Greater India - Terminology

Terminology

The term Greater India has several related meanings:

• The name Greater India (Portuguese: Indyos mayores) was used at least from the mid-15th century. The term, which seems to have been used with variable precision, sometimes meant only the Indian subcontinent; However, in some accounts of European nautical voyages, Greater India (or India Major) extended from the Malabar Coast (present-day Kerala) to India extra Gangem (lit. "India, beyond the Ganges," but usually the East Indies, i.e. present-day Malay Archipelago) and India Minor, from Malabar to Sind.
• In late 19th-century geography "Greater India" referred to Hindustan (India proper), the Punjab, the Himalayas, and extended eastwards to Indochina (including Burma), parts of Indonesia (namely, the Sunda Islands, Borneo and Celebes), and the Philippines."
• In 20th-century history, art history, linguistics, and allied fields but now largely out of favor, it consisted of "lands including Burma, Java, Cambodia, Bali, and the former Champa and Funan polities of present-day Vietnam," in which pre-Islamic Indian culture left an "imprint in the form of monuments, inscriptions and other traces of the historic ‘Indianising’ process." In some accounts, many Pacific societies and "most of the Buddhist world including Ceylon, Tibet, Central Asia, and even Japan were held to fall within this web of Indianizing culture colonies" This particular usage—implying cultural "sphere of influence" of India—was promoted by the Greater India Society, formed by a group of Bengali men of letters, and is not found before the 1920s. This usage lasted well into the 1970s in History; later in other fields.
• Still current as of 2005, "Greater India" signifies "the Indian sub-continent plus a postulated northern extension" in plate tectonic models of the India–Asia collision. Although its usage in geology pre-dates plate tectonic theory, the term has seen increased usage since the 1970s.