The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

The Ideal Flag for India

THE flutter of our flag on high is answered by a flutter of joy in every Indian heart. Our flag is the symbol or our fulfilment. It is intended to hold aloft in victory all that is most dear in our national life. With absolute devotion we stand under its happy flying sign, and wherever it beckons we are prepared to follow. But our love for it does not imply that the pattern it bears is completely satisfying. No matter what the pattern, it can count upon our allegiance. And yet we have the right to question whether those who have designed it have dipped their imagination sufficiently into the true heart of our land.

The Flags that are Inspired

Only a few flags in the world seem to rise out of the depths of a nation's consciousness. The Union Jack is a true symbolic creation. When its lines are seen as running towards the centre, it finely expresses the meeting of many strands of race and culture that constitutes the being of England. And finely too the lines are shown as merged in the centre of a cross – emblem of the faith whose defender by title is the King. When they seem to run from the centre outwards they speak of the multi-directional, far-flung energy of the greatest empire-building country on earth. And the three colours – red, white and blue – which are present in the design utter the enterprising spirit, the ideal of Pax Brittanica and the sea-faring mood that have distinguished the history of England. An added appropriateness is in the blue colour serving as the background which bears the whole pattern; for it is the sea that more than anything else among material and visible influences has made England what she is.

The flag of France is equally true to the soul of that country. Here also are the three colours – blue, white and red. But they are put side by side, vertically, in a simple clear ordering. This ordering and that verticalness are both typical of the French genius, logical

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yet visionary, enthusiast at once of "the Goddess of Reason" and Jeanne d' Arc. The three colours in this particular sequence are also symbolic of the modern France which came to birth with the Revolution. Blue gives the tint of liberty - it suggests the free spaces of the sky. White gives the tint of equality – the subdual of all shades of difference in a pure impartial light. Red gives the tint of fraternity – the warm blood of love and fellow-feeling and cordial communion.

The flag of the U.S.A. is another combination of the same colours in a significant scheme. The French ideals are also those of the United States, but with a different psychology. The United States is a continent as much as a country, it is full of diversity held together by a common spirit. The many white stars and the same single blue within which they are set are beautifully expressive of the various unified richness, no less than of the lofty dream of everlasting equality and never-ending liberty. The alternate white and red stripes in a long repetition voice too the association of the changing with the uniform, no less than a widespread desire for democracy and brotherhood. The lack of the red colour in the star-design and of the blue in the stripe-design and yet the presence of a common colour – the white – in both are a further symbolism of the multiple yet one race-entity that is the U.S.A. Here is also the symbolism of an insistent conviction that in spite of differences all men are equal.

Japan's flag is a fourth example of inspired creation. The scarlet sun spraying its rays around but most emphatically to the side away from the flag-pole, the outer side which signifies the rest of the world, is strikingly true to Japan's nature and activity. The sun is symbolic of the belief of the Japanese in being the heaven-born race, endowed with a high mission over the whole earth. And the sun as red light depicts the life-force thrilling at the same time with a bliss of beauty and a sense of all conquering power: the predominant motives of the Japanese consciousness – the aesthetic and the martial motives – authentically shine out in the depiction.

In the red banner, with the hammer and sickle and star, the Soviet Union has impressively figured itself. The proletarian mood

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is evident in the hammer and sickle, but there is also evident the force that always beats down and the keenness that always cuts away - with an unchanging steely ruthlessness that has found its incarnation in a man like Stalin. The star is the creative touch of religious idealism that seems to have paradoxically and perversely become energetic irreligious materialism in the unspiritual and body-preoccupied faith and fervour filling the Marxist with a blind enthusiasm as if for a lofty cause that never should be questioned. The hammer, the sickle and the star are all of them yellow -meant to be felt as though charged with a power of enlightenment -but they are gripped, as it were, in a huge domineering uniform redness intense with a suggestion of intolerant and totalitarian violence whereby one fanatical all-merging class shall fight and destroy the opulent variety and diverse freedom of human mind and life.

Our Flag is Constructed rather than Created

Turkey and Pakistan have less inspiration in their ensigns, but in the crescent and star upon a crimson background and the crescent and star upon a background that is green these countries give adequate though conventional voice to the Islamic spirit. Can we say even this much about India and her flag? No doubt, what we have designed is not without meaning; but it seems constructed rather than created. The three colours of green, white and saffron are said to represent generous production, balanced conservation and disciplined utilisation - processes implicit in the progress of a country. The wheel in the middle is said to urge by its round shape, blue colour and twenty-four spokes the perfect and equal running of these processes; the sea-wide and sky-wide -in short, universal - application of them to our life; their persistent day-in day-out all-the-year-round need and validity for national well-being. The wheel is declared also to be representative of the march of man towards a higher standard of living: it suggests the cartwheel, the potter's wheel, the spinning wheel. All these interpretations have point; yet how little they strike one as bringing out the genius of India!

