Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (28 page)

Lal Bahadur Shastri presented a perfect contrast to Nehru’s liberal Western upbringing and education. Educated at Kashi Vidyapith, Shastri was steeped in Hindu traditions. He wrote two articles for
Kalya
n
in 1965 (he was prime minister then) on the power of God’s name and the message behind religion.

With Dr Rajendra Prasad, Gita Press, especially Poddar, had a relationship marked by a high level of mutual admiration. A ‘sanatani Hindu’ who believed in idol worship and even observed fasts during solar and lunar eclipses, Prasad was closely associated with the cow- protection movement and the propagation of Hindi. As a contributor to
Kalyan
, he always found the time to deliver. Even as president, when asked to write for
Balak Ank
, he sent word through his personal secretary: ‘President always has the best wishes for
Kalyan
. He respects the work done by Gita Press.’ It was suggested that the journal carry an extract of his speech delivered at Birla Vidya Niketan, Nainital, as ‘President has stopped writing for journals’
.
⁵⁸

The president inaugurated Gita Press’s new building in 1955. He saw the Press as doing great service to Hindus; he was an ardent reader of its publications and would even have them read out to him.
⁵⁹
When Prasad did not receive the sixth issue of the short-lived
Mahabharata
, his personal secretary wrote to Poddar so that his collection would be complete.
⁶⁰

One episode indicates the care with which he read
Kalyan.
In 1956, an article in the
Satkatha Ank
(Issue on Stories from the Scriptures) referred to ‘Jeera Deyi’ (Zeradei), Prasad’s birthplace near Chapra in Bihar. Prasad immediately asked his personal secretary Gyanwati Darbar to ask for the book
History of Persia
by V.A. Smith that was cited by the writer in
Kalyan
as referring to ‘Jeera Deyi’. The Rashtrapati Bhavan librarian visited Delhi University library but could not find the book there. A desperate DU librarian wrote to Poddar requesting him to find out from Janaki Nath Sharma, writer of the
Kalyan
article, ‘whether the reference
History of Persia
by V.A. Smith is correct; whether the author can send a typed copy of the pages from which this reference on Jeera Deyi has been taken and whether the author has got a copy of the book’
.
⁶¹

J.B. Kripalani, Rajendra Prasad’s predecessor as Congress president in 1947, later a socialist and steeped in the Gandhian tradition, refused to write for
Kalya
n
’s
Hindu Sanskriti
number. His assistant N. Krishnaswamy wrote to Poddar expressing ‘regret’ due to Kripalani’s ‘preoccupations’.
⁶²
But the prominent names among the second-rung Congress leaders were not so lukewarm towards Gita Press. If Sri Prakash, as governor of Bombay in 1957, wrote to Poddar seeking copies of the journal
Mahabharata
that he felt would help him cope with the untimely demise of his second son, Sriman Narayan, a Gandhian economist, member of parliament, ambassador to Nepal and governor of Gujarat, offered to write on any topic suggested by Poddar.
⁶³
In fact, as ambassador to Nepal, Narayan helped forge a larger network of Hindu organizations involving the king of Nepal and prominent Hindu leaders like Poddar.

 

The Far Right
The story of Gita Press would be less than half-told without reference to the political and religious leaders belonging to the far right who not only contributed as writers but at crucial junctures used Gita Press and
Kalyan
to deepen religious polarization in India, especially during the communal flashpoints of the 1940s. The mix of writers reflected differing viewpoints. For instance, the animosity between the Arya Samaj and Sanatan Dharma Sabha did not come in the way of Swami Dayanand’s speeches and writings being carried in
Kalyan
along with those of other prominent Arya Samajists like Nardev Shastri Vedtirth, Chandkaran Sharda and Yudhishtir Mimasa. Sharda had been actively involved in the Congress and became an important member of the Rajputana Madhya Bharat Sabha when it was established during the 1918 Congress session in Delhi with Jamnalal Bajaj as president and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi as vice-president.
⁶⁴
In his speech, Sharda used harsher words than Poddar, saying Hindus had become ‘cowardly, weak and lazy’.
⁶⁵
For
Kalyan
’s
Hindu Sanskriti Ank
, Sharda wrote on what constituted Hindu culture. The running theme of his article was a comparison between the Hindu culture exemplified by Rama and Bharat, each stepping aside for the other to rule, and the Muslim example of Aurangzeb killing his siblings to grab power.
⁶⁶

