Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (33 page)

 

Non-Hindu Contributors
Poddar always claimed that people of all faiths were attracted to
Kalyan
since it followed the middle path, and his persuasive skills did help to give
Kalyan
a semblance of diversity. The journal, being the first of its kind devoted to religion, attracted people from other faiths who were keen followers of Hindu philosophy and religion, more as scholars than believers. It is unlikely that many of them were associated with Gita Press beyond their occasional writing for
Kalyan
or other journals.

It needs to be stressed that the inclusion of writings by non-Hindus in
Kalyan
did not in any way dilute the soul of Gita Press’s belief system. The public image of an open-house press did not stand the test of tolerance at times of religious antagonism and violence, a common occurrence from the 1920s onwards. On such occasions it was always Hindus versus the rest—or, to put it bluntly, the Muslims. By the 1940s, the language and discourse became harsher and often crude.

Prominent among
Kalyan
’s non-Hindu writers was Allahabad University professor of philosophy Mohammad Hafiz Syed. From the mid-1930s onwards Syed would write sixteen articles for
Kalyan
, on various aspects of Hinduism, the relationship between Islam and Hinduism, devotion in Islam, Sufism, cow protection and the Gita. In 1934 when the Gita Society was floated Poddar asked him to become a member and to recommend others who could join as well. Syed came up with the names of R.D. Ranade, professor of philosophy at the university, and Hirendra Nath Dutta, a solicitor based in Calcutta, both of whom were ‘distinguished scholars and love Gita’
.
¹⁷⁴
As for himself, he did not reject the proposal outright, but argued against his becoming a member ‘as I am not a Sanskrit scholar . . . If, however, you insist I can give you only my reluctant consent. It will be better if you drop me out,’ he told Poddar. (Eventually he did become a member.) In the same letter, he said he would ‘try to write an article on Gita for your Gita number’
.
Syed, who continued to contribute to
Kalyan
till the late 1950s, would often complain about being asked to write at short notice, which annoyed him no end.

Syed was something of a spiritualist, for he wrote to Poddar of having gone to Tiruvannamalai to spend a fortnight with Ramana Maharshi. There he encountered one Major Chadwick who had translated some of the Maharshi’s unpublished works from Tamil into English verse and prose. Syed had persuaded Chadwick to let him have these for publication in
Kalyan
, and offered to hand them over to Poddar for a fee of Rs 30.
¹⁷⁵
However, Chadwick’s translation could not be published.

On one occasion Poddar apparently returned Syed’s piece ‘
Nara
Aur Narayan
’ (Man and God) as it was ‘not up to mark’, requesting him to write another article. Syed replied that he had shown the rejected piece to Bankey Bihari, a lawyer from Allahabad and the author of
The
Persian Mystics
, Ramanathan, assistant editor,
Leade
r
and others, all of whom ‘approved of it . . . I also find it in proper order. I have retouched it. If you care to have it, I may send it on to you again. I am sorry, I have no time to write a fresh article.’
¹⁷⁶
Yet he complained if Poddar failed to ask him to write for a special issue of
Kalyan
, as in the case of the journal’s 1939
Gita Tattva Ank
. While expressing his willingness to oblige, Syed carped: ‘You ask me at the eleventh hour to contribute an article for your special number, which I find rather hard to comply with as I am a very busy person and keep indifferent health.’
¹⁷⁷

Occasional outbursts and unreasonable demands apart, the Syed– Poddar relationship was typical of an overzealous admirer and his role model. It was not enough for Syed that his articles were being published in
Kalyan
; he wished to meet the editor. Poddar was in Ratangarh in January 1943, and Syed wrote impatiently: ‘If you cannot come to UP in the near future where we can meet, I shall do my best to visit you in Ratangarh some day when I get leave from the university. I am really desirous of meeting you in physical form before I lay down my body.’ What had added to Syed’s impatience was news of the temporary suspension of publication of
Kalyana
-
Kalpataru
. Syed wanted his article on the ‘Aryan View of Life’ to be published in the English journal.
¹⁷⁸

