Book review: Sadan Jha. 2016. Reverence,Resistance and Politics of Seeing the Indian National Flag

The virtues of this monograph might have shone forth a little brighter had it been subjected to the attentions of a publisher’s editor before publication; or if the author had sought a professional editor’s help to ready the text for publication. In the absence of either step, we have in front of us a potentially useful and occasionally insightful exploration of the history and politics of the Indian national flag (and the many flag designs that vied for that coveted position) which hides its achievements behind a smog of erratic verbiage. The publisher—the Cambridge University Press, no less—is surely guilty of criminal neglect of basic responsibilities here, for it appears most likely that the package containing the manuscript was sent straight to the printer, probably unopened. Nothing else can explain the shoddiness of the text, the multiple errors and inelegances of several kinds on practically every page, which make reading the book a needlessly herculean exercise. Indians like to pride themselves on and harbour many illusions about their knowledge of English. In reality, apart from those who have had an elite education or have lived in Anglophone cultural environments for long periods, very few of us know the language well enough to think in it. We kid ourselves with charming tales of Indian English(es) having finally arrived, and do a lot else besides to distract ourselves from the destruction of minds that is going on around us. But everyone knows that unless the English is of a global standard, no book will be taken seriously. It is not surprising that so far nobody has ventured (consciously) to publish academic research in Indian English. The evidence of this disavowed truth keeps piling up every day, as everybody from Supreme Court justices to the teachers of English in primary schools shows a dangerous (for the public) inadequacy of command over the very medium they employ to rule our lives. On the other hand, today English dominates the global publishing industry and everybody wants to publish in English. The author who is self-aware and recognises the limits of his/her English skills is better off in such a situation: he/she will seek the required assistance to turn their manuscript into something readable and in this way avoid doing a disservice to their own scholarly labours. All over the world, people are adopting this sensible method which is closed to us because we have abjured self-knowledge due to the dangers it poses to the status quo.

When placed beside Arundhati Virmani’s (2008) book which was published nearly a decade before (although they seem to have begun their projects at roughly the same time), Jha’s monograph, while substantially overlapping with the former, also extends the research in several new directions. He places the flag in a visual studies context for one, and for another, he uses popular cultural texts and other rare archival material to provide us with a vivid and detailed picture of the engagement of several different sets of actors—rival political factions, various British agents, women, communal forces, and the public at large—in the conflicts over the form the flag should take, the uses it could or not be put to, questions of ownership and sovereignty as they arise in the relations between the public and the leaders of various parties and communities. The many facets of the contentious issue of colour are dealt with at length and the consensus of sorts that evolves around the choice of saffron, a name that was used to describe a wide variety of hues until the signifier was fixed to a referent that had to be produced with the help of chemists. The range of meanings attributed to colours is another fascinating aspect of this history, as is the effort on the part of the Congress leadership to supplant or repress the essentially communal meanings that political parties and the public alike preferred to read into the colours, guided as they were by the original ascription by Gandhi of the red/saffron, green and white of the flag to Hindus, Muslims and the rest of the population respectively. ‘This is what the colours will mean,’ they (Nehru, Radhakrishnan, etc.) try to dictate, trying in vain to dam the semantic flow.

Jha’s judgments are tentative, he tends to vacillate between possible readings, the sacred character of the flag tends to be treated with a suitable sanctimoniousness, imbued as the book is with a Gandhian piety. While he has unearthed a lot of interesting material from the archives, his reading of these materials is often disappointing. In a telling passage that opens the ‘Epilogue’, Jha cites a brilliant satirical poem—‘they took away female goat, took away male goat/took away all the eggs/in exchange what they gave/a flag made of paper’ (p. 239)—and manages to negate its merciless indictment and to restore the flag to its important place in people’s lives using his resignifying skills! While he is thrilled to have found such a bright gem and wants to share it with us, he does not want its negativity to distract from the message that the people are endowed with what he calls, citing Gandhi, a ‘believing eye’. There is also a lot of material here—distracting forays into side issues—that could have been edited out or relegated to the footnotes—which brings us back to the absence of the editor’s touch. Perhaps it is still not too late for the author to undo the damage done by an unscrupulous publisher by seeking the services of a competent professional editor. It might result in a shorter, but a much more useful book.