First on Indian Soil: Port Blair, 1943

30 December 1943

Picture 71 prints the flag’s birthday across its own sky — 22 July, the adoption date this gallery toasted back at picture 42. Let the banner keep its date; this page remembers a tricolour raised before there was an adopted design at all.

On 30 December 1943, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose raised the tricolour at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands — territory then held by his Provisional Government of Free India — and declared it the first Indian soil to fly the flag of independence. Whatever the war’s verdict on that government, the date stands in the flag’s own memory: four years before freedom, the tricolour had already claimed Indian ground.