Unflagging Enthusiast

In Hyderabad’s Sanjeeviah Park, on the banks of Hussain Sagar Lake, a flagpole stands 88 metres tall. Atop it flies one of the largest Indian tricolours in the country, measuring 22 metres by 33 metres. The flag, which frequently tears in the windy conditions, is repaired every week and replaced with a new one every month.

Each replacement is stitched by the same team, headed by Kambhampati Sanjeeva Rao—a 55-year-old man with a passion for flags. “I was completely in awe of the Indian tricolour, even as a child,” Rao told me. His fascination led him to “notice the flags of other countries as well,” he said. “I came to admire the ideals and struggles they stood for.”

Rao wanted to start an international flag collection in the 1990s, but purchasing the flags from his home in Khammam, a town about 200 kilometres east of Hyderabad, was nearly impossible. He began stitching them instead. Rao wrote to many embassies to ask for the specifications of their national flags, often waiting months before hearing back. Once he had the requisite information about a flag, he would begin to stitch a one-metre-long copy of it from strips of cloth he gathered. “Stitching was my hobby,” he said. “I took immense pleasure in it, and I learnt the tricks.” Rao now has homemade flags of over 200 countries, currently stored in wooden boxes in his home.

In addition to being a flag-maker, Rao is a vexillologist—someone who studies flags. He communicates with other vexillologists across the globe, and has attended flag-related conferences abroad. Decades ago, Michel Lupant, a Belgian vexillologist and the president of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations, encouraged Rao to share his love for flags with his countrymen. Inspired, Rao founded the Indian Vexillological Association in 1995.

The IVA, which holds one meeting a year, is small. Theoretically, anyone can pay a Rs 1,000 membership fee and join, but the association still has only ten members, all of whom are related to Rao. The current president is Rao’s eldest son, Srikanth. The IVA occasionally receives emails of interest from around the country, to which Rao tries to respond immediately—though language barriers can prove challenging.

Srikanth said that the costs for the IVA “have to be borne personally, and for a middle-class family this is a huge expenditure.” Rao collects stamps and currency in addition to flags, and most of the association’s funds come from the modest fees he receives for holding exhibitions of these collections at schools across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. “Imagine a person with very little educational qualifications biting into this huge subject of vexillology, and imagine him with his challenges in communicating in a foreign language, across cultures,” Srikanth said of his father. “This shows you his passion and the struggles he was willing to go through for this.”

Rao’s government job—he works as an additional project director for the District Rural Development Agency in Khammam—makes it difficult for him to spend much time expanding the IVA, though he intends to pursue this after he retires, three years from now. After that, Rao hopes to increase the IVA’s membership, start a monthly magazine for it, and host an international conference.

Making the tricolour for Sanjeeviah Park has proven more financially rewarding. Rao first heard of the opportunity, he told me, on a May morning in 2016, when he read in the newspaper about how Telangana’s chief minister wished to hoist the largest Indian flag on 2 June, the second anniversary of the state’s creation. Rao knew he had to lead this project, though he did not have any professional flag-making experience. Fortunately, on that day, he happened to be in Hyderabad. “I immediately put down the newspaper and ran to the secretariat,” he said. “I just knew I had to meet them.” He met Telangana’s principal secretary, who listened to his plea and reviewed his credentials. The next day, Rao was commissioned to stitch the flag, receiving an advance of Rs 1 lakh and a month’s paid leave to work on it.

With the anniversary less than a month away, Rao returned to Khammam and hired a team of ten women to help make the tricolour. “Seven strips of 35 metres each have to be stitched alongside each other for each band of colour for this particular flag,” he said. “The bundle of cloth gets so heavy that I need all the hands possible to lift and align the cloth for the stitching.”

Rao’s first flag was a success. He was commissioned to deliver one giant tricolour each month to the Telengana state exchequer. Despite this frequent replacement, the flag gets torn or worn out every few days. Rao and his younger son, Goutham Kambhampati, manage a team that patches the damage throughout the month.

Since he made the Sanjeeviah Park flag, many people have asked Rao to stitch giant tricolours. He now runs a separate team to deal with these private comissions. Some of those have been even larger than the Sanjeeviah Park flag, although those are generally not hoisted, just displayed. The Sanjeeviah Park flag is no longer India’s largest hoisted flag, either, having been eclipsed by a few others. This March in Belagavi, Karnataka, a 24-by-37-metre tricolour became the largest to be hoisted in India to date.

Rao still pursues vexillology, taking special interest in the history of the tricolour. He once went looking for the family of Pingali Venkayya, a freedom fighter from Andhra Pradesh and the designer of the Indian flag. Rao said he “found them selling street food in the streets of Machilipatnam”—a coastal city in Andhra Pradesh.

No one around the family knewthey were related to Venkayya, or even who Venkayya was. “While I am proud that I am able to do what I set out to do,” Rao said, “I also feel that my success is for so many others, including those who don’t get the recognition they deserve.”