Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (31 page)

Poddar with his extraordinary zeal disregarded the lukewarm reception given to him by the chroniclers of Hindi’s history. As was his style, he worked on personal terms with contributors and waded through the vast Hindi literary world inviting everyone who cared about the perceived danger to sanatan Hindu dharma or Hindu nationalism to write for Gita Press. Even those keen to give their views on the secular aspects of religion were welcome to do so. In the end Poddar collected a perfect blend of traditionalists, ultra-conservatives and progressive Hindi writers. Many Hindi writers who contributed to
Kalyan
in its early decades, and did not live to see the journal’s journey through the communal cauldron of the 1940s and ’50s, would have regretted their association with it.

A list of contributors, a veritable who’s who from the Hindi world, illustrates how everyone partook in the Gita Press project in its early years. Babu Shyamsundar Das, one of the founding members of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in 1896, spent his life teaching Hindi in school and at Banaras Hindu University, and propagating the language as the lingua franca of the masses. Das’s biggest contribution was as editor of the sixteen-volume
Hindi Sabdsagara
, a Nagari Pracharini Sabha publication. His single piece in
Kalyan
appeared in 1929 on the poetics of Tulsidas.

The oeuvre of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi is synonymous with an age in Hindi literature called the Dwivedi Yug (Dwivedi Era) that inspired many generations of writers. Editor of the highbrow
Saraswati
for seventeen years, Dwivedi was a language scholar and a pioneer of Khari Boli (standard Hindi dialect shorn of both Sanskrit and Urdu words). He had met Poddar in Calcutta,
¹²⁸
and wrote four original pieces for
Kalya
n
in its first decade on the themes of compassion, Ganga and prayer. One more article was extracted from his published work.

Dwivedi had the highest regard for Poddar and
Kalyan
and missed no opportunity to praise him. Even when he expressed his inability to send an article, Dwivedi would give Poddar permission to extract from his published works. He was also a regular reader of
Kalyan
and at times, overwhelmed by Poddar’s writing, would send a postcard of appreciation. After reading
Ishwar Ank
he wrote: ‘My eyes are full of tears and some of them have fallen on the postcard. You are great, your work is great . . .’ A few years later, on receiving a copy of
Kalyan
’s
Sant
Ank
(Issue on Saints, 1937), Dwivedi effusively thanked Poddar for ‘doing good to my materialistic life’
.
¹²⁹

Editor, writer, activist—and post-1947 a nominated member of parliament—Banarasi Das Chaturvedi was the Hindi literary world’s most influential figure for a long time, with excellent networking skills across the political–literary divide. Wearing multiple hats, Chaturvedi’s lifelong mission was to work for indentured Indian labour in Fiji, which brought him close to C.F. Andrews and a large number of political leaders across ideologies.

As editor of
Vishal Bharat
owned by Ramananda Chatterjee of the Hindu Mahasabha who was also owner-editor of
Modern Review
in English and
Prabasi
in Bengali (all three published from Calcutta), Chaturvedi was in the thick of Hindi literary politics. He ran a concerted campaign against
Chocolate
, (1927), a collection of stories by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’. The collection was an instant best-seller, but was not to the liking of the ‘literary establishment’ as it not only dealt with the forbidden subject of homosexuality but ‘depicted homosexuals not as slum or prison dwellers, but as respectably married middle-class men, both Hindu and Muslim, with flourishing social networks of their own, engaging in liasions in their homes and in public spaces’
.
¹³⁰
From Premchand who disapproved of the book to Gandhi who Ugra claimed was supportive,
¹³¹
virtually everyone of note got embroiled in the controversy, but it was Chaturvedi who termed such work ‘ghasleti sahitya’ (inferior literature). Chaturvedi and Ugra corresponded with each other, the former insisting that ‘chumban-pratha’ (practice of kissing) according to medical science led to various diseases.
¹³²
Still, Chaturvedi published a story by Ugra in
Vishal Bharat
, though the two sparred on the kind of drawing that should accompany it.
¹³³

Poddar and Chaturvedi were old acquaintances. In 1931 Poddar, while condoling with Chaturvedi on the death of his son, praised his work among indentured labour and advised him to ‘pray to the supreme God and see for yourself if your worries get translated into happiness or not’
.
¹³⁴
Chaturvedi contributed three articles to
Kalyan
—a relative study of Gandhi and Lenin, on children’s literature and on bhakti. In 1941, he suggested to Poddar that
Kalyan
should bring out a special
Matribhumi Ank
(Motherland Issue): ‘Not only would it educate the masses, even the topic would be contemporary.’ Chaturvedi volunteered to help bring out the special edition and promised to come to Gorakhpur to plan it. Acknowledging that ‘our world view does not match on many issues’, Chaturvedi said the two could ‘work together on issues where they agreed’
.
¹³⁵
But the issue never materialized.

