Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (19 page)

In the Hindi region, twenty-two students appeared for the second- level Madhyama test and 170 for the first-level Prathama test. Drawing on his strong network, Poddar created a prestigious board of examiners that included himself, Goyandka and big names of the Hindi literary world like Makhan Lal Chaturvedi, editor,
Karmayog
, Khandwa; Baburao Vishnu Paradkar, editor,
Aaj
, Kashi; Laxman Narayan Garde, editor,
Krishna Sandesh
, Calcutta; Ramdas Gaur, author of
Hindutva
, the one-volume encyclopaedia published in 1938, and among the earliest to write scientific articles;
⁵⁸
Gaurishankar Mishra of Banaras; and Swami Sachchidanand Maharaj of Gorakhpur. Seventeen of the twenty- two students cleared the Madhyama test and eighty-three of the 170 passed Prathama. Madhyama and Prathama toppers Shiv Prasad of Churu and Ambika of Ghazipur, respectively, were given silver medals and cash prizes of Rs 24 and Rs 16. Cash incentives of smaller amounts (Rs 2–5) were given to other successful candidates.
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Taking its role of ‘religious pedagogue’
⁶⁰
seriously, Gita Press formalized the rules of the Gita examination in the next few months. It was decided that, instead of two, there would be three tests—Prathama for beginners, Madhyama for mid-level students and Uttama for the highest level. Tests were to be conducted in the month of September and the results would appear in
Kalyan
after three months. Centres were to be established in places with a small post office and where there were at least sixteen candidates appearing for the test. The test fee was waived for female candidates, while male candidates had to pay a nominal amount. To get a first division in Uttama and Madhyama tests a candidate had to score an aggregate 65 per cent or more, for a second division 50 per cent or more was required, and to pass in third division a student had to get a minimum of 40 per cent. In case of the Prathama test, a candidate had to get 60 per cent for a first division, 45 per cent for a second division and 34 per cent to pass in third division. Candidates could request re-evaluation of their papers within a month of declaration of the results; answer sheets were to be retained in the Gita test office for six months.
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The examination committee also reserved the right to let students who had not cleared Prathama sit for the Madhyama test.

News about the Gita tests appeared in issues of
Kalyan
, on one occasion correcting the first year’s results and even arguing for a truncated test that would fetch candidates a certificate. In 1939,
Kalyan
claimed that Gandhi had endorsed the Gita tests: ‘A gentleman who is a great lover of the Gita asked Gandhi’s permission to take Gita tests. The gentleman wrote that Gandhi wanted parts of the Gita to be incorporated in the school syllabus as a compulsory subject. Gandhi was also of the view that the Gita test committee should make memorizing the text part of its rules.’
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Not content with the Gita tests as a tool to prepare a critical mass of people well versed in the tenets of the text, in 1934 Gita Press started the Gita Society ‘for the propagation of Gita literature here as well as abroad and to popularise it amongst schools and colleges of India and other countries, so that people of different faiths, while adhering to their own religions, may mould their lives according to the teachings of the Gita’.
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Poddar’s network once again came in handy as leading public figures throughout the country lent their name to the venture. Sir Manmatha Nath Mukherjee, a judge at the Calcutta High Court, was president of the Gita Society. Considered close to Hindu Mahasabha, Mukherjee was one of the three names recommended by Veer Savarkar for membership of the Viceroy’s War Council in 1940, along with B.S. Moonje and Syama Prasad Mookerjee.
⁶⁴
Earlier, Mukherjee had made a name in the celebrated case related to
Anand Bazar Patrika
. The paper had come under the scrutiny of the dreaded Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act that caused a vernacular newspaper to forfeit its deposit if it published anything against the government. Mukherjee and the other Indian judge, Sarat Kumar Ghosh, had set aside the order of forfeiture.
⁶⁵

