The Flag That Flew Before the Nation Did

Forty years before Independence, an Indian flag was raised on foreign soil — and the person who raised it was a woman who would spend most of her life in exile.

Bhikaji Rustom Cama was born into a prosperous Parsi family in Bombay and could have lived comfortably. Instead she became one of the most determined figures of the revolutionary wing of the freedom movement, working from London, Paris and Germany because returning to India would have meant arrest.

In August 1907, Cama attended the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in Germany. As proceedings began, the Union Jack was to be raised as the flag representing India — the delegation from a country that was, in the eyes of the organisers, simply a British possession.

Cama refused to let that stand. She rose, took a small tricolour from her bag, and unfurled it before the assembled delegates. "This is the flag of India's independence," she declared. "Behold, it is born." She then appealed to the gathering to support the cause of a country that most of them had never seriously considered as a nation in its own right.

The flag she raised is remembered as the Berlin Committee flag, designed with Shyamji Krishna Varma and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. It looked nothing like today's Tiranga. Its upper green band carried eight lotuses for the eight provinces of British India; the words Vande Mataram ran across the central band; the lower band bore a crescent moon and a rising sun.

It was not an official flag. No government had adopted it, no assembly had voted on it, and no territory flew it. It was a claim rather than a fact — an assertion, in front of witnesses from around the world, that India was a nation and would one day have the flag to prove it.

That is what makes the moment worth remembering. Long before there was a country to salute it, someone believed enough in the idea to sew it into cloth and carry it across a continent. The flag came first. The freedom followed.