A true hero in the story of India’s national flag was the remarkable Pingali Venkayya. Born in 1878 in Pedakallepalli village of Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh, he spent some childhood years in the home of his maternal grandparents in Bhatlapenumarru, a small village 40 kilometres away from Vijayawada. For his higher schooling, he was sent to “Hindu High School” in Machilipatnam, where he mastered many things, among them the art of growing good cotton. At the age of 19, he joined the British Indian Army and fought in the Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa, where he met Mahatma Gandhi who was then fighting for equal rights for Indians in that country. Venkayya soon developed a worldview and a passion to fight for India’s freedom. On returning home, he threw himself into the nationalist movement, even as he made his living doing odd jobs as diverse as those of a plague inspector and a railway guard. His was clearly a restless and curious mind; he learnt Sanskrit, Urdu, and even Japanese, which gave him the sobriquet Japan Venkayya; he developed an indigenous hybrid variety of cotton with the use of imported Cambodian cottonseed and this in turn gave him...
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