Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (61 page)

Balak Ank
maintained that it was the lack of good children’s literature in the country that had resulted in the growth and popularity of obscene literature and film journals. Banarsi Das Chaturvedi, a leading figure of the Hindi world and its internecine politics, asked why a country like India, where 9,000 children were born every day, could not find ten to twenty writers who could study the children’s literature of the world and present the best of this to Indian children.
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Though an upholder of Indian cultural values, Chaturvedi was not averse to borrowing good children’s literature from all over the world. He also criticized the government for not setting up any commission to study the needs of primary education in the country. Quoting English writer and poet G.K. Chesterton, Chaturvedi said that one of the key requirements of children’s literature was that the stories should lend themselves to illustration. He suggested that stories around Hindu pilgrimage centres could easily be converted into illustrated stories for children.

Aggrieved with pedagogy in general and the quality of textbooks in particular, Gita Press attempted to push
Balak Ank
as some sort of extra reading for school children. Madhya Pradesh under Ravi Shankar Shukla, a known Congress conservative, was among the first to sanction the purchase of copies of
Balak Ank
as prizes for competitions and in school libraries in the state.
¹⁵⁸

Poddar claimed some following in Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU) that existed between 1948 and 1956. Here too, the government approved purchase of
Balak Ank
for school libraries.
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The governments of Saurashtra and Vindhya Pradesh—both created in 1948—followed suit.
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In the mid-1930s, when Gita Press had started the Gita Society, Poddar had pushed for inclusion of the Gita in school curricula and also proposed publishing school textbooks. This evoked immediate response. From faraway Kunjah (in Gujrat district of present-day Pakistan’s Punjab province), the headmaster of Shri Krishna High and Middle School for Boys and Girls wrote to Poddar asking for a list of titles that he could order. He had met Poddar a year earlier in Rishikesh where the proposal had been discussed. The headmaster asked for Poddar’s help in ‘making a suitable selection of books for the boys and girls of high, middle and primary schools in the Punjab, where the standard in Hindi is the lowest’.
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From Assam, the president of Assam Sanskrit Board wrote to inform Poddar that the Gita or at least some chapters of it were already being taught at various levels.
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Soon there were others knocking on the doors of Gita Press seeking its expertise on textbooks for children. Set up in 1929, the Birla Education Trust (BET), based in Pilani, was run by Lt Commander (retired) Sukhdeo Pandey under the direct supervision of G.D. Birla and ran a clutch of schools in Rajasthan. In 1957, Pandey wrote to Poddar praising Gita Press for its religious and moral texts for children. Pandey said that religious and moral education was non-existent in Hindu households, and even though rituals were performed at home, very few understood their true meaning. Visiting temples, he said, had been reduced to offering flowers without knowing the purpose behind the ritual. He told Poddar: ‘I think it is important that religious and moral education be imparted in schools. But there is a shortage of such books which can be read and understood by children.’
¹⁶³

Pandey said he had expressed similar concern to teachers of BET- run schools and they had prepared manuscripts of textbooks on religion and morals up to class X. Pandey inquired if Poddar would be interested in publishing these books, complete with illustrations, and if it would be possible to pay the authors.

Poddar, who was at the time in his native Ratangarh, agreed in principle and told Pandey that he would put the proposal before Gita Press’s publications committee. He made it clear that, since Gita Press books were priced very low, royalties could not be promised to the authors, but instead they could be given one-time payment.
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Pandey agreed with the proposal of one-time payment and sent Poddar the manuscripts of textbooks for classes III to X.
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By February 1958, Poddar had seen most of the manuscripts and told Pandey he was hopeful that the Gita Press publications committee would give them the go-ahead.
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The same month, the publications committee scrutinized the manuscripts and gave in-principle approval. Poddar put forward a few conditions to Pandey: Gita Press should have the freedom to change the language and make additions to the manuscript in case any special instance or incident was missing; Pandey should seek the approval of the authors in case changes were carried out; and three, Gita Press should have the freedom to publish more editions of the books.167 Pandey agreed to all the conditions,
¹⁶⁸
but the books were only published at the end of 1959. Gita Press continues to publish textbooks on religion and morals for school children.

Gita Press’s pocket-sized Ramayana as well as the separate publication of each of its chapters became popular educational tools. In 1970, in celebration of Tulsi Jayanti, the Allahabad district education authority decided to distribute the pocket-sized Sundarkand of the Ramayana to 3.5 lakh school children throughout the district. Then district education inspector Kedar Nath Singh wrote requesting Poddar to fulfil the order at the earliest.
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If the
Balak Ank
presented Gita Press’s vision for the nation’s future,
Kalyan
’s
Shiksha Ank
, published thirty-five years later, was a compendium of accounts of successive governments’ failure to blend moral teaching with Western pedagogy—especially the failure to dismantle the structure of education created through Macaulay’s minutes of 1835.
¹⁷⁰

Shiksha Ank
looked at an entire gamut of issues from ancient to the contemporary times. The idea was to establish the superiority of an ancient education system while presenting a severe critique of modern state policy. It was argued that the word shiksha emanates from the Vedic concept ‘to give’, unlike the English word ‘education’ which means rule-based learning for a specific purpose.
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Macaulay’s dispatch of 1835 was dismissed as a product of ignorance, as it was unaware of the Indian discourse on education, be it the dialogue between Nachiketa (son of sage Gautama) and Yamraj, or what the
Chhandogya Upanishad
says about the relationship between the teacher and the taught.

