[sbmthakur]

Europeans used the word India long before Britishers colonized India. So it's not really a good analogy. Bombay -> Mumbai is a far better one. However, I do agree that spending taxpayers' money on changing each colonial name is not worth it.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_India

[sumedh]

> Europeans used the word India long before Britishers colonized India.

So why use a European name, shouldn't it be an "Indian" name.

[sbmthakur]

Bharat(along with India) is a constitutionally recognized name. So it is actually used in official context. But the general convention is India for English, and Bharat for Hindi(and some other languages like Marathi).

> So why use a European name, shouldn't it be an "Indian" name.

It's difficult to answer. I think Indians usually don't have much problem with foreign words. The day-to-day Hindi is somewhat influenced by Persian and even the word for the majority religion (Hindu) has a Persian origin. But in case of English worded cities, it quickly becomes problematic as they were named during the colonial period.

[Jagat]

There's also this other issue that unified India is an extremely new thing and it wasn't common for people within India to refer to that landmass as a whole.