A piece of Cloth? A Flag means more.
It gives me a deep sense of pride and belonging when I see
or hold the Tricolour.
Is it just a piece of coloured cloth? A mere symbol?
No.
It represents something far deeper — our sense of belonging,
our pride in this land, its people, its culture and its heritage; the land we
proudly call our own.
This year, that feeling carries a little more weight. India
marks its 80th year of independence — eight decades since a nation of a billion
stories chose to write its own future. Eighty years since a flag smuggled
across oceans, sewn in secret, and raised in defiance finally flew over a free
land without asking anyone's permission. It seems like the right moment to step
back and ask a simple question: why does a flag move us the way it does?
To answer that, we have to go back much further than 80
years.
Before Nations, There Were "Standards or
laanchanas"
A bit of background
Long before flags meant countries, they meant "follow
me" or "this ground is ours." The earliest known flag-like
objects —Laanchana or vexilloids, as historians call
them, standards mounted on a pole rather than cloth flown from one they are
mentioned in ancient India, Egypt and Chinese In the Roman vexillum, a square
of cloth hung from a crossbar and carried into every legion's battles from around
100 BC. None of these was quite a "flag" as we'd recognise one today
— that would wait perhaps for cloth-weaving techniques to spread through the
medieval world. But the instinct behind them is the one we still feel: raise
something high enough, and scattered people can look up and know exactly where
they belong.
That instinct of "Belongingness", as it turns out,
has one of its oldest and richest expressions right here.
The Word..
The Sanskrit word for flag, ध्वजः (dhvajaha),
comes from the root dhvaj — to shake, to waver, to flutter — a fittingly
literal name for an object whose entire purpose is to move in the wind. Over
centuries it travelled into Prakrit as jhaya (Indicating Victory - maybe) and
dhaya, and its distant cousins are still with us: पताका (patākā
- banner), ketu (pennon), and patakini, which the poet Kalidasa used
in the Raghuvamsha as a synonym for an army on the march, since no army worth
the name marched without its standards.
पुरन्दरश्रीः पुरमुत्पताकं प्रविश्य पौरैरभिनन्द्यमानः ।
भुजे भुजङ्गेन्द्रसमानसारे भूयः स भूमेर्धुरमाससञ्ज
The King, possessing the glory of Indra (पुरन्दरश्रीः),
entered the city which had its banners hoisted (पुरमुत्पताकं)
and was joyfully greeted by the citizens (पौरैरभिनन्द्यमानः). He once again
placed the yoke (burden) of the earth (भूमेर्धुरम्) upon his arm, which possessed a
strength equal to that of the lord of serpents, Shesha (भुजङ्गेन्द्रसमानसारे).
How far back does the dhvaja go? Possibly further than any
text can confirm — some Indus Valley seals, dated to the third millennium BC,
show figures carrying pole-mounted standards, though what exactly those
standards meant to the Harappans is still guesswork. What isn't guesswork is
the Vedic record: the Atharva Veda already speaks of a flag as the device of
Surya, the sun god, and by the time of the Rigveda, flags and standards appear
as an established part of how gods, kings, and armies were pictured.
The Ramayana, too, is dense with dhvajas and patakas —
fluttering over the towers of Lanka, or marking the grandeur of Ayodhya and the
Soorya lineage (vamsha), rising over the chariots of kings as a mark of lineage
and might.
By the time of the Mahabharata, the dhvaja had become
something close to a character in its own right. A well-known passage in the
epic catalogues the flags carried by the warriors of Kurukshetra, each one a
kind of visual signature: Arjuna's chariot carried the Kapi Dhvaja, bearing
Hanuman himself, who is said to have promised, during Arjuna's years of exile,
to sit atop his standard through the great war and roar loud enough to unsettle
the enemy. Bhima's flag bore a lion; Karna's, an elephant. On a battlefield
without radios or uniforms, a warrior's flag was how his own side found him in
the chaos, and how the enemy knew exactly whom they were facing.
This wasn't just poetic flourish that appear in Ramayana,
Mahabharatha or Kalidasas works . By the time of the Mauryan empire in the 4th
century BC, the flag had become administrative fact. Kautilya's Arthashastra
records that different divisions of the Mauryan army carried distinct dhvajas
and patakas, so that commanders could track formations across a battlefield the
way a modern general reads a map — flags bearing the Garuda (Eagle), the Varaha
(boar), the Naga (serpent), or the Mayura (peacock), often on a saffron field
marking imperial authority.
And it never really stopped. Almost every dynasty that rose
in India afterwards carried its identity into cloth. The Guptas, devout
worshippers of Vishnu, flew the Garuda as their standard. Among the great
southern kingdoms, the Cholas marched under a tiger, the Pandyas under a pair
of fish, and the Cheras under a bow and arrow — three emblems distinct enough
that, centuries later, historians still use them to tell the dynasties apart on
inscriptions and coins. The Chalukyas and, later, the mighty Vijayanagara
empire flew the Varaha, the boar, invoking Vishnu's third avatar as protector
of the earth or Bhoo devi (Goddess earth). In Mysore, the Wodeyar dynasty flew
the Gandaberunda, a mythical two-headed eagle — a flag so enduring it remains
Karnataka's state emblem today. Shivaji Maharaj built his kingdom in the 17th
century, and raised the Bhagwa Dhwaj — the saffron flag — with the
swallow-tailed Jaripataka, its gold-bordered variant, becoming the standard of
Maratha power across much of the subcontinent for the next century and a half.
