This excerpt from A Flag to Live and Die For: A Short History of India’s Tricolour by Navtej Sarna is reprinted by permission of Aleph Book Company. The replacement of the charkha by the chakra has been interpreted in different ways by scholars. It would be recalled that this was not a new idea but had already been suggested at the time of the deliberations of the 1931 Flag Committee by Suniti Kumar Chatterji. In essence, this change brought out the difference between Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of swaraj, epitomised by the spinning wheel which linked true freedom to India’s villages and the view of the builders of modern India, particularly Jawaharlal Nehru, whose vision encompassed a nation built by the modern means of technology, heavy industry and scientific growth.Inevitably, and despite protestations to the contrary, the Gandhian idea of swaraj was being gently pushed aside in favour of laying the foundations of a homogenous, modern nation-state. The change has also been perceived as a way of positioning the flag as a symbol of a sovereign nation-state, distinct from that of a party; a symbol of sovereignty rather than one of resistance.A Flag to Live and Die For: A Short History of India’s Tricolour, Navtej Sarna, Aleph Book Company, 2026.It would appear from a variety of statements and references that Mahatma Gandhi, who had been enthused about the flag in 1921 only when the inclusion of a charkha had been suggested, was initially unhappy with the change in the design of the flag by the Constituent Assembly. In his speech at the prayer meeting on July 22, the day the flag was adopted, he said:“Four sisters came to congratulate me today because the tricolour with the wheel has been adopted as the national flag of India. I see nothing in it for congratulations. I am told that instead of the charkha there is only a wheel on the flag. But it is all the same to me whether they keep or do not keep the charkha. Even if they cast it away I will still have it in my hand and in my heart. A friend tells me that the charkha is still there on the flag. Another friend tells me that it is not there, that it has been discarded even while I am still alive. I do not know. What I do know is that even if the charkha was shown on the flag but was not in people’s hearts, both the flag and the charkha would be fit only to be burnt. But if the charkha had a place in the hearts of the people, then it would not matter whether it was placed on the flag or not. I only want that the country should have only one flag and everyone should salute it.”Two days later, he expressed concern that a stock of old tricolour flags worth two lakhs that were lying with the Charkha Sangh, an organisation, of ‘very poor people’, should not go waste. ‘There is not much difference,’ he wrote, ‘between the new and the old except that the old one was a little more elegant. The old flag had the charkha. The new one has the wheel but not the spindle and the mal. The new flag does not render the old one redundant.’Responding to a correspondent who wrote ‘Gandhi is being buried alive’, the Mahatma wrote on August 3, 1947: ‘We can say from the debates that took place on the new flag that if it has not rendered the spinning wheel valueless it has without doubt diminished its value. Whether the Asoka Chakra and the spinning wheel are the same thing will ultimately depend on the behaviour of the people.’ The same correspondent seems to have misled Gandhi and given him the impression that the chakra in the new flag had nothing to do with the spinning wheel but rather came from the Sudarshan chakra, which according to the correspondent, signified violence.Talking to Congress workers in Lahore on August 6, he said:“I must say that if the flag of the Indian Union will not contain the emblem of the charkha I will refuse to salute that flag. You know the National Flag of India was first thought of by me and I cannot conceive of India’s National Flag without the emblem of the charkha. We have, however, been told by Pandit Nehru and others that the sign of wheel or the chakra in the new National Flag symbolises the charkha also. Some describe the wheel-mark as Sudarshan chakra but I know what the Sudarshan chakra means.”Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.A month later, Gandhi corrected his earlier impression on advice from a certain Professor Radha Kumud Mookerji and noted that the Sudarshan chakra did not signify violence and the chakra on the flag had its origins in Buddha’s Dhamma chakka which could be traced back further to Vishnu’s Sudarshan chakra with its spiritual significance.Writing at length on July 27, 1947 in strong words, he said:“Improved condition of the Flag has value only if it answers the significance attached to the original. If it does not, it is valueless in my estimation … It is conceivably possible to gild pure gold, but the son is yet to be born who would embellish his parent … Some say that the original has vanished for ever. A new generation has begun and with it have come new and befitting conception. I have not yet known a worthy son for whom age has disfigured his mother. Hence, in my opinion nothing would have been lost if our councillors had never thought of interfering with the design of the original flag.”He wrote that he would refuse to salute the new flag if the change in it implied a rejection of the values attached to the old, including non-violence and khadi or if the charkha was treated as an ‘old woman’s solace and Gandhi’s toy’. But gradually, the Mahatma veered towards accepting the interpretation that ‘the new flag is merely an improved design of the original. The spinning wheel continues on it. That it is without the spindle and the mal, is a failing of art.’Jawaharlal Nehru responded robustly to the criticism of the new design that was contained in some of the public reactions to the flag, many of which appeared in a special column run by the Hindustan Times under the heading ‘Thanks for the Flag’. Writing in the Harijan on August 31, 1947:“I am unconvinced by any of the criticisms made of the design and I think that the Flag, as adopted, successfully, represents both artistically and symbolically what it is meant to represent. The Flag was originally adopted after very careful consideration and the choice and arrangement of the colours was and is, I think, very artistic and beautiful. The charkha added a certain beauty of conception to the Flag. Because the full charkha is not there now, it must not be imagined that we have given up the charkha or what it meant. In the resolution of the Constituent Assembly, it was stated clearly that the wheel in the centre represented the charkha. This symbolic representation of the charkha retains in its entirety the conception behind the charkha and is, in fact, a continuation of that idea in a somewhat more feasible and artistic form more suited to the Flag.”Nehru rejected the suggestion that the wheel should have been bigger and should have covered part of the saffron and green stripes. He felt that suggestion – and here again we see his focus on the aesthetic aspects – ‘showed lack of appreciation of the artistry of the entire design’.After acknowledging the wheel’s connection to Ashoka, he wrote that the flag represents the common masses of India. ‘It is modern and also takes us back to the great cultural traditions of ancient India. Thus, it displays both the permanence of Indian culture and the dynamic quality of India today…’For V.D. Savarkar, too, the replacement of the charkha by the chakra had made the flag ‘much less objectionable’. But as his biographer Vikram Sampath records, he still ‘struck an oddly strident and bitter note against the new tricolour’.Navtej Sarna is a former ambassador of India to the United States and an author of several works of fiction and non-fiction. This excerpt was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.