Pingali Venkayya: The Man Who Gave India Its Flag
He was a geologist, a lecturer, a farmer and a polyglot — and he spent years collecting flags of the world before designing the one India would carry into freedom.
Ask most Indians who designed the National Flag and the answer comes slowly. The Tiranga is everywhere — on school gates, on cricket jerseys, on the shoulder of every soldier — yet the man who first sketched it is one of the quieter names of the freedom movement.
Pingali Venkayya was born on 2 August 1876 at Bhatlapenumarru, in what was then the Madras Presidency and is today Andhra Pradesh. He was not a professional designer, and flags were only one of his many pursuits. He worked as a lecturer, wrote books, studied geology, farmed, and spoke several languages fluently. What he had, above all, was persistence.
For years he studied the flags of other nations, asking a question that sounds obvious now and was radical then: if India was to be a nation, what would India fly? In 1916 he published a slim booklet titled A National Flag for India, setting out close to thirty possible designs. He then spent the better part of a decade pressing the idea at Congress sessions, one meeting at a time.
The breakthrough came in 1921, at the Congress meeting in Vijayawada, where Mahatma Gandhi saw his design and approved it. Venkayya's flag carried two bands — red for the Hindu community and green for the Muslim community. It was Gandhi who suggested a third band, white, to represent every other community in India, and the charkha across the centre to represent self-reliance and the dignity of labour.
The design kept evolving. In 1931 the Flag Committee replaced the red band with saffron and set the order we know today — saffron above, white in the middle, green below, with the charkha on the white band. That year the Indian National Congress formally adopted it. Sixteen years later, on 22 July 1947, the Constituent Assembly adopted the flag in its final form for a free India, with the Ashoka Chakra in place of the charkha.
Venkayya himself lived a modest life and died on 4 July 1963. He did not become wealthy or widely celebrated in his lifetime. Recognition came slowly and largely after his death: a commemorative postage stamp was issued in his honour in 2009, and he is remembered today as the Father of the Tiranga.
There is a lesson in that quietness. The flag he gave India was never meant to be about the man who drew it. It was meant to be about everybody who would one day stand under it — which is exactly why it is worth treating with care, in the ordinary moments as much as the ceremonial ones.