Chapter INAUM to INDIA of I by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

in a form distinct from Ptolemy’s Intra et extra Gangem; and the terms India Major, India Minor can be traced back to the 4th century. As was natural where there was so little knowledge, the application of these terms was various and oscillating, but they continued to hold their ground for 1000 years, and in the later centuries of that period we generally find a third India also, and a tendency (of which the roots go back, as far at least as Virgil’s time) to place one of the three in Africa.

It is this conception of a twofold or threefold India that has given us and the other nations of Europe the vernacular expressions in plural form which hold their ground to this day: the Indies, les Indes, (It.) le Indie, &c.

And we may add further, that China is called by Friar Odoric Upper India (India Superior), whilst Marignolli calls it India Magna and Maxima, and calls Malabar India Parva, and India Inferior.

There was yet another, and an Oriental, application of the term India to the country at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, which the people of Basra still call Hind; and which Sir H. Rawlinson connects with the fact that the Talmudic writers confounded Obillah in that region with the Havila of Genesis. (See Cathay, &c., 55, note.)

In the work of the Chinese traveller Hwen T’sang again we find that by him and his co-religionists a plurality of Indias was recognised, i.e. five, viz. North, Central, East, South, and West.

Here we may remark how two names grew out of the original Sindhu. The aspirated and Persianised form Hind, as applied to the great country beyond the Indus, passed to the Arabs. But when they invaded the valley of the Indus and found it called Sindhu, they adopted that name in the form Sind, and thenceforward ‘Hind and Sind, were habitually distinguished, though generally coupled, and conceived as two parts of a great whole.

Of the application of India to an Ethiopian region, an application of which indications extend over 1500 years, we have not space to speak here. On this and on the medieval plurality of Indias reference may be made to two notes on Marco Polo, 2nd edition vol. ii. pp. 419 and 425.

The vague extension of the term India to which we have referred, survives in another form besides that in the use of ‘Indies.’ India, to each European nation which has possessions in the East, may be said, without much inaccuracy, to mean in colloquial use that part of the East in which their own possessions lie. Thus to the Portuguese, India was, and probably still is, the West Coast only. In their writers of the 16th and 17th century a distinction is made between India, the territory of the Portuguese and their immediate neighbours on the West Coast, and Mogor, the dominions of the Great Mogul. To the Dutchman India means Java and its dependencies. To the Spaniard, if we mistake not, India is Manilla. To the Gaul are not les Indes Pondicherry, Chandernagore, and Réunion?

As regards the West Indies, this expression originates in the misconception of the great Admiral himself, who in his memorable enterprise was seeking, and thought he had found, a new route to the ‘Indias’ by sailing west instead of east. His discoveries were to Spain the Indies, until it gradually became manifest that they were not identical with the ancient lands of the east, and then they became the West-Indies.

Indian is a name which has been carried still further abroad; from being applied, as a matter of course, to the natives of the islands, supposed of India, discovered by Columbus, it naturally passed to the natives of the adjoining continent, till it came to be the familiar name of all the tribes between (and sometimes even including) the Esquimaux of the North and the Patagonians of the South.

This abuse no doubt has led to our hesitation in applying the term to a native of India itself. We use the adjective Indian, but no modern Englishman who has had to do with India ever speaks of a man of that country as ‘an Indian.’ Forrest, in his Voyage to Mergui, uses the inelegant word Indostaners; but in India itself a Hindustani means, as has been indicated under that word, a native of the upper Gangetic valley and adjoining districts. Among the Greeks ‘an Indian’ ( [Greek Text] IndoV) acquired a notable specific application. viz. to an elephant driver or mahout (q.v.).

B.C. c. 486.—“Says Darius the King: By the grace of Ormazd these (are) the countries which I have acquired besides Persia. I have established my power over them. They have brought tribute to me. That which has been said to them by me they have done. They have obeyed my law. Medea … Arachotia (Harauvatish), Sattagydia (Thatagush), Gandaria (Gadára), India (Hidush). …”—On the Tomb of Darius at Nakhsh-i-Rustam, see Rawlinson’s Herod. iv. 250.

B.C. c. 440.—“Eastward of India lies a tract which is entirely sand. Indeed, of all the inhabitants of Asia, concerning whom anything is known, the Indians dwell nearest to the east, and the rising of the Sun.”—Herodotus, iii. c. 98 (Rawlinson).

B.C. c. 300.—“India then ( [Greek Text] h toinun Indikh) being four-sided in plan, the side which looks to the Orient and that to the South, the Great Sea compasseth; that towards the Arctic is divided by the mountain