But more and more the party’s view of India’s Muslim history is monolithic. In Goa last year, the B.J.P. president, Amit Shah, described the Muslim period as part of a thousand-year history of slavery. Some months before, a B.J.P. minister had demanded that even Akbar Road — named after the third of the Great Mughals, and the exemplar of religious syncretism — be renamed for the Hindu king he defeated in battle.

It was an example of how even the glories of the Muslim past in India could in the eyes of its Hindu majority come to seem like an unbroken record of defeat. More recently, Yogi Adityanath, the new chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said, “Foreign dignitaries visiting the country used to be gifted replicas of the Taj Mahal and other minarets which do not reflect Indian culture.” If the Taj Mahal gets under your skin, safe to say probably everything will.

The war of nomenclature’s tensest battle lines are drawn around the relationship to modernity. India, like so many postcolonial countries, is an ancient culture reborn as a modern nation. The two most basic terms for the country reflect that double nature, modern and traditional: “India” and “Bharata.” The latter is the Sanskrit word, more commonly rendered in Hindi as Bharat, and it is the name by which the country knows itself, free of the gaze of outsiders. The former is Latin, and the etymology alone represents a long history of feeling oneself as under Western eyes. “Indos” is the Greek word for the Indus River; it is in turn derived from the Persian “Hindu,” which is an antique corruption of the Sanskrit word for river, “sindhu.”

“India” and “Bharat.” The one suggests modernity, with all the appeal and affront of the West, while the other represents that deeper need all people have to stay true to themselves, and their culture. The two are not easily reconciled. From the belly of the smartphone come alien values, attitudes, a way of life, and it is not really possible, as one Brahmin in Varanasi suggested to me, to be Western outside, and Indian at home.

The failure to assimilate the modern West — not just its trappings, but also its values — is never more apparent than in the epidemic of rape sweeping India. Rape, it is said, is not about sex but power. Modernity is power, and those who have better assimilated it, especially if physically weaker, can often appear threatening to those who feel disempowered. The most famous case of this kind was of Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old who was gang-raped in Delhi in 2012. The attack was so violent that she died of her injuries.

But even here the war of names continues. When the head of India’s main Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the cultural fountainhead of the B.J.P., was asked about Ms. Singh, his reply revealed the hysteria that underlies names in India today: Such crimes, he said, take place in India, not in Bharat. He added: “Where ‘Bharat’ becomes ‘India’ with the influence of Western culture, these types of incidents happen.”

Names in India are never just names.