A section of the Indian people has been relentlessly engaged in propagating a very sectarian concept regarding the identities of the people living in the Indian sub-continent. In view of them, people who have been living in this region are the Hindus or India is the land of the Hindus only. This has prompted us to look back and try to understand the question of identity and identity of the people living around us. Though such a deduction to propagate an identity on the unique basis of religion can easily be refuted on the ground that identities of an assembly of people undeniably demand explanation of many a factors, namely, the profession in which the people has been engaged and the languages the people speak and traditional development of the soil to which they have been tied and the sub-divisions or branches of the religions of the region and the province of the state and finally the state to which they belong and such others. In a sense these considerations are simple and still not at all simple as these are related directly and indirectly to a section at the helm of power. Hence when we hear from some persons who are at the chair and/or who are very close to the chair or are holding more or less almost same faces like those in the chair we determine to look back and learn the truth despite a great confusion already created by our nearest forefathers who had to face the formidable British for the urgent aspiration of national liberation and for that reason who had to dig out treasures of the motherland rationally and irrationally. Therefore, the salesmen of the Hinduism and the salesmen who have been declaring that the Hindus and the indians are identical should not be given free hand.

# # # #

A good number of features may be common in a set of people of an area and still the identity of those people will be instrumented by their distinctly different professions or any other features that make one different from another. We belong to West Bengal and we have been called Bengali and our identity is being determined against the existence of Punjabis (people of Punjab) or Gujarati (people of Gujarata).

It is easy to understand that a language is named long after its use by a set of people. The language of our province, that is, of West Bengal, has been named as Bangla after almost a millennium. Our earliest literary exercises are termed as CHARYAPADA which are actually songs, a few in number and songs composed by a section of the followers of the Buddha settled temporary in the eastern part of this sub-continent.These pieces of songs are older than one thousand years when and till the middle of the nineteenth century nobody has claimed that they are in the language called Bangla. Since then it has taken some centuries to grow enough so that the identity of this language is settled although literary contributions in this language have not been fewer throughout. Even when Raja Rammohan Roy (known in as the precurssor of the Indian Renessaince) has prepared a grammar book for this language he has named it GOURIYO BYAKORON meaning grammar for the language of the Gouriyo society. (GOURIYO refers to GOURA, name of Bengal of good old days ). And the Portuguese missionaries who were in Bengal during the eighteenth century called this language Bengala. It was Tagore (RABINDRANATH TAGORE) who for the first time had used the term "BANGLA" in late nineteenth century.

# # # #

The word Hindu came from an earlier word Sindhu. Herodotus, the Greek historian, used one word Indoi to refer to a province occupied by the Persian emperor Darius (522-486 BC). Indoi was used to denote an area between the river Sindhu and the region of Gandhara with an extention to the Arabin sea to the south. The river has since been termed as the Indus in the western references. The Persian could not pronounce S and DH properly and used to pronounce H for S and thus Sindhu became Hindu or Indoi. We can remember INDICA, the invaluable accounts of another Greek scholar Megasthenes who had visited the court of the Nandas in the early third century, the one of the beginners in building up of a united empire in the ancient India.The term India of the very recent time might havebeen derived in this way : Sindhu > Hindu > indoi > India. Thus Hindu was at the start an area in the Indus valley and in course of the time it began to cover the entire Indian sub-continent.

The region which had been begun to be addressed as Indoi or India and begun to be addressed by the people who did not belong to this region was in the Aryans' references and was known as Jambudweepa and Bharatawarsha. In the rock edicts of king Asoka of the third century BC we find the term Jambudweepa. In the great Indian epic (the Mahabharata) we again find the terms Jambudweepa and Bharatawarsha to indicate a great area of this Indian sub-continent. In the accounts of the Chinese traveller Huen Tsang who had visited India during the reign of Harshabardhana no such words as Hindu could be traced.

Thus the term Hindu has its association with a region however, and its reference to imply the Brahminical religion practiced in some parts of this region has been attributed by the muslims and that too long after their initial invasions. The Arab scholar Al Beruni (early eleventh century) has used this term as a reference to name a land or to name the inhabitants of the same land. It was probably Ameer Khusru (early thirteenth century) has used in his writing to denote the term Hindu as a religion for the first time. Probably, by this time the terms Hindu (to indicate a religion) and Hindustan (to indicate this territory) began to be used in general.

