India; and the Spanish Indies are in the Philippine Islands in the far east.
The ancients termed the Ultra-Indian region India beyond the Ganges. Leyden included it and the Indian Archipelago under the name of the Hindu-Chinese countries. Make Brun calls it Chin India. Ritter, the greatest of geographers, prefers the German name Hinter-Indies. But instead of Further India, Trans-Gangetic India, the Eastern Peninsula of India, etc., the single words Ultra India and Trans-India have been proposed by Mr. Logan, as they admit of the ethnic and adjective forms of Ultra-Indian or Trans-Indian ; and for the insular region of the Eastern or Indian Archipelago, Mr. Logan proposed the term Indo nesia. Mr. logan's names are well chosen, be cause several of the islands have been occupied by Indian races. Java was long under a race from Hindustan, and Bali still professes Hinduism. The whole of the East Indies, therefore, consist ing of the continental portions bisected by the Bay of Bengal, and the eastern islands, may be comprised under the three names of India Proper, Ultra-India or Trans-India, and Indonesia.