Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (58 page)

Sanger’s counter that Gandhi’s method of self-restraint could result in ‘irritations, disputes and thwarted longings’ did not convince him. When she gave ‘hard cases’ of people who had experienced nervous breakdowns as a result of sexual restraint, he responded that these must be ‘based on examination of imbeciles’. Gandhi reiterated his sex-only- for-procreation position in
Harijan
in March 1936, while also expressing admiration for Sanger’s ‘zeal’.
¹⁰⁷

For Poddar, the Gandhi–Sanger debate was a godsend. In his April 1936 article ‘
Vartaman Shiksha
’, Poddar acknowledged that in India having too many children was a cause of misery for parents, but called it divine providence. ‘Birth is pre-ordained . . . If someone does not believe in this, then self-restraint is the only solution.’
¹⁰⁸
Echoing Gandhi, Poddar said he did not want to be disrespectful to Sanger as her intentions were right, but contraception in the Indian context was both harmful and sinful. He argued the sole purpose of birth-control measures was to satisfy sexual passion, and that could encourage adultery.

Without mentioning the source (a common habit with him), Poddar referred to an article by Gandhi that warned of negative consequences of artificial birth control, many of which were still not apparent. One consequence was the wave of sexual liberty among school- and college- going females, as restricting the use of contraceptives to married women was impossible. Besides, with the availability of contraceptives, marriage had lost its sanctity and become merely a means to satisfy the sexual urge.

Even as late as 1969,
Kalyan
used a relevant portion from Gandhi’s
Navjivan
article of 1925 to make its point against contraception. Gandhi had appealed to doctors, saying that that they would do a great service to mankind if they stopped prescribing artificial methods of birth control. ‘Encouraging artificial methods is like encouraging evil. It makes men and women frivolous. Artificial methods would result in impotence and decline in sperm count. This remedy would prove to be worse than the disease.’
¹⁰⁹

Gandhi’s stance on birth control through abstention was integral to his view of marriage as an institution that, as he told C.F. Andrews, ‘is a status lower than that of celibacy’.
¹¹⁰
Writing to Andrews way back in 1920, Gandhi had said, ‘Take it from me that there is no happiness in marriage.’
¹¹¹
Sex between husband and wife was abhorrent for him: ‘I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of man and woman. That it leads to the birth of children is due to God’s inscrutable way’
¹¹²
and ‘. . . the occasion of marriage should remind us of self-restraint. If desires cannot be conquered, they should be harnessed.’
¹¹³

Vinoba Bhave, one of Gandhi’s closest disciples, lent his support to Gita Press’s campaign against family planning that for him represented the defeat of ‘spiritual and moral values’.
¹¹⁴
Disputing the theory of population becoming a burden, Bhave warned that birth control would negatively impact not only the birth of children but also intelligence: ‘The creative energy we call sperm has given birth to the great poet Valmiki and fearless Hanuman. People are now misusing that creative energy. Husband and wife are making such an arrangement (using birth control) so that they can have sex but not produce children. If they continue like this, the nation will lose power.’ Bhave’s one-point solution was to return to a life divided into four ashrams—brahmacharya, garhasthya, vanaprastha and sanyas—in which the garhasthya (householder) phase was to last from the age of twenty-five to forty- five, the right age for having children.

Charu Chandra Mitra’s 1948 serialized article ‘
Nari
’ included a scathing attack on the practice of birth control and its impact on women’s freedom. For him, the freedom that birth control promised was harmful to women and the nation, and would have a direct and adverse impact on marriage since the age-old concept of marriage as ‘the sole way to contain the sexual urge’ would no longer hold. Marriage and domesticity—the pleasure of bearing and rearing children—would be the biggest casualty of this freedom, he contended. Men and women who practised birth control, he predicted, would lead a lonely old age.
¹¹⁵