Occasionally, Chaturvedi sought financial help from Poddar for people and causes dear to him, a fact he admitted in a letter of 1958 written to wish Poddar a quick recovery from illness. Asking ‘how can I forget the help you gave me from time to time?’ Chaturvedi listed the monetary help Poddar had given him on various occasions (amounts between Rs 80 and 150) as well as timely payments for contributions to
Kalyan
. Significantly, in the same letter, Chaturvedi explained that because he was a brahmin he did not write ‘pranam’ (a form of greeting to elders) to Poddar, but instead wrote ‘ashish’ (blessing to someone younger)—revealing Chaturvedi’s deep-seated sense of his caste superiority.
¹³⁶

Munshi Premchand, the greatest writer of his time, was an influential voice in the Hindi public sphere when Poddar began prodding him for contributions for
Kalyan.
The choice of Premchand for a journal like
Kalyan
was curious, for the writer not only depicted the diminished role of religion in lives of his characters but publicly took a stand counter to that of Gita Press and the Hindu Mahasabha in their open opposition to Urdu as the language of Muslims. In 1934 he had stated at a meeting of the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha: ‘The name Hindi was given by the Muslims, and until just fifty years ago, the language now being described as Urdu was called Hindi even by Muslims.’
¹³⁷

After consistent persuasion by Poddar, Premchand wrote on Sri Krishna in 1931. But he made his reluctance apparent: ‘I received your kind letter. You are right I have not written anything for
Kalyan
in three years. The reason is it is a religious magazine and I have no knowledge of religious matters . . . You are an authority and yet you request a novice like me to write. I will have to follow your command. I like the topic of Sri Krishna and the Future World and I will write something on it.’
¹³⁸
In 1931, Premchand’s first article appeared in
Kalyan
on this topic.

In asking Premchand to write for
Kalyan
, Poddar seems to have turned a blind eye to the dialectics of language politics in which the writer played a key role. Premchand’s stature was possibly the reason; besides, he and Poddar were comfortable with each other. As we saw earlier, Premchand even recommended a Muslim artist, Mohammad Hakim Khan, for a job in Gita Press. In 1948, twelve years after the writer’s death,
Kalyan
published an extract of Premchand’s article on the true calling for women in its annual
Nari Ank
.

Gita Press’s policy of indifference to conflicting viewpoints being held by their writers was not limited to Hindi language politics but extended to new literary trends as well. For Poddar, the literary and personal predilections of writers meant little, as long as the contributions followed the Gita Press template. The biggest challenge to the established literary norms of the Dwivedi Yug came from three poets, unknown to each other, working in different places. It was the beginning of a new era of irreverence that would shake the world of Hindi literature. The poetry of Jayshankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’ and Sumitranandan Pant was uniformly derided by the literary establishment and labelled ‘chhayavad’ (literally, of the shadows), which came to denote neo-romanticism in Hindi poetry or an ‘allegedly mystical- ethereal-escapist school of poetry’.
¹³⁹
Dwivedi himself led the onslaught and was most disparaging towards chhayavad: ‘Perhaps what is meant by chhayavad is poetry that is the shadow (chhaya) of poetry being written elsewhere.’
¹⁴⁰
What rankled the Hindi public sphere was not only the chhayavadis’ complete disregard for rules of ‘language, meter, prosody, etc., but their choice of subjects like love, loss, romance, nature, beauty’, and their emphasis on ‘broadening the social context of individual’—these ran counter to the dominating theme of nationalism ‘at a time of intense political and social ferment, a time of alternately soaring hopes and sinking despair about the future for independence’
.

Prasad from Banaras, Pant from Almora (later settled in Allahabad) and Nirala the quintessential yayavar (itinerant) originally from Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, but born in Mahishadal (part of East Medinipur), a princely state in Bengal,
¹⁴¹
formed their own literary space and got their works published. In the case of Prasad and Pant, breaking the rules was limited to literary style and world view, but Nirala (which means unique), the most talented of the triad, was irreverent to the core, out to destroy all the institutions of sanatan Hindu dharma that Gita Press so zealously championed.

