Reconsiderations of the term 'Hindu'

It was a pleasure to be a witness to the event of the revered Mahāmahopādhyāya Paņditamārtaņda Manudeva Bhattacharya of Varanasi delivering the Swami Pranavananada Memorial lectures in Sanskrit at the invitation of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta on 12^th September, 2012.  The Vidyasagar Hall of the Asiatic Society imbued with the gracious presence of monks from the Bharata Sevasrama Sangha, and many other scholars of note.  Some of the most striking points that the learned doctor made in course of his lectures are summarised as follows:

1    The Sanskrit words, ‘mānava’ and ‘bhāratīya’ are held to be expressive of sectarian meanings, instead of their much-adored secular outlook. 

2   Bhāratīya, Manudeva Bhattacharya holds, means people ruled by and owing allegiance to Bharata, a king of mythological fame and antiquity.  Thus bhāratah is bharataśāsitarāşţram.

3    Similarly, the word, mānava, which is generally taken to be a very close Sanskrit parallel of the English word, ‘man’, is shown by the learned doctor, who resorts to Sanskrit grammatical exegesis in this regard, to mean the descendants and followers of Manu, the celebrated author of the Manu Samhitā.

4    While Bharata was a staunch adherent and upholder of the varņāśrama or caste system, it was Manu who actually promulgated the same.  Thus, in no way, can Bhāratīya and Mānava, as shown before, mean something else than sectarian.

5    Next comes the word ‘Hindu’.  Here the learned professor quotes the following verse from the Bārhaspatya Samhitā of the Ŗgveda:

Himālayam samārabhya yāvadindusarovaram .

                        Tam devanirmitam deśam hindusthānam pracakşate ..

(Tr. The divine land stretching from the Himalayas to Lake Indu is called Hindusthan.)

Evidently, Hindu has merely a geographical connotation here.  This is also what Manudev Bhattacharya has to say.  He also made an interesting observation that the ‘hi’ of Himālaya and the ‘ndu’ of Indu (the lake of that name mentioned in the above Sanskrit verse) together make the word, ‘Hindu’.  This is an extremely strong antithesis directed against the comparative philologists, who opine that it is a mispronunciation of the word ‘Sindhu’ by the Arabs that led to the origin of the word, ‘Hindu’.  There are also backup materials in support of the present contention of Manudev Bhattacharya. For example, from the word śata-kratu (lit. one who has performed a hundred sacrifices), an epithet applied to the Vedic deity, Indra, the initials, ‘śa’ of śata and ‘kra’ of kratu, unite to form the word ‘śakra’, an acronym by which Indra is widely known. So Hindusthan should be understood as follows: Hindūnām Himālayat samārabhya Indusarovaraparyantam yo deśo vartate tadadhivāsinām sthānam hindusthānam iti.  Such an interpretation discounts the parsimony connected with the philological view of the origin of the word, Hindu, stated above.  So Hindu is only the name of a place, and it has nothing to do with race or religion.  In the same vein Mahāmahopādhyāya Manudeva Bhattacharya suggests that so far as secularism is concerned, the use of the word ‘Hindu’ is preferable to that of ‘bhāratīya’ and ‘mānava’.               

6   Last but not the least, Prof. Bhattacharya suggested that the commonly used word for communal, ‘sāmpradāyika’, actually means ‘wise’.  Etymologically the word sampradāya can be analysed as follows: sam + pra + dāya.  In this connection, he made a reference to the famous Sanskrit law-text, Dāyabhāga of Jīmūtavāhana, which is still used by the Indian judiciary in the matter of succession disputes. Dāya, he says, means paternal property and dāyada successor.  In Sanskrit, upasargas or prefixes play a very role in the determination of the meaning of a word.  For example, the word ‘gacchati’ means ‘he goes’, but when this same word ‘gacchati’ follows the prefix ‘ā’ and becomes ‘āgacchati’, it conveys a diametrically opposite meaning in the form of ‘He comes’. So sampradāya means “samyak ca prakarşaśca yo dāyah sa sampradāyah”, i.e. highest wealth of knowledge, eternal and divine in nature, which develops day by day, but never wanes, and contributes to the purification of the soul. 

Postscript:

Generally speaking, dāya, as mentioned in the law-texts, means such paternal property as reduces on division and share.  In contradistinction to this, sampradāya is that kind of property which multiplies on division, and it can only be knowledge, which can multiply on getting shared with others, and herein constitutes its eternality and divinity. In this respect, Mahāmahopādhyāya Paņditamārtaņda Manudeva Bhattacharya also quoted a Sanskrit adage which runs as follows: "apūrvah ko’pi kośo’yam vidyate tava bhāratī / vyāyato vŗddhimāyāti kşayamāyāti sañcayāt//" (Tr. Incredible is your wealth, O Goddess of learning, which increases on getting spent and decreases on being reserved).  He adds, “vyāye kŗte vardhata eva nityam vidyādhanam sarvadhanapradhānam” (Tr. If the wealth of knowledge, the best among treasures, is spent [i.e., distributed and shared] it certainly increases all the time.) Thus “Dāya and Sampradāya are completely opposite in meaning.”  Dāya, being qualified by the prefixes, sam and pra, means the wealth of knowledge stated above. It is the aforesaid prefixes which bring in the semantic mutation of the root word, dāya.  And one who has such knowledge (i.e., one who shares and divides his knowledge with others and contributes to the multiplication of it) is verily a sāmpradāyika.