Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (42 page)

In the
Hindu Sanskriti Ank
,
Kalyan
’s annual number of 1950, criticism of the demand for temple entry became more blatant and provocative, even resorting to the use of highly pejorative terms for untouchables. An article by the Varnashram Swarajya Sangh stated: ‘Those who did noble deeds are born as brahmins or kshatriyas and those who indulged in bad deeds are born as chandals . . . A human being who commits sin has an impure body. He carries the impurity to his next birth. Therefore, such men are banned from entering temples . . . Untouchables should acknowledge that the ban on temple entry for them is the result of their past misdeeds. Regretting those misdeeds would purify them more than entry into temples.’
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Claiming that the untouchability rules were not discriminatory, the Varnashram Swarajya Sangh cited the case of women being considered ‘impure’: ‘In the
Manusmriti
where bathing is recommended after coming in touch with a chandala it is also stated that one should do the same thing in case of physical contact with a menstruating or lactating woman, even if she is one’s mother, sister or wife.’ In patronizing tones, untouchables were told that if the upper castes had truly ill-treated them they would have been in a similar state to the natives of the USA and the Aborigines of Australia—millions of them would not be alive.

The new republic was nothing like Poddar’s dream of a Hindu rashtra. Not only did secularism become the sine qua non of India’s constitution, something Poddar would always regret, but so many leaders at the helm of affairs were imbued with the reformist zeal that the voice of orthodoxy became weak. Bihar took the first step on 27 September 1953 when Chief Minister Sri Krishna Sinha along with Congress leaders Mahesh Prasad Singh and Vinodanand Jha led a group of 800 Harijans through the main gate of Baidyanath temple in Deoghar (now in Jharkhand).
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For Poddar this was an outrageous act that needed to be condemned in the strongest possible language.

Baidyanath Dham, one of the twelve most venerated seats of Shiva in the country,
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was not new to such controversy. In 1934, Gandhi had come here at the invitation of the Harijan Sevak Sangh and met with near-assault from orthodox groups, who violently opposed the idea of opening the temple gates and letting untouchables worship the Shivalinga. Before leaving Deoghar, Gandhi told thousands of his followers that he would enter the temple only if Harijans could accompany him.

The behaviour of the sanatanis towards Gandhi had created considerable public opinion against them, expressed in a resolution passed in a public meeting at Munger on 3 May 1934. It was decided to hold a disputation between representative scholars on what the Hindu shastras actually said in this context. Lakshman Shastri Joshi, who had conducted the wedding of the daughter of C. Rajagopalachari to Devdas Gandhi, was called on behalf of the Harijans while Pandit Akhilananda appeared for the sanatanis. It is believed that Joshi ‘proved beyond doubt that the Vedic view did not stand in the way of Harijans’ entry into the temple of Baidyanath Dham’
.
Though Akhilananda protested, the debate had its impact and ‘sanatanis gave up the practice of organizing public lectures in the premises of Deoghar temple against the cause of Harijans’
.

Sri Krishna Sinha’s entry with Harijans into Baidyanath Dham was the final act in the long struggle. Poddar reacted sharply in a twelve- page pamphlet—
Balpurvak Dev Mandir Pravesh Aur Bhakti
(Forceful Entry into Temples and Devotion). He claimed that after the Bihar incident he had been inundated with letters from a shocked public who wanted to know his views.

While granting that Harijans had the right to devotion, Poddar contended that bhakti did not require access to temples. Temples, he said, were not public places, as each had different gods with specific rules for their worship. Images of gods might be made of stone, metal or wood but they were worshipped on the basis of the shastras. ‘The same shastra that infused life into a god’s statue has also made rules about who can worship. If we do not agree there is life in the image of the god inside a temple then there is no point making demands to worship such a god. One might as well worship the image and statue of the god sold in the market or kept in the museum. Why demand entry into temples?’
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Poddar, like others in the sanatan fold, dismissed the changed discourse in the newly independent nation that emphasized equality of all citizens. While it was possible for the government with its majority to make laws of its choice and open temples to all, or even take over temples and change the rules of worship, ‘such changes brought through law cannot change what is there in the shastras. God ceases to exist in an image or statue inside a temple that does not follow shastras . . . Forceful entry is rape, violence and misuse of power. What kind of a democracy or Swaraj is it that allows an individual, a political party or ruling establishment to interfere and forcibly enter a place of worship of one particular faith?’ Reacting to reports of Vinoba Bhave having supported government takeover of temples, Poddar wondered how he, a supporter of Gandhi, could support rape. Warning of possible violence, Poddar in the same breath criticized those sanatanis who had attacked Vinoba Bhave and a woman accompanying him.

