Bhāratavarṣa is not a word that comes up often in conversations about yoga. But it is the oldest name we have for the land from which yoga emerged, and it carries something that the names we use today do not.
It is not a political name. It was not created to mark a border or administer a territory. It is a civilizational name, one that holds within it a particular understanding of what this land is, what it asks of those who live within it, and how the practices that arose here are meant to be held. That it remains present today is significant in itself. The Constitution of India opens with it: India, that is Bhārat. A modern nation choosing to root itself in a name thousands of years older than the nation.
Before any of the philosophical texts were written, before the traditions had names, this land was already known to the ancient world. Mesopotamian records speak of a trading civilization they called Meluhha, ships arriving from this coast, whole communities of Meluhha people living in Mesopotamian cities, a professional interpreter employed full-time to work between two worlds. Carnelian from Gujarat, teak from the western coast, lapis lazuli travelling south from a trading colony in what is now Afghanistan. We do not know what those people called their own land. Their script has not been deciphered. But the civilization was already flourishing, already in conversation with the ancient world, long before it settled on a name for itself.
The civilization was already flourishing, already in conversation with the ancient world, long before it settled on a name for itself.
I. Why this matters
Why does this matter for a series about words in the yoga tradition? Because one of the most persistent misunderstandings about yoga is to give it a starting point that is far too recent. It gets traced to the Yoga Sūtras, or to the Śramaṇa movements, or to the Ṛgveda — as though each appeared from nowhere, and as though the Ṛgveda itself was a beginning rather than a layer within something much older. The civilization that eventually named this land Bhāratavarṣa was already flourishing, already philosophically alive, already known to the wider world before any of these texts or movements emerged. That depth of continuity is part of what the name carries, and part of what gets lost when the name is replaced.
Today, yoga’s origins are increasingly described using the term South Asian. It sounds careful, academically precise, respectful of multiple national identities. But South Asia is a contemporary geopolitical category, assembled from nation-states whose borders were drawn largely in the 20th century, in many cases through partition, violence, and displacement. It is not the framework within which yoga was developed, transmitted, or understood. Applying it to a tradition thousands of years old is not neutral. It is a substitution and what it substitutes matters, which is what this essay is about.
To understand what Bhāratavarṣa names, it helps to look at all the names this land has carried, because each one is a different way of knowing it and each one, if followed carefully, opens into an entire world of history, philosophy, and lived understanding.
II. The names of the land
This land has been called Sapta Sindhava, Jambudvīpa, Āryāvarta, Bhāratavarṣa, Hind, Hindustan, and India. Several of these names were in use at the same time, each in a different context: one cosmological, one cultural, one political, one the name given by a foreign civilization looking in from outside. What changes between one name and the next is not the geography. It is the understanding of what the place is.
What follows is not a complete account of any of these names. Each one is the subject of vast scholarly and philosophical literature, centuries of commentary, and living traditions of interpretation that continue today. These entries are an introduction, a way of seeing the layers not a summary of what the names contain.
Sapta Sindhava सप्त सिन्धव
Early Vedic · approximately 1500–1000 BCE · The seven rivers
Among the earliest geographical descriptions in the Ṛgveda, the land is known first by its waters: the Sindhu, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas, the Sutlej, and the Sarasvatī, a great river that no longer flows above ground and whose lost course archaeologists are still working to trace. The Zoroastrian Avesta, scripture of the ancient Iranian tradition, records the same geography as Hapta Həndu. The shift from Sanskrit ‘s’ to Persian ‘h’ is a small phonological change with enormous consequence, it is the hinge that eventually gives the world the words Hindu, Hindustan, and India. The entire history of how this land is named in languages other than Sanskrit begins here, with seven rivers.
Jambudvīpa जम्बुद्वीप
Vedic–Purāṇic · approximately 1000 BCE onward · shared across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions · The cosmic continent, land of the Jambu tree
In the cosmological framework shared by Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, Jambudvīpa is the innermost of seven continents surrounding the cosmic mountain Meru. Bhāratavarṣa is its southernmost region, and in all three traditions it is described as the only place where karma fully ripens and liberation is genuinely possible. This is not a minor shared detail. Traditions that disagreed profoundly on almost every philosophical question inhabited the same map of the cosmos. When the Buddhist emperor Ashoka used Jambudvīpa in his rock edicts to name the land he governed, the word worked because every tradition already knew it. A term from cosmology had become common political language because the cosmology was common ground. The Purāṇic, Buddhist, and Jain elaborations of Jambudvīpa alone constitute enormous bodies of text, art, and philosophical commentary. What is offered here is only the surface.
Āryāvarta आर्यावर्त
Later Vedic to Classical · approximately 800 BCE – 1000 CE · The abode of those who live with discernment
Āryāvarta is a cultural map, not a geographic one. The word Ārya does not mean race, in the texts where it does real philosophical work, it means cultured, disciplined, attentive to dharma. Different texts draw the boundaries differently. Baudhāyana extends it from the Himālayas to the Vindhyas, sea to sea. Manu places it more precisely between the Sarasvatī and the Dṛṣadvatī rivers. That the boundaries shift across texts is itself the teaching, the tradition understood that what constituted the cultural heartland was not a fixed line on the ground but a quality of attention sustained within it. The 10th-century poet Rājaśekhara still uses the term. It outlasted every political empire it was associated with, which tells you something about what it was actually describing.