In June 1944, Syed wrote to Poddar again lamenting the physical distance between them but drawing solace from the fact that ‘in spirit we are always one . . . I often think of you and feel that I am not away from you, I really do not know when my desire to meet you would ever be fulfilled.’ Syed had taken a year off from Allahabad University in preparation for retirement and had more time for
Kalyan
: ‘I am glad to tell you that I get more leisure to occupy myself in the services of our Lord more earnestly than before.’
¹⁷⁹
By the late 1950s, Syed had met his role model. Poddar would describe how Syed had taken him to his house in Allahabad and shown him a photograph of Krishna with sandalwood paste on the forehead.
¹⁸⁰
In 1958, bedridden but still enthusiastic about writing for
Kalyan
, Syed was anxious to meet Poddar once more because ‘my life has become so uncertain’
.
¹⁸¹

Syed Kasim Ali from Jabalpur was a journalist with a Sahityalankar (Ornament of Literature) degree to boot. Enthusiastic about writing in
Kalyan
, he considered Poddar a ‘dharmatma (religious soul) whose benevolence acts as a big encouragement’
.
¹⁸²
He wrote nine articles for
Kalya
n
on the concept of God in Islam, harmful effects of eating meat, humanism in Islam, Baba Tajjudin and other subjects. Kasim Ali even attempted to match couplets from the Ramayana with verses from the Quran.
¹⁸³
Little is known about another Muslim writer, Mubarak Ali, whose eleven articles in
Kalyan
were of diverse nature, including profiles of Abraham Lincoln and Horatio Nelson.

Another enthusiastic writer for
Kalyan
was Syed Afzal Hussain from Faizabad who considered it an honour to be invited to contribute to the ‘most praiseworthy enterprise’. Asked to write on ‘that great book’ (Gita), Hussain expressed his doubts about being qualified enough but told Poddar he would try his hand on the ‘conception of God in certain Islamic sects’ and also on the ‘ethics of Gita’.
¹⁸⁴

I have earlier described the close relationship between Raihana Tyabji and Poddar. The pages of
Kalyan
were always open to Raihana, who being a Krishna bhakt wrote on various manifestations of Krishna, nine articles in all.

Firoze Cowasji Davar was a lecturer in English in the prestigious Gujarat College, Ahmedabad, where he had been a student. An ardent votary of Parsi Zoroastrians retaining their racial purity, Davar wrote against mixed marriages, arguing: ‘Larger communities lose little or nothing by mixed marriages. It is the smaller one that is swamped or overwhelmed so as to lose its communal identity.’
¹⁸⁵
Davar did not mind calling himself a ‘communalist’ and it was little wonder that his plainspeak was often misunderstood. In 1935, clarifying a statement he had made about his lack of knowledge about Hindu lore, Davar wrote to Poddar: ‘It is my misfortune that I fail to carry conviction in some of my most serious statements which are misunderstood by my kind and well-meaning friends as representing only modesty on my part. My knowledge of Hindu lore, I beg to repeat, is strictly limited; and my ignorance of Sanskrit makes my adventure into that region not only precarious to me but damaging to the prestige of the paper to which I may have the temerity to contribute.’
¹⁸⁶

In 1936 Davar was again in the news for alleged remarks against Krishna’s teachings and the Gita. Once again he wrote to Poddar with an explanation: ‘I have never doubted or disputed the universality of Sri Krishna’s teaching or of the gospel of the Gita. Nor do I maintain for a moment that the Gita should be confined to Hindus only. They belong to all who choose to profit by them . . . Ignorance of anything, except law, must be admitted as a valid reason. I only hope it is not interpreted as disrespect for Sri Krishna and the Gita.’
¹⁸⁷
He need not have worried; requests for contributions to
Kalyan
continued to come to him. For the journal’s
Gita Tattva Ank
(1939), Davar wrote an article on the essentials of Zoroastrianism. In 1958 he sent another one on the religion of humanity. By then he had a ‘shaky hand’ but he considered writing articles for
Kalyan
as a ‘debt of honour to the esteemed journal, which aims to disseminate the gospel of love, peace and goodness in society’
.
¹⁸⁸
Davar’s association with Gita Press began in 1932 and resulted in eleven articles.

