The semiotic significance of the Indian national flag as well as the historical evolution of the flag has attracted the attention of a host of authors in the past. Among others, Sumathi Ramaswamy in 2010, Arundhati Virmani in 2008, Srirupa Roy in 2006, and earlier, K. V. Singh in 1991, U. P. Thapliyal in 1983, and V. S. Agrawala et al. in 1964 have all written specifically on the subject, while many others, including the present reviewer, have touched on that theme in historical explorations of the culture of nationalist politics in India. Sadan Jha advances the discourse into a deeper exploration of the semiotics of the national flag and his is also one of the more well-documented narratives produced till now. Whatever may be one's view of the epistemological position he takes, especially in the “Epilogue” appended to the main text, there can be no doubt that the historical narrative he has reconstructed is founded on exemplary research into the archives and literature on his theme.
The book is structured along the following lines. The first chapter is devoted to the place of the flag or its indigenous variations in the political culture of pre-British India. The author has drawn upon sources like the “Arthasastra” by Kautilya, epigraphs of ancient Indian monarchs, and observations made by Ibn Batuta, Abul Fazal or Niccolao Manucci, as interpreted by historians of ancient and medieval India. In the second chapter the author moves from secondary sources to primary sources researched by him. His object is to examine the political process which led to the accumulation of meanings and an ethos around the idea of the flag from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. The flag began to acquire “mythic dimensions” in this period. However, the national flag came to occupy a central position only in the 1920s and 1930s, a process the author examines in the third chapter of this book. From 1921 when Mahatma Gandhi adopted the swaraj (self-rule) flag as a mobilizing symbol for the struggle against British domination, the flag became the most popular and powerful symbol in the nation-making process. The author has thrown new light on the pioneering role of Pingali Venkayya of Andhra Pradesh, as well as the well-known Flag Satyagraha in central India, particularly Nagpur and Jubbalpur. Although the Flag Satyagraha episode is known to historians, many new facts are brought to light by the author, and he demonstrates how an ideological content was installed through visual representation. In the next chapter we enter into “the politics of colour saffron”. Although saffron is only one of the three colours in the tri-colour flag that emerged, the author attributes special significance to saffron, earlier known as geru, kesari or basanti. In chapter 5 the author leads the reader into the 1930s and 1940s when there was “tremendous investment on the public display of the flag”. Sentiments aroused by the rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom gathered around the flag. In the second part of this chapter the author focuses on the debates on the Constituent Assembly on the design of the national flag to be adopted for the new Republic of India. Chapter 6 is in the nature of an epilogue where the trends of the previous chapter are examined again in the light of post-independence developments. Here the author brings to historians’ attention the Flag Code of India 2002, the National Honour Act of 1971, and juridical pronouncements on the special significance of the flag among the symbols of independent India. Chapter 7, entitled “Gendered Symbol, Communal Politics”, looks at those particular aspects of the symbolization of the political culture of a nation state through the visual representation of the flag.
A careful reading of the chapters mentioned above would show a conventional chronological framework from pre-British India to the post-independence period. However, the author's intention seems to be not so much the presentation of a chronological story, but the exposition of a theoretical argument according to the following agenda:
Focused on the history of the national flag in India, the current study aspires to explore this language which crucially shapes the contours of both politics as well as symbols. This is an investigation of those terms and conditions which determine the intertwined nature of the political and the symbolic; the manner in which these are displayed, visualized and resisted upon in a society… . This study has tried to reconstruct visual experiences pertaining to a political symbol, the Indian national flag. The use of the term, visual experience, is based on insights drawn from the works of Giorgio Agamben who delineates “the idea of experience as separate from knowledge” (p. xii).
That agenda statement in the Preface is followed by other similar statements in the Introduction. For example:
For a good majority of scholars working on political symbols (more crucially on symbols of national significance) studies of symbols are primarily investigations into their respective ideologies. For them, the question of the national symbols remains nothing but a question of nationalism. I argue that such exploration though necessary yet remains insufficient to historically examine the visual status of political symbols. The plurality of formats in which the flag has been in circulation and the ambivalence of gaze directed towards it in history, demand that we should look at it essentially as a visual symbol and seek an explanation by placing it in the history of visuality and not merely as a byproduct of nationalist politics along the axis of ideology or party politics. Thus, I am least concerned with what do symbols contain or represent or how do they advocate the cause of their clients, their subjects. I, rather, place my attention on how symbols are represented, perceived and acted upon (p. 17).
The author has very consistently worked on the above agenda and he seems to leave aside a question readers may have: if the objective is not to explicate the meaning of the flag as a symbol in the making of nationhood, if as he says his intention is “to restrict myself to study this symbol and not what it ought to or intends to represent”, what is the significance of such a study beyond the domain of theory-making in respect of the visual experience, or rather illustrating the applicability of such theory derived from European authors? In fact much of this book is actually concerned with historical processes which the declared agenda would exclude, and he throws light on the construction of symbols in the nation-making process. That remains a contribution to historiography even if the author prefers to foreground his theoretical position derived from philosophers like Giorgio Agamben.
It will not be inappropriate to highlight one of the findings of the author. This is the extraordinary insight of Mahatma Gandhi on the significance of the visual representation of national identity. Gandhi believed that what mattered was not so much the words in the rhetoric of nationalism as the visual impact of the flag as a symbol, the emotions aroused by the flag seen by the “believing eye”. “My ideal is speaking to the crowd from under a tree. Never mind if the voice does not reach the thousands, nay millions. They come not to hear but to see” (p. 84). This was Gandhi's view expressed in a letter to the sociologist Patrick Geddes in April 1918. This shows Gandhi's deep understanding of the power of the visual. A good deal of the author's central thesis, when you separate it from the philosophical vocabulary, may be considered to be an elaboration of Gandhi's perception.
The publisher cannot be congratulated on the production quality of this work. There are linguistic lapses which the copy editor should have taken care of (e.g. pp. 90, 95, 179, 237, etc.) and the index to the book is grossly inadequate. The most important shortcoming is the fact that all the photographs are in black and white even as the author emphasizes the significance of colour. The whole point of documentation of the visual representation and differing colour schemes of the flag is lost if the visuals are only in black and white and not in colour.
On the whole this work is commendable for the empirical research which has gone into it, while the author's analysis of the empirical data raises many new questions which demand attention and further study.
