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.
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
Yeah, but at the same time those name changes aren’t very well respected by westerners.
It’s kind of weird how the west respects eSwatini (well, “Eswatini”) more than it respects Czechia.
Eswatini is more respected than Czechia which is more respected than Türkiye. Chinese people are referred to in Chinese name order, but Japanese people are referred to in Western name order. Pinyin is finally used by Americans but they omit the tone marks. We really are all over the place…
Your guns go peru peru, my guns go BHARAT BHARAT :
