It was the morning of 22 July 1947.
Members of India’s newly elected Constituent Assembly were getting ready for one of their many lively debates. There were 299 of them, and they were drafting independent India’s very own, brand new Constitution.
The members of this Assembly had gathered in a building that was, at the time, called Council House. (Council House became our Parliament building post-Independence, and was the seat of the Legislature, till 2023.) It had been built and inaugurated just twenty years earlier by the British after they moved their capital from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to New Delhi. The imposing new buildings laid out across Raisina Hill by architects Edward Lutyens and Herbert Baker were designed to project imperial power, to reflect the might of the British.
When these monumental structures were planned for the new capital city of New Delhi, the cost was initially estimated to be 4-5 million pounds. Due to the delays caused by World War II, eventually the cost was 10 million pounds! In today’s value, this would be approximately 819 million pounds, or almost 91 billion rupees. Evidently, the British believed it was a worthwhile investment since they thought they would govern India forever from these buildings!
But just twenty tumultuous years after the inauguration, the people seated at the grand circular Council House were not British colonial rulers, but 299 Indians. In this building designed by the Englishman Herbert Baker, Indians began the process of governing themselves.
That July morning, as the session began, Assembly member Ram Narayan Singh from Bihar stood up to speak. Addressing Dr Rajendra Prasad, the President of the Constituent Assembly, he said:
“Sir, I wish to draw your attention to a very important constitutional issue. I think, and everybody knows, that we are meeting as a sovereign body here and making the Constitution for a Free India. But in the envelopes used by the Assembly Office, we still find on the top, the words ‘On His Majesty’s Service’. I think this is not proper and I draw the attention of the House and yourself to this matter. I hope these words will be dropped from the envelopes in future in the correspondence conducted by the Assembly Office.”
It was time for India to replace the words ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ not only on official envelopes and letterheads, but also from currency notes, postage stamps, and official government documents. India needed to have her very own National Emblem!
The same day, Jawaharlal Nehru rose to pass a resolution regarding the Indian flag. Nehru’s speech was an emotional one – full of hope about India’s future. In this speech, what Nehru said about using the Ashoka Chakra (or Dharma Chakra) on the national flag, is equally applicable to what eventually became India’s National Emblem – the four lions that once sat atop a 50-foot Ashoka pillar.
Now because I have mentioned the name of Ashoka, I should like you to think that the Ashokan period in Indian history was essentially an international period of Indian history. It was not a narrowly national period. It was a period when India’s ambassadors went abroad to far countries not in the way of an Empire and imperialism but as ambassadors of peace and culture and goodwill.”
In response to these lines, the packed hall broke into applause. The words resonated with the audience, a majority of whom were freedom fighters. These men and women were brave survivors of countless lathi charges, indiscriminate police firings, jail terms, and endless harassment by the British administration in India.
In June 1947, Lord Mountbatten had announced that the British would leave India, and the country would be divided into two nations – India and Pakistan – and this came to be known as the Partition of India. The initial schedule had the handover of rule to Indians on 8 June 1948. This would have given the British, Indian, and the newly-formed state of Pakistan adequate time to plan for the new reality. (To add to the complexity of the handover, Pakistan itself was to be a bifurcated country, with one part separated from the other by thousands of kilometres into West and East Pakistan.)
However, this plan changed, and the British decided to leave earlier, in August 1947. This meant that the Indians had to accelerate their preparations for self-governance. The Constituent Assembly set up to draft the new Constitution would take close to three years to complete their task. But this was too long a period for a proud new country to continue using old symbols of the British Raj.
Free India needed a National Emblem that represented its new status amongst the free nations of the world. The emblem also needed to represent its constitutional philosophy.
By the end of the session on 22 July 1947, the matter of India’s flag got settled. With 15 August, India’s first Independence Day barely three weeks away, a flag to replace the Union Jack was an urgent matter.
Deciding on the National Emblem would take a few more months. It was only in December 1947 that the capital of the Ashoka pillar at Sarnath, with the words “Satyameva Jayate” written below it in Devanagiri, got adopted as our National Emblem.
Excerpted with permission from The Story of India’s National Emblem, Kavitha Mandana, Talking Cub.