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar of the RSS made his presence felt in the pages of
Kalyan
in 1947 through his article ‘
Sachcha Rashtravad
’ (True Nationalism) and also excerpts from his speech ‘
Hamar
i Sanskriti
Ki Akhand Dhara
’ (The Continuum of Our Culture) made to RSS cadres in Delhi. Responding to Poddar’s invitation to contribute to the
Hindu Sanskriti Ank
, Golwalkar sent a short piece giving the editor the freedom ‘not to publish if you do not like it . . . I am not a writer nor very educated. But I am writing simply because of the respect that I have for you and your love towards me. The subject is too vast but it became easier for me to write since you had defined the broad contours of the article. Today people are ashamed to call themselves Hindus.’
⁶⁷
Five years later, Golwalkar wrote effusively: ‘The off-tracked Hindu . . . of today should study this (
Hindu Sanskriti Ank
) and realize the greatness of his life. Once the realization sets in he would discard [his] un-Indian belief system.’
⁶⁸

In all, Golwalkar wrote seven articles for
Kalyan
. He was such an ardent reader of the journal that when he went to Pattambi (Malabar) in Kerala for oil therapy and recuperation, his associate Aaba Thate requested a copy of the
Satkatha Ank
to be sent there by parcel post.
⁶⁹
When Golwalkar received the copy at the residence of A.K. Warrier, the RSS karyavah (in-charge) of Pattambi tehsil, he praised the issue, saying it had ‘nursed my mind’.
⁷⁰

Thus, in just over two decades, Gita Press became an attractive platform for the liberal and orthodox Congress elements as well as those preaching and practising strident Hindu nationalism. The colossus Gandhi still featured in the pages of
Kalyan
, but his authority was clearly being challenged and his tools of passive resistance, tolerance and non-violence severely attacked and mocked as helping only Muslims. 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 the Gandhi assassination.

An old acquaintance of Hedgewar, Veer Savarkar and Golwalkar, Syama Prasad Mookerjee quit the Congress and joined the Hindu Mahasabha in 1939. Belonging to an elite Bengali family, Mookerjee was ‘brought up in an erudite atmosphere’ with the best of liberal education in India and Britain.
⁷¹
A growing disillusionment with the Congress, on whose ticket he had been elected to the Bengal legislative council in 1929, brought him to the welcoming arms of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha. In 1951 he formed the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the political arm of the RSS. Poddar courted him for long, requesting him to write articles for the special issues on
Gau
and
Hindu Sanskriti
, and Mookerjee would oblige on both occasions. In 1952, a year before his death in Kashmir, Mookerjee, by then out of Nehru’s cabinet on the issue of the Nehru–Liaquat pact and immersed in opposing the government’s Kashmir policy, would express his inability to write a long article and instead offer to pen a short one for
Kalyan.
However, he continued to subscribe to
Kalyan
and informed Poddar, ‘I do not get your magazine regularly every month.’
⁷²
Poddar’s handwritten remark on this letter, marked ‘urgent’, instructed his staff to ensure that Mookerjee got copies of
Kalyan
and
Kalyana-Kalpataru
without fail.

Mookerjee was not alone among the Bengali elite who gravitated towards the Hindu Mahasabha and its politics. Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, an eminent lawyer and judge, joined the organization around the same time as Mookerjee and became a leading conservative voice during the tumultuous 1940s and in independent India. He remained with the Mahasabha, declining invitations to join the Jana Sangh when it was formed in 1951. A three-term Lok Sabha member and an eminent lawyer of the Supreme Court till the early 1960s, Chatterjee, father of former Lok Sabha speaker and leftist leader Somnath Chatterjee, was effusive when asked to contribute to
Kalyan
. ‘You do not know my respect for you and my admiration for the great work you have done for Hindu religion and culture,’ he told Poddar.
⁷³
He wrote on the future of Hindu jati (race) in the annual number of 1953.

