Chapter INAUM to INDIA of I by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

INAUM to INDIA

INAUM, ENAUM, s. Ar. in’am, ‘a gift’ (from a superior), ‘a favour,’ but especially in India a gift of rent- free land: also land so held. In’amdar, the holder of such lands. A full detail of the different kinds of in’am, especially among the Mahrattas, will be found in Wilson, s.v. The word is also used in Western India for bucksheesh (q.v.). This use is said to have given rise to a little mistake on the part of an English political traveller some 30 or 40 years ago, when there had been some agitation regarding the in’am lands and the alleged harshness of the Government in dealing with such claims. The traveller reported that the public feeling in the west of India was so strong on this subject that his very palankin- bearers at the end of their stage invariably joined their hands in supplication, shouting, “In’am! In’am! Sahib!”

INDIA, INDIES, n.p. A book might be written on this name. We can only notice a few points in connection with it.

It is not easy, if it be possible, to find a truly native (i.e. Hindu) name for the whole country which we call India; but the conception certainly existed from an early date. Bharatavarsha is used apparently in the Puranas with something like this conception. Jambudwipa, a term belonging to the mythical cosmography, is use d in the Buddhist books, an d sometimes, by the natives of the south, even now. The accuracy of the defini tions of India in some of the Greek and Roman authors shows the existence of the same conception of the co untry that we have now; a conception also obvious in the modes of speech of Hwen T’sang and the other Chinese pilgrims. The Asoka inscriptions, c. B.C. 250, had enumerated Indian kingdoms covering a considerable part of the conception, and in the great inscription at Tanjore, of the 11th century A.D., which incidentally mentions the conquest (real or imaginary) of a great part of India, by the king of Tanjore, Vira-Chola, the same system is followed. In a copperplate of the 11th century, by the Chalukya dynasty of Kalyana, we find the expression “from the Himalaya to the Bridge” (Ind. Antiq. i. 81), i.e. the Bridge of Rama, or ‘Adam’s Bridge,’ as our maps have it. And Mahommedan definitions as old, and with the name, will be found below. Under the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara also (from the 14th century) inscriptions indicate all India by like expressions.

The origin of the name is without doubt (Skt.) Sindhu, ‘the sea,’ and thence the Great River on the West, and the country on its banks, which we still call Sindh.¹ By a change common in many parts of the world, and in various parts of India itself, this name exchanged the initial sibilant for an aspirate, and became (eventually) in Persia Hindu, and so passed on to the Greeks and Latins, viz. [Greek Text] Indoi for the people, [Greek Text] IndoV for the river, [Greek Text] Indikh and India for the country on its banks. Given this name for the western tract, and the conception of the country as a whole to which we have alluded, the name in the mouths of foreigners naturally but gradually spread to the whole.

Some have imagined that the name of the land of Nod (‘wandering’), to which Cain is said to have migrated, and which has the same consonants, is but a form of this; which is worth noting, as this idea may have had to do with the curious statement in some medieval writers (e.g. John Marignolli) that certain eastern races were “the descendants of Cain.” In the form Hidhu [Hindus, see Encycl. Bibl. ii. 2169] India appears in the great cuneiform inscription on the tomb of Darius Hystaspes near Persepolis, coupled with Gadara (i.e. Gandhara, or the Peshawar country), and no doubt still in some degree restricted in its application. In the Hebrew of Esther i. 1, and viii. 9, the form is Hod(d)u, or perhaps rather Hiddu (see also Peritsol below). The first Greek writers to speak of India and the Indians were Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus, and Ctesias (B.C. c. 500, c. 440, c. 400). The last, though repeating more fables than Herodotus, shows a truer conception of what India was.

Before going further, we ought to point out that India itself is a Latin form, and does not appear in a Greek writer, we believe, before Lucian and Polyænus, both writers of the middle of the 2nd century. The Greek form is [Greek Text] h Indikh, or else ‘The Land of the Indians.’

The name of ‘India’ spread not only from its original application, as denoting the country on the banks of the Indus, to the whole peninsula between (and including) the valleys of Indus and Ganges; but also in a vaguer way to all the regions beyond. The compromise between the vaguer and the more precise use of the term is seen in Ptolemy, where the boundaries of the true India are defined, on the whole, with surprising exactness, as ‘India within the Ganges,’ whilst the darker regions beyond appear as ‘India beyond the Ganges.’ And this double conception of India, as ‘India Proper’ (as we may call it), and India in the vaguer sense, has descended to our own time.

So vague became the conception in the ‘dark ages’ that the name is sometimes found to be used as synonymous with Asia, ‘Europe, Africa, and India,’ forming the three parts of the world. Earlier than this, however, we find a tendency to discriminate different Indias,