The purpose of education—to create an ideal Hindu male child—was clearly delineated through a poem by Ramchandra Shastri Vidyalankar.
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The gist of the poem was that to serve one’s parents, teachers and nation was the primary dharma of any child. A child must not be cunning or foxlike; should have faith in religion, God and truth; and must respect time and fellow citizens. He should be hard-working, courageous and fearless, charming, knowledgeable, skilled, cultured and should learn art, science, philosophy and policy, to grasp the essence of knowledge. He was advised to shun fashion, music and dance and not be a spendthrift; and further stay away from playing taash (cards), chaupar (a board game) and shatranj (chess). Educated children were asked to teach others, help the downtrodden and learn new ways to serve society. The cow should be protected, as should the interests of the twice-born castes and the nation.

The special number on education highlighted the note of dissent that Hindu nationalist leader Mahant Digvijaynath had raised in opposition to the National Education Policy of 1968. An important leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, he was an independent member of parliament from Gorakhpur and had objected to the broad outlines of the policy in 1967. He said the basic problem with the policy was that its core was still based on Macaulay’s minutes on education of 2 February 1835.
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Macaulay’s aim had been to create a class of interpreters between the British imperialist rulers and the ruled. This class, Macaulay had said, should be Indian in flesh and blood but British in its interests, thinking, morality and intelligence.

Digvijaynath had lamented that Macaulay’s mindset still continued to dominate policy formulation more than a century later. He was particularly upset that instead of creating a national identity, the new policy stressed India’s diversity—this was nothing more than a clear rejection of the majoritarian politics of the Hindu nationalists. ‘There is no big country in the world without minority groups. But a country’s identity is not altered by minorities. Therefore, it is not true that India is a country of many religions and languages,’ Digvijaynath said.

Opposed to the idea of giving English the status of associate national language, Nath had wanted pride of place for Sanskrit and a massive programme for translation of school and college textbooks into Indian languages. The final policy did talk of promotion of Sanskrit, but did not match the aspirations of the sadhu-politician from Uttar Pradesh.

Shiksha Ank
carried in full Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s speech on the New Education Policy of 1986 to the National Development Council, along with an article criticizing it
.
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Dubbing the New Education Policy the 10+2+3 scheme, the writer Vedram Sharma maintained that it was an old and incomplete scheme, first proposed by Calcutta University in 1919. He argued that the system of uniform school education for ten years did not make any distinction between urban and rural contexts, and between boys and girls. The common syllabus, he said, failed on the touchstone of the ‘unity in diversity’ principle, as it disregarded distinctions of gender and culture and ignored the relationship between education and culture.

Making a plea for a different education system for rural students, Sharma said the essence of the nation resided in its villages and historically it had been proven that if urban India, while sustaining itself on the people and culture of rural India, did not give them anything in return, the country suffered. Therefore, he favoured a parallel education system specific to the needs and aspirations of people living in villages. It had to be a three-layered scheme with basic primary schools, rural middle schools and rural universities.

Sharma’s arguments would have found enough backers among liberal educationists, but it began to falter as his intentions became apparent. His problem with a gender-neutral education system was based on the belief that girls needed a different syllabus that would prepare them for a life that was clearly different from boys. He even cited the Radhakrishnan Commission report of 1950 that while advocating equality in education for both sexes, also insisted on ‘practical laboratory experience for them [girls] in the care of a home and family’
.

The special issues of
Kalyan
on education and the male child were supplemented by scores of monographs on how to build moral character through a disciplined life, devotion to God and obedience to elders. Narrating heroic tales of mythic and historical personalities, Gita Press emphasized that an ideal ‘Hindu nation’ could be built only through the adoption of their values. While investment for the future was made in the Hindu male child, the adult male was also expected to follow the codes to maintain his hold over the community and to ensure that the movement for revivalism did not falter.

As usual Poddar made no bones about his contempt for the colonial education system, stating in a 1928 tract: ‘An education that enhances the number of clerks, an education that makes you dependent on others, an education that looks down upon farming, shopkeeping, manual labour and considers them to be the work of the uneducated, an education that only teaches how to use the pen and makes a person arrogant and lazy can never be a source of happiness.’
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In his famous 1936 essay ‘
Vartama
n Shiksha
’, portions of which were carried in
Nari Ank
and after his death in
Shiksha Ank
, Poddar dwelt on the ideal education for the Hindu male child. According to him, Indian education would be successful as long as it was based on the Aryan system of the four stages (ashrams) of life. Education should result in physical, mental, material and moral growth in this world and salvation after death. ‘Good education is one that liberates us from darkness,’ he said, quoting an unnamed sage.
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The essay expands on the social ills caused by colonial education which, Poddar warned, was turning a whole generation of college-going youth into atheists and agnostics. He said questions and comments like ‘God is an imagination of mankind’, ‘To talk of God is a waste of time’, ‘Who has seen God?’ or ‘Religion is a farce’ had become common among youth. This lack of faith in God, he said, would encourage youth to act out of free will and result in erratic behaviour.

Poddar also blamed colonial education for making youth impatient, impolite and insensitive to social/religious norms as well as to family values. In his inimitable style, full of illustrations from his experience, the
Kalya
n
editor gave various instances of rude and abusive behaviour by young men in the presence of women and the elderly. He claimed that the intermingling of youth from different caste, class and religious backgrounds had created a new lifestyle of eating and drinking from the same plate and even sharing the same morsel of food. He specially referred to the popularity of soda water and likened the manner in which a single bottle was shared among friends to a mother’s breast being shared by all the children. Poddar could not hide his specific apprehension of Muslims sharing food and drinks with their Hindu friends.

Poddar criticized the lifestyle in student hostels. While their parents struggled to send them money, students spent lavishly. As Poddar described it, they often had multiple pairs of shoes, wasted time singing and dancing, went out with girls and maintained intimate relationships with them, gambled, drank tea before taking a bath, wore perfume, watched movies and read obscene novels. He classified these habits as the biggest contributors to the erosion of patience, politeness and sensitivity among the youth.