Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (4 page)

It needs to be pointed out that, in contrast to the Gita, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas and Upanishads, the Vedas were neglected by Gita Press. Though articles in
Kalyan
referred to these most ancient of texts, Gita Press never published translations or even the original texts. Poddar explained to one of his biographers that he had not been able to take up the task owing to the absence of authoritative voices on the Vedas. ‘He believed that the available translations of Vedas did not match up to the dignity and prestige of the originals. Therefore, despite a keen desire, he could not succeed in making this source of Indian culture available to the general public.’
⁴⁸

Gita Press’s popularization of the
Ramcharitmanas
and other works coincided with a rise in the number of professional kathavachaks of these texts. At least two, Radheshyam Kathavachak (1890–1963) and Narayan Prasad Betab (1872–1945), gave the
Ramcharitmanas
, Puranas and Mahabharata new meaning by composing plays based on stories inspired from these texts. The kathavachaks’ singular contribution was rendition of the
Ramcharitmanas
in popular verse, which became the basis of Ramlila performances.
⁴⁹
Gita Press relied on its own kathavachak Kripashankar Ramayani, who not only wrote for
Kalyan
but also participated in the discourses that the publishing house organized from time to time. Ramayani’s rendering of the Ramayana has been kept alive by his followers through a web portal.

Recognizing the power of oral tradition, Gita Press, within a few years of coming into existence, had organized Gita and Ramayana sabhas that would regularly hold recitations throughout the country. It had published a pocket-sized Ramayana ‘specifically for an all-India recitation during Chaitra Navratra (the period of Ram Navami) observances in 1939 and had promoted it for months in
Kalyan
’.
⁵⁰
Lutgendorf argues that Gita Press’s ‘encouragement of mass reading of the
Manas
during the nine nights of goddess worship again suggests the role of the epic as a synthesizing element in North Indian religion, specifically as a mediator between the traditions of Vaishnava devotionalism and Shaiva/Shakta worship’.
Manas
, he says, became the ‘text of choice for filling any vacuum in popular religious practice’.
⁵¹
This mixture of print and oral propagation worked as a perfect strategy for Gita Press’s mission of re-establishing the superiority of sanatan dharma. The impact was significant in a society—especially in the United Provinces—where literacy levels were low.
⁵²
However, the popularization of the
Ramcharitmanas
among people of all classes through printed versions did little to change the social order in villages or towns.

Right from 1789, when the Chronicle Press of Daniel Stuart and Joseph Cooper prepared Nagari fonts in Calcutta, book publishing in India had been fraught with failures. The introduction of lithography in India in the 1820s made printing easier and cheaper, yet success was either confined to state-sponsored initiatives like the translated texts published by Fort William College, missionary publishers, or much later commercial publishing enterprises like Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow established in 1858. As French-born Calcutta printer Haji Mustapha succinctly put it: ‘Printing in this country requires a young man and a rich man, and I am neither.’
⁵³
Gita Press, the initiative of not-so-young but rich Marwari men, never encountered failure though occasionally it did face serious threats of closure.

Before Gita Press, the publication of religious texts was on the agenda of publishing houses like Naval Kishore Press. Ulrike Stark discusses how printing texts like the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranas had started from the beginning of the nineteenth century and even Muslim publishers were involved in the task.
⁵⁴
It could have very well been argued that the dissemination of religious texts by established publishers like Naval Kishore Press would have left no space for other religious publications in north India.