Read together, it's a striking thing: centuries before
"flag" meant "nation" anywhere in the modern sense, Indian
kingdoms were already using dhvajas exactly that way — as portable,
unmistakable answers to the question "whose ground is this, and who stands
on it?" or declare "Belongingness".
A Few Curious Threads From Elsewhere - Trivia.
Flags carry a surprising amount of personality once you look
beyond India, too. Nepal's flag is the only national flag on Earth that isn't a
rectangle — two stacked triangular pennants representing the Himalayas.
Denmark's Dannebrog, a white cross on red, is interesting, with a legend
claiming that it fell from the sky during a 13th-century battle. And when the
Apollo astronauts planted the American flag on the airless, windless Moon, they
had to stiffen it with a wire hem — otherwise no photograph would ever have
caught that famous ripple, because on the Moon, nothing ripples at all.
Small, almost playful facts — but they point to the same
truth the dhvajas already told us: a flag is one of the few objects human
beings have agreed, across centuries and continents, is worth carrying to the
ends of the earth just to say: we were here, and this is who we are.
The Flag That Led a Revolution
India's modern tricolour did not arrive fully formed — it
was fought for, redesigned, smuggled, and rewritten almost as many times as the
freedom movement itself changed shape.
The story usually begins in 1906, with the unofficial
Calcutta Flag of green, yellow, and red bands, born of the Swadeshi movement.
In 1907, the revolutionary Bhikaiji Cama carried a modified version to the
International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, Germany, and unfurled it before
an international audience — remembered as the first Indian flag raised on
foreign soil. It kept evolving alongside the movement: the 1917 Home Rule flag
still carried the Union Jack in its corner, a sign that many still sought
dominion status rather than a clean break. That changed in 1921, when Pingali
Venkayya presented Gandhi with a design built around the charkha, the spinning
wheel, as a symbol of self-reliance; by 1931, the Congress had refined it into
saffron, white, and green with the charkha at its centre, and this version
carried the movement through Quit India in 1942.
It was in those final years that the flag found one of its
most stirring, least remembered moments. Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National
Army, the Azad Hind Fauj, flew its own tricolour — the same three colours, but
with a springing tiger at its centre instead of the charkha. On 19 March 1944,
Colonel Shaukat Malik led the INA into Moirang, in present-day Manipur, and
raised that flag on Indian soil — more than three years before independence
actually arrived. For a few fleeting months, a free Indian flag flew over free
Indian ground, raised by Indians themselves.
When independence finally came, the flag changed once more.
On 22 July 1947, a Constituent Assembly committee headed by Rajendra Prasad
replaced the charkha with the Ashoka Chakra — the 24-spoked wheel from Emperor
Ashoka's Lion Capital at Sarnath — rooting the flag in a civilisational symbol
rather than the emblem of any one movement. Three weeks later, it rose over a
free nation for the first time.
When the Tricolour Rises: A Few Stories of Pride follows
Every generation since has added its own small story to that
flag's long history.
1948 - Olympics
In 1948, at the London Olympics, India competed for the
first time as an independent nation. Its hockey team won gold, and forward
Balbir Singh Sr. would recall the medal ceremony for the rest of his life with
a single line: "When I saw the flag, I felt I was flying."
Half a century later, in the summer of 1999, that same flag
was carried up mountainsides in the Kargil war. Captain Vikram Batra, leading
his men to seize Point 5140, radioed back his success with the words "Yeh
dil maange more" — this heart wants more — before going on to lead further
assaults that would eventually cost him his life. The image of the tricolour
planted on Tiger Hill remains one of the defining photographs of that war.
Unfurled or Hoisted? Knowing the Difference
If you've watched India's two biggest national celebrations
closely, you may have noticed the flag is never treated quite the same way on
both.
On Independence Day, 15 August, the Prime Minister hoists
the flag at the Red Fort — it begins folded at the base of the pole and is
raised, quite literally, from the bottom to the top as the national anthem
plays. This mirrors the moment itself: a nation rising, ascending to freedom
for the first time.
On Republic Day, 26 January, the President unfurls the flag
rather than hoisting it — it is already fastened at the top of the pole, folded
shut, and is opened outward at that height rather than travelling upward. The
symbolism is deliberate: by January 1950, India was no longer rising toward
freedom; it had arrived, and was instead affirming its identity as a sovereign,
constitutional republic. One is the language of ascent. The other is the
language of arrival.
How Do You Salute a Flag?
Which brings us, finally, to the simplest and most personal
question of all: what do you actually do when the flag goes up?
For those in uniform — the armed forces, police, and NCC
cadets among them — there is a formal answer: a crisp hand salute, the same
gesture rendered to a superior officer or a fallen comrade. For the rest of us,
the Flag Code of India asks for something simpler, and in some ways harder: to
simply stand. To stop whatever we're doing, face the flag, and hold ourselves
at attention — silent, still, present — for as long as it takes to rise or
unfurl.
Because that, in the end, is what a flag has always asked of
the people who claim it — from a warrior's chariot standard, to a dynasty's
tiger or boar or sun, to a tricolour raised on a mountainside at terrible cost.
Not worship, not spectacle. Just a moment of stillness, in which a piece of
coloured cloth stops being cloth at all, and becomes, again, everything it was
always meant to represent — our belonging, our pride, and the land we proudly
call our own.
Jai Hind!
Brilliant!
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