Baba Raghav Das, now at the helm of the Gita tests, was made secretary of the Gita Society. Members of the Society were drawn from all walks of life—politics, academics and business—and even included non-Hindus. Among others, there was Syama Prasad Mookerjee, then vice chancellor of Calcutta University; S. Radhakrishnan, vice chancellor of Andhra University; industrialist turned right-wing politician Jugal Kishore Birla; historian Radha Kumud Mookerji; Sir Badridas Goenka, the first Indian chairperson of the Imperial Bank of India (1933); Gouri Shankar Goenka who was involved in an intense legal battle over the reduction of share capital of Marwari Stores Private Ltd.,
⁶⁶
and Krishnalal M. Jhaveri, ex-chief justice, Bombay High Court and author of
The Present State of Gujarati Literature
written in English.
⁶⁷
Taraporewala even wrote to Poddar suggesting the names of six people who could be requested to become members of Gita Society: K. Dadachandji, author of
Light of the Avesta and Gathas
; industrialist Mavji Govindji Seth; R.P. Bakshi, principal of Anandilal Poddar High School, Santa Cruz, Bombay; Khurshed S. Dabu, principal of the Parsi Orphanage, Surat; theosophist and writer K.J.B. Wadia; and Hirendra Nath Datta, an attorney from Calcutta.

An equally formidable list of people supported the venture from the outside, including Madan Mohan Malaviya, Sanskrit scholar Gopinath Kaviraj, Carmichael professor of ancient history and culture at Calcutta University Devdatta Ramakrishna Bhandarkar, and Sadhu Thanwardas Lilaram Vaswani, founder of the Mira movement in education and the Sadhu Vaswani Mission (also a regular writer in
Kalyan
).

Among foreign scholars, F. Otto Schrader, former director of the Adyar Library, Madras, and professor of divinity at the University of Kiel, Germany, who was already a known name to
Kalyan
readers, agreed to join the Gita Society. But the most enthusiastic was Ernest P. Hortwitz of Hunter College, New York, who found the Gita Society a ‘fine and feasible idea’.
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Hortwitz was no ordinary Gitaphile. He had taught the text in Hunter College for twelve years ‘as part of world literature’ and was convinced ‘no world scripture teaches more clearly and sublimely self-realisation and cosmic consciousness than Gita, which is a unique platform where all the major and minor creeds of the whole universe can seek and cooperate for the advancement of the world’s spiritual culture’. With Hitler ruling Germany, Hortwitz talked of how the Nazis were ‘deeply impressed by the heroic aspect of the Gita, represented by the kshatriyas, those dauntless defenders of
advaita
’. Addressing Poddar as brother, Hortwitz said he was off to the Pacific coast, Portland or Seattle, but would not mind sparing time for the Gita, though it would not be possible to help the initiative financially. ‘But wherever I stay if you have friends and supporters in that place, who would like to establish a Gita Society branch or Gita class, I shall only be too happy—if you want it—to conduct it.’

On the other hand, there were some who declined to be a part of the Gita Press pedagogy. Firoze C. Davar, a plain-speaking Parsi writer with strong views on religious identity, declined membership of the Gita Society in 1934: ‘I am a man of very limited means. By that account I have refrained from becoming a member of some worthy Zoroastrian societies, which I think, in fairness, must have a prior claim over me.’
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Davar also talked of being ‘innocent of Sanskrit’ and though, he said, he admired Hinduism, particularly the Gita, he was ‘but a very indifferent student of the same . . . This is not mere mock-modesty on my part nor a pretext to evade future trouble.’

