Fwd: GITA PRESS AND MAKING OF HINDU INDIA - by Pranay Krishna
Venugopalan K M
From: "Marx Laboratory" <marx.la...@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 30, 2015 7:27 PM
Subject: GITA PRESS AND MAKING OF HINDU INDIA - by Pranay Krishna
To: "Marx Laboratory" <marx.la...@gmail.com>
Cc:
Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India
(A review of Akshay Mukul’s book)
Pranay Krishna
The RSS and its affiliates are desperate even today to lay claim over the heritage of Indian freedom struggle in which they were never historically involved and have no worthwhile icons to showcase. But their ideology nevertheless got sustenance from the cultural-social upheavals of the same tumultuous era and weaknesses of the same freedom struggle, and got crystallized through numerous channels of organizations, movements and institutions, one of which was Gita Press of Gorakhpur.
Akshaya Mukul tells a fascinating story of the making of Gita Press (born 1926) which has shaped the middle class Hindu consciousness, especially of northern India through its periodicals ‘Kalyan’ (Hindi) and ‘Kalyan Kalpataru’ (English) which now have a monthly circulation of 2 lakhs and 1 lakh copies respectively. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India is a remarkable piece of work which gives us many insights into the historical and cultural roots of the ‘Hindutva’ project, its formative constituencies, core agenda and its dissemination in public consciousness.
The Hindus did not always exist as a community ‘for itself’ in India. There was a specific political process that constituted ‘Hindus’ as a social and political community and constituency in India. The political project of Hindutva sought to imagine and create a specifically Hindu rather than Indian nation – and the Gita Press was integral to that project.
Gita Press was instrumental in resolving conflicts between the reformist organizations and the traditionalist ones which upheld ‘sanatana dharma’ for the larger project of ‘Hindu nationalism.’ The author has convincingly and authentically brought into bold relief how Gita Press graduated from a platform of ‘homogenous, popular, bhakti-oriented brahminical hinduism’ to a platform of communal hatred and Muslim vilification during the 1940s, and a vehicle for the campaign against the Hindu Code Bill and many other fanatical campaigns of the Ram Rajya Parishad, Hindu Mahasabha, RSS and VHP in the post-independence era.
Mukul’s work is addressed to academics, activists and the lay reader alike, who may benefit from a significant academic work drawing upon huge hitherto untouched archives of Gita Press and personal papers of Hanuman Prasad Poddar, as also from the lucid narrative style of the book, full of hundreds of interesting characters and anecdotes woven around the story of Gita Press.
In the beginning itself, the author underlines the emergence and growth of a Hindi public sphere in the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. This public sphere - marked by the consolidation of Hindi as a language of Hindus, Marwari religious philanthropy and most importantly the communal conflagration of 1920s in U.P. and Bihar which saw right-wing Congress leaders tilting towards cow protection and ‘shuddhi’ (what is today called ‘Ghar-wapsi’) movements - contributed to the birth and eventual success of Gita Press.
At a time when innocents are being lynched to death in Dadri (Uttar Pradesh), Udhampur (Kashmir) and Shimla (Himachal Pradesh) in the name of protecting the cow, Mukul’s book gives us a glimpse of the discourses and events of history which went into the making of Dadri-like episodes we are witnessing today. Mukul’s book provides an exhaustive account of the role of Gita Press in sustaining the politics of ‘cow protection’ in post-independence India: starting with an ‘anti-cow slaughter day’ just five days before Independence; and moving on to a violent protest at the Congress office and Parliament that claimed 8 lives in the heart of Delhi in November 1966; and the continuity of that movement till today. Mukul’s description of the 663-page ‘gau ank’ (cow edition) of ‘Kalyan’ (1945) with contributors drawn from varied ideological affiliations, from ultra conservatives to Hindu nationalists and Congress conservatives, enlightens the readers about how the modern ‘Hindutva’ project gained ‘hegemony’.
