Formation badge, Nagpur District, India, (c)

Cloth badge with a black and yellow cobra on a red ground with black border.

This badge continues a long military tradition of using animals to represent qualities with which an organisation would like to be associated. In this case the fearsome snake of Indian folklore. Nagpur, located in the Central Provinces (now Maharashtra), is named after the Nag River. The latter derived its name (Nag means cobra) from its sinuous snake like course.

This example was worn by Colonel Patrick Emerson, who served with the Indian Army from 1938 before transferring to the Pakistan Army in 1944. He retired in 1949 and subsequently served with the Israeli and Australian Forces.