Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (3 page)

Sahay’s forthrightness would pit him against prominent Marwari writers in Hindi like Baijnath Prasad Deora and Shyamlal Deora. They sought an apology for his critical comments on Marwari writers in the inaugural issue. Sahay, however, made it clear that though he was a true well-wisher of Marwaris, he would not succumb to pressure from a few misguided youth and writers. The promising journal ceased publication in 1923 when the newly founded All India Marwari Aggarwal Mahasabha proposed another journal,
Marwari Aggarwal
, as the community’s mouthpiece. The new journal edited by Hemchandra Joshi had a three-pronged goal: to eradicate ill practices among Marwaris, to spread the message of the All India Marwari Aggarwal Mahasabha and to revitalize the Marwari community.

Marwari Sudhar
and
Marwari Aggarwal
, with their primary mission of reforming the community, advocated a life that struck a fine balance between commerce, profit and spiritualism but failed in suggesting a specific path to that goal. Within a few years, some prominent members of the Marwari Aggarwal Mahasabha decided to strike out on their own. Thus was born
Kalyan
, the first-of-its-kind religious monthly with a single-minded focus on spreading sanatan dharma as the sole saviour, not only of Marwaris but of Hindus in general.

 

The Political Context
The later decades of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth were a time of rising religious antagonism between Hindus and Muslims, marked by frequent riots and competitive communalism. Besides the battle for supremacy between Hindi and Urdu, incidents of cow slaughter and music before mosques were becoming flashpoints between the two communities—from the major riot of 1893 in Azamgarh, Mau and adjoining areas on the issue of cow slaughter during Bakr-Id, to the resurgence of widespread violence in 1917 in Bihar’s Shahabad, Gaya and Patna.
³¹
The idea here is not to repeat the vast body of work done on these and other points of conflagration, but to situate them in the context of the birth of Gita Press and how
Kalyan
became a successful vehicle for articulation of religious and communal issues, a trend that continues till today.

The fuzzy divide between religion and politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century ensured that even the Congress, at the vanguard of the national movement, could not keep itself aloof from the cow protection issue. Way back in 1891, a gaurakshini sabha meeting took place during the Nagpur session of Congress.
³²
Interestingly, this religious matter continued to impact politics even after Independence. From the 1920s, Poddar was at the forefront of cow protection, supported by a motley mix of sadhus like Prabhudatt Brahmachari, a host of sanatan dharma organizations, the Hindu Mahasabha, RSS and later the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, and a not-so-insignificant section of the Congress consisting of leaders like Seth Govind Das, former Mahasabhaite Jagat Narayan Lal (who was later a minister in the Congress government in Bihar) and many others.

The Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj came together in Banaras in 1923, and decided to make common cause on cow slaughter and reconversion. A relatively young Congress, despite its claim of maintaining a distance from religion, failed to remain neutral. By then, leaders like Madan Mohan Malaviya, Rajendra Prasad and other conservatives had found a firm foothold within the party, forcing it to engage with religiously volatile issues. Meetings of the Hindu Mahasabha from 1922 onwards would regularly take place along with Congress annual sessions. This continued till 1937 when the relationship between the Mahasabha and Congress formally ended.

As gaurakshini sabhas grew in strength and the opposition to cow slaughter became strident, communal riots became the order of the day to salvage the honour of gau mata, the cow as mother. Ninety-one riots took place in the United Provinces between 1923 and 1927,
³³
not limited to cow protection as the communal universe of Hindus and Muslims was simultaneously populated with issues such as music before mosques and prabhat pheris (singing of bhajans, etc., in processions at dawn).

Even as the Hindu Mahasabha and other communal organizations pursued their agenda, internal contradictions in the Congress were becoming apparent, adding to the Hindu–Muslim divide. This was most notably witnessed in Allahabad, in the contest between the inclusive and exclusive politics of Motilal Nehru and Madan Mohan Malaviya respectively, during the local body election of 1927. The Malaviya group, under the banner of the Congress, blocked all attempts to strike an amicable deal in 1925 on the matter of Hindu religious processions with music passing before mosques. Another attempt at reconciliation by Nehru in 1926 also failed. Malaviya along with Bishan Narayan Dar represented a perfect blend of ‘nationalist and Hindu causes’.
³⁴
This mixture would become potent in the coming years and sharpen the communal divide. Consistently placated by British high officials, Dar and Malaviya became the dominant voices of the religious right in the United Provinces. In the case of Malaviya, who was Congress president in 1919, what added to his rightist stature was his membership of the Viceroy’s Council, founding of Banaras Hindu University, control of the daily
Abhyuday
and active association with many religious organizations in various parts of the country, especially Allahabad and Banaras.

