When the king of Swaziland changed the name of his country to Eswatini back in 2018, the Communist Party of Swaziland called it out as a populist distraction and continued to use the colonial name while demanding real change.
http://www.solidnet.org/article/ba5f172f-e2d7-11e8-a7f8-42723ed76c54/
So I think the question should be, what are Indian communists calling their country? How do they feel about the various names?
the Communist Party of Swaziland called it out as a populist distraction ... while demanding real change
Completely understandable, of course the name of the country matters little compared to material conditions.
... and continued to use the colonial name ...
But why? Like yeah the above is true, but how does that mean it's bad to move to the native name instead of the colonizer name?
Side note: it should technically be "eSwatini", but annoyingly no one — not even the eSwatini government — uses that spelling.
Technically in what way? If you're writing the name in English, it still exists in the context of English grammatical rules even if the word is not English in origin.
called it out as a populist distraction [by extremely unpopular right wing governments]
exactly what happened with Iran & Myanmar, lol
Officially, it’s both. Culturally, there’s those two, plus Hindustan. You can call it whatever. Bharat is being championed by the Hindu-right as the only official/indigenous name. So you might want to steer clear of that for those reasons.
I’ve never met any Indians who referred to their country as anything but India when speaking in English. So if they’re not doing it, I - a non-Indian - will not try to one up them for no reason lol
Like some native Americans prefer to be called Indian, some prefer their specific tribal name, some want xyz. I’m not going to just say “uhmm actually it’s indigenous American, not Indian.” Or vice versa
That's up to them, I think. There's precedent for countries changing their official English names.
See Czech Republic -> Czechia and Turkey -> Turkiye
Your guns go peru peru, my guns go BHARAT BHARAT :
: :As an Indian I use India because the whole 'Bharat' thing is just a propaganda campaign by the bjp. Although it's also the legal alternate name of the country so you can use it.
India because then Hindutvas will out themselves to "correct" you
If the name does change I hope the more principled transliteration of 婆羅多 gets used in Chinese.
AFAIK, the use of Bharat is considered to be a form linguistic imperialism foisted by the plains-dwellers upon the rest of the country.
I'd call 'em any, depending on which crowd I'm referring that likes either or both names...
