India Emoji

🇮🇳 the India flag emoji is not a picture stored in a font: it is two invisible regional indicator letters, 🇮 and 🇳, for the country code IN, which phones and Macs join into the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the same two characters show as the letters IN, while the person you send them to still sees the flag on their phone.

The flag, the tiranga (tricolour), was adopted on 22 July 1947: saffron on top, white in the middle, green at the bottom, and in the centre the navy-blue Ashoka Chakra, a wheel with 24 spokes. Saffron is read as courage and strength, white as peace and truth, green as growth and the land. Where a flag will not do, people write the colours instead: 🧡🤍💚 is the tiranga heart (tiranga dil) sent on Independence Day and Republic Day and under every cricket win, and 🟧⬜🟩 draws the flag in blocks. ☸️, the wheel of dharma, is the nearest emoji to the chakra.

National symbols of India in emoji

Almost every national symbol has an emoji. The Bengal tiger 🐅 is the national animal and the peacock 🦚 the national bird; the lotus 🪷 is the national flower, the mango 🥭 the national fruit and the banyan 🌳 the national tree. The elephant 🐘 was named the national heritage animal in 2010, and the Ganges river dolphin the national aquatic animal in 2009; 🐬 is the closest emoji, although the real animal is nearly blind and lives only in fresh water.

The state emblem is the Lion Capital of Ashoka from Sarnath, four lions standing back to back, of which three are seen at once 🦁, above the motto सत्यमेव जयते (Satyameva Jayate, truth alone triumphs). Hockey 🏑 is often called the national game, after India's eight Olympic golds from 1928 to 1980, but no sport has been officially declared national. The national anthem is Jana Gana Mana by Rabindranath Tagore, the national song Vande Mataram.

Rupee symbol ₹: copy and paste or type it on a keyboard

₹ is the Indian rupee sign, Unicode U+20B9. It was designed by D. Udaya Kumar and adopted in July 2010, a Devanagari र (ra) and a Latin R in one mark, with two lines across the top that recall the flag and an equals sign. Before it, prices were written Rs or with the old rupee sign ₨ (U+20A8), which is still used for the rupees of Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. A rupee has 100 paise; big sums are grouped the Indian way, ₹1,00,000 for one lakh and ₹1,00,00,000 for one crore.

To type the rupee symbol in keyboard shortcuts on Windows, switch to the English (India) keyboard and press Right Alt+4 (or Ctrl+Alt+4); in Word you can also type 20B9 and press Alt+X. On a Mac, open the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space) and search for rupee. In HTML write ₹ or ₹. Indian phone keyboards keep ₹ on the symbols page. 📲 is the emoji for paying by phone, the way most Indians now pay a shopkeeper or split a bill over UPI, and 💰 and 🪙 for money in general.

Hindi letters and the scripts of India

Hindi is the most spoken language of India, with roughly 580 million speakers by CLDR estimates out of about 1.4 billion people, and it is written in Devanagari, the script of Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit too. Hindi in Devanagari is the official language of the Union; English may also be used for official Union purposes under the Official Languages Act, and the Constitution lists 22 scheduled languages. India has no single national language. Schools teach the Hindi alphabet, the वर्णमाला (varnamala), as 11 vowels, स्वर, and 33 consonants, व्यंजन, with the grid laid out the same way: the first 25 consonants in five rows by where in the mouth they are said, plain, aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated and nasal.

Devanagari is an abugida: each consonant carries the vowel a by itself, so क is ka, and other vowels are added as signs, का kā, कि ki, कु ku. The letters hang from a line along the top, the शिरोरेखा (shirorekha). ं (anusvara) writes a nasal consonant, as in हिंदी, and ँ (chandrabindu) a nasal vowel, as in माँ (mā̃, mother); the dotted ड़ and ढ़ are flapped sounds, as in बड़ा (baṛā, big). Hindi sentences traditionally end with the danda । rather than a full stop, and it is still the usual mark in print, though the Latin full stop is increasingly common in informal and online writing. On a computer, Windows and macOS ship Hindi keyboards (InScript and phonetic layouts), and on phones Gboard and other keyboards turn Latin typing into Hindi, so typing namaste gives नमस्ते.

India writes in many more scripts. The row of a's in the grid shows the letter in the scripts of the next biggest languages: Bangla অ (about 114 million speakers), Telugu అ (about 101 million), Tamil அ (about 83 million), Urdu ا in Perso-Arabic script (about 70 million), Gujarati અ, Kannada ಅ, Odia ଅ, Malayalam അ and Punjabi ਅ in Gurmukhi; Marathi, with about 99 million, shares Devanagari with Hindi. English, with roughly 270 million speakers, is the shared language of courts, business and the internet. Each of these languages has its own collection.

Indian emoji combos for festivals: Diwali, Holi, Independence Day

Diwali, the festival of lights in October or November, is sent as 🪔 for the clay diya lamps lit at every door, 🎆 and 🧨 for the fireworks and crackers, 🪷 for Lakshmi and 🍬 for the boxes of mithai that families give each other; the Diwali collection has more. Holi in March is 🎨🌈💦: coloured powder, gulal, and water thrown in the street. 🧵 is the rakhi that a sister ties on her brother's wrist on Raksha Bandhan, 💃🕺 the garba and dandiya dancing of Navratri, 🪁 the kites of Makar Sankranti and Uttarayan in January, 🌾 the harvest of Pongal and 🌼 the flower carpets, pookalam, of Onam in Kerala. 🕉️ ॐ and 🛕 go with prayers and temple visits, 🌙🕌 with Eid Mubarak, 🪯 with Gurpurab.

On Independence Day, 15 August, and Republic Day, 26 January, the feed fills with 🇮🇳🧡🤍💚 and 🫡, with Jai Hind or Vande Mataram written beside them. In Delhi, 15 August is also a day of kite flying from the rooftops 🪁.

Cricket, chai, autos and the rest of everyday India

🏏 is the most Indian emoji of all. India won the men's World Cup in 1983 and 2011 and the T20 World Cup in 2007 and 2024, and every match brings 🏏🇮🇳 before the toss and 🏆 after a win; 🏸 is badminton, 🤼 kushti wrestling, ♟️ chess, which grew from the Indian game chaturanga and gave India the world champion D. Gukesh in 2024, and 🏅 an Olympic medal.

☕ is chai, sweet milky tea from a roadside stall, and 🍵 the leaf from Assam, Darjeeling and the Nilgiris. 🍛🍚 are rice and curry, 🫓 roti, naan or paratha, 🫘 dal, 🥘 and 🍲 a pot of biryani or sabzi, 🌶️🧅🫚 the masala, 🥟 momos, 🥥🍌 the south, 🧈 ghee and 🥛 lassi. 🛺 is the auto-rickshaw, 🛵 the scooters and motorbikes that fill the roads, 🚂🚆 Indian Railways and 🚇 the metros of Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. 🕌 stands in for the Taj Mahal, which has no emoji of its own, 🏰 for the forts of Rajasthan, 🏔️ for the Himalaya, 🏜️🐪 for the Thar desert, 🏖️🌴 for Goa, 🛶 for the Kerala backwaters and ☔ for the monsoon. 🚀🌕 became an Indian combo on 23 August 2023, when Chandrayaan-3 landed near the Moon's south pole; the day is now National Space Day.