While everyone knows that Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore penned the word's of India's national anthem, very little is known about the creative brains behind other national symbols. In fact, there is a debate about who designed the flag though it is widely believe that Pingali Venkayya was the one who created it.?
Similarly, almost nothing is known about the man who sketched India's national emblem, a legacy that unfortunately was forgotten in 70 years of independence.
Dinanath Bhargava, the man handpicked by legendary painter Nandalal Bose to design the National Emblem as a 21-year-old, died at his home in Anand Nagar, Indore, on Saturday evening.
At 89, Bhargava was sitting with his wife at home when he collapsed, according to family sources. His daughter-in-law, Sapekshi Bhargava, who works in Medanta Hospital, told TOI that she rushed home with an ambulance but it was too late. Bhargava had been suffering from cardiac ailments for a decade and had undergone angioplasty.?
TOI
In the late 1940s, Bhargava was studying at Kala Bhavan in Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Nandalal Bose, principal of Kala Bhavan's Fine Arts department was entrusted with the task of illustrating the cover and pages of the Constitution. Bose shortlisted around five students, including Bhargava, Kripal Singh Sekhawat, Jagdish Mittal and Gauri Bhanja (Bose's daughter) to design the page borders.
The brief was to illustrate the 34 inch borders representing styles from different civilisations of the sub-continent ranging from prehistoric Mohenjodaro to Indus Valley to the present. The cover was to be adorned by an image of the Lion Capital on an Ashoka Pillar at Sarnath.
While the Lion Capital was a three-dimension sculpture and comprised four lines atop a base with an inverted lotus below it, Bhargava was given the task to do a two dimension rendition of the Lion Capital with its motto extracted from Mundaka Upanishad -Satyameva Jayate (Truth alone triumphs).
indianexpress.com
He eventually ended up making the first 30 pages of the Constitution by end-1948. Each of the 300-odd pages of the Constitution was designed with pencil and brush at Santiniketan and then touched up with gold. The document was adopted on January 26, 1950, and the country got its National Emblem.
"It was an exciting project. Flush from the newly won Independence, we were crafting infant India's most important document. Bose himself designed much of it and got us, including Bhargava, to help. The calligraphy in the book was done by Prem Behari Narain Raizda and we designed the borders," recounted Mittal, who lives in Hyderabad.
R Sivakumar, professor of artistry at Kala Bhavan, said it was indeed a matter of pride that artists from Kala Bhavan had embellished the prestigious document. He though pointed out that he considered the page borders more interesting than the emblem as it was an adoption from a Mauryan sculpture and not an original art work.
NDTV
"Had Nandalal Bose designed the emblem himself, I think he would have done it differently and it would have contained a touch of Bengal art and would have been more stylised than the realistic sketch that we have today," said Sushobhan Adhikari, curator of Kala Bhavan Museum.
While the Lion capital has an ox, a horse, an elephant and a deer interspersed with wheels or chakra at the base, the two animals that figure below the lion in the National Emblem are the ox and the horse. With this, Bhargava's legacy has been etched in India's heritage for eternity.?