History repeats itself. The story of India’s nomenclature as “Hindustan” sounds incredibly similar to the Turkish saga:
After the Turkish war of independence, which ended in 1923, arguments ensued about what to call the new country. By choosing to call the country “Turkey” and its citizens “Turks,” who were clearly the most numerous ethnic group in this country, Atatürk and his followers unwittingly created a problem for non-ethnic Turks – the most numerous of whom were the Kurds – in that new country. Atatürk and his colleagues wanted the word “Turk” to mean a citizen of that country irrespective of ethnicity or religion. But the word “Turk” was also used to describe an ethnic identity which made other non-ethnic Turks unsure of their position in the state. Since they were not ethnic Turks, the confusing and double meaning of the word “Turk” – now to mean both ethnic and national identities – made some non-ethnic Turks wonder whether they could be full citizens of this new republic.
Had Atatürk named this new country “Anatolia,” the geographic/non-ethnic name for that area, this problem would probably not have arisen. (A similar problem existed in the UK. The British solved this by separating political from ethnic identity. They use the word British to connote the political identity of the country, and the terms “English,” “Scottish,” “Welsh,” and “Irish” for ethnic identity.) (source)
I remain convinced that a lot of trouble back home could have been avoided by effectuating a straight leap from “Bharat” to “India”. No thanks to the Persians.
Hindustan is derived from the Persian word Hindu, which is itself is derived from Sindhu, Sanskrit for the Indus River. Sindhu is a river in Sanskrit, in Persian it becomes Hindu.[2] This together with a popular suffix -stān (Sanskrit and Old Persian ‘sthāna’, meaning place) [3][4] gave birth to the word Hindustan, which was rendered as Hindusthan.[5] Literally, the word means land of the Hindus. (source)
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