Still With Us: The First Flag of Fort St George

A museum keeps the morning

Picture 76 scatters the flag into dozens of little ribbons and badges — the tricolour as ephemera, printed to be pinned and forgotten. The gallery closes on the perfect opposite: the one cloth that was never let go.

One flag from the first Independence morning can still be visited. The tricolour hoisted over Fort St George in Madras on 15 August 1947 — a full twelve feet by eight of it — was taken down, preserved, and rests today in the Fort Museum in Chennai, the celebrated survivor of that first sunrise. Seventy-six pictures end here deliberately: after all the art, the record closes on actual cloth that saw the actual day.