Jawaharlal Nehru’s red rose to international socialism: Tracing the symbolism of flower

If there is one thing our politicians excel at, is finding creative ways to insult their opponents. And this can reach real heights when India’s current ruling party targets our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Almost every aspect of Nehru’s life and personality, real or imagined, has been attacked, ranging from his ancestry, his eating habits, his personal life and his political rivalries. And last week, without directly naming him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took aim at the red rose that Nehru habitually wore as a buttonhole.

At a rally in Jodhpur the prime minister declared: “Those who went around wearing a rose had knowledge of gardens; they had knowledge neither of farming nor of the sweat of the farmer.” Since almost every official portrait or statue of Nehru across India shows him wearing a rose it was easy to understand the allusion.

In The Reason for Flowers, Steven Buchmann’s study of the history, biology and cultural role that flowers play in our lives, he traces the habit of men in past centuries carrying or wearing flowers to the need “to ward off diseases, possibly evil spirits and ameliorate bad body odours”. This was particularly important for judges who had to deal with prisoners redolent of the poor hygiene of jails. Even today some judges in the UK carry small bunches of flowers as part of their ceremonial garb on certain days.

When flowers were worn they were called a boutonniere or buttonhole, and it became a way to signal a special day, like a wedding. In time, the flower came to be worn simply “to accent a man’s formal ensemble”. The flower buttonhole then served the same function as the colourful pocket square which has become almost the signature style statement of PM Modi and other male members of his cabinet. This hasn’t stopped the speculation on why Nehru used a rose. When asked, Nehru would simply say dismissively that there was no particular reason. One story that spread, apparently via his sister Krishna Hutheesing, and relayed by Nehru’s secretary MO Mathai, was that it was a tribute to a young girl who would stand waiting for him with a rose, but this sounds romantically fanciful and Mathai’s memoirs often don’t seem too reliable.

The British tradition was to wear a carnation, as PG Wodehouse showed in Leave it to Psmith, when his hero is made to wear a (much larger) chrysanthemum as a signal for his meeting with Freddie Threepwood. When Freddie asks why he’s wearing a ‘cabbage’, Psmith realises he made a mistake: “He looked at his companion reproachfully. ‘If you had studied botany at school, comrade,’ he said, ‘much misery might have been averted. I cannot begin to tell you the spiritual agony I suffered, trailing through the metropolis behind that shrub.’”

The anthropologist Jack Goody suggested in his book The Culture of Flowers that by using a rose instead of a carnation Nehru was “adding a Kashmiri twist to a European tradition”. Kashmir, where Nehru’s family came from, is one of the few parts of India where roses grow easily. In the rest of the subcontinent providing daily roses was a challenge, particularly in those days before easy access to air cargo and refrigerated transport.

Writing in the Times of India, GS Bhat remembered Nehru visiting and staying with his uncle in Mangalore. In the morning the family found that “the roses in the garden had only tightly-petalled buds. Uncle’s brainwave saved the day. He asked for a bucket of hot water, dipped the biggest bud in it and slowly it opened. Nehru’s day was saved.”

In a similar circumstance, Amul’s Dr Verghese Kurien recalled his wife Molly experimenting with several roses before figuring that “we would have to store the flower in the fridge for a certain time and then keep it at room temperature for a certain time.” This ensured a rose of perfect shape and colour. But when Nehru emerged from his room they saw he had simply used a regular flower from the vase in his room. “Then he saw us with the rose on a platter. He immediately removed the one from his buttonhole and put on the one Molly offered him.”

This does suggest that Nehru’s rose was a stylistic quirk that, after a point, took on a momentum of its own, whether or not he cared about it. People expected a fresh red rose to be part of his image, and went to great lengths to arrange them so, Nehru just accepted and wore them.

An essay from a volume commissioned for his centenary notes that “the supply seemed inexhaustible, as were those eager to give him his favoured flower… One day Nehru’s flower must have dropped off, unnoticed. A woman standing nearby rushed, almost in a panic, to get another bloom at once. The absence of the rose seemed an evil omen to her: Nehru had somehow been stripped of a secret power…”

Deepak Chopra also writes about the talismanic importance given to Nehru’s rose. In his book Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream, he writes of how his mother once went to see Nehru in a procession, convinced he would notice her particularly.

