> If anything is a recent invention, it's the idea of a country as a nation state. When we use the bare word "India" in the English language today, it refers t

> If anything is a recent invention, it's the idea of a country as a nation state. When we use the bare word "India" in the English language today, it refers to the modern country as a nation state, and not to its etymological origin as the Hellenized Persian word for the peoples and lands to the southeast of the Sindhu (Indus) river. The great empires of subcontinental history wouldn't have called themselves India, but rather used their own names like "Magadha" or "Chola". Even the standard name for modern India used in much of the northern part of the country, "Bharat" is itself a reference to a ancient tribe of the Gangetic plain region, and not something that historically reflected the subcontinent as a whole, much like the situation with names used for Germany. When we refer to the subcontinent in other time periods, (i.e. the time of the Arthashastra), we qualify it with that time period, like , "Prehistoric India", "Vedic India", "Classical India" "Medieval India", etc. That's nothing specific to India either, we do that for all parts of the world.