From Vajra to Tricolour: Kolkata’s links to India’s flag history
Times of India | 14 August 2026
KOLKATA: As the Har Ghar Tiranga initiative renewed public focus on the national flag, Kolkata-based vexillologist Sekhar Chakrabarti dug into his years of research to highlight the city’s lesser-known links with the evolution of the Tricolour.
Chakrabarti, a retired engineer who has studied flags for over five decades, says Kolkata’s connection with the idea of an Indian national flag dates back to the early freedom movement, when symbols of resistance were still being imagined.
One of the earliest attempts, he says, came from Sister Nivedita in 1904. Known as the Vajra flag, it had a yellow and red field with a thunderbolt and a white lotus.
“After Swami Vivekananda’s death in 1902, Sister Nivedita drifted from the Ramakrishna Mission and plunged into the freedom movement. She wanted to create a flag with which freedom fighters and revolutionaries could identify. But it never gained popularity,” Chakrabarti said.
The Vajra, associated with strength and spiritual power, reflected Nivedita’s attempt to create a nationalist emblem rooted in Indian cultural imagination. Though it did not gain wide acceptance, Chakrabarti sees it as an important early moment in Indian flag-making.
Two years later, during the Swadeshi movement, the Calcutta Flag, also called the Boycott Flag, was unveiled. Jointly designed by Sachindra Prasad Bose and Sukumar Mitra, it had three horizontal stripes of green, yellow and red and was unfurled at Parsi Bagan Square in Kolkata during the anti-partition movement in Bengal. The first mock up flag was stitched by Sukumar Mitra's sister Kumudini Basu.
The flag drew on the energy of Swadeshi, which turned boycott, indigenous enterprise and public mobilisation into political tools. Chakrabarti says it was among the first flags publicly associated with the nationalist cause.
“A variant of this Calcutta Flag was unfurled in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1907 by nationalists and Hem Chandra Kanungo, the revolutionary who had learnt how to make bombs from underground Russian revolutionaries,” Chakrabarti said.
Kanungo later became a principal co-accused, along with Aurobindo Ghosh, in the Alipore Bomb Case. The Stuttgart episode showed how the search for an Indian national symbol had moved beyond Bengal and India through revolutionaries and expatriate nationalists.
Kolkata’s links continued through the Berlin Committee Flag, used by Indian students and activists in Germany during World War I. The Berlin Committee, formed by Indian revolutionaries abroad, included Virendranath Chattopadhyay, Sarojini Naidu’s elder brother, and Bhupendranath Datta, Swami Vivekananda’s younger brother.
Chakrabarti says these links show how Bengal’s intellectual, revolutionary and expatriate networks shaped nationalism’s visual vocabulary. The flag, he notes, evolved through decades of experiments, movements and symbolic choices.
The final Kolkata connection, he says, lies in the saffron shade of the national flag. In 1931, when the top stripe changed from red to saffron, several shades were used, causing confusion.
“Spotting the problem, Jawaharlal Nehru asked freedom fighter Satish Chandra Dasgupta, who was connected to Prafulla Chandra Roy’s Bengal Chemical, to develop a unique saffron colour. Bengal Chemical then developed the saffron colour that is used today and named it Indian Saffron,” Chakrabarti said