Indians were lost in speculation on Tuesday following rumors that authorities were planning to drop the official use of their country’s English name, “India”, referred to as “Bharat” in an official invitation to G20 leaders.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has indeed worked to remove the lingering symbols of British colonization from the cityscape, political institutions and history books of the world’s now most populous country. Narendra Modi himself generally resorts when speaking of India to the word “Bharat”, which dates back to ancient Hindu texts written in Sanskrit and is one of its two official names under its Constitution.
Members of the BJP, the ruling Hindu nationalist party, have previously campaigned against the use of the name “India”, which has its roots in Western antiquity and was imposed by the UK. Next weekend, New Delhi will host a G20 summit to be capped off with a state dinner hosted, according to the invitation cards, by the “President of Bharat”.
The government has convened an extraordinary session of parliament for later in the month, while remaining tight-lipped on its legislative agenda. But the News18 television channel claimed that unnamed government sources had told it that BJP parliamentarians would present a special resolution on that occasion to give prominence to the official use of the term “Bharat”.
Rumors about the project were enough to elicit a mix of offended reactions from Narendra Modi’s opponents and enthusiastic support in other quarters. “I hope the government won’t be stupid enough to do without ‘India’ completely,” commented Shashi Tharoor, a Congress (opposition) party official, on X, formerly Twitter. “We should continue to use both words” and not give up on “a name steeped in history, a name recognized around the world,” he added.
Former cricketer Virender Sehwag on the contrary welcomed the prospect of such a name change and urged the Indian Cricket Board to start putting ‘Bharat’ on team uniforms. “India is a British-given name [and] it’s high time we got our original name ‘Bharat’ back,” he said.
For decades, Indian governments of various persuasions have sought to erase the traces of the British colonial era by renaming roads, and even entire towns. The process has intensified since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister (2014) and he stressed in public speeches the need for India to abandon the smacks of ‘colonial mentality’. His government also removed the Islamic names of places imposed under the Mughal empire which preceded British colonization, a measure emblematic, denounce his detractors, of a desire to establish the supremacy of the majority Hindu religion in India.