Bhikaiji Cama Unfurled a Flag of Indian Independence Before an International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart in August 1907, Forty Years Before 1947

Britannica credits Bhikaiji Cama with unfurling the first version of the Indian national flag, a tricolour, at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1907. She was 45, a Parsi woman born in Bombay, and she did it forty years before the flag of independent India was adopted. Sources disagree on the exact day, on what the flag looked like and on who drew it, so this piece sets out what each account says.

From a wealthy Bombay family to Hyde Park

Britannica says she was born on 24 September 1861 into a wealthy Parsi business family and married the lawyer Rustomji Cama in 1885. Marital difficulties and poor health took her to London. The South Asian Britain project, a partnership that includes the British Library and Queen Mary University of London, says she went to Britain in 1901 after falling ill while working as a social worker in the 1897 Bombay plague epidemic. One philatelic catalogue gives 1902.

In London she met Dadabhai Naoroji, and the same project records that she worked on his unsuccessful 1906 campaign for Lambeth North. Britannica adds that she met Savarkar, Lala Har Dayal and Shyamji Krishnavarma and spoke at several meetings in Hyde Park. The Press Information Bureau’s feature on her says she helped set up the Indian Home Rule Society in London in 1905. South Asian Britain describes her politics as closer to that society’s radicalism than to Naoroji’s.

What happened at the congress

The congress ran from 18 to 24 August 1907, according to the title page of the Berlin booklet printed for it. R. C. Majumdar, in his history of the freedom movement, writes that Cama and Sardar Singh Rana “were elected to represent India” and that she moved a resolution calling British rule in India disastrous to the country’s interests. Dhananjay Keer, Savarkar’s biographer, says Savarkar had sent the two of them. I found no entry for either in the congress documents I could open, so the question of what standing she held there is open.

Both authors agree on the outcome. The British delegates objected that the resolution had not first gone to the congress’s International Bureau, and Majumdar says every member of the British delegation except H. M. Hyndman, Ramsay MacDonald among them, opposed it and left the room. The resolution was not put to a vote. Cama was allowed to speak and to unfurl the flag, and the congress’s president, whom Keer names as Herr Singer, said the spirit of the resolution had the Bureau’s approval.

The Press Information Bureau dates the speech to 22 August 1907. The Nehru Centre in Mumbai prints a text of it under the date 18 August, the day the congress opened. In that text she says she speaks “for the dumb millions of Hindustan”, describes a yearly drain of money from India to England and names two men deported without trial, whom the newsletter identifies as Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh. She ends by saying “I unfold this little Indian national flag before you” and asks the delegates to fight for justice. The economic argument she makes there is the one that the drain of wealth article follows in detail.

Keer prints a different wording and cites Majumdar’s history and a biography called Savarkar-Charitra for the passage. In his version she calls the flag one of Indian independence, adds “Behold it is born!” and asks the delegates to rise and salute it, which Keer says they did. The two texts do not match, and neither source says where the original wording was recorded.

The Press Information Bureau’s 2022 feature adds that Cama, seeing a British flag in the hall, removed it and raised the Indian one. Neither Keer nor Majumdar says this.

What the flag looked like

The most specific description comes from a footnote in Majumdar’s revised second volume. He cites a confidential record of the Foreign Department of the Government of India from 1911 (Internal B, Confidential, No. 62). By that record the flag had three horizontal bands. The top band was green, with eight stars for the eight provinces of British India. The middle band was golden, carrying “Bande Mataram” in Devanagari script. The bottom band was plain red. Majumdar adds that a photograph in Keer’s book shows a sun and a crescent moon on the lowest band, and he notes that accounts of the flag differ.

The Flags of the World website collects the variants. One author it cites counts eight white lotuses on the green band, another a single lotus with seven stars for the Saptarishi, the seven sages. A booklet titled Our Flag, which it quotes, puts the sun at the fly end and a crescent at the hoist end. The website also records the stripe order as green, saffron, red in some accounts and as red, saffron, green in another. Britannica says green, saffron and red. Majumdar describes the middle band as golden. The Congress party’s 2022 tribute calls the flag a modification of the Calcutta flag.

