Folded History Of an Unfolded Flag.

“Vijayi Vishwa Tiranga Pyara,
Jhanda Uncha Rahe Hamara…”

If you grew up in India, you don’t read those lines. You hear them. Usually through a loudspeaker that has survived three monsoons, two election campaigns and one overenthusiastic school annual day. The singer is almost always a child with more patriotism than pitch.

Yesterday, 22nd July, was National Flag Day. Every influencer worth their ring light and every well-meaning housing society secretary was busy teaching us how to fold the Tiranga. Apparently, the Republic now hangs by the precision of a seven-fold crease.

Frankly, I wish they showed the same enthusiasm for the people who actually gave us the flag.

Modern patriotism is a curious performance. We have become experts at respecting the accessories of the nation while remaining blissfully ignorant of its authors. We know exactly how high the flag must fly, how it should never touch the ground, how many degrees one should bend while saluting it, and precisely how offended to become if someone else gets it wrong.

Ask the same people who designed the national flag and you will be greeted with the kind of silence normally reserved for income tax raids.

We have turned patriotism into an instruction manual.

First came the battles over whether everyone should stand for the national anthem in cinema halls. Then the annual debates on Vande Mataram. Now we have tutorials on folding the flag with surgical precision. At this rate, I fully expect next year to feature a prime-time debate on the constitutionality of flag ironing.

What we rarely do is remember the people behind the cloth.

Take Pingali Venkayya.

This remarkable man from Andhra was not merely someone who sketched a flag on the back of an envelope. He was an agriculturist, a linguist, a geologist, a scholar, and by all accounts a man who became almost obsessively fascinated with flags from around the world. He studied more than thirty national flags before proposing one that could unite a country which agreed on almost nothing except that the British needed to leave.

In 1921, he presented Mahatma Gandhi with the original design featuring the charkha. That idea eventually evolved into the flag we know today.

Independent India thanked him in the uniquely Indian way we reserve for inconvenient idealists.

He died in 1963 in poverty, largely forgotten, while the flag he helped create fluttered majestically over government buildings whose occupants probably couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup.

One suspects Pingali Venkayya suffered from a terrible disability in Indian public life.

He lacked a public relations department.

He did not cultivate factions. He did not build a personality cult. He simply did the work and quietly disappeared into history’s footnotes.

Then there is Surayya Tyabji, whose story deserves far more attention than it receives.

When Independence finally arrived, the charkha was no longer suitable as the symbol of a sovereign republic. It needed something that belonged not to one political movement but to every Indian.

Surayya Tyabji—a gifted artist from Hyderabad—played a pivotal role in giving us the final form of the Tricolour. She championed replacing the charkha with the navy-blue Ashoka Chakra, helped settle its proportions, and supervised the making of the first national flag hoisted on 15 August 1947.

Yet mention her name in most gatherings and people assume she must have been somebody’s aunt who stitched curtains.

History has not been particularly generous to women who create quietly. Nor has it always been generous to Muslims in the stories we choose to celebrate after Partition.

A woman. A Muslim. An artist.

She managed to be three categories that rarely make it into patriotic WhatsApp forwards.

And that is the irony.

The Indian flag itself is perhaps one of the finest expressions of the country we claim to love. It carries the labour of a Hindu scholar from Andhra and a Muslim artist from Hyderabad. Agriculture met aesthetics. Scholarship met design. A man and a woman contributed to a symbol that belongs equally to all of us.

If that isn’t India, I don’t know what is.

Instead, we reduce patriotism to choreography.

Stand here.

Face that direction.

Fold this corner first.

Don’t let the cloth touch the ground.

Excellent.

Now forget the people who made it possible.

There is something deeply comic about our national character. We preserve rituals with extraordinary devotion while neglecting memory with equal determination. We worship symbols but routinely misplace the stories that gave birth to them.

Perhaps remembering is harder than performing.

Remembering demands curiosity. Performance only requires volume.

So by all means, sing “Vijayi Vishwa Tiranga Pyara.” Teach children how to fold the flag correctly. Correct your neighbour if they accidentally display it upside down. The flag deserves respect.

But spare a thought for Pingali Venkayya and Surayya Tyabji.

Because a nation that remembers only its symbols and forgets its creators is rather like a family that proudly frames the wedding photograph while forgetting the names of the bride and groom.

The frame may be polished.

The memory, unfortunately, remains folded away.