In Kanpur, a similar blurring of lines between nationalism and religious revivalism led to Muslims losing faith in the Congress. Muslim intransigence had already taken firm shape during the 1913 Kanpur Mosque affair, when the decision to relocate a small mosque for building a road, though approved by community leaders, led to widespread protests among local Muslims, forcing the British provincial government to rethink its strategy of working through mediators. By the early 1920s, as the practices of prabhat pheri, shuddhi (reconversion to Hinduism) and sangathan (organization) gained ground in the United Provinces, the industrial town, despite its massive migrant population, could not remain untouched. Already suspicious of the government after the 1913 mosque incident, what added to the Muslims’ discomfiture was Congress sponsorship of prabhat pheris and Hindu-only akharas (gymnasiums) in the city, funded by the Municipal Board.
³⁵

Congress’s open patronage of these communal symbols, coupled with party workers resorting to coercion and violence in 1931 to force a bandh against the execution of Bhagat Singh, degenerated into full-fledged rioting in Kanpur. Gone was the bonhomie between the two communities witnessed during the Khilafat agitation and the non-cooperation movement. Forty-two mosques and eighteen temples were destroyed during the 1931 riots, not to speak of the many lives lost. Among these was Congress leader Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, who was also editor of the daily
Pratap
. Gandhi wrote in
Young India
: ‘The death of Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi was one to be envied by us all. His blood is the cement that will ultimately bind the two communities. No pact will bind our hearts. But heroism such as Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi showed is bound in the end to melt the stoniest hearts, melt them into one. The poison has however gone so deep that the blood even of a man so great, so self-sacrificing and so utterly brave as Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi may today not be enough to wash us of it. Let this noble example stimulate us all to similar effort should the occasion arise again.’
³⁶

As editor of
Kalyan
, Hanuman Prasad Poddar too felt that Vidyarthi’s killing warranted comment. He termed the incident a reflection of how Indian humanity was fast degenerating. ‘This demonic excitement’s victim has been a man who was out there to douse the fire of mutual hatred.’
³⁷
For the barely five-year-old
Kalyan
this was the beginning of its mixing of religion and politics.

In that era of competitive communalism, the Hindu Mahasabha’s shuddhi, sangathan and prabhat pheris, equally patronized by Congress, was matched by the Muslim practices of tabligh (propaganda) and tanzim (organization). Tanzim was a direct response to sangathan and prabhat pheris
³⁸
and tabligh to shuddhi. Further, in 1924, the Muslim League would meet separately, outside the umbrella of Congress, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah would make a demand for autonomy in areas where Muslims outnumbered Hindus. Thus, the religious schism of the 1920s and ’30s redefined the politics of nationalism, and became a driving force behind Partition and its bloody aftermath.

Within this triangle of Hindi/Hindu journals, Marwari munificence and the blurring of the demarcation between religion and politics, especially in the United Provinces, exists the story of Gita Press. Religious separatism—termed ‘communalism’ in the approved secular discourse—was a reactive ideology; so one sees both Hindu and Muslim revivalist movements stuck in a chain of reactions to each other. This study of the phenomenon of Gita Press/
Kalyan
will show how Hindu revivalism constituted a response to various forces—of modernity and Western education, of challenge from other religions (in particular Islam), and of change within Hindu society itself.
³⁹

 

The Significance of Gita Press and Kalyan
In 1893, Pratap Narayan Mishra castigated readers of his journal
Brahman
for not being serious in their commitment to the goal of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. This taunt was taken seriously by many Hindi journals whose politics in the national context was still in the process of getting defined. In specific terms, despite the communalization of the Hindi–Urdu debate at the turn of the century, it had not yet expanded enough to disturb the peaceful, if tenuous, coexistence of the two communities. Periodicals of different genres surfaced, some related to women (
Chand
,
Jyoti
,
Grihalakshmi
), to children (
Balak
) and to education (
Shiksha Amrit
,
Shiksha Sevak
), besides the magazines of the Arya Samaj. These became vehicles to express the aspirations of the expanding class of literates.

