Surayya Tyabji

Some Lesser Known Facts About Surayya Tyabji

• Surayya Tyabji belonged to a family of civil servants, social reformers, and freedom fighters.

• When she was under a year old, her father passed away at a very young age due to illness.

  

• Her stepfather, Hasan Camruddin Latif, the chief engineer of the Hyderabad State, and her mother encouraged their children to be adventurous and adaptive.

• She was raised in a secular environment, learning about every religion and celebrating every religious festival.

• She always wore a saree, even when she played competitive sports and adventure activities.

  

• She worked as a teacher at Mahboobia Girl’s High School in Hyderabad for a brief period.

• She won a gold medal for learning art at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Still, she did not pursue it as she married Badruddin Tyabji, an Indian Civil Service Official in 1939.

  

• Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned Badruddin Tyabji to design the National Emblem as he was part of the constituent assembly formed in 1946. He intimated the major art schools but the designs received lacked originality.

• Her daughter Laila Tyabji wrote in one of her social media accounts that her parents liked period sculptures from which they got the idea of lions and chakra atop the Ashoka column. The first design was printed at the Vice Regal Lodge Press in Delhi.

• The flag designed by Pingali Venkayya had the charkha (spinning wheel) in the centre which was used at the meetings of the Indian National Congress. The national leaders wanted to give a new flag for the new nation.

• Surayya Tyabji contributed to the Pingali Venkayya’s original design of the National Flag by adding the Ashoka Chakra at the centre replacing the charkha and the final design of the National Flag in its present form was approved by the constituent assembly on 22 July 1947.

• The course of incidents was noted in the book, The Last Days of the Raj (1989), by historian Trevor Royle.

• In Surayya Tyabji’s design, the Ashoka Chakra was given the colour black which Mahatma Gandhi did not approve. So, it was changed to the blue colour that it has now.

• According to their daughter Laila Tyabji, her parents never claimed their contribution to the design of the national flag.

• According to historian Trevor Royle, she also supervised the sewing of the first Indian Flag.

• As the ambassador’s wife, she resided in Brussels, Jakarta, Tehran, Bonn, and Tokyo from 1948 till 1960.

• Surayya Tayabji appeared in a Belgian magazine when her husband opened the first embassy in Brussels, Belgium.

  

• When she had depression in the last decade of her life as she was not able to draw and paint as she wished, she wrote a book Mirch Masala (1975) in which the illustrations were done by cartoonist and painter, Mario Miranda, who is her niece Habiba’s husband.

  

• Surayya Tyabji had a close relationship with Indira Gandhi.

• In 2018, Capt. L Panduranga Reddy, historian and a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, mentioned Surayya Tyabji’s contribution to the design of the National Flag which was backed up by the research conducted by the Flag Foundation of India.