On Friday 13 Jul 2007 9:12 am, Charles Haynes wrote: > was there actually any "inside" there?
My take on this. Yes and no. NO in the sense that there was no widespread "self awareness" of India as a nation state with fixed borders, visas, national flower, national sport, national religion and national song. All were just "people" who had (as far as I know) free access to travel to areas that they felt they needed to travel to on pilgrimage no matter which ruler was in charge of a given area. There are no Indian civilizational memories that I know of that speak of any barrier to any Hindu from travelling to Kashi (Benaras, Varanasi) from any area of modern India. No similar records of people being prevented from travelling to the pilgrim centers of Badrinath and Kedarnath. Or the yet to be pillaged temple at Somnath. So I would say YES there was some awareness of "Bharata" - Bharata desha - or Bharat whose boundaries were the Himalayas in the North and had a "Lanka" across a sea, and had, within its boundaries holy rivers such as the Ganga (Ganges), Jamuna. the Sindhu (Indus), the now defunct Saraswati in the West, the Brahmaputra in the east and the Kaveri in the South. For the people of Bharata who held these as part of their lands there were some important "old ciies" including Benaras that I have mentioned, Ayodhya, Indraprastha (Delhi), Patiliputra (Patna - I think). Modern day Kandahar in Afghanistan has a name derived from Gandhari, after a girl from a Kingdom in that area who married Dhritarashtra - the blind father of the sons who fought the war in the Mahabharata. The Bhagvad gita is of coure part of the Mahabharata. Moredn day Lahore, and Kasur in Pakistan are said to have been named after Lava and Kusha - sons of Rama of the Ramayana. So the people of old India were just people who did not see themselves as "India" or "Hindu" which were both externally derived names. shiv