In such a context, the launch of Gita Press and its eventual success may be largely ascribed to its monthly
Kalyan
—the first journal to be devoted exclusively to the Hindu religion. The existing journals, political, literary, women-or child-specific, did devote a few pages to religious issues that reflected the growing concerns about identity among readers. The increasing communalization of Indian politics in the 1920s contributed to this identity crisis in a big way. Gita Press’s declaration in
Kalyan
that the all-round decline in society was the result of Hindus having moved away from the path of religion made it clear that here was a journal that meant business insofar as defending the religion was concerned. Gita Press’s defence of religion was a ‘solution to an existing societal crisis’, to the ‘dark age’ that ‘threatened order and well-being in society’.
⁵⁵

Significantly, there was also recognition by the promoters of Gita Press that
Kalyan
should specifically address the crisis that the Marwari community faced internally and in the eyes of society. Gita Press founder Jaydayal Goyandka was aware of the widespread anger and distrust that Marwari trade practices evoked. In the second year of
Kalyan
he addressed the problem within the trading community. Refusing to lay the entire blame on the colonial government (a common refrain during the period), Goyandka ‘condemned the traders themselves for their moral and emotional decline as their transactions were riddled with lies, fraud and cheating’. He ascribed such practices to ‘lobh’ or greed that ‘had brought on the decline of the community and was manifested in practices of speculation, in the widespread adulteration of food and other illegal or shady business practices’. He also warned them that ‘immoral business practices would bar them from spiritual merit and also, as a consequence, from the attainment of god’.
⁵⁶
Over time,
Kalyan
took to instilling the fear of god in its readers to dissuade them from indulging in acts that were against the tenets of religion and morality. An ingenious ‘bania’ (trading-class) model of devotion or bhakti was invented, that promised sure-shot salvation if the well-laid-out path of sanatan dharma was followed.

One of the key assets of Gita Press was its ability to resolve the conflict between, in Monika Freier’s words, ‘reformist organizations like the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj and traditionalist organizations based on sanatan dharma principles for the larger project of Hindu nationalism promoted by organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha and Bharat Dharma Mahamandal’. To achieve this, Freier argues, ‘Gita Press founders deliberately styled their writings as religiously and politically impartial. Instead of focusing on the difference with other Hindu sects or sampradayas, they offered a framework for emotion cultivation that could serve as an ideal point of reference and identification for the Hindu community as a whole.’ However, Gita Press has only partially translated Freier’s argument that the ‘new political philosophy demanded effacement of all existing divisions of caste, creed and religious sects’.
⁵⁷
Though it has kept away from attacking other Hindu sects or reformist organizations like the Arya Samaj, Gita Press has not changed its rigid stance on the validity of the caste system.

Gita Press no longer has to contend with the towering presence of someone like B.R. Ambedkar, who it viciously attacked—‘himself of hinvarna (low caste) who has married a Brahmin in old age and introduced Hindu Code Bill’
⁵⁸
—but that does not mean that the Press can loosen its grip over the idea that ‘those who do noble deeds are born as Brahmins or Kshatriyas and those who indulged in bad deeds are born as chandals’.
⁵⁹
As in the past, for Gita Press the doors of sanatan Hindu dharma are so well locked from inside that neither Gandhi’s ambivalence on caste nor Ambedkar’s stout criticism of it can waft through. It has place only for the top three varnas and the consequent benefits—a monotonous pattern for centuries now—that accrue to them on the basis of birth. The mission, therefore, of working for all Hindus and be their spokesperson remains a mere promise whose time will never come. Its publications also continue to propagate gender stereotypes that relegate women to the inner world of the household while men dominate in the outer world.

But the aspect of Gita Press and
Kalyan
that has the greatest significance in present times is the platform it has provided for communal organizations like the RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and many others. Arney points out that Gita Press was ‘able to take advantage of the introduction of mass printing technology and successfully promote a homogeneous, popular, bhakti-oriented brahminical Hinduism to which spiritual aspirants of many theological and sectarian persuasions could relate’.
⁶⁰
He cites a special issue of
Hindu Chetna
, a VHP publication, which came out in 1992 in honour of Poddar. The issue carried a 1964 interview of Poddar by Shivram Shankar Apte, earlier with the RSS and later loaned to the VHP. Poddar, who was among the founders of the VHP, told Apte that it was Gita Press that ‘sowed the tolerant ideals that have now blossomed into the plant of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’.
⁶¹

Gita Press and its flagship
Kaylan
would grow and prosper as the only indigenous publishing enterprise of colonial India that continues till this day. Other Hindi journals of the period, whether religious, literary or political, survive only in the archives to be read by scholars interested in unravelling the heady days of Hindi and Hindu nationalism.