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The flag appears to be an economist's vision, concerned with the outer life and its beneficial, its profitable ordering. Of course, the wheel comes from a pillar erected by Asoka and carries a religio-ethical association; we may, therefore, read in its message a strain of satya, ahimsa and karuna - truth, non-violence and pity. Still, the level of the vision is not much uplifted; rather, the religio-ethical association is pulled down for want of a genuine spiritual intuition irradiating it. Economics, however moralised and humanitarian, can hardly do justice to the destiny of India. Surely, India's summum bonum is not compassed by a vision of well ordered, peaceful and democratic outer life scrupulously achieved and vigilantly sustained. Even if we add more nuances of significance we do not bring out India 's soul. For instance, we may say that the three combined colours stand for the unity of the main divisions into which the communities of the country fall - the Hindus who .revere the sannyasi's saffron robe, the Muslims whose prophet favoured green, the Sikhs and Jains and Christians and Parsis who should get blended into a homogeneity like white which blends so many colours. Or else we may take green to be firmness and faith like the spontaneous clinging of green things to the soil, white to be probity and purity and harmlessness, saffron to be austerity and courage and sacrifice. And we may understand by the Asoka wheel the unerring and eternal law of karma which Buddha held to be the secret power in the interminable world-process.Even then the depths of India remain unexpressed.

No Touch of the Mystical Realisation

There seems to be an attempt at embodying in the flag a thoroughly secular mood. No touch of the mystical realisation that lay at the sources of Indian history is allowed. The only sense in which India can be secular without ceasing to be herself - the rising above creed and caste into essential spirituality and the practising of spirituality with an eye turned not merely towards the Beyond but also towards the Here and Now - this sense is evidently overlooked. The inter-communal politico-religious tension of a particular period of our history has influenced

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overmuch the conception of our flag. And another exaggerated influence is the viewing of India in terms of the worker, the labourer, the poor toiling majority: naturally such terms bring the economic values to the fore and make us see our country's fulfilment in the right production, conservation and utilisation of outward life-resources. The choice of that Buddhist emblem, the Asoka wheel, is in keeping with both the secular mood and the labourer-emphasis. For, in the first place, Buddhism, by its denial of either a personal-impersonal Godhead or a persistent soul and its refusal of metaphysical exploration and its insistence on a purely psychological approach to self-perfection, functions with a sort of agnostic spirituality, a negative mysticism, and appears to do away with religion while accepting morality. In the second place, it aims at being a rule of life for the common majority, it purports to offer a mysteryless religion, a non-esoteric revelation which all can accept. In the third place, it puts a premium on poverty and service and encourages a levelling down of social distinctions to a classless primitiveness. Buddhism is in tune also with the virtues underlined by Gandhi whose personality powerfully colours the thought of our leaders - the virtues of nonviolence and humanitarian fellow-feeling. The Asoka wheel is, therefore, considered most appropriate as an emblem of the Indian consciousness. But it is blissfully forgotten that the heart and core of Buddhism is none of these aspects of Buddha's message but the all-annulling all-transcending experience of Nirvana, an experience which throws away the entire universe as a trifle or an illusion, an experience intensely and immensely other-worldly and hence the absolute opposite of everything secular, everything connected with the outer life of mankind at large. It is also forgotten that Nirvana is so much above the head of the common man and so difficult of attainment that mankind at large can never have anything to do with it. Buddhism, in a very important sense, is as little democratic as it is secular.

The Nature of the Indian Genius

It is, moreover, not fully in consonance with the Indian genius.

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That is why it is as good as defunct in the land of its birth. The genius of India can never be satisfied with a sort of agnostic spirituality and negative mysticism; nor with an endeavour at dissolving the variety and diversity of her mental and physical existence; nor, again, with setting at a discount the urge to realise a dynamic divinity, a spiritual and mystical light turned towards the flowering of noble and beautiful world-values. Non-violence and humanitarianism are also not the last word of the Indian ethical mind: a manifestation of God in humanity is the main ideal. Humanity is not a supreme value in itself, and non-violence and compassionate fellow-feeling are fine virtues but they are not the utter goal of the ethical life, the utter goal being nothing else than a general avatar-hood, so to speak, which acts according to a spiritual and mystical truth within and which can even appear at times to be violent and ruthless, just as Sri Krishna appeared on the battlefield of Kurukshetra where humanity stood divided into an army of the Divine and an army of the Diabolic. Further, the Indian genius is not democratic in the superficial modern manner. The whole world is indeed to be embraced by the individual's consciousness and the good of mankind at large has indeed to be worked for by every member of organised society; but the foundation of this democracy is in realising the God who is the One Superhuman in all that is human, and ever to this high, rare, extraordinary realisation the common mind is to be called, and each altruistic action must spring from that luminously aristocratic experience. The true Indian democracy, therefore, must lay stress not on the mere common man, not on mankind as it is in the majority: it must lay stress on the man of God, the Saint and the Seer, mankind as it is in the finest few and as in the majority it ought to be.