Mukul’s account of the life and personality of the chief architect of Gita Press, Hanuman Prasad Poddar, as a man adept at making friends and influencing people of multiple vocations and even contradictory commitments; wholly or partially appropriating their fame, authority, achievements and even their inner conflicts and ambivalences for the cause of a Sanatana Dharma-led Hindu nationalism is simply astounding. Poddar had kept company and had fruitful relationships with a diverse spectrum of people such as stalwarts of the Marwari business houses of Birlas, Dalmiyas, Goenkas , leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and his followers such as Vinoba Bhave, Viyogi Hari, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Kaka Kalelkar, rightwing congress leaders such as Madan Mohan Malaviya, P.D. Tandon, Sampurnanand, K.M. Munshi, Rajendra Prasad, G.B. Pant and those from Hindu right such as M.S. Golwalkar, Mahant Digvijaynath, Prabhudutt Brahmachari, Swami Karpatri, Baba Raghav Das, Shyama Prasad Mukherji, A.B. Vajpayee etc. All these men wrote for ‘Kalyan’ at various points of time commensurate with their varied degrees of relations with Gita Press. The list of contributors of ‘Kalyan’ and ‘Kalyan-Kalpataru’ reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the intellectual and political history of the first half of the 20th century India. Apart from those noted above, the list included historians like Bhupendranath Sanyal and Radha Kumud Mukherjee, sociologist Radha Kamal Mukherjee, scholars such as Satyendranath Sen, Kshitimohan Sen, S. Radhakrishnan, G.N. Jha, linguists Suniti Kumar Chatterjee and Raghuvir, Indologists and spiritualists Otto Schrader, E.P. Hortwitz, Annie Besant, Gopinath Kaviraj, Sadhu Vaswani, Nicholas Roreich, George Arundale, C.F. Andrews, scholar politicians such as C.Y. Chintamani, Pattabhi Sitaramaiyah and C. Rajagopalachari, jurists K N Katju and K M Jhaver, Parsi writer Firoze C Dawar, Muslim scholar Mohammad Sayyid Hafiz, far right wing writers such as Nardev Shastri Vedtirth, Chandkaran Sharda, Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, N C Kelkar, and Narayan Bhaskar Khare among several others.
Although, as the writer notes, Gita Press or Poddar were never given any importance in the history of Hindi literature, Poddar was successful in getting leading lights of Hindi literature from the pre-independence era to write for Kalyan. Some of them wrote only once or twice and some wrote reluctantly, yet many of them contributed regularly too. Banarasi Das Chaturvedi, Harioudh, Ambuikadutt Vajpayee, Ramnaresh Tripathi, Padam Singh Sharma, Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, Pitambhar Dutt Badathwal, Badrinath Bhatt, Gulabrai, Gaya Prasad Shukla ‘Sanehi’, Baburao Vishnu Paradkar, Kishoridas Vajpayee, Seth Govind Das, Dinesh Nandini Dalmiya, Ilachandra Joshi, Ramchandra Shukla, Nand Dulare Vajpayee, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Shivprasad Gupta, Premchand, Nirala, Pant, Prasad and Harivansh Rai Bachchan were among those who wrote for Kalyan. Not all the contributors subscribed to the ideological framework of Gita Press as it evolved eventually, but Poddar “would reach out to anyone who might fit some aspect of the well designed template.” Artists trained at leading Art Schools and by great painters did illustrations and worked for Kalyan. These included Satyendranath Banerjee, Sharadacharan Ukil, D D Deolalikar, Kanu Desai, Binay Kumar Mitra, Jagannath Chitakar, and Bhagwan Das.
The decade of 1940 was the turning point in the history of Gita Press. “In the 1940s, as the prospect of Independence and subsequently Partition became real, the focus of Gita Press and Kalyan turned entirely political, reporting and interpreting events through the communal prism. ....This was also the period when the Gita Press took its cordial relationship with the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha to another level, that of open collaboration.....it was time to throw caution to the winds and exchange Gita Press’s stated mission of spreading bhakti (devotion), gyan (knowledge) and vairagya (renunciation) for the language of violence, intimidation, reprisal and everything else that contributed to the uncertainty of 1940s.” (Pgs 234-235) Articles in Kalyan carried graphic tales of rape and torture of Hindu women and portrayed the entire violence as the unilateral work of the Muslims. Poddar in his articles exhorted Hindus to form self-defence squads, justified Hindu violence as having been in retaliation to violence committed by Muslims, criticized Mahatma Gandhi for his visit to Noakhali as well as his campaign for temple entry for ‘harijans’, removal of untouchability and inter-caste marriages, praised RSS and wrote a twelve-point template for the Hindu majority independent India. The June 1947 issue of Kalyan carried Golwalkar’s article mocking Hindu-Muslim unity endeavours. Such was the closeness of Poddar with the RSS chief that “Poddar incidentally, presided over the reception held for Golwalkar in the Town Hall of Banaras in 1949, on his release after being arrested for his alleged involvement in Gandhi assassination.” (pg.183)
Reacting to a November 1946 article written by Poddar about the Calcutta violence on and after the Direct Action day called by Muslim league (16 August, 1946), “some of Poddar’s friends from Calcutta pointed out that many of the incidents of violence mentioned in the article had not taken place.” (pg.236) The December 1946 issue carrying an inflammatory article titled “Hindu Kya Karen” (What Should the Hindus Do?) and the “Malviya Ank” (Malviya issue, also published in December) got banned by the governments of UP and Bihar. But lakhs of copies of ‘Hindu Kya Karen’ had already been circulated as a separate pamphlet published by Gita Press by then.
