He spent four years begging India to choose a flag. It chose his — and then forgot his name.
On the last day of March 1921, the Congress met at Bezwada on the Krishna river, and a lecturer from Machilipatnam finally got his hearing. For four years running, Pingali Venkayya had stood up at session after session to ask the same unfashionable question — what flag will a free India fly? — and for four years he had been humoured and moved along. He had already printed a booklet, in 1916, laying out some thirty designs. Now Gandhi asked him for one. By the account long told in Andhra, he drew it in three hours: two bands, red for the Hindus and green for the Muslims. Gandhi looked at it and made two changes that made it a nation's — a white band for everyone else, and across all three, the charkha, the spinning wheel of self-reliance.
He was not a designer by trade. He had enlisted in the British Indian Army at nineteen and fought in South Africa in the Boer War, where he first met Gandhi. He took a diploma in geology, hunted mica in Nellore, lectured for over thirty years at Machilipatnam, taught himself Japanese well enough to lecture in it, and bred cotton so ably that people called him Patti Venkayya — Cotton Venkayya. He also gave away the one thing that made him immortal. By the late 1950s he was living in a hut. He died on 4 July 1963, unpensioned and unhonoured, sixteen years after independent India first raised a flag descended from his.
Soldier, geologist, flag-maker
The lifeline
1876
Born at Bhatlapenumarru, near Machilipatnam, Madras Presidency
1899
Serves in the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa, where he first meets Gandhi
1916
Publishes a booklet of some thirty designs for a national flag
1921
At Bezwada, hands Gandhi the flag; Gandhi adds white and the charkha
1931
Congress adopts saffron, white and green with the charkha at Karachi
1963
Dies at Vijayawada on 4 July, in poverty and near-total obscurity
By the numbers
The measure of him
30
Flag designs he set down in his 1916 booklet, when India had none of its own
4
Congress sessions running at which he pressed the case — Gandhi's own count, in 1921
3 hrs
To draw the Bezwada flag, by the account long told in Andhra
16
Years he lived after 1947, watching his flag fly over a country that had lost his address
What he made, found and pressed for
The work
1913
A lecture delivered entirely in Japanese at Bapatla — a language he had taught himself, and which earned him a second nickname: Japan Venkayya.
1916
A National Flag for India — a printed booklet of roughly thirty designs, drawn after studying the flags of other nations. The first serious attempt to give the idea a shape.
1921
The Bezwada flag — red and green, for two communities. Gandhi's white band made it three, and the charkha at its heart made it a programme as well as a banner.
1920s
Cambodia cotton — years of breeding trials on the strain grown around Machilipatnam, the work behind the name Patti Venkayya.
1924–44
Mica in Nellore — two decades of geological survey, and a book on rocks written in Telugu, Thalli Raayi.
1947
22 July — the Constituent Assembly adopts the tricolour, with Ashoka's 24-spoke chakra in place of the charkha. The bands are his; the wheel is not.
Unthanked, then commemorated
Recognition
In his lifetime
Gandhi praised his "persistent zeal" — and wrote that the designs themselves stirred nothing in him
The 1931 flag was settled by a Congress committee; the 1947 flag by another. Neither bore his name
After independence he withdrew to farming and teaching outside Vijayawada
Lived his last years in a hut, in acute poverty
Died on 4 July 1963 with no state pension, title or honour
Today
India Post issued a commemorative stamp in his honour in 2009
All India Radio's Vijayawada station was renamed the Pingali Venkayya AIR Station in 2014
A second stamp was released on 2 August 2022, his 146th birth anniversary, at the Tiranga Utsav in Delhi
Andhra Pradesh has repeatedly asked for him to be given the Bharat Ratna
Every 15 August, a billion people raise a flag descended from the one he carried to Bezwada
The cotton coast that made him
Machilipatnam
He was born in a village on the Krishna delta and schooled at Machilipatnam — old Masulipatnam, once the busiest port on the Coromandel coast. It was a cotton town before it was anything else: its painted kalamkari cloths went to Persia and Europe, and both the Dutch and the English set up trading factories on its shore in the early 1600s. Venkayya spent his working life there, first learning to grow better cotton, then arguing that the cloth of a free country ought to carry its own colours.
1611
The English East India Company's first factory on the Coromandel coast, at Masulipatnam
33 yrs
He taught at Andhra National College, Machilipatnam, from 1911
70 km
From the coast to Vijayawada, where he showed Gandhi the flag — and where he died
"A flag is a necessity for all nations. Millions have died for it. It is no doubt a kind of idolatry which it would be a sin to destroy. For a flag represents an ideal."
— M. K. Gandhi, Young India, 13 April 1921 the article that asked Venkayya for a flag