How did India get its name ?

[Guest guest]

An Indian in East Africa discusses " maize "

 

" ...That is why I mention the Caribs. Through this European contact,

they introduced the world to what is probably mankind's most important

food today. I can only mean maize, the richest of all the grains and

yet one that had been produced completely artificially by Amerindian

genius... "

 

http://www.nationmedia.com/eastafrican/current/Magazine/Mag2304071.htm

 

Magazine

Monday, April 23, 2007

 

The Indian in the maize

 

IS IT BY CHANCE THAT, in Kiswahili, an Indian shares the term Mhindi

with a crop of vital importance to East Africans? Hardly. It is

evident that even India and Hindu are etymologically related to mhindi

(the maize plant) and hindi (the grain, plural: mahindi).

 

That is why many of us think that maize was brought to East Africa by

pre-colonial South Asian traders. Indeed, many Kiswahili words have

Gujarati or Hindustani provenance (as opposed to the hundreds of

near-identical words in Kiswahili and Hindustani that owe their

similarity to their common Arabic roots, such as kitabu [book] or

hesabu [arithmetic] — Hindustani kitab and hisab). I can think of, for

instance, gundi, from the Hindustani gond, gumpaste; bima (insurance);

budaa (old man, budhdha) chokora (streetkid in Sheng; chhokra, boy in

Hundustani) and so on.

 

Yet, concerning maize, the Indian link is missing. The Hindustani word

is makka; nor is the crop a staple anywhere on the subcontinent. We

cannot trace mhindi even to Arabia, to which Kiswahili, a Bantu

language at base, owes a great deal of its thought content. Thus, just

as the word mhindi is not Bantu, so, strictly speaking, the words

" India " and " Hindu " are not Indian.

 

We do not find such words in the Vedas. As John Keay reports (in an

engrossing study called A History of India), " ... there was no

gainsaying the fact that in the whole colossal corpus of Sanskrit

literature nowhere called `India' is ever mentioned... "

 

He points out that, although British colonial propaganda claimed to

have " ... incubated an `India consciousness " , the term India " ...

lacked a respectable indigenous pedigree " and was " bitterly contested "

by many newly important nationalist groups.

 

They preferred Bharat, a term derived from the expression

Bharata-varsha, " land of Bharatas " , which refers to a cluster of

distinguished early Vedic clans. Indeed, India today is officially

India to the rest of the world, but also Bharat in the bilingual

(English and Hindi) documents through which its administration is

conducted.

 

In any case, Bharat did not cater for the whole vast heterogeneity of

" British India, " which included India, West Pakistan, East Pakistan

(now Bangladesh), Burma, Nepal, Bhutan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). But

it was courageous to latch onto " India. "

 

For, etymologically, the word " India " is much closer to Pakistan, the

very same concept whose exponents — led by the great Mohammed Ali

Jinnah — fought so bitterly to take into independence as a separate

Muslim Shangri-la.

 

The leading Indian nationalists could make that choice because they

were exceptionally well-educated and cosmopolitan minds. In The

Discovery of India (Jawaharlal Nehru), The Foundations of Indian

Culture (Sri Aurobindo) and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, they

reveal themselves as men of inimitable intellect and refinement of spirit.

 

By adopting the term " India, " they hoped to convince Jinnah and his

followers of the need to enter independence as a single political

entity. Thanks to characteristic British duplicity, they failed, and

the consequences still overwhelm us today.

 

WHERE, THEN, DID THE word " India " come from? It was imposed on Indians

by Europeans. But this only begs the question. Where did the Europeans

themselves get it from? They got it from a country next door to that

part of British India that is now Pakistan.

 

Keay relates the paradox: " The first occurrence of the word [`India']

sets the trend. It makes its debut in an inscription found at

Persepolis in Iran, which was the capital of the Persian or Achaeminid

empire of Darius I, he whose far-flung battles included defeat at

Marathon by the Athenians in 490 BC.

