One such proposal came from Margaret Noble (popularly known as Sister Nivedita) in 1905, the young Irish disciple of the nineteenth-century Hindu reformist and protonationalist Swami Vivekananda. Under Nivedita’s supervision, students at the Nivedita Girls’ School in Calcutta stitched a national flag, which she then presented to the Indian National Congress.
Nivedita’s visualization of Indianness conflated (a particular notion of) Hindu identity with Indian national identity. Thus, the flag had 108 jyotis, or oil lamps, around the border, a vajra, the thunderbolt symbol of the god Indra in the center, and the legend Vande Mataram (Victory to the Mother), the popular slogan of the antipartition agitations, inscribed across the flag in Bengali script (Singh 1991, pp. 20–21).
Although the idea to design a flag was inspired by international exemplars (such as the flags of the French revolution and the Boxer uprising in China), Nivedita was acutely conscious of the need to translate or indigenize this inspirational source by designing a flag that could resonate with Indians. As she confessed in a letter sent to a friend in England:
“Unfortunately I took the Chinese war-flag as my ideal and made [the Indian flag] black on red. This does not appeal to India, so the next is to be yellow on scarlet” (cited in Singh 1991, p. 20)
As we will shortly see, similar discussions about the appropriate colors and symbols of Indianness would be a common theme of flag debates throughout the nationalist movement and in the postcolonial period as well. Nivedita’s self-conscious location as an outsider may well have pushed her to adopt an overtly Orientalist version of what the authentic inner core of India looked like: oil lamps, renunciatory shades of yellow and scarlet, and holy thunderbolts as the visible signs of Hindu spiritualism.
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