The Parade’s First Home: Irwin Amphitheatre

1950 to 1955: finding the route

The lettering leads and the wheel fades behind it — a design about the day’s name more than its geography. The geography, as it happens, took five years to settle.

The first Republic Day parade of 1950 marched not down a great avenue but inside the Irwin Amphitheatre — the arena Delhi now knows as the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium. Only from 1955 did the parade adopt the ceremonial boulevard as its permanent route, the same axis that today bears the name Kartavya Path and receives the flag’s grandest morning each year.