 

" Before this, Darius had evidently enjoyed greater success on his

eastern frontier, for the Persepolis inscription, dated c518 BC, lists

among his numerous domains that of `Hi(n)du'. The word for `river' in

Sanskrit is sindhu. Hence sapta-sindhu meant `[the land of] the seven

rivers', which was what the Vedic arya called the Punjab... " Thus

" India " originally referred only to the riverine land of the Punjabi,

making the Kalasingha the only true Indian.

 

As Zecharia Sitchin demonstrates in The Earth Chronicles, the Sanskrit

word for seven, sapta, is related to Sumerian sambethe and sabitu. I

can add that both came from Egyptian s'ba or s'bat, which the

Israelite slaves took into Hebrew as sh'va, Sheba, and Shabbat or Sabbath.

 

It then travelled to Europe as septus or septem (Latin), where it

later spawned sept (French), siete (Spanish), sieben (German), seven

(English), etc. The Omani Arabs bequeathed it to Kiswahili as saba and

from Euro-Christianity we have reborrowed it as sabato.

 

Keay goes on: " The Indus, to which most of these seven rivers were

tributary, was the sindhu [`the river'] par excellence; and in the

language of ancient Persia, a near relative of Sanskrit, the initial

`s' of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as an aspirate — [as

an] `h " .

 

" Soma, the mysterious hallucinogen distilled, deified and drunk to

excess by the Vedic arya, is thus homa or haoma in old Persian; and

sindhu is thus Hind(h)u. When from Persian, the word found its way

into Greece, the initial aspirate [h] was dropped, and it started to

appear as the root `Ind' (as in `India', etc.)

 

" In this form it reached Latin and most other European languages.

However, in Arabic and related languages it retained the initial `h',

giving `Hindustan' as the name by which [the] Turks and Mughals would

know India. The word also passed on to Europe to give `Hindu' as the

name of the country's indigenous people and of what, by Muslims and

Christians alike, was regarded as their infidel religion. "

 

Thus the terms India, the country, and Hinduism, the Vedic religion of

most of its people, were imposed on India by outsiders — albeit as

distortions of a native word — sindh. A swathe of southeastern

Pakistan is still known as Sind or Sindh, the term which, by dropping

the initial " s " , became Ind (later Latinised as the Indus). It is,

therefore, quite fatuous to speak of the River Indus.

 

Shakespeare's " Ind " began to capture the Western European imagination

in medieval times as a country of untold wealth, often identified with

the legendary Prester John, whose " Christian kingdom " was first placed

in the Far East but, after the 14th century, was identified with

Ethiopia.

 

The Venetian merchant Marco Polo had visited China in the late 13th

century and thus shown one way of reaching India — directly eastwards

by caravan. But it had proved tortuous, time-consuming and treacherous.

 

Fortunately, by the middle of the 15th century, European scientists

had rediscovered a vital cosmological fact already known to the

Egyptian Nilotes and the Dogons of Mali thousands of years earlier —

that the Earth was a sphere. It thus began to be speculated,

especially by Prince Henry the Navigator's maritime school at Lisbon,

established by the Knights Templar and the Arab scholars of Cordoba,

Granada and Toledo, that you could reach India by sailing westwards.

 

When, by the end of that century, Christobel Colombo ( " Christopher

Columbus " ) was hired by that school to follow this " North-western

Passage " , reaching the Americas in 1492, European merchants were

overcome with euphoria. The headlines writers of those days were clear

in their minds: Columbus had reached India!

 

That was how the native Americans — many of them of Mongoloid stock —

came to be known all over Europe as Indians or Red Indians or

Amerindians. It was how the Atlantic archipelago close to the two

American continents came to be called the Indies.

 

Later — when the territories of southeast Asia, including India,

Indochina and the islands to the south of them, came also to be called

Indies — the American ones were dubbed the West Indies. Later they

were also named the Caribbean (after the Caribs, the " Red Indian "

tribe that inhabited many of them).

