[1] Hardouin, _Conc._ ii. 940; Labbé, _Conc._ ii. 938-941. The whole
document has also been reprinted in Smith's _Dict. of Chr. Antiq._,
art. "Prohibited Books."
INDIA,[1] a great country and empire of Asia under British rule,
inhabited by a congeries of different races, speaking upwards of fifty
different languages. The whole Indian empire, including Burma, has an
area of 1,766,000 sq. m., and a population of 294 million inhabitants,
being about equal to the area and population of the whole of Europe
without Russia. The population more than doubles Gibbon's estimate of
120 millions for all the races and nations which obeyed imperial Rome.
The natives of India can scarcely be said to have a word of their own by
which to express their common country. In Sanskrit, it would be called
"Bharata-varsha," from Bharata, a legendary monarch of the Lunar line;
but Sanskrit is no more the vernacular of India than Latin is of Europe.
The name "Hindustan," which was at one time adopted by European
geographers, is of Persian origin, meaning "the land of the Hindus," as
Afghanistan means "the land of the Afghans." According to native usage,
however, "Hindustan" is limited either to that portion of the peninsula
lying north of the Vindhya mountains, or yet more strictly to the upper
basin of the Ganges where Hindi is the spoken language. The "East
Indies," as opposed to the "West Indies," is an old-fashioned and
inaccurate phrase, dating from the dawn of maritime discovery, and still
lingering in certain parliamentary papers. "India," the abstract form of
a word derived through the Greeks from the Persicized form of the
Sanskrit _sindhu_, a "river," pre-eminently the Indus, has become
familiar since the British acquired the country, and is now officially
recognized in the imperial title of the sovereign.