That Calcutta flag was hoisted on 7 August 1906 at Parsee Bagan Square during the Swadeshi and boycott agitation that followed Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal. The Ministry of Culture’s 2022 factsheet calls the 1907 flag “similar” to it “with slight modifications”.

Who designed it

The earliest designer credit I found is Keer’s 1950 biography, which says the flag was designed by Savarkar. For that passage he cites Savarkar-Charitra and Majumdar’s history and gives no separate source for the design credit. Majumdar does not name a designer.

The Press Information Bureau’s 2022 feature says the present flag was built on the basis of the flag designed by Cama, and quotes Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying the inspiration for today’s tricolour was a flag designed by freedom fighters like Cama and Shyamji Krishna Varma. The Congress Sandesh tribute and Live History India also credit Cama, the first as co-designer without naming the other. No contemporary document I opened says who drew it, and no source I found settles the matter.

On the modern flag, the Ministry of Culture’s factsheet traces it to a design Pingali Venkaiah presented to Gandhi at the Bezwada session of the Congress in 1921, with three stripes and a spinning wheel. Ramachandra Guha, writing in The Hindu on 26 September 2004, argues that the 1907 flag was quite different from it, describes it as green, saffron and red with a crescent and a sun, and gives the credit for the tricolour’s idea to P. Venkayya, as he spells the name. His verdict on her gesture is “Brave though it was, Madam Cama’s gesture had little effect on the freedom movement.” Majumdar takes a different measure of her and writes that she “earned undying reputation as the Mother of the Indian Revolution”.

Where the flag went

The Press Information Bureau feature and Guha both say the original is kept at the Maratha and Kesari Library in Pune. Keer says it was brought to India through the efforts of Gajananrao Ketkar and that Savarkar hoisted it at Poona in the last week of October 1937. The Flags of the World site, quoting a biography by Kamat, says it was smuggled in by Indulal Yagnik. The accounts name two different people and I could not reconcile them.

One more discrepancy sits inside the government’s own material. The Ministry of Culture’s July 2022 factsheet puts the 1907 flag in Paris and says it was also exhibited at a socialist conference in Berlin, which is why it came to be called the Berlin Committee Flag. The Press Information Bureau’s August 2022 feature says Stuttgart, as do Britannica, Majumdar and Keer.

Paris, a newspaper and a government report

Britannica and South Asian Britain say she settled in Paris in 1909 after rumours that she would be deported from England. The Congress Sandesh tribute says she moved there in 1905 and co-founded the Paris Indian Society with S. R. Rana and Munchershah Burjorji Godrej. The 1918 Sedition Committee report calls Rana “of Paris” and says Krishnavarma settled there after leaving London in 1907, so the date of the society and the date of her own move are separate questions.

Her Paris house became a meeting point for exiles. The Sedition Committee, a British Indian government body, wrote of “Madame Cama’s paper called Bande Mataram”, published in Paris. It quotes the paper’s April 1911 number as saying that “Englishmen ought to be killed”, says the passage was an indication that a crime of this kind was in contemplation, and ties it to the shooting of Mr Ashe, the Tinnevelly district magistrate, in June 1911. It also quotes a July 1911 article by her that tried to show the recent assassinations accorded with the Bhagavad Gita. The report is a government document written about a paper its authors wanted suppressed, and I have not seen the original issues. The Press Information Bureau feature on her does not mention it.

Majumdar writes that the French authorities suppressed her Bande Mataram in June 1914. After the war began, British records cited by Majumdar say Rana and Cama tried to reach Indian troops arriving in France, and the French government interned the two inside French territory rather than deport them to England. Britannica says she was interned for three years. Live History India says she was released in November 1917. South Asian Britain says she returned to Bombay in November 1935, and Britannica gives her death as 13 August 1936.

The 1962 stamp

India issued a 15 naya paise stamp with her portrait on 26 January 1962, Republic Day, for her birth centenary. Two philatelic catalogues give the print run as 2.5 million, and one adds that a staff artist of the India Security Press designed it.