Pingali Venkayya Gave Gandhi a Spinning-Wheel Flag Design in Three Hours in 1921, and the Tricolour India Adopted on 22 July 1947 Descends From It

Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Young India on 13 April 1921 that Pingali Venkayya had given him a flag in three hours. Venkayya, of the National College in Masulipatam (now Machilipatnam), had been asked at Bezwada (now Vijayawada) for a design with a spinning wheel on a red and green background. The flag that independent India adopted on 22 July 1947 descends from that design, according to the Ministry of Culture, with saffron in place of red and the Ashoka Chakra in place of the wheel.

The flag Gandhi described in April 1921

Gandhi’s article, reprinted as item 281 in volume 19 of his Collected Works, opens with the case for having a flag at all. He called it a necessity for every nation and wrote that Indians of every faith needed “a common flag to live and to die for”. The same volume’s chronology puts him at Bezwada on 31 March and 1 April 1921, where the All-India Congress Committee was meeting.

He names two people besides himself. Venkayya, he wrote, had for years put out a booklet of flag designs and pressed the question at every Congress session for four years, but “was never able to enthuse me”. The spinning wheel came from Lala Hansraj of Jullundur, who raised it while discussing what the wheel could do for India. At Bezwada, Gandhi says, he asked Venkayya for a design with the wheel on red, which he called the Hindu colour, and green, the Muslim colour, and Venkayya’s “enthusiastic spirit enabled me to possess a flag in three hours.”

The flag reached him just too late to show the committee, and Gandhi says he was glad of it. On second thought he wanted the background to stand for every faith in India, so he added a white band, placed first for the smallest communities, with green next and red last “the idea being that the strongest should act as a shield to the weakest.” Each colour got equal space. He also wrote that the flag should be made of khaddar, the coarse homespun cloth, and that the full-sized spinning wheel should appear on the regulation flag.

The man who kept bringing flags to the Congress

Gandhi’s own words are the earliest account of Venkayya’s work that I could open. Later writers fill in his life, and they do not agree on the details. Birth is the plainest case. The Ministry of Culture’s release for his 146th birth anniversary on 2 August 2022 says he was born that day in 1876. The News Minute’s 2015 profile and Navtej Sarna’s book, in an excerpt published by Scroll, give 1878, and all three say 2 August. Both of those name Peddakallepalli as the village, while a 2021 News Minute report names Bhatlapenumarru near Machilipatnam.

Sarna’s account has him joining the British Indian Army at 19 and serving in the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 in South Africa, where he met Gandhi. The News Minute profile says the same. Both describe a man of many jobs. The News Minute lists a railway guard and a plague inspector, a student of Sanskrit, Urdu and Japanese who made a speech in Japanese at Bapatla in 1913 and earned the nickname “Japan Venkayya”, and a cotton researcher known as “Patti Venkayya” for that work, Drishti IAS says.

His booklet, A National Flag for India, came out in 1916. The Madras Courier and the News Minute say it carried 30 designs, and Drishti IAS says nearly 30. The Madras Courier adds that each design came with a rationale and that the illustrations were by E. Venkatasastry. Sarna’s excerpt gives 24 designs, paid for by Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar. I did not find a copy of the booklet, so the count stays open.

What the 1921 flag was, and was not

The Ministry of Culture’s factsheet says that in 1921, at the Bezwada session of the Congress, a young freedom fighter named Pingali Venkaiah presented Gandhi with a design of three stripes for the communities living together and a spinning wheel in the centre. Gandhi’s article is more specific. The first design, in his telling, had two colours, and the white band was his own second thought. The Ministry’s release for the 2022 birth anniversary goes further and says Venkayya designed, at Gandhi’s request, a flag in saffron, white and green with a chakra in the middle. By the factsheet’s own account saffron arrived in 1931 and the chakra in 1947.

