Yeah us.
Says you. The people who used that term didn't limit it, also Gandhara still has Indus flowing that in itself defeats your argument. Why not call em India. And again, why dwell so much on the Sanskrit nomenclature when the name is itself ultimately derived from Sanskrit? If I'm named Varuna, the fact that someone pronounces or adapts my name differently doesn't somehow mean I'm no longer the Varuna. If it's convenient I adopt that name too.
It's in the Indian constitution itself, India that is Bharat.
So what if we adopted that exonym. It's afterall our name. It has been for thousands of years.
Agreed in principle. Foreign imposed or derived nomenclature, languages, and ideologies, should be judged on merit, not on who brought them and from where. Glad you have started to understand this simple rationality.
THAT SAID, "India" is inaccurate as a descriptor of ANY sort for your kind specifically, for the explanations provided over the last couple of days (and repeatedly in the past). The word itself is more accurately co-located to Pakistan than it is to Bharat.
Indeed, this simple misappropriation of nomenclature is what has caused 79 years of confusion among gangetics who think, erroneously, they have some form of descendancy "claim" over the IVC. It will probably continue for some time yet until reasonable folk come to this acceptance. Russians and Poles have very similar genomic profiles and neighbour each other (including, btw, our old mutual friend, R1a!.. lolz!) but they are distinct nations, comfortable in their respective identities. Poles don't claim Russia as some "lost heartland" and Russians are the same regarding Poland. Imagine if Poles had "called themselves" or "self identified as" a nation called "Muscovia". They would have spent centuries obsessing and spewing nonsense about their "claims" over the Volga or the Urals or the vast Muscovian plains.
As for your comments on "limiting the geographical boundaries of ancient India", I have already explained the original source of the phraseology and its clear intent in geographical terms from those who imposed the term upon us all. The term "INDIA" IS NOT MENTIONED IN VEDIC SCRIPT FOR THE AREA OF MODERN INDIA IN ITS ENTIRETY; THE TERM GIVEN WAS BHARAT. IF IVC NEVER EXISTED OR WAS SHIELDED FROM YOUR VIEW, YOUR PEOPLE WOULD HAVE CHOSEN BHARAT.
If others have come along later and regarded the whole region as the "Indian subcontinent", it remains a reasonable and accurate geographical descriptor for them, although erroneously oversimplified. Of course, we now know that it was a poor choice because apparently, deployment of this term as an innocent descriptor leads gangetics from Nehru onwards to claim some form of retrofitted ownership! I suppose the Indian Ocean is also administered by a call centre in Lucknow these days.
I do, of course, understand why there is a need among those cultural descendants of elephant riders to urgently retrospectively associate with and reverse engineer their history on that of the city builders to their west but it is all based on a nehruvian error of nomenclature and nothing more.
Gandhara is mentioned repeatedly by you as if it is some flex, but it actually further supports the PAKISTANI POSITION. Does it matter to my argument if the option of being called "India" was NOT availed by them or their owners? Of course not! They are not obliged to call themselves "India". They or their owners will choose any name they like. What they should categorically not do, to avert civilisational confusion and legacy theft, is call themselves "Gangadesh" or "China" or "Russia". Likewise, Pakistan could easily have called itself "India", an entirely accurate national descriptor - that we did not doesn't suddenly leave the term "available" for false usurpers like some personalised number plate on Ebay.
Do you recall the episode between FYROM and Greece? Very instructive in this context. Give it a read when you have time. FYROM took it to the point of naming their airport after Alexander of Macedon. Greece pushed back, rightly so!