The high watermark of Suryakant Tripathi’s career was his stint at
Matwal
a
(the intoxicated; the wayward or free spirit).
¹⁴²
Launched in Calcutta on 26 August 1923 by Seth Mahadev Prasad,
Matwala
was a journal with disdain for institutions, individuals, organized religion, politics and politicians, but respect for the progressive ethos.
Matwala
’s attack on sanatan dharma was so scathing that a journal called
Dharma-
Rakshak
was brought out in response.
¹⁴³
‘Nirala’ was added to Tripathi’s name by what came to be known as the
Matwala
gang. A motley group of immensely talented writers—satirist Munshi Navjadiklal Srivastava, writer of beautiful prose Shivpujan Sahay, and the head of the group Nirala—formed the core of
Matwala
, in which leading names of that time wrote. Nirala, who eventually quit
Matwala
over the magazine’s failure to defend him against charges of plagiarizing Tagore and later not publishing his poems, was known for his magnanimity to all even while he himself suffered financially. A kanyakubja brahmin, Nirala discarded the sacred thread, mixed with Muslims, drank alcohol, visited a ‘very unwell’ prostitute in Calcutta’s Sonagachi brothel—he was taken there by Ugra as revenge for Nirala having served him country liquor mixed with colour—and contracted a serious disease. Eventually, Prasad got Nirala treated in Banaras: one chhayavadi to the aid of another.

For
Kalyan
, Nirala chose to write on contemporary literature and religion, a theme that must have nagged him in the midst of the all- round attack that he and his chhayavadi fellow-travellers were facing at the hands of the literary establishment enmeshed in the language of Hindu nationalism. Nirala’s article appeared in 1931, when he had left
Matwala
and was freelancing. Again, it was the result of Poddar’s constant persuasion. Embarrassed by the reminders, Nirala explained he had been caught up with domestic affairs: ‘What should I write? I am ashamed of my behaviour towards a gentleman like you. For the future issues of
Kalyan
I will keep sending something. One article will reach you soon.’
¹⁴⁴

Poddar had requested Pant to write on the importance of Hindu religion for the
Hindu Sanskriti Ank
of 1950.
¹⁴⁵
While this stage of Pant’s career was marked by the ‘culmination of the
chhayavad
phase’ and beginning of ‘ideological poetry inspired by Gandhism and Marxism’, he later took to ‘philosophical poetry inspired by Aurobindo’.
¹⁴⁶
For the
Hindu Sanskriti Ank
, he wrote a poem ‘
Stavan
’ (Praise), a highly Sanskritized eulogy to God.

Prasad, a tobacco merchant from Banaras, began as a poet in Braj Bhasha (dialect of Hindi spoken in western UP), took to Khari Boli and later emerged as the fountainhead of chhayavad poetry. After
Saraswati
declined to publish his poetry, he started his own journal,
Ind
u
.
¹⁴⁷
Like Nirala and Pant, Prasad also chose to write on the relatively safe topic of ‘mysticism’ for
Kalyan
in 1937, the year he died. Mahadevi Varma, a late entrant to the chhayavad school but a prominent voice of the Hindi literary world, never wrote for
Kalyan
.
Gita Press’s eclectic mix of contributors from the world of Hindi literature included Maithilisharan Gupta, the most influential nationalist Hindi poet of the Dwivedi era, christened ‘rashtra kavi’ (national poet) after 1947 and also nominated to the Rajya Sabha for two terms from 1952. He had shot into fame with
Bharat-Bharati
published in 1912, a ‘rousing nationalist survey of the state of the nation and Hindus’
¹⁴⁸
and simultaneously a eulogy to British rule: ‘It is not possible that foreign rule by even the noblest soul would be fair; even if it’s true, British rule is acceptable to us. It is better organized and full of hope.’ Gupt even ‘doled out a certificate’ to the British government for its work during famines.
¹⁴⁹
The irreverent
Matwala
would take a swipe at Gupt when news of his poem ‘
Ish-Vinay
’ (Prayer to God), part of
Bharat-Bharati
, came: ‘Prayer to British rule! Taking the name of Rama in Lanka. He should be interned somewhere to justify the name Gupt (secret).’
¹⁵⁰