In the same annual issue, one-time Congressman, former premier of the Central Provinces and Berar and later chief minister of Alwar, Mahasabha leader Narayan Bhaskar Khare wrote on the need to revive religious principles among people. In his speech as Mahasabha president in Calcutta, 1949, Khare had given a call for the formation of a ‘cultural state of Hindu Rashtra’.
⁷⁴
A known Gandhi-baiter, Khare was among those arrested in connection with the assassination of the Mahatma in 1948.
⁷⁵
Among the other leading Mahasabha contributors to
Kalyan
were Mahant Digvijaynath (head of the Nath sect based in Gorakhpur), N.C. Kelkar (Hindu Mahasabha president during the Kanpur session, 1925) and sadhu-politician Baba Raghav Das who was the most prolific.
⁷⁶
As many as forty-five articles by Das appeared in
Kalyan.
Interestingly, he contested and won as a Congress candidate, fully supported by Hindu Mahasabha, during the 1948 by-election to the Faizabad assembly constituency against Acharya Narendra Dev, another prominent
Kalyan
contributor.

Sanskrit scholar, Indologist and an expert on languages, Raghuvira was among the earliest Congressmen to leave the party in 1961 over differences with Nehru on government’s China policy. He joined the Jana Sangh that elected him party president in 1962. Raghuvira turned his International Academy of Indian Culture (Sarasvati Vihar) into a centre for research on Hindu culture, religion and languages. An activist for Hindi and other Indian languages, Raghuvira was behind the compilation of the
Greater English-Hindi Dictionary
(1969), among other lexicographical works published by Sarasvati Vihar. The Hindi literary world was critical of his efforts, especially his excessive stress on Sanskritized Hindi. A majority of Raghuvira’s six articles in
Kalyan
dealt with national language and formation of a national identity. Later, his son Lokesh Chandra, scholar of Buddhism and Indian art, would also write for
Kalyan.
Poddar was Raghuvira’s benefactor. Raghuvira offered to make him a member of Sarasvati Vihar since ‘there is no one who understands our mission better than you’
.
⁷⁷
It was rather unusual that Raghuvira would refuse to take money for ten books sent to Poddar and, in the same letter, ask for Rs 70,000–80,000 to run his institute as it did not have enough cash for its monthly expenditure.
⁷⁸

Then there were the sadhu-politicians who took time out to write for Gita Press. Swami Karpatri Maharaj and Prabhudatt Brahmachari hogged the political limelight in the years immediately after Independence for their role in the cow-protection movement and protest against the Hindu Code Bill. These two sadhu-politicians, with considerable following and the stout backing of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, were part of the first-generation, slowly forming opposition to the Nehruvian socialist and secular order.

Born in 1907 in the Pratapgarh district of the United Provinces, by the time of Independence, Karpatri had acquired a reputation as a rabble-rouser who had strong views on the course India should chart. His life story followed the familiar god-man trajectory—gravitating towards God from a young age, he renounced domestic life at sixteen (he was married at the age of nine). His spiritual quest took him to various gurus and he is said to have gone to the Himalayas to lead the life of an ascetic before joining the Dandis, an order of sanyasis established by Shankara. As communal polarization hardened in the late 1930s, Karpatri Maharaj formed the Dharma Sangh in 1940 and started the paper
Sanmarg
.
⁷⁹
In many ways it was a new coalition of various sanatan Hindu religious organizations to speak in one voice and work unitedly for the defence of Hinduism.

Apart from raising the bogey of threat to Hinduism, the Dharma Sangh coined slogans in defence of religion that are still part of sanatan Hindu religion congregations, private or public. For example, ‘
dharma
ki jay ho
’ (may religion conquer), ‘
adharm ka nash ho
’ (may irreligiosity be destroyed), ‘
praniyo
n mein sadbhavna ho
’ (may there be goodwill among living creatures) and ‘
vishw
a ka kalyan ho
’ (may there be welfare in the world).
⁸⁰
By 1948, Swami Karpatri had formed his own political party, Ram Rajya Parishad. ‘. . . certainly the most orthodox of all the rightist parties which have achieved any renown’, the Parishad stood for a ‘rural economy based on traditional jajmani system and barter, traditional system of medicine such as ayurveda, prohibition of alcoholic drinks and cow slaughter’
.
⁸¹
Karpatri’s insistence that the Jana Sangh should be based on a holy Hindu text, a suggestion rejected by Deendayal Upadhyaya,
⁸²
resulted in right-wing parties failing to put up a united front in the early 1950s.