By Phillip M Carter* When India invited delegates attending the G20 summit in September 2023 to dinner with “ the President of Bharat ,” rather than “the President of India,” it may have looked to the world like a simple case of postcolonial course correction. The word “India” is, after all, an exonym – a placename given by outsiders. In this case, the name came from the British, who ruled the subcontinent from 1858 to 1947, a violent period of colonialism that later came to be called “the British Raj.” “Bharat,” on the other hand, is the word for “India” in Hindi, by far the most spoken language in the nation . Alongside English, Hindi is one of two languages used in the Indian Constitution , with versions written in each language. “Bharat” may, therefore, look like a well-reasoned and uncontroversial replacement for a term anointed long ago by outsiders – something akin to how Eswatini , Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso updated their countries’ names from the colonial designations “Swa