The colours of our flag represent who we are

THE SGPC advisory to change the colour of the Nishan Sahib at gurdwaras from bhagwa (saffron) to basanti or surmai is an important step towards distinguishing Sikh identity. Religion, after all, defines a people; it provides them with an identity. It is not just a matter of personal or private belief. And it certainly is not about deep philosophies. Its public manifestations and shared signs and symbols help people form an identity for themselves. It identifies people as members of a group. At the same time, it also identifies those who do not belong to the group.

It was in this context that in Young India (April 14, 1921), Mahatma Gandhi proposed a national flag that had two colours: green and red. Green, explained Gandhi, was the colour of Muslims, and red was of Hindus. The green-and-red national flag represented an India that was made up of Muslims and Hindus — both sharing a flag.

Gandhi’s design was akin to the flag of the UK. That flag sported three types of crosses. Each represented a Christian denomination, which, in turn, represented the lands that had come together to form the UK.

But Sikh leaders disabused Gandhi of his ‘blindness’ towards other religions in India. “Please incorporate the colour black to represent Sikhs since they are neither Hindu nor Muslim,” they urged.

After all, India was not a country of Hindus or Muslims alone but of hundreds of other dharma paramparas, too. Each had a distinct philosophy, rituals, visibly different sants, gurus and mentors. Gandhi’s mother, Putlibai, was a follower of Prannath, a sant who came from a prosperous merchant family and advocated a dharma parampara that freely used components of Jainism, Vaishnavism and Christianity while asserting its independent identity.

A later version of the flag for India that Gandhi made public included three stripes: red, white and green. White, in the middle, represented all other religious communities of India. Addressing Sikhs, Gandhi’s article effectively said that they would simply have to adjust and accommodate with everyone else. You are ‘needlessly agitated’, Gandhi wrote. “To ask for special prominence is tantamount to a refusal to merge in the two numerically great communities,” he stressed. Gandhi also conceded that the ‘quarrel between Hindus and Mussalmans’ was intractable, (but) that Sikhs had never had any difference with Hindus and that the Sikhs’ “quarrel with the Mussalmans was of the same type as the Hindus.”

Communal conflicts grew in the 1920s to such an extent that when Gandhi wrote a scathing report on the Kohat riots, Maulana Mohammed Ali — one of his closest friends — accused him of being communal. Consequently, Gandhi decided to abandon religion as the basis of the nation.

Such separation based on religion was used by the British to divide Indians, the Congress leadership would argue repeatedly. In 1928, the British Indian Army came out with the Handbook for the Indian Army: Sikhs, published for the instruction of officers who commanded the Sikh regiment. This handbook explained that Sikhs had fought the “political tyranny of the Mussalmans and the social tyranny of the Hindus.” It also warned about colours: no bhagwa colour for Sikhs since that was the colour of Hindus. Bhagwa, the handbook explained, was the colour of renunciation. Sikhs did not renounce the world. Rather, they strived to protect dharma by taking up arms.

The handbook noted that Sikhism had been on the wane in the 19th century. But then, it again started growing. The population of Sikhs went up from 17,06,165 in 1881 to 31,10,000 in 1921.

It also warned that Sikhs had been prohibited by their religion from eating halal meat, from bowing to a Brahmin and from drinking the foot-wash (charanamrut) of anyone, god or king. Instead, they drank only amrit (literally ‘divine nectar’).

When Gandhi next wrote on the national flag for India, he suggested a tricolour with bhagwa, white and green stripes. These stood, respectively, for sacrifice, purity and sustenance, he said. The red for Hindus had been changed by Gandhi to bhagwa without any explanation, perhaps because by then, red had come to be associated with communists. A bomb explosion in the Central Legislative Assembly on April 8, 1929, was reported to be the doing of communists. In light of the incident, the colour red was quietly dropped from the national flag.

Gandhi seems to have not noticed the colour basanti, the one recently recommended by the SGPC. It is a colour of joy, growth and bravery.

It was sensitivity to this context that made lyricist Prem Dhawan use the colour ‘basanti’ in his famous song “Mera rang de basanti chola...” Dhawan explains in a line, “Jis chole ko pehan Shivaji khele apni jaan pe; Jise pehan Jhansi ki Rani mit gayi apni aan pe.” No one in India had to be told what basanti stood for here. Actor-filmmaker Manoj Kumar recalled that Dhawan had penned those lines after the crew of the film Shaheed (1965) went on a long road trip to the ancestral village of Shaheed Bhagat Singh to meet his mother and get a feel of the subject. Along the way, they saw yellow mustard fields. By the time the journey was over, Dhawan had penned one of the most iconic lyrics in India’s history. It is this colour, basanti, that has been put forward as one of the colours for the Nishan Sahib.