Religious journals became critical to this expression. Religion was gaining ground as a subject of debate in the public domain, and gradually came to be reflected in the pages of journals of various genres. Even irreverent ones like
Matwala
could oppose but not ignore religion. It was no longer about Hindi but Hindu religiosity as well.

What added to the debate was the gradual communalization of politics. It is important to understand how Gita Press with its journal
Kalya
n
came to occupy the space relating to public discourse on religion. It is not that there were no exclusive journals dealing with Hinduism in general and sanatan Hindu dharma in particular. The monthly
Sanatan
Dharma Pataka
started in 1900 from Moradabad and continued till the late 1920s, but its failure to adopt new printing technology as well as the evolving a reader-friendly style of writing limited its circulation and influence, and it remained a local initiative.
⁴⁰
In the 1920s, when the irreverent
Matwala
regularly attacked votaries of sanatan dharma, the weekly
Dharma-Rakshak
was launched in retaliation. But it too failed to make any impact.

What contributed to
Kalyan
/Gita Press’s distinguishing presence and immediate success was the fact that its promoters and editor did not remain impervious to the larger political changes taking place in the colonial period. The propagation of sanatan dharma, with all its emphasis on texts, rituals, social practice and institutions was mixed with the ideals of nationalism. Vasudha Dalmia prefers to call sanatanis traditionalists, and makes the fine distinction between them and revivalist/reformist movements like the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, arguing that ‘incessant change and exchange’ took place between traditionalists and revivalists.
⁴¹

Monika Hortsmann, taking from Paul Hacker’s interpretation of neo-Hinduism, argues that the
Kalyan
variety of Hinduism fell in the same category: ‘Its roots are nationalistic; it makes a universal claim to universalism, to religious hegemony within the boundaries of India while reaching out beyond these to Hindus overseas, it is missionary in the sense that it strives to rally the Hindus in India and the lukewarm expatriates under the single umbrella of the one universal dharma’
⁴²

The story of Gita Press and
Kalyan
diverges from, even partially subverts, Benedict Anderson’s notion of print capitalism and its role in the creation of ‘monoglot masses’ that led to a ‘national identity’.
⁴³
Anderson’s basic premise is that booksellers were interested in profit alone and exploited the ‘revolutionary vernacularising thrust of capitalism’. This influenced the manner in which pre-Christian-era literature was taken to the public. Gita Press differed in the sense that profit was not at the core of its enterprise. Its promoters were Marwaris, the prominent mercantile class, who at the beginning of the twentieth century were moving towards industrial capital. They were definitely not averse to profit, but not from a venture like Gita Press, an ‘indigenous model of proselytization’
⁴⁴
whose object was defence of the Hindu religion. Goyandka would later acknowledge that popularization of Gita and other texts in Hindi was important to counter the efforts of Christian missionaries.
⁴⁵

At the same time, Gita Press recognized the opportunity that print provided at a juncture when Hindi was coming of age, and used it to take the message of sanatan dharma to the hinterland through
Kalyan
and cheap but high-quality, mass-produced editions of the Ramayana, Gita, Mahabharata, Puranas and other Hindu religious texts. Paul Arney calls Gita Press the ‘leading purveyor of print Hinduism in the twentieth century’.
⁴⁶

In fact, the printing of religious texts contributed to the consolidation of Gita Press in a big way. These texts were the proverbial best-sellers, led by the
Ramcharitmanas
. The print version of the
Ramcharitmanas
widened the scope for its recitation—this was now no longer the preserve of the priestly class. There was no longer the need to copy texts by hand, which had limited their availability. By 1983, Gita Press had sold nearly 5.7 million copies of
Ramcharitmanas
; in that year alone, there were two print runs of 100,000 copies each.
⁴⁷