• Capt. Praveen Davar

The National Flag was adopted in the Constituent Assembly on July 2, 1947. The resolution to adopt the flag was followed by a speech by the Prime Minister-designate Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru (then Vice President Viceroy’s Executive Council). In his address Pt. Nehru said: “I am sure that many in this House will feel the glow and warmth which I feel at the present moment. For behind this resolution and the Flag which I have the honour to present to this House for adoption lies history, the concentrated history of a short span in a nation’s existence. I remember, and many in this House will remember, how we looked up to this Flag not only with pride and enthusiasm but with a tingling in our veins and also how, when we were sometimes down and out, the sight of this Flag gave us courage to go on. Many who are not present here today, many of our comrades who have passed, held on to this Flag, a few of them even unto death, and handed it over, as they sank, to others to hold it aloft.”

BhikaijiCama was one amongst the early freedom fighters who held this flag aloft and handed it over to the generations that followed. The first national flag in India was said to have been hoisted on August 7, 1906, in the Parsee Bagan Square (Green Park) in Calcutta. The flag was composed of horizontal strips of red, yellow and green. The second flag was hoisted in Paris by Madame Cama and her band of exiled revolutionaries in 1907 (according to some in 1905). This was very similar to the first flag except that the top strip had only one lotus but seven stars denoting the Saptarishi. This flag was also exhibited at a socialist conference in Berlin.

Bhikaiji Rustom Cama was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in a large, affluent Parsi Zoroastrian family. Like many Parsi girls of the time, Bhikaiji attended Alexandra Girls’ English Institution. Bhikaiji was by all accounts a diligent, disciplined student with a flair for languages.’

In October 1896, the Bombay Presidency was hit first by famine, and shortly thereafter by bubonic plague. Bhikaiji joined one of the many teams working out of Grant Medical College (which would subsequently become Haffkine’s plague vaccine research centre), in an effort to provide care for the afflicted, and (later) to inoculate the healthy. Cama subsequently contracted the plague herself but survived.

In 1905, Cama relocated to Paris, where, together with S. R. Rana and MunchershahBurjorji Godrej, she co-founded the Paris Indian Society. Together with other notable members of the movement for Indian sovereignty living in exile, Cama published (in the Netherlands and Switzerland) and distributed revolutionary literature for the movement, including Bande Mataram (founded in response to the Crown ban on the poem VandeMataram) and later Madan’s Talwar (in response to the execution of Madan Lal Dhingra). These weeklies were smuggled into India through the French colony of Pondicherry.

On August 22, 1907, Cama attended the second Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, Germany, where she described the devastating effects of a famine that had struck the Indian subcontinent. In her appeal for human rights, equality and autonomy from Great Britain, she unfurled what she called the “Flag of Indian Independence”.

It has been speculated that this movement may have been an inspiration to African American writers and intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois in writing his 1928 novel Dark Princess. Cama’s flag, a modification of the Calcutta Flag, was co-designed by Cama, and would later serve as one of the templates from which the current national flag of India was created.

BhikaijiCama was passionate in her support for gender equality. Speaking in Cairo, Egypt in 1910, she asked, “I see here the representatives of only half the population of Egypt. May I ask where is the other half? Sons of Egypt, where are the daughters of Egypt? Where are your mothers and sisters? Your wives and daughters?”

Several Indian cities have streets and places named after BhikaijiCama, including a commercial centre in the heart of New Delhi. On January 26, 1962, India’s 11th Republic Day, the Indian Posts and Telegraphs Department issued a commemorative stamp in her honour. Madame Cama will continue to be a source of inspiration for patriots for decades to come.

The author is former secretary, AICC