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The river indus in Indian languages is Sindhu. This may be the reason and this term Hindu is coined by the persian invaders from my limited knowledge.
There is another trivia here, have you heard of the Hindukush mountain ranges? do you know what that means?
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I'm not a linguist by any stretch (though I do like to play pretend sometimes), but as I recall, you are correct in your etymology of Indus >< Sindhu.
Aha! Wikipedia to the rescue: "The name Indus is a Latinization of Hindu, in turn the Iranian variant of Sindhu, the name of the Indus in the Rigveda." (it's Wikipedia, so take it for what it's worth
) Then again, I've been told that the basic structure of languages like Persian, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin are all very similar, so it's not a surprise that this would be the case (I've only ever worked in the latter two, so I can't speak to their relation to Sanskrit or Persian... if I think of it, I'll have to ask a friend of mine who is a Hindu scholar and also works in Classical Sanskrit if she knows anything further).
From what I know, you're also correct in that the terms "Indian" and "Hindu" were coined by foreigners coming into the region. According to my limited knowledge (which I must admit is *very* limited) the term came into use in the Persian period after the Sassanian incursions, which you noted in your post.
As for Hindukush... I know that there's a ton of theories, but I think the prevalent one is that it means something like "Hindu killer"... but I could be wrong, since I would have heard that a looooong time ago. I'm always up for a history lesson, though!
