Impression

‘Can't we imagine certain people having a different geometry of colour than we do?’ That, of course, means: Can't we imagine people having colour concepts other than ours?

Introduction

One of the primary functions of a political symbol is to provide a framework to the political ideology and to act as a unifying agent in a political movement. This task of political unification also transforms the nature of symbol from merely a reflection of political ideology to a propaganda object, a carrier of abstract political ideologies and finally converts it as a contested field, where claims are made and resisted. French historians of political culture have emphasized many of these aspects in their studies of French Revolution. Lynn Hunt writes, ‘Symbols of everyday life did not simply express political positions, they were the means by which public became aware of their positions….’ She further writes, ‘By making a political position manifest, they made adherence, opposition, and indifference possible. In this way they constituted a field of political struggle’. With the example of cockade, in the context of French Revolution, she has described how ‘the potential for political and social conflict became apparent as soon as the first symbols were invented.’ The potentialities of conflict then force us to look at political symbols like the national flag not merely as a unifying agent, as has been often argued, but as a deeply contested one too. In this regard, Pal Kolsto in his study of ‘new’ and ‘insecure’ nations make an interesting argument. He has studied Bosnia (that is considered by him as ‘new state’), Russia (‘newly reconfigured state’) and Norway (an ‘established state’). He argues that ‘in new, insecure nations the flags and other national symbols often fail to fulfill their most important function as promoters of national unity. Quite to the contrary, they often bring to the fore strong divisions within the putative nation’. He makes another important claim by distinguishing symbols and their unifying/divisive potentials on the basis of their rootedness in the past. He writes that ‘Symbols that are rooted in a cultural past will more often than not be more divisive than unifying since different ethnic and political groups often hark back to different pasts. Symbols taken from political history or even created from scratch may in fact fulfill the function of unifying the nation just as well, or better, than can ethnic symbols’.