An important matter to be noted is that in the writings of the Indians even before the fourteenth/fifteenth century the term Hindu was absent either to indicate this region of the Indian sub-continent or to refer to any religion. In ancient India we find mainly two sets of religion -- Brahminism and Buddhism-Jainism by name. Even in the most important relgious text of this region, that is, in the Gita we do not encounter with any word like Hindu. Nor this word has ever been noticed in the great Indian epics (the Ramayana and the Mahabharata). And again in the works of Manu who has been projected as a High Hindu in our time by different corners has not pronounced any such word. Nor we do come across such a word in Acharyo Shamkara (ninth century) or in Ramanuja (twelfth century). The most surprising fact is that Tulsidas, the author of the Ramachoritamanasa, of the sixteenth century, has not uttered the term Hindu at least once although his principal character is Ramachandra the great savior.

Most probably, the term Hindu has been used for the first time to denote a name of a religion by certain religious sects of the soil of India. Dadu or Kabir belonged to this section. They were influence by the Sufis of Persia. These section was not interested neither in the Vedas nor in the Koran. They were against the Hinduism and the Islam. Finally, from a few western Indologist the terms Hindu and Hinduism began to be heard and the Indians of the nineteenth century have found the term fruitful and instrumentable for the necessary political ideology with the lustre of nationalism. In this way the Hinduism and the Indianness have become close and usable to propound as something undivided by some people in whose dream India was to stand for the India of the Hindus only. This one, we consider, is an example of the political consideration of nomenclature in the main.

As the idea of nationalism necessary to fight against the formidable British has gradually become the battery of the people right from the second half of the nineeenth century India has witnessed a good number of thinkers and social and political activists tilted to the Brahminism and pleaded for the sake of Hinduism. The memory of the muslim rule was not a happy one and it was still green in the more than two hundred years of injured mind and the term Hinduism became a catch word of the day. Still the stalwarts of the century , be it Dayananda Saraswati or Swami Vivekananda or even Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay or anyone else, had to hunt and find out the traditional glory and the roots of the history of the motherland and they dipped into the Vedas and the Epics and other ancient Sanskrit texts many of which fortunately and unfortunately illuminated by this time by the latest invader and occupier and their European brethren.The thought-process of the youth of this period was shaped by these pro-Brahminism individuals who had fascination in uttering and writing the term Hinduism and who were really tutored or , to the minimum to say, influenced even by the British authors writing the history of India. Such authors had, true to comment, a knee-deep knowledge on the long history of the vast India the vastness they were not in a position to fathom. They, may be with some ulteror motif, divided the history of India into three periods, namely, Hindu Age, Muslim Age and the British or Modern Age.They could, obviously, use terms like Ancient Age, Middle Age and Modern Age. Here, at this point, the two sets, the first set being the privileged individuals and people surrounding them having an affinity to the Brahminical whatnots and the second one consisting of the administrators and the intellectuals associated with the British had common oppositions. They were the muslims who as the rulers just before the British for reason one and many could not win the heart of the inhabitants of the region and who, mostly by themselves, had to build up the last walls of resistance against the British intruders. Hence one will definitely notice that in the initial stage of Indian nationalism the participation of the muslims was not significant and that the muslims being late starters in this respect and also being members of the formidable enemy still in the process of getting defeated by the British army in different fronts of the sub-continent had to eat an humble pie in the spheres of opportunities and advantages the imperialist had to shower in order to assure the longevity of its alien rule in India.

Despite all these, the modern pioneers of Brahminism in India had no uniform conception on what they actually had decided to take to the hapless millions of India in the name of Hinduism. Dayananda Swaraswati and Swami Vivekananda did not mean the same thing and did not represent the same in the name of Hinduism. There were others, too, in the field with specific different perceptions.

# # #

India is an old landmass and is ornamented with people engaged in diverse ideas and opinions and with people settled in different religious beliefs and customs and all these have been cultivated from some epoch of history not distinctly determined still. It is said that the neo-Austrics and Mongoloids and Dravidians were the original inhabitants of this land prior to the arrival of the agricultural Aryans. India has been termed by the historians as an ethnological museum. And really it is so. Here one wll find a wonderful blending of the Sakas, Hunas, Mughals and co-existence of others including the British. At present there are many sets of people with prominent difference in their language and religious and cultural practices. There are tribals of different sets and they do not belong to the Hindus and nor they do belong to any other religious community. Look I am a Bengali as I have introduced myself at the start. So, there are Asomia and Oriya or Punjabi and Keraleans and others. There are Buddhists and Jainees and Muslims and Hindus and thus many others. I should, therefore, humbly state that Hindus and Indians cannot be termed identical.