Other flags came first. The factsheet records one raised in Calcutta in 1906, a similar one raised by Bhikaiji Cama in 1907 (it names Paris, and our account of her flag sets out why other sources say Stuttgart) and another hoisted in 1917 by Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak during the Home Rule movement. Chakrabarti writes that the Congress had no flag of its own until 1921, when the first tricolour arrived with the backing of Gandhi.

From red to saffron in 1931

The three colours were read in communal terms, and the Congress Working Committee took the objection up in 1931. Sekhar Chakrabarti, in a paper for the 2017 International Congress of Vexillology, quotes its resolution. It said the flag had gained popularity by usage, that objection had been taken to the colours as conceived on a communal basis, and that a committee should examine the objections and recommend a flag. The committee sent questionnaires to provincial Congress committees and individuals and recommended a flag of saffron alone with a brown spinning wheel in the corner. The Congress did not accept it.

On 8 August 1931, Chakrabarti writes, the Congress at its Bombay session adopted a flag of saffron over white over green with the spinning wheel on the white band only, and called it the Purna Swaraj flag, the flag of complete independence. The Ministry of Culture gives the same change without the date: white and green stayed, red gave way to saffron, and the factsheet lists the meanings as courage, peace and fertility with growth.

22 July 1947 in the Constitution Hall

The Constituent Assembly took up the flag first on its agenda on 22 July 1947, with Rajendra Prasad in the chair. Chakrabarti says the Assembly had set up a nine-member committee under Prasad on 23 June 1947 to recommend a flag. Jawaharlal Nehru moved the resolution (the Assembly’s wider work has its own article), which the debate record gives as: “horizontal tricolour of deep Saffron (Kesari), white and dark green in equal proportion.” A navy blue wheel in the centre of the white band was to represent the charkha, and its design was copied from the Chakra on the abacus of the Sarnath Lion Capital of Asoka, its diameter about the width of the white band, with a ratio of width to length of 2 to 3 “ordinarily”.

Nehru told the House that the flag had in effect been adopted earlier by popular acclaim and usage, and that the Assembly was ratifying that. He explained the one change. The old charkha showed a wheel at one end and a spindle at the other, so the two faces of the flag could not both keep the wheel nearest the pole, and the wheel alone solved that. He presented two flags, one in silk, which he held, and one in cotton khadi.

Other members spoke to the colours. S. Radhakrishnan took the wheel as the wheel of dharma, saffron as renunciation and green as the relation to the soil. Seth Govind Das of Jubbulpore said the flag had been hoisted over the town hall there in 1922 when Motilal Nehru visited, and that a question was asked about it in the House of Commons. Sarojini Naidu recalled that Indian women at an international conference in Berlin had torn strips from their saris to make a tricolour for a flag parade, because India had no official flag. H. V. Kamath proposed a swastika inside the wheel, and P. S. Deshmukh, who had wanted the charkha kept, chose not to move his amendment. The President asked members to stand for half a minute, and the record reads: “The motion was adopted, the whole Assembly standing.”

The debate record I opened does not mention Venkayya. Gandhi regretted the wheel’s replacement, Chakrabarti writes, quoting a Harijan statement: “Nothing would have been lost if our councillors had never thought of interfering with the design of the original flag.”

The record of his last years and his honours

Venkayya died on 4 July 1963. The News Minute’s 2015 profile says he spent his last days in poverty and left a request that his body be covered with the tricolour. Scroll, quoting Sarna, says the same of his poverty. The News Minute also reports that a postage stamp and first day cover were issued for him in 2009.

On 2 August 2022 the Ministry of Culture held a Tiranga Utsav in New Delhi, and the Union Home Minister released a commemorative stamp for Venkayya and honoured his family. The Prime Minister’s Office the same day published his tweet calling the nation indebted to Venkayya for the tricolour. In March 2021 the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister had written to the Prime Minister asking for a posthumous Bharat Ratna for him, and the News Minute’s report records no reply from the Union government.