Poddar’s pamphlet included a letter Gandhi had written to him on 5 November 1932 criticizing those who ‘taunt and slander santanists, commit himsa (violence) and undoubtedly injure the cause of the removal of untouchability . . . Sanatanists who see untouchability as a part of religion should not be subjected to attacks of any kind. They have as much right to stand firm on their belief as we have to stand on ours.’
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In October 1967,
Kalyan
carried an extract from a religious discourse delivered by Shankaracharya Niranjan Dev Tirth in Delhi.
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The speech was highly contemptuous of changes in urban lifestyles and consumption patterns, from the manner in which men urinated in public to the use of ‘biscuits consisting eggs, toothbrushes made of pig hair and impure tooth powder’
.
Far more serious was Tirth’s argument in defence of the caste system as the ultimate marker of social identity. He said ‘caste’ was not unique among the Hindus but existed in both animate and inanimate worlds—stones, metals, birds, animals, plants and flowers. He derided those who were striving for a casteless society. Tirth saw such an act as a mahapap (grave sin). He contended that being born in a certain caste was an act of fate that could not be changed through knowledge and imbibing of a pure lifestyle. At most he was willing to grant that good deeds in the present life could be rewarded in the next life, whereby even a shudra could be reborn as a brahmin. He said the converse was also true—a non-believer brahmin was likely to be a shudra in his next life.

On 6 December 1968, the Lok Sabha debated Tirth’s article in
Kalyan
. Union home minister Yashwantrao Chavan, replying to a question by George Fernandes, stated: ‘Government strongly disapprove of the views of Shankaracharya and consider that such articles are harmful to national unity’
.
However, he made it clear that the ‘article was not actionable under the law’
.
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Kalyan
’s issue of December 1968 was in press when the matter came up in parliament, but it lost no time in putting up a defence on the inside back cover, arguing that Tirth’s article did not demean other religions.
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There is no missing Poddar’s style in the unsigned piece: ‘The article should be read properly. We think those who raised the issue in parliament and Mr Chavan did not make the effort to read and understand the article properly. Despite being a scholar and an intelligent man who holds such a responsible position, Chavan’s words against the Shankaracharya do not behove him. A man in high position of a secular country has no reason or the right to make such a comment against Hindu sanatan dharma and its religious leaders.’
Kalyan
also reproduced the solidarity telegram the Shankaracharya of Dwarka had sent to the president seeking withdrawal of Chavan’s statement. He termed Chavan’s statement ‘highly objectionable’ that ‘denounces intentionally the dignity of Hindu religious heads and interferes with Hinduism and their religious practices when the so-called secular government does not utter a word about the activities of other minority communities’
.

On the question of the status of tribals, Gita Press reflected the relative silence of Hindu nationalists. Unlike the marginalized castes that had began asserting themselves from the 1920s onwards, the voice of the vast spectrum of tribal India was not substantially raised in mainstream politics or among the assertive conservative Hindu groups.

However, the formation of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in October 1951,
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the first attempt by the RSS to depute its cadres for political work, saw a surfeit of new issues brought into the public and electoral arena. Though, as Christophe Jaffrelot points out, ‘the presence of Hindu traditionalists within the Congress served to deprive the Jana Sangh of many of its strongest arguments on which its appeal was based, such as the promotion of Hindi, the protection of the cow and the fight against Christian missions’,
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the Jana Sangh had begun asserting itself separately. In August 1953, the party’s All India General Council in Allahabad expressed ‘concern over the recent spurt in the activities of American, British and other foreign missionaries who are exploiting illiteracy and poverty of the backward sections of our people for converting them to Christianity’
.
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The creation of ‘denationalized elements in an already weak society’, they said, was giving rise to demands for ‘independent states of Naga and Jharkhand regions’ and such demands were ‘proofs of their anti-national and disruptive influence’
.

