Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (20 page)

One could become a member of both Gita and Ramayana departments of the Shri Gita-Ramayana Prachar Sangh, but had to be sure to read the texts oneself, after a bath. However, if one was unwell or travelling there was no need to take a bath—reading was more important. During menstruation, women members were advised not to touch the text but to request someone else to read it out to them. Gita Press also made it clear that members would not be given free copies of the Ramayana or the Gita.

Meanwhile, individual efforts related to the Gita, whether translations or fresh commentaries, were being sent to the Gita Press for endorsement. For instance, in 1939 a request was sent to Gita Press to publish a Marwari translation of the Gita with commentary by Gulab Chand Nagori, that, it was said, would not only help in the development of the language but would be beneficial to less-educated Marwaris, especially women, who would be able to read the text easily.
⁸⁰

Over the years, as Gita Press gained a reputation as the country’s biggest religious publishing house, even the Indian Army would request it for free copies of the Gita to present to jawans at the end of their training. The request in the 1960s was for an average of 1,000 copies every year of the Gita in ‘Hindi script without commentary’.
⁸¹
Gita Press’s response is not known, but it aggressively pushed pocket-sized Gitas for free publicity. Helping the army would have suited its ideological belief in a strong nation.

In 1967, a year after the army’s request, the Indian government sought the assistance of Gita Press. As part of the preparations to celebrate Gandhi’s birth centenary in 1969, Deputy Prime Minister Morarji Desai proposed that documentaries be made on Gandhi and the Gita. S.N. Mangal of the Indian Cultural Defence Council, an organization set up with the help of Jana Sangh and Omkarmal Saraf, Poddar’s comrade in the Rodda Arms case and ‘promoter of the short- lived Calcutta Industrial Bank’,
⁸²
was approached. Mangal consulted Poddar who called the Gita documentary proposal ‘revolutionary’ and referred him to spiritual gurus for further guidance. Mangal said the documentary would cost Rs 10 lakh but this could be brought down if he (Poddar) helped.
⁸³

 

Kalyana-Kalpataru
Poddar regularly sent out issues of
Kalyan
to selected scholars and religious leaders abroad who were doing their bit for the cause of sanatan dharma; however a need was felt to reach out to the non- Hindi-speaking public, especially the Hindu diaspora in the West, and in former plantation outposts like Mauritius, Trinidad and African countries. Thus was launched the English-language journal
Kalyana-
Kalpataru
in 1934.

The Western world’s relationship with Indian spirituality and scholarship was built through ‘the availability of the Indian classics and the commentaries and histories being written by the Orientalist scholar- bureaucrats and missionaries’.
⁸⁴
Mauritius, on the other hand, with a large population of Indians whose forefathers had gone as plantation workers, was witnessing an identity crisis of two kinds—Hindu–Muslim fragmentation on the one hand, and Tamil self-assertion on the other. An assertive ‘Hindi-speaking Hindu elite’ had floated the idea of Chhota Bharat and matters came to a flashpoint in 1935 when this group celebrated the ‘centenary of the beginning of Indian immigration’, creating a clear division between the post-abolition (1835) Indian population, originating mainly from Bihar, and of Indians who had come much earlier, mainly from the French
comptoirs
(trading posts) in south India.
⁸⁵

The launch of
Kalyana
-
Kalpataru
helped Gita Press in its attempt to don the mantle of being the sole spokesperson for the Hindu cause. Scholars or spiritual seekers, everyone knocked on the doors of Gita Press. Within a year of
Kalyana-Kalpataru
’s launch, Gita Press could feel the change.

Cultural philosopher Tarachand Roy, teaching in Berlin, ‘serving the cause of my motherland’, asked for a regular supply of books,
Kalyan
and even Poddar’s photograph to be used as ‘a slide in my lectures on India and her culture’.
⁸⁶
Impressed with cheap editions of the Quran being distributed free, Roy asked if Gita Press could also bring out an English edition of the Gita for free distribution in Europe. He even suggested seeking help from ‘well-known Hindu families and Rajas’. Roy was also instrumental in Poddar’s contacting of leading Indologists like Helmuth von Glassenapp, W. Kirfel, Ludwig Alsdorf and Ernst Waldschmidt.

