India’s Tiraṅgā at the Confluence of Postcolonial Nationalism, Cosmopolitan Aspirations, and Chromatic Social Cognition: “Saffronising” Democracy?

The tricoloured flag India adopted in 1947 to mark its independence from Britain, the Tiraṅgā, results in fact from the combination of four elements whose official and popular semiotics has traversed several waves of negotiations during the decades preceding the foundation of contemporary India. Three of these elements are its equally sized, horizontal colours: saffron, white, and green; theirs is a chronicle of embeddedness in both confessional and secularist narratives which had shaped ancient and modern India, whereby the colour at the top—the saffron—best testifies to the intensity of and controversies surrounding mentioned narratives. Related struggles are subsumed under the choice to replace the 1921/1931 spinning wheel (charkha) with the blue-stained Ashok/Dharma Chakra, the “Wheel of Law”. Significant legal accounts coalesce indeed into the Tiraṅgā, from both spiritual-philosophical and positivistic standpoints. Despite conveying a supposedly ethnicity-neutral identity, the Chakra is often replaced with sectarian symbols by “minority” movements when they protest against the Hindu majority’s legislative radicalism.