 "Independence Day 2024: From red-and-yellow to Tiranga, the long history of India’s national flag")
What is it about the national flag that instills such a sense of pride and belonging? Each time you see it fluttering high above on buildings, the eyes get misty and you can’t help but smile.
But, did you know that our Tiranga was not always three colours and didn’t always have the Ashok Chakra in the middle? It has evolved over the years — and great thought, planning and work has gone into making the flag today the way it is.
As we gear up for Independence Day and the flag wraps India like a cloak of honour, rejuvenating our love for the motherland, let’s traverse back in time and understand the true origins of the Tiranga. A brief history of how it finally came to being the Tricolour that we are so proud of today.
First flag of India
The idea of a single flag for India was, believe it or not, raised by the British rulers after the rebellion of 1857. However, the design was based on western standards with the Union Flag in the upper-left quadrant and a Star of India enclosed in the royal crown in the middle of the right half. The flag was a symbol of the direct imperial rule in India.
Rejecting this western design, others at the time started designing their own versions of the flag. It has been reported that Sister Nivedita, an Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda, reportedly designed a flag between 1904 and 1906.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe flag was red and yellow with an image of ‘Vajra’ (weapon of god Indra). The phrase ‘Vande Mataram’ was written in Bengali on it. The red colour and the yellow colour signified freedom and victory while the symbol of vajra stood for strength.
However, the first national flag of the nation was hoisted on 7 August 1906 in Kolkata at the Parsee Bagan Square (Green Park). This one was believed to have been designed by freedom activists Sachindra Prasad Bose and Hemchandra Kanungo. It comprised three horizontal stripes of green, yellow and red with Vande Mataram written in the middle. Additionally, the red strip on the flag had symbols of the sun and a crescent moon, and the green strip had eight half-open lotuses.y
In 1907, a slightly modified version was used by Madam Bhikaji Cama at the second International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart. But the flag received little attention from the press and reportedly failed to generate enthusiasm amongst Indian nationalists.
In 1917, Dr Annie Besant and Lokmanya Tilak adopted a new flag as part of the Home Rule Movement. It had five alternate red and four green horizontal stripes, and seven stars in the saptarishi configuration. A white crescent and star occupied one top corner, and the other had Union Jack.
The foundations of present-day flag
The Tricolour as we know today is largely based off the design by freedom fighter Pingali Venkayya , also known as ‘Japan Venkayya’.
Venkayya was first struck by the idea of designing a national flag when he served as a soldier in the British Indian Army and was deployed to South Africa for the Second Boer War (1899-1902). He saw how the Union Jack struck a sense of nationhood among the British soldiers and this served as an inspiration for him.
It was during this stint that he also met Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa and became a staunch Gandhian. They became close with an association that lasted over 50 years.
At the All India Congress Committee in Bezwada in 1921, Venkayya met Gandhi and proposed his design, called the Swaraj flag. It consisted of two red and green bands; the two bands represented the two major religious communities — the Hindus and the Muslims. The flag also had a charkha, which represented Swaraj.
However, Gandhi suggested adding a white band to represent peace and the rest of the communities living in India, and a spinning wheel to symbolise the progress of the country.
On April 13 1923, during a procession by local Congress volunteers in Nagpur commemorating the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the ‘Swaraj’ flag, designed by Venkayya, was hoisted.
The flag kept being used, but generated a lot of discourse around it. Around 1931, concerns were raised about the religious aspect of the flag and whether it was secular in nature.
It was then that a Flag Committee was set up and they came up with the new idea of the flag, with the colour saffron replacing red and the order of the colours changing too. It was now devoid of any religious interpretation.
The colours stood for qualities and not communities; the saffron for courage and sacrifice, white for truth and peace, and green for faith and strength. The charkha stood for the welfare of the masses.
The Tricolour as we know it
On June 23 1947, the Constituent Assembly formed an ad hoc committee to select a flag for Independent India, and it was headed by Rajendra Prasad and included Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Sarojini Naidu, C Rajagopalachari, KM Munshi and BR Ambedkar.
On July 14 1947, the committee recommended that the Swaraj flag, which was already in vogue be adopted as the national flag of India with suitable modifications.
History reports that finally on July 22, members of the Constituent Assembly of India met in the Constitution Hall in Delhi, and the first item on the agenda was adopting the national flag for free India.
It was proposed that “the National Flag of India shall be horizontal tricolour of deep saffron (kesari), white and dark green in equal proportion.” The white band was to have a wheel in navy blue (the charkha being replaced by the chakra), which appears on the abacus of the Sarnath Lion Capital of Ashoka.
However, Gandhiji was not pleased with the flag proposed by the Constituent Assembly. In one of the letters written by Gandhiji, published in The collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, he expressed his objection with the flag adopted by the Constituent Assembly. He was unhappy with the design due to two reasons, absence of the Union Jack, and replacing the charkha (spinning wheel) with the Ashoka Chakra.
In his letter, Gandhiji conveyed his support for the flag proposed by the last British viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten. That design included the flag of the Congress but with a Union Jack in the canton. However, the flag was rejected by Jawaharlal Nehru, claiming that Congress’ nationalist members would see the inclusion of the Union Jack as being overly deferential to the British.
Gandhiji defended the inclusion of the Union Jack canton in India’s national flag. He was of the opinion that even though the British had inflicted harm on the Indians, it was not done by their flag.
“But what is wrong with having the Union Jack in a corner of our flag? If harm has been done to us by the British, it has not been done by their flag and we must also take note of the virtues of the British. They are voluntarily withdrawing from India, leaving power in our hands,” wrote Gandhi to Nehru.
Gandhi ji was also against the charkha being replaced by the Ashok Chakra. In his letter to Nehru, he wrote, “I must say that, if the Flag of the Indian Union will not embody the emblem of the Charkha, I will refuse to salute that flag. You know the National Flag of India was first thought of by me, and I cannot conceive of India’s National Flag without the emblem of the Charkha”.
Controversy over the Tricolour
A controversy over the national flag that keeps re-emerging is that of the designer of the final version of it.
The resolution in the Constituent Assembly mentions no name, owing to which new attributions keep cropping up.
In a 2018 article in The Wire, ‘How the Tricolour and Lion Emblem Really Came to Be’, Laila Tyabji, daughter of Suraiya Tyabji, recollected how her father Baddruddin Tyabji - an ICS in the prime minister’s office - had under Prime Minister Nehru’s instruction set up a Flag Committee headed by Dr Rajendra Prasad.
She described in detail how her parents came up with the idea of the Ashoka Chakra and her mother made a graphic representation of the flag. In the article, she said, “My father watched that first flag — sewn under my mother’s supervision by Edde Tailors & Drapers in Connaught Place — go up over Raisina Hill.”
Controversy and the many rows aside, one can’t argue today that the national flag has become the symbol of our dignity, an essence of what India is. We hope that as the nation celebrates this momentous occasion of independence, the flag continues to fly high and proud.
With inputs from agencies
This article was originally published in 2022 and is now being republished on the occasion of India’s 78th Independence Day.
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