Sapna Aggarwal

According to Benedict Anderson, ‘nationality’ and ‘that word’s multiple significations, nation­ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind.’ Indeed, they are performative gestures effected on a motley of objects as symbolic national emblems. For post­colonial countries in the Asian continent, like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and others, the national flag as one such emblem has been both the site of nationalist struggle for independence from colonial rule, as well as the focal point around which a distinct national identity has been built post­independence. The performance of nationhood is inscribed on the body of the flag every time it is employed to evoke national consciousness. It becomes the site where symbolic discourses of national grandeur are etched. However, once devoid of this symbolism, what is left of the flag is an inanimate piece of cloth (and other material) that was carved into a certain shape and formed by a cut. The laceration is the very body of the flag. It is usually this body which is left out of discussions on the flag as a politico­national symbol of power and prestige. The real body of the flag is the actual site of crime — the wounded fragment of cloth — which is ascribed the illusory meaning of national unity and wholeness. This meaning is betrayed by the fragmentariness of the visual and tangible body of the flag — a cut of cloth that is painted in multiple (and hence partial) shades — which always lurks potently underneath narratives of greatness.

The wound that is the flag was strikingly exposed in 2017 during the 29th Southeast Asian Games held in Kuala Lumpur, when Malaysia mistakenly printed Indonesia’s flag upside down in its guidebook. The upside­down flag resembled that of Poland, leading Indonesia to take it as an insult to its ‘national identity.’ In becoming interchanged with each other, the visual body of the two flags collapsed the state­manufactured identity/­ies on pieces of cloth, thereby establishing that symbolic narratives of distinct national­political identities are externally attached to these bodies and not intrinsic to the flags themselves. Indonesia’s Youth and Sports Minister, Imam Nahrawi, described this incident as an ‘error,’ one that was ‘very painful.’ If pain is but visceral manifestation of a wound, this episode was experienced as a laceration on the body of the nation. The cut, however, was made neither on the body of the nation nor its emblematic flag. Rather, the materiality of the body of the flag was the cut itself. The whole incident made the flag a measure of lack and deficiency, rather than a performing agent of symbolic wholeness, that induced pain and suffering through its very body.

The body of the flag as a cut/ wound/fragment that could bleed and induce the experience of pain emerged more powerfully during the years of the Indian independence movement, when it became a site of struggle, resistance, and national pride, as argued by writer Sadan Jha. In the course of the fight against British colonialism, there were multiple flags (read: fragments) that were internally vying to become the one, the supposed ‘whole’ as the national flag. As political scientist Sudha Pai observes, these fragments were ‘the “Congress” flag, the saffron flag or Bhagwa Dhvaja of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh], and the green flag associated with the Muslim League.’ These were later incorporated into a sutured wholeness in the colour palette (saffron, white, and green) of the final version of the Indian national flag. Despite their specific symbolic associations, the colours of the national flag remain in the last instance corporeal fragments — portions painted in a specific shade on a piece of cloth. Professor Galili Shahar describes fragments as ‘a form of a wound.’ He notes that ‘fragments, like wounds, have the texture of a cut. […] Like the wounded body, the fragment bears the form of a rupture and stands as evidence of deficiency and imperfection. The fragment is thus the written form of absence and pain.’ The body of the flag(s) is thus a cut, a wound. It might be sutured multiple times in dif­ ferent forms and colours, but it remains, visually and tangibly, gaping, betraying the symbolic wholeness. It is a marker of deficiency, lack, and pain which refuses to embody perfection and unity as a self­contained unit. These fragments as wounds are therefore not emblems of national unity and pride, but underlying ruptures symptomatic of partition(s), loss, violence, and hostilities in the history of post­independence South Asia.

Any attempt to merge and create an undivided whole out of already­gaping fragments of hues and shapes must remain chasmal. The Pakistan High Commission in Dhaka was forced to confront this reality in July 2022, when it tried to replace Bangladesh’s flag from its official Facebook page with a ‘collage picture’ that merged the flags of Pakistan and Bangladesh by superimposing a moon and crescent onto the original red and green Bangladeshi flag. Bangladesh objected to Pakistan’s amnesic endeavour to forge unity and eventually forced the High

Commission to take it down. What this case demonstrates is that the merging of the two flags could not make a seamless whole as the body is already a wound on two levels: first, as a cut of fabric in itself; and second, through the real division of Bangladesh from Pakistan. The former constitutive cut as the body of the flag sits parallel to the latter as a historical site of conflict and violence. The body thus surfaces as a symptom, such that ‘the form of the symptom is that of a fragment,’ to borrow the words of Shahar. Far from representing the grandeur of national unity and federation that is attributed to it in official narratives, it is precisely the fragmentariness of the body of the flag which embodies the very essence of nation­states.

The real cut of the body of the flag can undermine both the political signification of national unity that is historically layered onto the flag and attempts to create alternate national visions through it. In a recent decision made by the Union government in 2022 to amend the Flag Code of India (2002), certain materials other than khadi or hand­spun cloth have been allowed for the national flag. Given that khadi has historically been associated with Gandhi and his legacy of struggle for independence in India, this amendment has effectively leveraged the materiality of the flag to undercut the flag as a symbol of na­ tion­ness and nationalism of the kind associated with the legacy of the Congress. At the same time, the body of the flag also undermines the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) attempt to make it their own. In 2022, the party launched the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign to mark the 75th year of Indian independence. Moving away from the erstwhile ‘formal and institutional’ connection with the flag, this campaign is meant to foster a ‘personal connection to the Tiranga.’ It is supposed to make the flag ‘an embodiment of our commitment to nation­building.’ This narrative of building a newer connection to the nation as opposed to an old one is associated with the party’s politics of religious nationalism that it wants to ascribe to the body of the flag, as well as the nation by extension. BJP has created a ‘frenzy’ around the national flag in a bid to be the new flag bearers of Indian nationalism. As a matter of fact, the Ekta Yatras (National Integration Rallies) that they have carried out in the past two decades have ended precisely with the unfurling of the national flag. However, once juxtaposed with the local portrayals of the flag, these narcissistic discourses of putative nation­ness and nationalism come crashing down as the body of the flag resurfaces in the moments of its mere physical existence. In some evocative pictures taken in a neighbourhood, resonating with the ethos of the campaign, on India’s Independence Day in 2022, photojournalist Chirodeep Chaudhuri captures the national flag in its most informal, domestic, and plain settings. In one of the pictures, the flag is depicted as torn — a visual, tactile cut/wound set against a prosaic background of everyday life — in a moment of ironic realization of the alleged intent of the campaign by BJP. The image thus juxtaposes the mundanity of the body of the flag against symbolic meanings of anti­colonial nationalism and politico­social partisanship. It betrays these larger­than­life narratives that are written allegorically on the body, thereby functioning as a foil to the nationalist politics that the BJP indulges in. Chaudhuri focuses on the tedious visuality of the body of the flag by in­ troducing it as an interruptive cut. It is literally torn apart as a non­symbol; it can be seen and touched as a mere piece of cloth. It becomes dissociated from political partisanship as well as the symbolism of patriotism and national unity at the same time.

Thus, the body of the flag is in and of itself neither pro­nationalist nor anti­nationalist in its political orientation. The flag is rather a visual/tactile cut which only gains symbolic currency by means of a performance of meta­narratives through and on its body. The irony is that the body of the flag in its material reality is a mere cut of fabric, a cut which is far from being a sacred signature on the body of Christ and which undermines the very nationalist and identitarian discourses that are inscribed on it.