The English journal had several readers in India as well. One of them, G.A. Bernand, an employee of American Express in Calcutta, wrote with many requests, from publication of an illustrated
Yoga Ank
in English to help with finding someone who had ‘practiced Tantrik yoga, especially pranayam and kundalini yoga’ and could help him in this art.
⁸⁷

One of the biggest patrons of Gita Press and
Kalyana
-
Kalpataru
was Shanti Sadan of London. Established in 1929 by Hari Prasad Shastri of Bareilly, Shanti Sadan claimed to have introduced Adhyatma Yoga (yoga of self-knowledge) in Britain. Before settling down in London, Shastri had taught in Japan and in China where he befriended Sun Yat-sen and lived for eleven years translating Buddhist classics, supervising translation of the Quran into Chinese and the works of Confucius into Hindi.
⁸⁸
Inspired by
Kalyana
-
Kalpataru
, Shastri had introduced ‘repetition of the sacred mantram
Hare Ram
’ in Shanti Sadan and asked his close aide Uttama Devi to inform Poddar about it and thank him.
⁸⁹
Kalyana-Kalpataru
had suspended publication in 1942 due to short supply of newsprint and when it resumed after a year, Uttama Devi wrote to Poddar about resuming her subscription as well as those of two friends Ms Robley and Mrs Barnard. ‘A great deal of use is made of the
Kalyana
by our groups, who appreciate it enormously. We are very glad that it has been possible to produce it again,’ she wrote to Poddar.
⁹⁰

Kalyana-Kalpataru
’s year-long suspension evoked disappointed reactions among several of its patrons. Subscriber Louise Wilding on getting the news wrote: ‘The English speaking section of your readers will experience a loss by the stopping of your English publication.’
⁹¹

She also asked that the copy of her husband H. Wilding’s book
Cosmos
loaned to Gita Press for carrying an extract be returned immediately, promising to send the book again when publication was resumed. Louise told Poddar it was important that
Kalyana-Kalpataru
should start again as it ‘breathes the very spirit of India’—‘That spirit, which we believe, will come as a rejuvenating force for the whole world, when India shall realize her full significance in the world’s life.’
⁹²

Premel El Adaros, later Swami Brahmavidya, and founder of the Society of Transcendent Science in Chicago, was a friend of Poddar. He had plans to popularize
Kalyana-Kalpataru
as well as other publications of Gita Press in the United States and was saddened by the news of the suspension. However, by the time Adaros wrote to Gita Press, publication of
Kalyana-Kalpataru
had resumed. Adaros requested regular supply of
Kalyana-Kalpataru
as well as other publications. He said sending him these ‘would be well worth your while as we could besides paying you for same, the costs, add extra as a gift for your time, trouble and trust’.
⁹³

The life story of Henry Thomas Hamblin from Sussex was similar to Poddar’s in many respects. Born into a poor family, Hamblin became a successful optician by dint of hard work and dedication. But Poddar- like ‘visionary experiences where he came in contact with a divine presence’
⁹⁴
turned him into a mystic. He started the instantly successful magazine,
The Science of Thought Review
, which was based on the principle of ‘Applied Right Thinking’. Poddar and Hamblin corresponded in the mid-1940s. Hamblin was aware and appreciative of
Kalyan.
Poddar had ordered many books from Hamblin, but some of them were out of print as the government had put restrictions on the use of paper that was in short supply. Hamblin sent the available books at half the price and even bore the postage.
⁹⁵

Growing irreligiosity among people bothered Hamblin too. He wrote to Poddar of how in post-war Britain ‘churches are becoming empty, except the Roman Catholic, and their people of course accept all the old Theology and Doctrine and Dogma . . . They swallow it all whole, like a fish swallows a bait. Although there are thinkers among them, their followers are generally gullible people.’ Hamblin believed that ‘materialism has reached its limit in this country and now the tide has turned’.
⁹⁶

Jean Herbert, a high-profile French Indologist who was among the founders of the interpretation service in the United Nations, travelled to India and other parts of Asia in search of knowledge on Buddhism and Hinduism. He took to
Kalyana-Kalpataru
in a big way, translating two of its articles for his mammoth
Mélanges sur l’Inde
(Vignettes from India). Herbert told Poddar that, for his next book on Hindu spirituality,
L
a Mythologie Hindoue
,
Son Message
, he had quoted
Kalyana-Kalpataru
‘with full references and acknowledgement about 50 times’.
⁹⁷
The war years had resulted in irregular delivery of the journal in Europe and Herbert hoped its circulation would rise once normalcy was restored, as it was ‘gradually becoming known in France’.