The secretary of leading industrialist Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas wrote on his behalf regretting ‘inability to comply with the request’.
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Eminent Sanskrit scholar Sir Ganganath Jha also opted out on the ground that his health did not permit him to add to his activities and he did not ‘relish the idea of being a sleeping member of any society’.
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Edwin Greaves of the London Missionary Society and an established figure of Banaras’s literary world, having authored a book on Hindi grammar, wrote for
Kalyan
but was circumspect about the Gita Society. Greaves said he could not ‘pretend’ to understand the Gita and ‘in the second place so far as I do understand the general outlook taken I do not agree with it. The conception of the meaning of life, its conditions and purpose as unfolded in the Gita, differs widely from those which commend themselves to me as the soundest and the best.’
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And then there was Ragbans Kishore Balbir from an elite kayastha family of Delhi, studying philosophy in St Stephen’s College. For his age, Balbir expressed unusual anguish about people’s ignorance of their religion. He asked how any ‘gentleman of today, gentleman in the most modern sense, can very easily claim to be an atheist’. Having read many translations of the Gita, Balbir had concluded that the text was the sole path to self-realization and could well be the sole marker of nationalism: ‘If every Hindu, Muslim, or Christian takes up this principle and begins to realize himself, we can very easily get Swaraj, we can easily get that Independence for which we all have been trying for so long’.
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Balbir suggested two people who could help further the cause of the Gita Society, Rai Sahib Azmat Singh, headmaster of Sanskrit High School and Professor N.V. Thadani, principal of Hindu College. Of course, he offered to do ‘any work, any service’ himself. Curiously, this very Balbir, the passionate youth worried about spiritual decay and elusive Swaraj, was on the list of people awarded ‘honours, decorations and medals’ by the British Empire in 1947, the year the elusive Swaraj became a reality.
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In the troubled aftermath of Independence and Partition, Gita Press came up with the Shri Gita-Ramayana Prachar Sangh (Gita- Ramayana Propagation Society), asking people to recite the two texts in a regimented fashion for peace, succour and tranquillity. Simultaneously, it was decided to revive the Bhagwan naam jap introduced in
Kalyan
’s first year. Since it was a Gita Press initiative, a general appeal was not enough; it had to be formalized and turned into collective action in mission mode. In a well-publicized statement, Poddar talked of widespread disturbance, oppression and pain.
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In such a situation, he said, it was important for the peace and welfare of our motherland India and the entire world, that people should resort to the naam jap as had been done in 1926. Again, there were none of the strict sanatan dharma restrictions of gender, caste or age; everyone was asked to participate in the chanting. While women were allowed to chant Hare Ram during menstruation, they were asked not to use tulsi (sacred basil) beads to keep count. Instead, they could use wooden beads. The duration of this chanting mission was from 16 November 1948 to 13 April 1949. Participants had to report their chanting count to the Naam Jap Vibhag of Gita Press.

The rules of Shri Gita-Ramayana Prachar Sangh were more elaborate.
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Membership of the Sangh was open to anyone—disregarding barriers of caste, class and gender—who believed in the tenets of the two texts. Applicants for membership were expected to fill in forms; those members who could get others to join would be made associates. Monitoring of the membership was to be done through two departments dealing with the Gita and the Ramayana.

Four kinds of membership were on offer for the Gita department. The first included those who read the entire Gita (eighteen chapters) once every day, i.e., 365 times in a year. The second type of members could finish all the chapters over two days, and the complete text 180 times in a year. The third category of members read six chapters in a day, thus reading the Gita 120 times in a year. The last category of members could read as much of the Gita as they wished daily as long as they completed at least forty-two readings in a year. Members were also advised to devote an hour daily to observe the teachings of the Gita.

It was expected that a member of the Ramayana department would read Tulsidas’s text twice a year. Gita Press’s insistence on the
Ramcharitmanas
of Tulsidas and not any other version was with good reason—promotion of the 1938
Manas Ank
of
Kalyan
. Poddar had realized early on that for a religious publishing house aspiring to become the sole mouthpiece of sanatan Hindu dharma it was important to make texts like the Gita and Ramayana available to the public at low prices. He had issued an ‘appeal for manuscripts of Ramayana in the hope of obtaining a complete one in Tulsi’s own hand’.
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Receiving no positive response, Poddar with the help of Anjaninandan Sharan, a scholar-sadhu of Ayodhya, ‘began to assemble an edition based on the oldest available manuscripts’. After working for years, the annual issue of
Kalyan
devoted to
Ramcharitmanas
was published in 1938. The 900- page
Manas Ank
was considered a ‘milestone in popular Hindi publishing’. ‘Lavishly illustrated with specially commissioned paintings embellished with gold and protected by waxed slipsheets, it looked less like a journal than like a family heirloom.’ It contained a ‘verse-by-verse prose translation by Poddar, as well as extensive front and back matter’. The very first print run was of 40,600 copies and by late 1983 a total of 5,695,000 copies had been printed, a record unparalleled in the world of Indian publishing. In time, pocket-size versions of the
Ramcharitmanas
were brought out by Gita Press.
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Manas Ank
’s impact was far-reaching. The doyen of ancient history at the University of Madras, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, had no direct contact with Poddar, but S.S. Suryanarayana Sastri of the university’s department of Indian philosophy wrote on his behalf: ‘The first part containing Tulsi Das’ Ramacaritamanasa is so valuable that there is a special demand for it from my friend K.A. Nilakanta Sastri of the Indian History department.’
⁷⁹
Poddar immediately obliged.