Last week, on the social media site X, the former minister of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) Fawad Chaudhry was given a rather stern lesson in history by the chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

In an X post, Bilawal had used the word ‘Sindhu’ for the River Indus, warning that “an attack” on its flow (by India) would not be tolerated. Mr Chaudhry commented that Bilawal should not have used the word ‘Sindhu’. He wrote: “This is an attack on Pakistan, not on Sindh, unless you have also joined Sindhu Desh.”

This was a rather uninformed comment by Chaudhry. Bilawal was livid. He responded by posting that Sindhu is the ancient name of the Indus. He is right. Many folks outside Sindh aren’t aware of this. This is not something that is taught in Pakistani textbooks. So, whenever they hear the word ‘Sindhu’, the first thing that comes to their mind is ‘Sindhu Desh’, a term coined for an independent Sindh by the Sindhi scholar G.M. Syed.

The River Indus originates from a mountain spring in Tibet. Fed by glaciers, it flows through the Ladakh region into Pakistan. The majority of its journey towards the Arabian Sea unfolds within Pakistan’s borders. It is the country’s largest river and is often referred to as ‘Pakistan’s national river.’

Like most fed only on Pakistani textbooks, the former minister of information Fawad Chaudhry is woefully ignorant about the etymology of the word ‘Sindhu’ that he took offence to. It is, in fact, one of the oldest names for the River Indus and very much in continuous usage

About 5,000 years ago, a major civilisation emerged on the banks of the river. Archaeologists call it the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC). It extended from northeast Afghanistan, to what today is Pakistan and northwest India.

No one’s sure what the river was called during the IVC period — even though, according to the American linguist Franklin Southworth, it was likely called ‘cintu’. However, the word ‘Sindhu’ first appeared in the oldest Vedic text, Rigveda (second millennium BCE). It is a Sanskrit word and Southworth suggests it may have been derived from ‘cintu’ by the people who dislodged and replaced the IVC population.

The ancient Persians pronounced ‘Sindhu’ as ‘Hindu’. Present-day Punjab and Sindh in Pakistan were part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550-330 BCE). The Persians referred to the people living in these regions as ‘Hindu’ or ‘people of the river.’

In the fifth century BCE, ancient Greeks encountered these people. The Greek rendering of the word ‘Hindu’ was ‘Indos’. They called the river ‘Indos’ and the region ‘Indoi’, or ‘the land/people of the Indos River.’

So, the word ‘Hindu’ is an ancient Persian word derived from the Sanskrit word ‘Sindhu’ referring to the river. ‘Indos’ was derived by ancient Greeks from the Persian word ‘Hindu’. It is from ‘Indos’ that we get the name ‘Indus’ (and India). None of this had anything to do with religion. There was no Hinduism as such at the time. The word ‘Hinduism’ is relatively new.

According to the historian Abraham Eraly, it was in the 16th century that non-Muslim populations of India began being referred to as ‘Hindu’, to distinguish them from the ruling Muslims. However, the word ‘Hinduism’ was only coined by British writers in the first decades of the 19th century. It referred to culminated traditions, texts and practices that date to the 2nd millennium BCE. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that the word ‘Hindu’ was given a monolithic religious context. Yet, there are still ‘Hindus’ who reject this word and claim to be followers of ancient ‘Vedic beliefs.’

The word Sindhu is still in use in India and Pakistan. For example, in Pakistan, Indus is also referred to as the ‘River Sindh’ (Darya-i-Sindh in Urdu). Again, the word ‘Sindh’ (in this regard) is obtained from the word Sindhu and not from ‘Sindh’ — the region that has a Sindhi-speaking majority. So where did the word Sindh come from?

Since a large part of the Indus runs across this region, the ancient Persians called it ‘Abisind’, the Greeks referred to it as ‘Sinthus’, the Romans called it ‘Sindus’, the Chinese ‘Sintow’ and the Arabs called it ‘Sind’. It is this eight century name that the Arabs gave to the region that has lasted to this day.

In 1843, British colonialists conquered Sindh and merged it with the ‘Bombay Presidency.’ This fostered a sense of deprivation among the Sindhis. For the next nine decades, Sindhi intellectuals and politicians worked to establish the status of Sindh as a province. In 1936, they succeeded. In 1947, Sindh voted to become part of the newly created Pakistan.

However, the sense of deprivation among the Sindhi-speakers returned when Sindh’s capital Karachi was put under federal control. Also, after the country’s creation, millions of Urdu-speaking Muslim migrants (mohajirs) from India settled in Sindh, leading to a significant demographic shift. This altered the ethnic composition of the province, especially in Karachi and Hyderabad.

New grievances rekindled the Sindhi nationalism that had emerged during British rule to establish Sindh as a province. In Pakistan, it was largely an intellectual project, led by the likes of G.M. Syed, Ibrahim Joyo and Sheikh Ayaz. In the 1960s, they formulated a ‘history’ of the Sindhi people which, according to the academic Dr Asma Faiz, “expressed the political and ideological aspirations of a community in search of its lost glory, hearkening back to a past that included a period of territorial and political autonomy before the onset of colonialism.”

Sindhi nationalism then took a more militant turn after the Bengali-majority East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh in 1971. A year later, Syed launched the Sindhu Desh movement, which aspired to separate Sindh from Pakistan. Ironically, at the time, a Sindhi, Z.A. Bhutto, rose to power. Bhutto and his PPP were staunch federalists, popular in Sindh as well as in Punjab. The Bhutto regime launched a scheme to neutralise Syed’s separatist politics. Bhutto co-opted Syed’s Sindhi nationalist narrative and put it in the context of Pakistani federalism.

In this, one can find the seeds of a federalist nationalism that posits that Pakistan is a continuation of civilisations that have been emerging on the banks of the Indus for 5,000 years. According to this narrative, Sindh is but just one part of this continuation, which otherwise includes all of Pakistan. This narrative has continued to erode the more aggressive conduits of Sindhi nationalism.

So, Mr Chaudhry should relax. Technically, being a Punjabi from Jhelum, he too is a part of civilisations which emerged in regions fed by River Indus, which also happened to be called Sindhu centuries before anything known as Sindhu Desh even existed.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 6th, 2025