Most of the international writers who contributed to
Kalyan
and
Kalyana-Kalpatar
u
belonged to the Christian faith. Ralph T. Templin from the United States was no ordinary missionary. In the fifteen years that he lived in India he pushed the boundaries of his work—from ‘creating a cooperative education method that allowed senior boys to help build various structures for local villages’ to setting up the ‘Peacemakers’ movement after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi’
.
¹⁸⁹
Templin experimented with Gandhian methods after his return to the US where he first took up the job of director of the School of Living, Suffern, New York, and later was the first white faculty member teaching sociology at the all-black Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio. He refused to pay tax, did not enlist at the time of World War II, protested against American suppression of the independence movement in Puerto Rico and failed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era. Templin contributed articles on human relations for
Kalyana-Kalpataru
long after he had left India—showing the thought and work that went into the search for suitable contributors. His life would be an interesting subject for study, considering that he left behind a rich archive of his India years, now made accessible by the General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Church at Drew University, New Jersey.

Christian D. Larson was not a priest but as a New Thought teacher exercised considerable influence. Though sent to the Lutheran seminary at Minneapolis, he switched over to the liberal Unitarian theological school and established a New Age temple. Larson believed each person had a ‘latent power which can be put to use for success with the proper attitude’
.
¹⁹⁰
Widely quoted even now by self-help books, Larson’s reputation must have brought him to the notice of Poddar. Larson wrote in
Kalyan
on the need to take refuge in God in times of crises
.

Edwin Greaves, a priest belonging to the London Missionary Society based in Banaras, had made a name with his
Grammar of Modern Hindi
that was first published in 1896 and completely revised in 1921. The book did not include any Urdu words. Aware of the intense debate around Hindi and Urdu, Greaves admitted that ‘the language dealt with is modern Hindi in the form that many of its best friends are endeavouring to standardize it, a self-respecting Hindi which is not forever parading its aristocratic ancestry by filling its pages with Sanskrit words, nor affecting modernity by the cultivation of Persian vocabulary and idioms’
.
At the same time, he argued that ‘purism in Hindi is sheer folly . . . Words of Persian and Arabic origin, and words imported also from English and other languages, have made their home in Hindi, and it is futile to try and oust them from their place.’
¹⁹¹
Though never considered a serious player in the Hindi–Urdu conflagration, Gita Press had joined the debate following in the footsteps of Hindu Mahasabha, and did its bit associating Hindi with Hindu nationalism.

Greaves wrote four articles in
Kalyan
, though on topics unrelated to Hindi, such as the place of yoga in Christianity and the lives and works of great poets and great men. Also a writer for
Kalyana
-
Kalpataru
, he was insistent that his article be ‘allowed to appear as it is, in its English dress’, as ‘ninety per cent of readers know English as well as they know Hindi, some of them probably better’
.
¹⁹²

Three other priests—Arthur E. Massey, George Chaney and E.T. Price—had studied Indian culture and religion closely. They suited Gita Press—having foreigners appreciate various aspects of Hindu religion furthered its mission of taking sanatan Hindu dharma to each nook and corner of the globe.

Carrying excerpts from the works of known writers was a common feature of Hindi journals of the time, and
Kalyan
was no different. It was catholic in its selection: political theorist and philosopher Edmund Burke; priest, historian and proponent of the filling theory of Christianity as the crown of Hinduism, J.N. Farquhar; writers George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde; leading Urdu poet Josh Malihabadi; medieval historian Abul Fazl; the man behind the Linguistic Survey of India G.A. Grierson—
Kalyan
carried works by all these great men, of course carefully selecting those that had a suitable message or a moral.

The English-language
Kalyana
-
Kalpataru
generated wide interest among European and American scholars of religion, philosophy and Indology, all of whom vied to write for the new journal. With Poddar’s relentless scouting of universities and religious institutions for contributors, an enviable mix was achieved.