Gita Press’s opposition to artificial birth-control measures continued into the late 1960s.
Kalyan
now turned to K.C. Mishra, a medical practitioner who articulated a medico-religious argument. With over three decades of practice, as he claimed, Mishra regretted the adoption of Western methods, ‘that was akin to people in the plains wearing winter clothing required in Kashmir’.
¹¹⁶
Mishra said birth-control measures being used in the cold countries of Europe could not be used in a warm country like India. Listing their side effects, Mishra said that even Dr Robert B.M.C. Clure, who had worked on family planning in China for twenty-four years, in the Arab world for four years and in India for twelve years, had found problems with contraceptives. Clure had said that ‘until public health education made sterilization acceptable, there would be no good contraceptive available in rural areas’, and that ‘unnatural methods all have serious side effects on the nervous system besides leading to digestive trouble, etc.’. Mishra’s invocation to Indian youth was not to go in for sterilization as it would in the long term weaken the nation. ‘If youth lose their power to produce, the nation would face a shortage of soldiers.’

The subtext of Gita Press’s sustained, often shrill, campaign with religious and moral overtones was not so much resistance to modern methods of birth control as it was another reflection of an Islamophobic mindset.
¹¹⁷
Population was an important ingredient in the communal competition, the bogey of the Muslim population rising at an unimaginably greater pace than that of the Hindus being one of the many used by Hindu nationalist groups.
¹¹⁸

Right from its inception, through the intense communal polarization during the 1940s and 1960s, Gita Press made repeated use of common Hindu nationalist phrases such as ‘Muslim violence against Hindus’, ‘Muslim rape of Hindu women’, ‘Muslim pillaging of Hindu property’, ‘Muslim virility’ and ‘increasing Muslim population’ to drive home the story of victimhood of the Hindus at the hands of invader Muslims.

Already, Gita Press had carried Hitler’s appeal to German women to confine themselves to the roles of wives and mothers. Drawing from Hitler’s Germany was not an innocuous act, but Gita Press’s affirmation of its regard for the fascist ruler. In fact, when it comes to the ‘women question’, there is a great deal of similarity between Nazi Germany, Gita Press and other Hindu nationalist organizations like the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and others; in particular, the ‘hysterical protective anxiety about numbers’ vis-à-vis the Muslims shown by Gita Press and the entire Hindu right owes a lot to Hitler.
¹¹⁹

Much of Gita Press’s concern about the declining Hindu population emanated from successive census reports that created the fear of Muslims racing past the Hindus, at least in the politically and socially volatile United Provinces. The census report in 1911 gave official credence to the Hindu nationalist narrative by making statements like ‘Musalmans are more fertile than Hindus’,
¹²⁰
and in 1921, ‘prohibition of remarriage of widows does not affect Muhammadans’ and ‘both relatively and absolutely Hindus have lost’.
¹²¹
Further, between 1911 and 1921, ‘Hindus decreased by 347 persons per 1,000’. Such reports only fuelled fears based on the belief that ‘the social and political influence of a population is in direct proportion to its size’
.
¹²²

The hysteria of ‘saffron demography’, a term coined by Particia and Roger Jeffery, was echoed by Poddar himself in reply to a
Kalyan
reader who wanted his views on family planning. Poddar severely criticized the government for its family planning programme. Repeating the moral and physical problems caused by the government initiative, he said the biggest threat was to ‘the future of the Hindu jati’.
¹²³

Poddar was angry that the government’s family planning was gaining ground only among Hindus, while Muslims had termed it ‘anti-religious’ and kept away from it. Muslims, he said, were allowed to keep more than one wife and, therefore, their population was rising at a greater pace while that of the Hindus was declining and was likely to dip further: ‘If the situation continues like this, the number of Muslims would be the same as the Hindus or may even surpass them. The adverse impact of such a scenario can be gauged from the formation of one Pakistan. Even the Christian population is rising. Every law-abiding citizen should pay heed to this, especially the Hindus.’

Poddar batted for self-restraint as the best form of birth control. It seems the reader had expressed concern about the shortage of food due to rising population; Poddar dismissed such a fear and told him to leave the task of feeding everyone to God.