A stout defence of the four varnas, four ashramas and concepts of purity and pollution, complete ‘othering’ of Muslims painting them as barbarians, hostile opposition to Ambedkar and the Hindu Code Bill, comparing it with Muslim Law and citing the legislation as an instance of Muslim assault on their domestic domain, opposing inter-caste and same-gotra marriages, defining Hindi as language of Hindus and opposing the concept of Hindustani, leading the politics of cow protection from the front, colluding with VHP against the Christian missionaries, vilification of communism and secularism, active involvement in the Ram Janmabhoomi and Krishna Janmabhoomi campaigns and indirect electoral support to the Hindutva forces mark the political-ideological journey of Kalyan and Gita press establishment.
Mukul’s work also details the fashioning of the moral universe of Gita Press, which sought to ‘preserve the purity of women’ through strict regulation of their sexual life, prescribed dress codes and duties of women towards husband, family and the male child, opposed women’s emancipation as a cause of moral decay, opposed widow remarriage, exhorted women to confine themselves to the roles of wives and mothers, resisted birth control and abortion as part of an Islamophobic paranoia about rising Muslim population, and prepared elaborate literature to guide the religious and moral education of women on the lines of sanatana dharma. Despite Poddar’s dexterity in bringing together people of divergent view-points to write in ‘Kalyan’ – as long as their voice ‘might fit some aspect of the well designed template’ - the ‘Kalyan’ did not welcome any dissenting voice on the woman question. “…The two leading women writers in Hindi of that period - Subhadra Kumari Chauhan and Mahadevi Varma - do not find place in the journal, either as role models or as contributors.” (Pg. 390) All that we see in today’s India - the moral policing, the honour killings, the call to Hindu women to produce 10 children each and a lot more reflects the world of the Gita Press’s imagination.
Mukul has surveyed and analysed the copious literature published by the Gita Press which reached millions of homes through many generations for the last eight decades. Earlier, a general perception about Gita Press was that it popularised the Gita, Ramcharitmanas, Mahabharata, Ramayan, Puranas, Upanishads and Dharmashastras among the masses, but Mukul’s thorough research and sharp analysis of the content of Kalyan and ‘Kalyan-Kalptaru’, especially their special issues such as Manas Ank (on thought), Gau Ank (cow), Nari Ank (women), Hindu Sanskriti Ank (Hindu culture), Balak Ank (children), Shiksha Ank (education), Bhakti Ank (devotion), Upasana Ank (worship), Dharma Ank (religion), Parlok Aur Punarjanma Ank (heaven and rebirth), Sadachar Ank (good conduct) etc brings out in bold relief the politics of religion and Hindutva ideology shaped by the Gita Press establishment through generations. The two chapters ‘Foot Soldier of Sangh Parivar’ and ‘Religion as Politics, Politics of Religion’ concentrate mainly on this aspect of the Gita Press phenomenon. Mukul has convincingly demonstrated that the re-invented ‘Sanatana Dharma’ is the core philosophical foundation on which the entire architecture of ‘Hindutva’ politics rests. This may explain why rationalists like Dabholkar, Pansaare and Kalburgi were considered threats by these forces and killed.
The author has dwelt in considerable detail on each and every aspect of the Gita Press enterprise - its finances, activities in social services, allied activities such as production of handlooms and footwear, labor unrest, editorial policy, special issues of the twin magazines, inter-personal relationships among the major actors, occasional scandals, property disputes and so on.
The book is a must-read for all who wish to understand the historical-discursive background of the rampant hate crimes witnessed in contemporary India, especially under the present Modi-led NDA regime.
Published by
Liberation
[The Central Organ of CPIML]
November 2015
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