 

The Red Indians introduced the Europeans to a great variety of foods,

including beans, pumpkins, tomato, Irish (!) potato, chocolate and

turkey and how to prepare them — which, in Made in America, Bill

Bryson lists as including succotash, clam chowder, corn pone,

cranberry sauce, johnnycakes, Boston baked beans and Brunswick stew.

 

That is why I mention the Caribs. Through this European contact, they

introduced the world to what is probably mankind's most important food

today. I can only mean maize, the richest of all the grains and yet

one that had been produced completely artificially by Amerindian genius.

 

In his book Plant and Planet, Aldous Huxley shows that the cultivated

modern grains — barley, millet, oat, rice, rye, sorghum, teff, wheat,

wimbi — are all human artifices from ancient grasses in the wild. But

maize is the most artificial of them all, which is why it is also the

least hardy and cannot survive in the wild.

 

Biologist David Wilson affirms its vitality: " Maize is probably the

most important single food crop in the world nowadays; it [was]

certainly the main [staple] of the Mayas, the Aztecs and the Incas.

 

" There is more foodstuff in a single grain of some modern varieties of

corn [maize] than there was in an entire ear of the Tehuacan wild corn

[from which the Amerindians artificed the modern grain]. A wild grass

with tiny ears — a species scarcely more promising as a food than some

of the weedy grasses of our gardens and lawns — has, through a

combination of circumstances ... evolved into the most productive of

the cereals, becoming the basic food plant ... of ... the majority of

the modern [civilisations], including our own [british]. "

 

What's more, unlike other grain grasses, maize can yield up to two or

three crops a year. But therein lies its Achilles heel. Maize, like

all human babies, requires full-time attention. It is impossible for

it to thrive without careful nurturing throughout its life.

 

Because it lacks the hardiness of the wild or semi-wild grasses, they

will most certainly choke it to extinction when mankind itself goes

extinct.

 

Says Wilson: " Modern botanists point to the vulnerability of the maize

plant of modern times because man has forced it to evolve until it

cannot live without cultivation because it cannot spread its own seeds. "

 

Why? Because " ... the ear is completely enclosed by the husks and the

plant has no way of dispersing its seeds. "

 

The impossibility of spreading its seeds is thus a direct result of

its artificiality. It must be planted and tended by human hands.

Bryson corroborates this: " Left on its own, the kernels of each cob —

its seeds — would be strangled by the husk. Even in colonial times it

was a far more demanding plant than the [European] colonists were used

to.

 

" With their usual vexing ineptitude, the first colonists tried sowing

by the broadcast method ... and were baffled that it didn't grow. It

took the natives to show them that corn flourished only when each seed

was planted in a mound and helped along with a little fish-meal

fertiliser... "

 

Which brings us back to the point of our story. It is that this

amazing " intrusion " into nature to create a lookalike more vital to

the intruder — which is the purpose of all tool-making and the essence

of all art — was achieved seven thousand years ago by the Olmecs,

Toltecs, Aztecs, Incas and Mayas.

 

THOUGH THESE PEOPLES OF ancient Honduras, Guatemala, Yucatan and

Mexico were mostly of Negro stock, Euro-historiography lumps them

together as Red Indians. That is why whoever brought maize back with

him from Mesoamerica to Eurafrasia (the " Old World " ) introduced it as

" Indian corn. "

 

This explains why Kiswahili knows the crop as mhindi — " corn of the

(Red) Indians. " . Yet, in North America, the word " corn " has come to be

restricted to " maize. "

 

This is problematic because, originally — as they still are in the

rest of the English-speaking world — all common grains were corns.

 

The Taino (a " West Indian " tribe) knew this special corn as mahiz, the

word which, after the Spanish conquistadores had introduced it to

Europe, became the French mais and the English maize.

 

But some questions remain. When and in what circumstances did maize

become the staple food of most East African communities?

 

How did many tribes even produce their own homegrown names for it? Why

do the Luo call it oduma, the Luhya ebando and the Kikuyu mbembe?

[Guest guest]

besides the fact the ALL MAIZE in the americas is now GMO' jiwan jot

Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check out

new cars at Autos.