What's in a Colour?

The recent Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee directive about identifying specific colours for a Sikh identity has sparked a debate

- M Rajivlochan

COLOURS carry meaning. Meanings that are shared by an entire culture, an entire people. Even a change in shade can change the meaning. The significance of colours plays out in myriad ways, picking up bits and pieces from the past, imbuing them with new meanings, often seeking to transform the lived reality of a people. So, when in 1921, Sikh leaders insisted that black was the colour that represented the Sikhs of India and that their identity was distinct from all other communities in India, Mahatma Gandhi was, to say the least, flabbergasted.

Gandhi, already a mass leader and known reverentially as the 'Mahatma' at the age of 50, sought to dip into shared meanings to explain to the people of India the design of a national flag for India, which he thought was most appropriate for the nation. The country was at that time in the middle of the Non-Cooperation Movement. On August 2, 1920, Gandhi had promised Indians that with their support, he would bring Swaraj within a year. People stepped out on the streets in large numbers such as India had never seen before. Now was the time to bring out a national flag for the nation. After all, since the French Revolution of 1789, which had overthrown one of the most powerful absolutist rulers of the world, every respectable nation was supposed to have a national flag. The colours of the flag were designed to assert the ideological underpinnings of the nation. Gandhi's design, the first iteration of which he made public in his journal Young India dated April 14, 1921, was a red and green flag designed at his behest by Pingali Venkayya, a young college student from Masulipatam. At the centre of this flag was to be a charkha, suggested by the revolutionary leader from Punjab, Lala Hansraj. Red was, according to Gandhi, the colour of Hindus; green that of Muslims.