In the light of the above considerations we cannot help feeling that the true flag of India is yet to be found. This does not mean we should fail to respect and love the ensign we have before us. The ensign is set up with the purpose of drawing our thoughts to the wonderful being of our country and when we lift our eyes to its flight above our heads we look not so much at its pattern as at its general figuration of the triumphant spirit of our motherland.

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"Jai Hind" or "Bande Mataram" is what our hearts cry out, and through the green and white and saffron and through the Asoka wheel we move really towards that spirit. For the sake of that spirit which the flag-makers sought to catch and keep like a beacon for the Indian multitudes, we must always give the most fervent response of patriotism even though the pattern may be inadequate to our country's inner greatness. But the flow of our devotion must not drown the fact that extremely desirable is a pattern with deeper significances, with more inspiration from the soul of this country whose life-breath has been the Divine and the Infinite.

The Ideal Flag for India

Luckily, in our opinion, we do not have to cast about for the right pattern: we already possess it in the symbolisation made of India's spiritual mission by the greatest spiritual figure of our day. The symbolisation by Sri Aurobindo uses a simple yet subtle combination of the three colours that we associate most with the overarching heavens - blue, silver and gold. It uses also the most beautiful and ancient Indian emblem of divine revelation, the lotus, but with a stylisation of it into a circle to create the impression of fullness and completeness; and there is a further packing of significances by making this circle concentric with two others within it of different dimensions, the innermost circle having nothing inside it while the middle has four divisions like petals and the outermost has twelve petallic divisions. Golden - suggestive of luminous sovereignty - against a background of silvery blue is the lotus here. The Seed-Shakti of the Divine Mother, creatrix of all, is pictured by the small centre in which all things seem to be held secretly concentrated. Out of this, four primary creative powers are shown as breaking: these are Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati - goddess-personalities of wisdom, puissance, harmonious beauty, flawless organisation. These personalities are then depicted as putting forth twelve manifesting powers that work within the periodic time-process. The supreme infinity that is the all-containing and all-supporting Spiritual Self,

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The Ideal Flag for India

the foundational mystery from which the Divine's creative and manifesting marvel stands out, is the background of silvery blue, in the centre of which the three-tiered lotus is placed. This silvery blue background is a square piece, each side of the square bearing to the diameter of the lotus the ratio of 6:12.5. This ratio gives the right balance: the four equal sides suggest a perfection of being, an omni-competence for a world-structure that can face and meet all demands.

Here is a flag charged with India's authentic mission, the mission of rendering victorious the Divine Mother, the Infinite Self and Shakti. In this flag we have the suggestion not only of a sky with an ethereal lotus poised in it, but also of a stretch of water with an earthly lotus afloat. The ever-existing ideality above and the secret wonder that is to be revealed below are both compassed in a satisfying symbolism. The full-blown circular lotus with

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two rows of petals seems to be the true inspired emblem which was hovering, so to speak, in the nation's inner mind but which through an insufficiently receptive imagination our leaders miscaught as Asoka's wheel. Here too is a wheel-like design, but suffused with a superb meaning attuned to the Rig-Veda which is hidden in the heart of man and which the Indian consciousness has heard down the ages. Foremost here of all suggestions by the wheel-like design is the Presence of God as intuited by our country's Seers and Saints - the Presence of God within a lotus-chakra that is the centre of a luminous life on every level of the profound recesses of our subliminal and supraliminal being. In the colours, too, though we may see several implications pertaining to our outer existence, the master implication by virtue of this particular pattern remains the Infinite and the Divine.

In Sri Aurobindo's flag of Mother India and her spiritual mission we have also the promise of India's unity. For, the genuine indefeasible unity can come only of a sense in all men of the one God within, the God in whom alone are eternal liberty, equality and fraternity, the three grandest ideals that a country can pursue, the sole ideals that can make one harmonious country of all the countries constituting the world. If India wishes to be great by fulfilling her true genius and if she wishes to be the missionary of a world-union, no flag but this can ever be the symbol of her victorious emergence as an independent nation.

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