Avya Mathur
Mumbai: Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut has called for the abolition of the country’s foreign name ‘India’ and appealed that the nation should be officially renamed only as ‘Bharat’.
The first article of the Constitution states that ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’, implicitly codifying ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ as equally official short names for the Republic of India.
The Manikarnika-The Queen of Jhansi actor, who often hogs headlines for her controversial statements, took to her new microblogging platform Koo account on Tuesday to express her views on how to identify the motherland.
Describing India as a ‘slave name’, she wrote on her social media account that a country fails to progress if it is a reminder of a ‘cheap copy’ of the Western world.
India can only rise if it’s rooted in its ancient spirituality and wisdom that is the soul of this great civilization, she said.
‘The world will look up to us and we will emerge as a world leader if we go higher in urban growth but not be a cheap copy of the western world and remain deeply rooted in the Vedas, Gita, and Yoga. Can we please change this slave name India back to Bharat?’
‘The British gave us slave name India… which literally means east of the Indus River. Really would you call a child small nose, or second-born, or worse, C-section? What kind of a name is this? So rudimentary.
‘Let me tell you the meaning of Bharat. It is made of three Sanskrit words BH (bhav), Ra (rag), ta (tal). Yes, that is who we were before we were enslaved, the most culturally and aesthetically evolved civilization. Every name has a vibration and the British knew this. They not only gave new names to places but even to people and important monuments. We must regain our lost glory, let us start with the name Bharat’, she added.
She also shared the post on Instagram.
Twitter had banned Kangana from the microblogging site in May 2021 for sharing a series of provocative tweets after the West Bengal Assembly elections. Recently, she even condemned Instagram and urged her fans to follow her on Koo, India’s own microblogging platform.
‘I am not interested in your clothes and skin. I want to see deeper. I want to see your mind and intellect’, she wrote.
