Reading the republic | Review of T.M. Krishna’s We, the People of India

Over the past decade, I have spent time reading the edicts of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (304-232 BCE) with philologists and teaching my students to appreciate them. In our discussions, we employed modern translations. It never occurred to me to imagine how they would sound if uttered aloud, since they are composed in ancient languages — Prakrit, Aramaic, and Classical Greek; and inscribed in ancient scripts — Brahmi, Kharoshthi, and Greek. Much of interest in the edicts has been in their archaeological excavation, their decipherment, and their geographical spread across the subcontinent. Romila Thapar’s pathbreaking work in the 1960s was focused on reconstructing the political history of the Mauryan Empire, and establishing Ashoka as a historical figure, distinct from the plethora of literary representations and Buddhist hagiographies produced in the first millennium.

This slow-moving field of inquiry changed when T.M. Krishna, with guidance from Gopalkrishna Gandhi, decided to figure out not only how the words would be pronounced, but also how they might be set to melody and sung. He collaborated with leading scholars, notably Nayanjot Lahiri, Naresh Keerthi, and the Buddhist monk Shravasti Dhammika. The result was ‘The Edict Project’, which aims to “reimagine the edicts in musical form”. It was launched in 2020 and housed, appropriately, at Ashoka University. The renditions sung by Krishna, in all three classical languages, have a haunting beauty. He gives a profound emotional and aesthetic resonance to the moral values of non-violence, pacifism, justice, and tolerance with which the great monarch sought to imbue his sovereignty.

It was Gopal Gandhi, to whom We the People of India: Decoding a Nation’s Symbols is dedicated, who had earlier encouraged Krishna to revisit the national anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana’, written by Rabindranath Tagore. Krishna realised it was worth restoring the complete song with five stanzas, of which only the first one is sung as the official anthem. Krishna renders it slowly and mellifluously, its plangent lyrics conveying not only the glory, but also the pathos that attends to the idea of India, from the very inception of the lyric in Tagore’s mind in 1911. Krishna also worked with the historian Sugata Bose to tease out the subtle differences, both melodic and verbal, between the less well-known version of the anthem used by Bose’s ancestor Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose for his patriotic activities, and that given by Tagore and formally adopted at Independence.

Lion capital from the Pillar of Emperor Ashoka.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images

These experiments, combining archival research with musical creativity, not to mention linguistic dexterity, have led Krishna to write his latest book on India’s national symbols. Never one to shy away from intervening in public discourse, he sets out to examine, explain, and extoll not just the four symbols — the flag, the emblem, the motto, and the anthem — but also adds a fifth chapter, on the Preamble to the Constitution. With characteristic intellectual ambition and a sense of political urgency, Krishna doesn’t merely explore what each of them means. Rather he takes us back to the debates in the Constituent Assembly where these symbols were chosen and adopted, and points to our present circumstances which necessitate recalling the lofty vision that went into the making of modern India.

The book combines a scholar’s rigour with a citizen’s anxiety, returning us to the founding moment and its promises at the very juncture when the foundations of free India threaten to collapse. As always, Krishna puts his erudition in service of his activism, holding up the aspirations of the past to critique the failures of the present.

The four national symbols are each one a combination of the ancient and the modern. The Tricolour flag evokes the many — rather than merely three — religious communities enfolded into the Indian nation, even while placing the Ashokan Dhamma Chakra at the centre. The emblem is adapted from the Ashokan Lion Capital, and the Sanskrit motto ‘Satyameva Jayate’ is taken from a verse in the Mundaka Upanisad. The Preamble was adopted by the Constituent Assembly towards the very end of the drafting of the Constitution, in November 1949, but the text evolved over two decades, from 1928 onwards, with its most significant elements contributed by Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, B.N. Rau, and Babasaheb Ambedkar. Krishna is meticulous in documenting the complex and contentious processes whereby consensus was achieved around these symbols.

In my own writing about the symbolic repertoire of independent India, I focused on classical texts and artefacts and their historical contexts which attracted and inspired the founders, particularly Gandhi, Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore, Nehru, and Ambedkar. But Krishna goes a step further, including in his account the doubts, mistakes, disagreements, and controversies surrounding choices that had to be made amidst the turmoil of Independence and Partition. And more importantly, he continually links the semantics of the symbols to our contemporary condition. He seeks, through the reinterpretation of our tangible symbols, a reinvigoration of our intangible democracy.

The writer is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.

We, the People of India: Decoding a Nation’s Symbols

T.M. Krishna

Context/Westland

₹899

Published – April 03, 2026 06:30 am IST