Bhāratavarṣa भारतवर्ष
Epic–Purāṇic onward · approximately 500 BCE to the present · The region of Bharata from bhr, to bear and sustain
The most inclusive of all the names. Varṣa means a region or division of the earth - in the Purāṇic geographic imagination, the world was divided into varṣas, each understood as a complete world in itself, with its own mountains, rivers, and character. Bhāratavarṣa is the varṣa of Bharata. Bharata comes from bhr, to bear and maintain - the people who sustain what they have been given. Two traditions trace the name differently. In the Mahābhārata, Bharata is the ancestor of the great epic families, the lineage from which the poem takes its name. In the Bhāgavata Purāṇan and in Jain texts, Bharata is the son of Ṛṣabhadeva, the first tīrthaṃkara of the Jain tradition. That the same name carries both a Vedic epic lineage and a Jain one is not an oversight. It is the name already holding more than one story of this land within it.
uttaraṃ yat samudrasya himādreś caiva dakṣiṇam
varṣaṃ tad bhārataṃ nāma bhāratī yatra santatiḥ
Viṣṇu Purāṇa II.3.1 · “The land north of the ocean, south of the snowy mountains. that region is called Bhārata, where the descendants of Bharata dwell”
Hind · Hindustan هند · हिन्दुस्तान
Medieval onward · approximately 7th century CE · The subcontinent as the Persian and Arabic world came to know it
Al-Bīrūnī came to the subcontinent as part of Mahmud of Ghazni’s court, a ruler whose repeated raids destroyed temples and cities across this land. Al-Bīrūnī’s own scholarly work was different in character. He spent years studying Sanskrit directly with scholars and wrote his Kitāb al-Hind around 1030 CE with a rigour and seriousness that sits apart from the violence of the context that brought him here. His name for the subcontinent is Hind, from the Persian rendering of Sindhu. At this point in history, Hindu means primarily of this land - a geographic and cultural designation, not a sectarian one. Hindustan, the Persian compound that becomes the name of empire and later of poetry, carries a suffix cognate with the Sanskrit sthāna, meaning place or ground. Even in its foreign form, the land’s own root is audible.
India Ἰνδία → India
Classical Greek onward · approximately 5th century BCE · The Indus river’s name carried westward through five languages
Sindhu becomes Hindu in Persian, Indos in Greek, India in Latin, and then India in every European language that reached this coast. Herodotus described it as the most populous land he knew. Megasthenes, who spent time at the Mauryan court, wrote a detailed account that historians still draw on. The name is entirely external — nobody on the subcontinent used it to describe their own land until the colonial period made it official. And yet it now sits in the Constitution alongside Bhārat. Article 1 reads: India, that is Bhārat. An external name and the civilization’s own name, placed in one sentence without hierarchy, neither cancelling the other out.
III. What is being lost
Each of these names Jambudvīpa, Āryāvarta, Sapta Sindhava, Bhāratavarṣa represents not just a label but an entire architecture of understanding. Volumes of scripture, philosophy, art, and lived practice have been built on each one. Communities of people have organized their sense of the cosmos, their ethical responsibilities, and their understanding of liberation around these frameworks for thousands of years. To reduce them to a modern political category is not simplification. It is erasure and it is happening in real time, often in the name of making yoga more accessible or more inclusive.
The deeper problem with describing yoga as South Asian is not only that the term is historically imprecise. It is that the term actively replaces a living civilizational identity with a political map and that map no longer reflects where the living tradition actually resides. Consider what the name Hindu Kush the mountain range marking the northwestern boundary of this civilizational geography means in Persian. It means kills the Hindus. A mountain range was named after the destruction of the communities who lived on its other side. That a geographic feature carries this name is not incidental. It is one of the ways civilizational violence leaves its mark on the landscape itself, in plain sight, for anyone willing to look.
A mountain range was named after the destruction of the communities who lived on its other side. Civilizational violence leaves its mark on the landscape itself.
Taxila or Takṣaśilā, was one of the ancient world’s great seats of learning, where Vedic and Buddhist traditions converged for centuries. It sits near modern Islamabad. The great monastic centres of what is now Afghanistan were among the most significant sites of Buddhist scholarship in the ancient world. The philosophical universities of what is now Bangladesh shaped the intellectual traditions of the eastern subcontinent for generations. None of these places retain significant living presence of the traditions they once carried. Within living memory, the communities who maintained that continuity have been reduced to near-absence through partition, repeated communal violence, and coerced departure. The Hindu population of what is now Pakistan has gone from roughly 15 percent at partition to under 2 percent today. In Bangladesh, from approximately 28 percent to under 8 percent. In Afghanistan, the ancient dharmic communities are functionally gone.
