Bhatlapenumarru is a small farming village near Machilipatnam, in what is now the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. It has no monuments of note and appears on few maps, yet the flag that flies over every government building in India can be traced back to a man born there on 2 August 1876. Pingali Venkayya, the son of Hanumantharayudu and Venkataratnamma, grew up in the coastal Andhra countryside of the late nineteenth century and went on to lead one of the most unusual lives of the Indian freedom movement: soldier, geologist, linguist, cotton scientist, college teacher and, above all, the designer of the Swaraj flag from which the national tricolour descends.

Soldier and scholar

Venkayya received his schooling at the Hindu High School in Machilipatnam, then a lively centre of Telugu education and nationalist thought, and later studied geology at Presidency College in Madras. At around nineteen he enlisted in the British Indian Army and was sent to South Africa, where he served during the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902. It was in South Africa that he encountered Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, then a young lawyer, and the two formed an association that would matter greatly two decades later.

The experience also planted a question in his mind. Serving under a foreign flag, watching other nations parade their own colours, he began to think about what emblem an independent India might carry. He returned to India carrying that question and never quite put it down.

His curiosity ranged far beyond politics. He learned Japanese with such thoroughness that he delivered an entire public lecture in the language at Bapatla in 1913, an achievement that earned him the affectionate local nickname Japan Venkayya. He studied diamond-bearing formations and mica deposits, work that led to another nickname, Diamond Venkayya. Most substantially, he devoted years to agricultural research on cotton, particularly the Cambodia varieties suited to Andhra soils, and among farmers of the region he was known simply as Patti Venkayya, Venkayya of the cotton. He taught for many years at the Andhra National College in Machilipatnam, one of the nationalist educational institutions set up outside the colonial system.

A flag for India

In 1916 Venkayya published a slim book titled A National Flag for India. It was not a pamphlet of slogans but a piece of careful comparative work: he had studied the flags of many nations and set out close to thirty possible designs for an Indian one, weighing colours, proportions and symbols. For several years afterwards he raised the idea at Congress gatherings, arguing that a movement without a flag lacked something essential.

The moment came in 1921, at the session of the All India Congress Committee held at Vijayawada. Gandhi was present, and Venkayya put his design before him. The flag he proposed carried two horizontal bands, red for the Hindus and green for the Muslims of India. Gandhi, characteristically, both accepted and amended it. He suggested a third band in white to stand for all the other communities of the country, and the addition of the charkha, the spinning wheel, as the emblem of self-reliance and of the dignity of hand labour. The result became known as the Swaraj flag.

It was never formally adopted by the Congress that year, but it did not need to be. From 1921 onward it was carried at Congress meetings, hoisted at public gatherings and defended in the streets. Ordinary volunteers were beaten and jailed for raising it. Within a decade it had become the recognised standard of the national movement.

From Swaraj flag to national flag

In 1931 a Congress flag committee revisited the design and made a decisive change. The communal reading of the colours was set aside, red was replaced by saffron, and the order of the bands was fixed as saffron, white and green, with the charkha in the centre. The colours were now given qualities rather than communities: courage and sacrifice, truth and peace, faith and fertility.

The final step came on 22 July 1947, weeks before independence, when the Constituent Assembly adopted the national flag of India. The proportions and the three bands were retained exactly as they had evolved from Venkayya's design; the spinning wheel at the centre was replaced by the Ashoka Chakra, the twenty-four-spoked wheel from the lion capital at Sarnath. The thread running from a schoolteacher's booklet of 1916 to the flag raised over the Red Fort was unbroken.

Last years and remembrance

Venkayya withdrew from active political life in the early 1920s and returned to his research and teaching. He continued his work on mica and cotton for decades. He did not seek office in independent India and did not profit from what he had given it. He died on 4 July 1963, having lived to see the flag he conceived fly over a free country for sixteen years.

Recognition arrived slowly and largely after his death. A statue of him was installed on Tank Bund Road in Hyderabad in 1995, and another was unveiled at Vijayawada in January 2015. The All India Radio station at Vijayawada was named in his honour in 2014. India Post issued a commemorative postage stamp bearing his portrait in 2009, and successive governments of Andhra Pradesh have pressed for the country's highest civilian honour to be conferred on him posthumously. During the seventy-fifth anniversary observances of independence his name was widely invoked, and school textbooks across several states now carry his story.

His legacy is unusual in that almost every Indian encounters it daily without knowing the name attached to it. The flag is his monument; Bhatlapenumarru, the village where it began, is slowly learning to be one too.