And as he passed “Nehru suddenly took the rose he always wore from his lapel and tossed it almost directly in front of my mother.” Mrs Chopra retrieved the rose and kept it at home where people came to see it for three weeks. “At the end of that time, she threw a party and gave everyone in attendance a rose petal.”

This story, if true and he had heard it, would probably have deeply annoyed Nehru. He had little patience with this instinctive urge to idolise personalities, even to the extent of preserving their possessions. It would also have fitted awkwardly with another meaning of the red rose—its use as a symbol of socialism.

The Socialist International uses a symbol of red rose in a fist. ‘Bread and Roses’ is an iconic socialist song that emphasises the contributions of women. And the British Labour Party now uses a red rose as its political symbol. Some of these uses came after Nehru’s era, but he would have known of the association and as a long supporter of international socialism might have partly meant his use as a tribute.

This sort of political use of flowers is ancient. Medieval European heraldry used flowers like lilies for the French kings, and red and white roses were famously symbols of the opposing factions in the 15th century British Wars of the Roses. Political factions across countries and ideologies have used flowers, like primroses (British conservatives), white roses (anti-Nazis), carnations (Portugal’s 1974 revolution) and jasmine (Tunisia’s 2011 revolution).

Flower symbolism seems to pose a problem in China. Imperial China used multiple flower symbols, like peonies, chrysanthemums and plum blossoms. But Japan now claims the chrysanthemum for its imperial dynasty and Taiwan has taken plum blossoms as its national symbol. When Hong Kong came under Chinese rule there was a contest to find a new, suitably neutral symbol. Despite getting hundreds of entries, the contest was abruptly discarded and a symbol of a bauhinia flower, modified to show the five stars of the Chinese flag was imposed.

Despite this not too subtle indication of how power would be exercised in the future in Hong Kong, even this bauhinia has proved a problem as activists for Hong Kong’s identity have tried to use it —for example, by using umbrellas to imitate it, or covering up bauhinia symbols in black cloth.

But perhaps no political party has invested as much in flowers as the BJP. In the post Janata Party years, when the party was launched independent of its old Jan Sangh identity, it managed to have the lotus accepted as its electoral and political identity. The lotus is a symbol with deep Hindu roots, though it is also of great importance in Buddhism and, to a somewhat lesser extent in Jainism.

In 1937 there was even a lively exchange of letters in the Times of India about whether the lotus could be considered a Muslim symbol based on one translation from Sura 53 of the Koran which spoke of “a lotus near the garden of eternal abode.” (The writer, CB Cockaine, also noted its ancient use in Egyptian mythology as a symbol of the Nile). Other respondents though suggested that the Koranic reference was to the lote-tree, an entirely different scrub tree.

The other flower widely used in India for religious, and now political purposes is the marigold. Its bright orange garlands are now a staple at political rallies and stages are commonly decorated with its flowers. It is rather more suited for political use than the lotus since flowers with their heads of its tightly packed petals last longer. Yet the curious fact is that the particular version used for this purpose isn’t Indian in origin.

The marigold almost universally used now is the Mexican marigold, Tagetes, which has displaced the older Calendula marigolds, which are the ones with ancient Indian roots. And this is most probably due to the efforts of the Burpee Seeds, an American company, founded in 1876, which lead the effort to hybridise and develop the modern mass production marigold. Its efforts have been so successful that most of the marigolds grown across the world are these new American varieties.

Burpee also tried for years to get the USA to accept the marigold as its national flower. They lobbied American politicians, pointing to the North American origins of this variety and how it was American botanical and business ability that had made it a major product. And for years its representatives would descend on Washington DC trying to get American politicians to start using marigolds in their buttonholes.

Sadly, for Burpee, they ultimately failed in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan signed a decree affirming roses as the American national flower. But perhaps it should consider trying again in India. It is probably not possible to get marigolds to replace the lotus as our national flower, but they might find a receptive audience with politicians who might consider replacing their pocket squares with marigold buttonholes.