When someone describes yoga as South Asian, and by that implies a tradition that belongs equally to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and India, they are describing a distribution of living tradition that does not, in fact, exist. The geography is there. The custodians of the tradition within those geographies, in most cases, are not. To speak as if they are is not inclusion. It is the use of a political map to paper over a civilizational wound.
Bhāratavarṣa is not a claim of ownership; it is not nationalism framed in Sanskrit. It is a civilizational description of a place that was philosophically continuous and genuinely plural where Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, and Tāntric traditions argued with each other across centuries, borrowed from each other, sharpened each other’s thinking, and produced the extraordinary body of philosophy and practice that yoga draws from. Using the name is an act of precision. It acknowledges what the tradition knew about itself, and what has been done to it.
IV. What Bhāratavarṣa asks
This brings us to what the word Bhāratavarṣan asks of anyone who works with yoga today. Bharata from bhr - to bear, to maintain, to carry forward with care. The name does not describe what the land contains. It describes what its people do with it. They sustain it. They do not let it fall.
Varṣa is a region- a complete division of the earth, understood in the Purāṇic tradition as a world entire in itself. Bhāratavarṣa is not a territory bounded by armies. It is a world, understood through the responsibility of those who inhabit and sustain it.
There are people today who make their living teaching, selling, and building businesses around practices and ideas that originated in this civilization. Many do so with genuine care. But good intention is not the same as understanding. And understanding requires, at minimum, knowing the name of the land, knowing what happened to it, and knowing what the tradition itself says about the responsibility of those who carry it forward.
Sapta Sindhava knows this land by its rivers. Jambudvīpa knows it by its place in the cosmos. Āryāvarta knows it by the quality of attention cultivated within it. Bhāratavarṣa knows it by the responsibility of those who bear it forward. These are not competing descriptions. They are layers of understanding that the tradition held simultaneously, and that this series will return to, word by word.
The question is not whether you are from this civilization. The question is whether you are willing to hold what you have received with the same care that the name itself describes.
I started this series because I kept noticing the same thing that the words around yoga were quietly changing what yoga was understood to be. Bhāratavarṣa is the first word. There are many more. If you want to follow where they lead, subscribe for Sunday essays. And if this one resonated with a teacher, a student, anyone who has ever wondered what yoga is actually rooted in, please pass it on.
Om Tat Sat
Trupti · SattvaSpired | Yoga in Essence
Primary Texts & Sources
1. Ṛgveda · Vedic · approximately 1500–1200 BCE
Sapta Sindhava the earliest geographical self-description, knowing the land by its seven rivers. Nadistuti Sukta (RV 10.75); also RV 2.41.16 and RV 6.52.6 on the Sarasvatī.
2. Avesta, Vendidad 1.18 · Zoroastrian · approximately 1000–600 BCE
Hapta Həndu the same seven-river geography in the ancient Iranian tradition. Discussed in Gherardo Gnoli, Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 3, 1989, pp. 44–46.
3. Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra · Vedic legal text · approximately 800–600 BCE
Contains an early definition of Āryāvarta. No specific verse number given, as editions vary; readers are advised to consult a critical edition.
4. Mahābhārata, Ādiparva · Sanskrit epic · approximately 400 BCE – 400 CE
Establishes the Bharata lineage, from which the land takes its name.
5. Viṣṇu Purāṇa, Chapter II.3.1 · Purāṇic text · core composition approximately 1st–4th century CE
The canonical verse defining Bhāratavarṣa. Available in full at the Sacred Texts Archive.
6. Bhāgavata Purāṇa · Purāṇic text · approximately 9th–10th century CE
Bharata as son of Ṛṣabhadeva the name carrying both Vedic and Jain origin traditions. General reference; verse numbers vary by edition.
7. Ashokan Rock Edicts · Buddhist–Mauryan · approximately 250 BCE
Ashoka uses Jambudvīpa to name the land he governs — a cosmological term entering political statecraft. See Major Rock Edict XIII and the Minor Rock Edicts.
8. Akkadian Royal Inscriptions of Sargon of Akkad · Mesopotamian · approximately 2300 BCE
Records trade with Meluhha, identified by scholars with the Indus–Sarasvatī civilization. Discussed in A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton University Press, 1969.
9. Kitāb al-Hind (Al-Bīrūnī) · Islamic scholarship · approximately 1030 CE
A rigorous external account of the subcontinent’s philosophical traditions. Al-Bīrūnī studied Sanskrit directly with scholars within the Ghaznavid court.
10. Jain Āgamas · Jain canonical texts · approximately 3rd century BCE onward
Share the Jambudvīpa cosmological geography and carry the Bharata origin through Ṛṣabhadeva. General reference to the canonical corpus.
A note on dates and sources: all timelines in this essay are working approximations. The composition history of the Vedic texts, the dating of the Purāṇas, and the archaeology of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization are all subjects of ongoing scholarly discussion. Where specific verse or chapter references are given, readers are encouraged to verify them in a critical edition, as numbering varies across translations. This essay will be updated as additional references and maps are added to the series. If you have a correction or a source that adds to what is discussed here, please send me a DM with additional info to review.