 

A Discursive Space for Women
Late nineteenth-century United Provinces saw the birth of Hindi journals for women. The earliest was the short-lived
Bal Bodhini
, probably the first in the country, started by the maverick Bharatendu Harishchandra of Banaras in 1874. But its attempt to raise ‘consciousness about emerging democratic ideas and nationalism’
¹²⁴
came to a premature end with the demise of the owner at a young age.

Gita Press was still far from being born when two women from the Nehru clan of Allahabad, Rameshwari Nehru and Roop Kumari Nehru, came out with the radical
Stri Darpan
in 1909. Unmatched in its ‘gravity and depth’,
¹²⁵
there was a great deal of synergy between
Stri
Darpan
’s advocacy of women’s rights and the equal importance it laid on their traditional duties or dharma
.
What marked out
Stri Darpan
was its clarity of purpose and firm belief that the fate of women lay in their own hands ‘because husbands, brothers and fathers cannot promote the welfare of the country while treating women like animals’.
¹²⁶
The journal had a mix of male and female contributors who wrote on a range of issues: domestic, national and international. From the purdah system, health and hygiene, to international events, women’s education and women’s movements in other states of India, and news of the national movement,
Stri Darpan
had an enviable range of coverage.

The same year saw the birth of another journal, again in Allahabad, a few kilometres away from
Stri Darpan
. The wife–husband team of Gopaldevi and Sudarsanacharya brought out
Grihalaksmi
(literally, Goddess Lakshmi of the home). The journal began with an impressive circulation of 4,000 and, as the name suggests, represented all that
Stri
Darpan
vocally opposed.
Grihalaksmi
’s conservatism and ‘practical, lower middle class orientation’ was a counter to the elitist
Stri Darpan
, as it talked of ‘moral education for girls and stressed their role as wives and mothers’ and how it was important for them to learn to sacrifice their aspirations and desires at the altar of family.
¹²⁷

Critical of men who, instead of treating their wives as companions in dharma (sahadharminis), looked on them as lovers (pranayini),
Grihalaksmi
saw companionship in marriage as not only a marker of equality but something that had the sanction of the scriptures. The disparate worlds of
Grihalaksmi
and
Stri Darpan
often clashed as each published rebuttal and rejoinders to the other’s views.
¹²⁸

Chand
, the most iconic of Hindi women’s journals, was also born in Allahabad. In 1922, more than a decade after
Stri Darpan
and
Grihalaksmi
, the discursive sphere of the United Provinces had undergone a great transformation. As Francesca Orsini points out, a ‘kind of rapprochement was taking place between women’s journals and general magazines’, as a result of which issues related to women were finding a place in ‘mainstream journals’.
¹²⁹
While this change was about the recognition of women as a new class of readers, it also reinforced through dedicated columns that they were a separate category.
Chand
, as Orsini argues, demolished the trend of women’s journals carrying articles that were ‘stri-upyogi’ (useful for women). Instead, she says,
Chand
brought women and issues related to them to the centre of the nationalist movement.

Chand
, which means the moon, was started by Ramrakh Singh Sahgal, who was originally from Lahore. Ramkrishna Mukund Laghate was the co-editor and Ramrakh’s daughter, Vidyavati Sahgal, the office manager. Eclectic and diverse in its contents,
Chand
became the front- line journal of its time, with a circulation that at its peak reached 15,000. The idea of special issues—
Achhut Ank, Kayastha Ank, Marwari
Ank, Vidushi Ank
—was another dimension of
Chand
’s innovative editorial policy. Within a few years, the journal was recommended for school and public libraries in many states.

Chand
’s biggest achievement was the manner in which it supported and strongly advocated women’s access to the public sphere through the concept of seva dharma (the duty to serve). This ‘redefined’ and ‘legitimized’ a woman who was active in the public sphere, ‘bestowing moral capital’ on her. The journal caught the imagination of women, educated and uneducated alike, by urging them to join its mission if they wanted to ‘save the millions of women drowning in an ocean of ignorance’, ‘if the heart-rending cries of thirty-five million Indian widows affect you somehow’ and if they wished ‘to destroy the evil custom of child-marriage and dowry’.