As
Kalyana-Kalpataru
’s reach and impact spread through the Western world, Gita Press was approached with all kinds of requests. W.D. Padfield, based in Delhi, wrote to the editor on behalf of her friend in Paris, a reader of
Kalyana
-
Kalpataru
who had gone through a ‘few articles on authentic cases of re-incarnation’ and urgently requested ‘relevant back numbers’.
⁹⁸
When Y.G. Torres, a Mexican girl, came to India on a scholarship to study Indian culture at Delhi University, her Indian contact Krishna Dutt Bharadwaj, a teacher in Modern School, wrote to Poddar on her behalf requesting a subscription to
Kalyana-
Kalpataru
. Bharadwaj mentioned that Torres had decided to turn vegetarian during her stint in India.
⁹⁹

Within India,
Kalyana-Kalpataru
attracted the attention of Sri Chitra Central Hindu Religious Library, Trivandrum, when it decided to launch a religious quarterly
Chaitra Prabha
under the auspices of the Devasom department, for the uplift and promulgation of the Hindu religion. After the first issue of
Chaitra Prabha
came out on 12 November 1945, Temple Proclamation Day, the curator of the library wrote to Gita Press requesting ‘general permission’ to translate articles from
Kalyana-Kalpataru
for the ‘benefit of the public in Travancore and outside’.
¹⁰⁰

 

Epic as a Journal: The Short Life of Mahabharata
In November 1955, Gita Press launched another monthly journal,
Mahabharata
, to be published for three years. In its first issue, Poddar’s editorial comment, titled ‘
Namra Nivedan
’ (Humble Submission), explained the rationale for a limited-period journal devoted exclusively to one religious text. He said there were many Hindi translations of the Mahabharata as well as commentaries on it, but all of them came separately and were expensive; the thirty-six issues of the journal would provide the complete original Sanskrit text and its Hindi translation.

In the inaugural issue, Poddar explained the Herculean task of putting together the Mahabharata because of the variation in texts prevalent in different parts of India. Referring to the evolution of the epic, Poddar said that over the centuries additions had been made that sometimes led to mutually contradictory contents. Even the complete and revised Mahabharata in over 89,000 verses brought out after years of research by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Poona, in Poddar’s opinion, could not be said to have been born out of consensus or to be true to the original.
¹⁰¹
After much deliberation Poddar decided to follow the commentary on the Mahabharata by Nilakantha Chaturdhar since it also included verses recited in south India. The job of translation was entrusted to Ram Narayan Dutt Shastri Pandey and Swami Akhandanand Maharaj. The annual subscription for
Mahabharata
was fixed at Rs 20, a fairly low price even in the mid- 1950s.

The task of publishing the Sanskrit text and the Hindi translation was accomplished by the ninth issue of the third year, but it was decided to carry related articles on the Mahabharata as well as the procedure for reciting and listening to the text in the last three numbers. In the penultimate number, Gangashankar Mishra wrote a long essay on Western scholars’ fascination with the Mahabharata, presenting an exhaustive account of works by scholars like Charles Lawson, Alfred Ludwig, Albrecht Weber, Ludwig von Schroder, Max Müller, Edward Washburn Hopkins and G.A. Grierson.

Poddar wrote in the final issue of
Mahabharata
that the entire effort of serializing the epic was part of Gita Press’s larger objective of standardizing religious texts. He stated that the Mahabharata of Veda Vyasa had one lakh verses and these had been presented in the journal.
¹⁰²
The Hindi translation was later issued in six volumes that are still in print.

 

The Annual Issues of Kalyan
In the more than eight decades of
Kalya
n
’s life so far, nothing has been more meticulously planned than its annual numbers. Called
varshikank,