Are we witnessing the rise of the nation of Bharat, a new civilizational India? That’s exactly what it looks like. It’s being widely reported that the Indian government is going to bring a resolution forward to change India’s official name to a more ancient name, and we’re going to see why that change is so significant for the rise of a new conservative world!
– The name Bharat has deep historical roots and cultural significance, dating back to ancient texts like the Vedas.
– India’s move towards Bharat is part of a broader global trend, with other nations like Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey also embracing their ancient cultural traditions.
– The potential name change to Bharat reflects India’s role in this emerging civilizational world.
It looks like the nation of India is going to have a name change. The government will consider a resolution to change their name from India, which was the name given to them by British colonists based on their proximity to the Indus Valley, to the far more ancient name of Bharat. India is hosting a meeting of the G20 in just a few days. An invitation went out from the president’s house. This invitation goes to all heads of state of G20 countries, their ministers, and prime ministers. It went out with the heading ‘from the President of Bharat.’
Previous invitations from the president’s office were always on a letterhead that said ‘president of the Republic of India’, so this is the first time the president’s office has sent out a formal letterhead that changed the name of the nation from India to Bharat. The significance of the name Bharat is that, unlike India, it’s a term that is entirely indigenous to the people and stretches back thousands of years in their history. It’s a term that goes back to India’s first holy books, the Vedas. The Bharat was the name of the king of Rigveda from whom the Bharata clan descended. It has all the hallmarks of a name that unifies and galvanizes the nation.
This disposition to return to the cultural source and fountain of national life is reflective of an even greater project that’s happening inside India. This is reshaping and restructuring the world in ways we never even thought imaginable just a few short years ago. India’s nationalist populist prime minister Narendra Modi leads a party known as the Bharatiya Janata Party, or the BJP. They have the word Bharat in their name. The Bharatiya Janata Party is the largest democratic party in the world.
They won two landslide elections in a row and have been very successful in instituting what’s called Hindutva, which we might see as akin to a Hindu version of Sharia Law. It’s the deliberate recalibration of Indian life around Hindu norms as we are seeing most particularly with their educational projects. What is so essential to get here is that Modi’s vision of India goes way beyond what’s historically known as the nation-state. More scholars are recognizing that India is indeed rising as a massive civilization state.
Civilization states are worlds within the world. These are nations that are redrawing their boundaries around ancient civilizational spheres, such that the basic organizing principle for the whole of society is culture rather than politics. Linked to a civilization, the state has the paramount task of protecting a specific cultural tradition. In each case, the goal is not world revolution or imperial world conquest, but rather staking out a particular sphere of civilizational self-containment. The full unification of a people’s unique history, culture, and spiritual space is what Prime Minister Modi and the BJP advocate for.
A name change to the far more civilizationally significant Bharat was inevitable. But it’s not just India/Bharat; civilization states are restructuring the whole world. Nations like Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, and the coups in Africa are all ultimately about returning to their ancient religious civilizations. As we saw at the recent BRICS summit, they are forging bilateral trade relations to reconfigure the political and economic order around these civilizationalist sentiments. With a possible name change coming in the next couple of weeks, the nation of Bharat will have secured its place in this rising civilizational world!
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