Today,
Kalyan
has a circulation of over 200,000 copies while the English
Kalyana-Kalpataru
has a circulation of over 100,000. And the key mission of Gita Press—publishing cheap and well-produced editions of the Gita, Ramayana and Mahabharata—is a stupendous success, unheard of in the world of publishing. For instance, in April 1955 when President Rajendra Prasad visited Gita Press, a pamphlet was published which stated that Gita Press, in the thirty-odd years since its inception, had printed and sold 6.157 million copies of the Gita and 2.08 million copies of the Ramayana
.
Not including
Kalyan
and
Kalyana-Kalpataru
, 27.8 million copies of all Gita Press publications had been sold in the market.
⁶²
As of February 2014, 71.9 million copies of the Gita have been sold; for the
Ramcharitmanas
and other works by Goswami Tulsidas the figure is seventy million copies, while nineteen million copies of the Puranas, Upanishads and ancient scriptures have been sold. Then there are the tracts and monographs on the duties of ideal Hindu women and children, of which 94.8 million copies have been sold so far, while more than sixty-five million copies of stories from India’s mythic past, biographies of saints and devotional songs have been bought.
⁶³
Though the bulk of the titles (739 to be precise) are in Hindi and Sanskrit, Gujarati titles number 152, the second highest after the combined figure for Hindi and Sanskrit. Gita Press also publishes in Telugu, Oriya, English, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Assamese Malayalam, Nepali and Punjabi. Urdu publications were started in the 1990s, but only two titles have come out so far.

 

Writings on Gita Press
Considering the significance of Gita Press and
Kalyan
, what is surprising is the near-total lack of critical evaluation by its contemporaries. During his lifetime, Poddar dabbled in Hindi politics by encouraging the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, but the Hindi world largely ignored him and the publications of Gita Press. In fact, it was left to hagiographic accounts by insiders like Bhagwati Prasad Singh and Shyamsundar Dujari to praise Poddar as a Hindi litterateur of great calibre and Gita Press as an agent of literary awakening. Authoritative accounts of Hindi literature bypassed or made cursory mention of Gita Press. It is possible that early chroniclers of the Hindi world were too preoccupied with the considerable turmoil in the world of Hindi language and literary endeavour to pay attention to the output of a religious publisher.

However, the silence on Gita Press continued throughout the twentieth century. This may be ascribed to the fact that the study of the making of the Hindi public sphere is itself of recent origin. In many ways Vasudha Dalmia’s brilliant 1997 study could be said to have heralded the process of mapping the Hindi literary and public sphere. This was followed by several scholarly works of high quality that looked at various aspects of the Hindi world. Alok Rai’s
Hindi Nationalism
(2001) traced the evolution of Hindi and how upper-caste monopoly of the language, by making Hindi too dependent on Sanskrit, took away its vivacity built through easy give and take with Persian and Urdu. Charu Gupta’s
Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and
the Hindu Public in Colonial India
(2001) was another milestone, followed by Francesca Orsini’s
The Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature
in the Age of Nationalism
(2002)
.
Works on individual publishing houses, journals, pamphlets, etc., were still elusive, Ulrike Stark’s
An
Empir
e of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed
Wor
d in Colonial India
(2007) being the first comprehensive work on the life and times of this leading publishing house from Uttar Pradesh. Recently, Shobna Nijhawan in
Women and Girls in the Hindi Public
Sphere
: Periodical Literature in Colonial North India
(2012) has evaluated a set of women’s journals like
Stri Darpan, Grihalakshmi
and
Arya
Mahil
a
and girls’ periodicals like
Kumari Darpan
and
Kanya Manoranjan
, taking the study of the Hindi public sphere into a new realm.