In January 1954, the Jana Sangh demanded the government ‘keep a watchful eye on the anti-national activities of foreign missionaries’ and ensure that ‘foreign money does not influence these missions’
.
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The party’s ‘Anti-Foreign Missionary Week’ protest resulted in the Madhya Pradesh government setting up a commission to inquire into the activities of Christian missionaries under Justice Dr Bhawani Shankar Niyogi, former chief justice of the Calcutta High Court.
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For Gita Press, politically inclined and active since the 1940s, the subject of foreign missionaries working in tribal areas became an immediate cause for concern and counteraction. But the first task was to establish that the tribals were an integral, though independent, part of the Hindu fold.
Kalyan
was pressed into the job of historicizing the Hindu origin of vanvasis (literally, forest dwellers), and simultaneously various affiliates of the Gita Press descended into the tribal regions with the mission of reconversion. The Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, set up as an arm of the RSS in 1952 to work among the adivasis (literally, original dwellers), was already active in the tribal regions of Madhya Pradesh and what is now Chhattisgarh.

Writing in
Kalyan
, politician-sadhu Prabhudatt Brahmachari said the largely accepted theory of the Aryan invasion having pushed tribes to the interior forested areas was a Western one and reflected their ignorance and irreligious bent.
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He said India had two kinds of adivasis: the Kols, Bhils, Oraons, Gonds, Baiga, Matiya and others were listed as forest tribes, and Nishad, Mallah, Kevat, Kahar and Mahar as riverside tribes. The latter,
Kalyan
would have us believe, also lived by occasionally robbing city dwellers.

Brahmachari’s version of the origin of tribal people was equally offensive. Ven, the ruler of the forests, oppressed the ascetics living there and had to be killed. But his death had caused anarchy, and so the rishis had to revive the corpse. This led to the birth of a ‘black man, short in height, flat nose and red eyes’. Thus was born the first ‘Hindu tribal’ who was told never to leave the forest. Brahmachari claimed that during his fourteen-year forest exile Rama was instrumental in forging cordial relations between forest and non-forest dwellers and transforming the religious habits of various tribes. ‘They had their own gods and goddesses and worshipped the forest, mountain, trees, cow, ghosts. But interaction with followers of varnashram dharma made them followers of Rama.’

Blaming the British for attempting to convert the whole country to Christianity, something that even Muslim rulers had not attempted, Brahmachari chronicled the rise in the number of Christians in the tribal belt across Madhya Pradesh, parts of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Bihar. Repeating the Jana Sangh’s fears, Brahmachari said the report of the Niyogi Commission was ‘hair-raising’ and a proof of how missionaries were exploiting innocent tribals by converting them to Christianity in exchange for food, education and medicine.

In fact, as Baxter states, the Niyogi report continued to ‘form the basis of the anti-missionary stance of all communal Hindu political parties, of such Hindu groups as the Arya Samaj and the sanatan dharma, and of many conservative Hindus in other political parties’
.
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The Niyogi Commission stated that it had found an ‘appreciable increase of American personnel since independence’; that conversion was being brought about through undue influence; there were instances of political activities by the Church; and that missionary work was ‘part of the uniform world policy to revive Christendom for re-establishing the western supremacy’
.
In Baxter’s view, the Commission had ‘made up its mind in advance as to what it would find’, and found exactly that.

Brahmachari demanded quick action on the recommendations of the Niyogi Commission, especially sending home those missionaries who were ‘primarily engaged’ in evangelism; banning all kinds of inducements including school and medical facilities; the formation of a United Christian Church in India not dependent on foreign funds; and an amendment in the Constitution of India giving only Indian citizens the right to propagate religion.
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