The word the second student noticed is Hindu. From which language was…

A history teacher in Lucknow shows her class a page from a long eleventh-century work about India, written in Arabic by a scholar from Central Asia who had come to the Punjab. The work describes religion, festivals, astronomy and customs, and many of its chapters open with a question. One student asks which readers the author had in mind when he wrote it. Another student notices that the author uses a word for the people of the lands beyond the Indus and asks where that word first came from.

The word the second student noticed is Hindu. From which language was this term first derived?

Answer & explanation

Correct answer: option 4

The correct answer is Option (4) → Old Persian

Option (1) Turkish — Incorrect. The Turks came much later. They used Hindu, Hindustan and Hindavi, carrying on the older usage.

Option (2) Arabic — Incorrect. The Arabs only continued the Persian usage. They called the region al-Hind and its people Hindi.

Option (3) Sanskrit — Incorrect. Sindhu is the river's own name in Sanskrit, but the word Hindu itself was formed in Old Persian.

Option (4) Old Persian — Correct. The term came from an Old Persian word used in about the sixth-fifth centuries BCE for the region east of the river Sindhu (Indus). It did not then mean a religion.

NCERT (2026-27): “1.2 The Kitab-ul-Hind …
The term “Hindu” was derived from an Old Persian word, used c. sixth-fifth centuries BCE, to refer to the region east of the river Sindhu (Indus). The Arabs continued the Persian usage and called this region “al-Hind” and its people “Hindi”. Later the Turks referred to the people east of the Indus as “Hindu”, their land as “Hindustan”, and their language as “Hindavi”. None of these expressions indicated the religious identity of the people. It was much later that the term developed religious connotations.”