Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (5 page)

Through all this, Gita Press has been relegated to an odd paragraph, appendix or footnotes. This formidable religious publishing house has not been the subject of any detailed study. The few doctoral dissertations on Gita Press and Mahavir Prasad Poddar from the universities of Gorakhpur, Allahabad and Banaras have been hagiographical in nature, failing to critically evaluate its role in the larger world of religious publishing houses and journals that existed in Uttar Pradesh. One M.Phil. work from Delhi University and monographs and articles by foreign scholars like Monika Hortsmann, Monika Freier and Paul Arney have provided tantalizing glimpses, but fall short of taking a comprehensive view of one of the most successful publishing houses of the twentieth century that continues to flourish today.

Arney attributed the ‘neglect of Gita Press’ to a host of reasons.
⁶⁴
First, there was the ‘anomalous status of the establishment in relation to the concepts of sampraday (sect), ashram (school for religious learning), publisher and factory’. To add to this, he said, Gita Press’s principle of ‘shun(ning) publicity on ideological grounds’ and its refusal to indulge in worship of individuals (vyaktigat puja) kept scholars away from evaluating the publishing house or its editor. Arney also thinks that ‘English-language scholarship’ never took sufficient note of Gita Press’s overwhelmingly rich body of work because it was in Hindi.

 

The Poddar Papers
When I began working on the history of Gita Press, all I had were the best wishes of historian Wendy Doniger. During my university years I had spent long months in the National Archives and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), but very little direct literature could be found there on either the institution or the individuals who ran it. However, various admirers of the institution spoke about its success and its contribution in the making of a Hindu public sphere. Each one had a story on Gita Press or Poddar more gushing, more reverential than the other. Goyandka was rarely mentioned, and facts did not matter.

In Gorakhpur, Gita Press officials continued to maintain collective silence on crucial academic questions. Its mammoth library and bookshop had everything but the story of the press, or information about Poddar or Goyandka. ‘Vyaktigat puja’ was still anathema for the publishing house; so while the writings of Poddar and Goyandka continued to dominate Gita Press publications even after their death, there were no writings on the two founders. As I moved from hope to despair, an old acquaintance suggested I go to Gita Vatika at the other end of Gorakhpur. Poddar had lived the better part of his life and even breathed his last there. His family and a few close associates still live in separate quarters there. In Gita Vatika, which had the air of a commune, I met Harikrishna Dujari, whose father and elder brother had both served Poddar and Gita Press their entire lives. An affable man in his seventies, Dujari was the sole window to a world now gone. He was warm and reticent in equal measure. The first few hours were spent talking about Poddar, affectionately called Bhaiji, and Goyandka, who was Sethji to the world.

Dujari agreed to give me access to old issues of
Kalyan
but made it plain I would have to get them photocopied, an arduous exercise in a city where load-shedding is the norm. Over the next few days, as he watched me shuttle between Gita Vatika and the photocopier’s shop, I guess he realized I was serious about the project. First, he offered me a room in Gita Vatika so that I could save time commuting from my hotel in the centre of Gorakhpur. And then, in a matter-of-fact tone, which I now call Dujariesque, he said he had some letters that Bhaiji had written and received. Knowing full well that
Kalyan
itself was not going to be of much help, I requested him to share whatever he had.

What started as a promise of a few letters turned out to be a veritable flood of information on Poddar and Gita Press. I had not yet shifted to Gita Vatika but did not mind leaving my hotel at the crack of dawn to pore over those papers. Dujari would give me file after file of correspondence, pamphlets, manuscripts of hagiographies written on Poddar, government records and all that constitutes a robust archive. In the sweltering Gorakhpur heat, sometimes Dujari would ask me to look at files in the room where Poddar had died. Reading the private papers of a public man in a room full of his memories can be surreal. But in the dimly lit room, as the prospect of the project brightened, I realized the Gita Press story needed to be told differently, and that there was much more to Hanuman Prasad Poddar than had so far been apparent. Besides, the Poddar Papers not only tell the tale of Gita Press, but fill a crucial gap in the history of Hindu nationalism in both colonial and post-colonial periods, telling of how the success of the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and Jana Sangh was built by foot soldiers such as the makers of Gita Press. Dujari even agreed to let me photocopy the files and I struck a deal with a new photocopy shop that would open early and close late. My days were spent in this shop getting copies made of documents, most of which had not seen light for decades.

During my many subsequent visits to Gorakhpur, I became a resident of the Gita Vatika guest house, following the rules of austerity, eating satvik (pure) food in their small mess where a maharaj (brahmin cook) worked. I literally burnt the midnight oil going through the files that Dujari would leave with me every day. Each time he said no more files were left, I would prod him, urge him to make sure, and the next morning, more would appear. For Dujari, Poddar was a saint, but he found it difficult to comprehend why someone from the English-speaking world was keen to write on him and Gita Press. Finally, in February 2012, Dujari threw up his hands and took me to the room that housed the Poddar Papers in boxes and on bookshelves. He was right; I had literally seen each and every bit of them. In my overenthusiasm I had got everything photocopied, barring the contents of one box—which when opened drew me to tears. The resident joint family of pests, many generations of whom had fed themselves on history, had deprived us of some of the most crucial papers of Poddar’s last years. What is left at Gita Vatika is on the brink of extinction and needs serious attention. Even the extra set of copies I made for Dujari will soon fall prey to heat and humidity.

In Delhi, after each visit to Gorakhpur, I spent days at the NMML going through the papers of Jamnalal Bajaj, G.D. Birla, Seth Govind Das, Madan Mohan Malaviya and others. As I joined the dots, the picture that emerged was of a giant twentieth-century Hindu missionary and a mammoth publishing house whose fascinating, quiet and often troubling story was not limited to its primary task. It was a crucial cog in the wheel of Hindu nationalism that struck up alliances with everyone: mendicants, liberals, politicians, philanthropists, scholars, sectarian organizations like the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha, Jana Sangh and VHP, and conservative elements within the Congress.

In the following pages, the story of Gita Press unfolds as we first look at the lives of two individuals, Hanuman Prasad Poddar and Jaydayal Goyandka, and place them within the larger paradigm of ‘ascetic nationalist masculinity’.
⁶⁵

The thematic chapters that follow describe the founding of
Kalyan
, its early years and the manner in which Poddar created a web of national and international contributors for the journal and its English-language counterpart,
Kalyana-Kalpataru
started in 1934. Apart from examining the making of Gita Press and important events in its life, the book looks at how the goals of a religious publishing house in a small UP town intersected with the aims of communal Hindu organizations and nationalism at flashpoints in history from 1926 onwards,
⁶⁶
and provides an account of the as yet unchronicled role of Gita Press during the years leading to Partition. Through the pages of
Kalyan
, it not only accentuated the Hindu–Muslim divide, criticizing Gandhi both privately and publicly, but also fanned communal hatred.

The post-Independence years saw Gita Press again become a vehicle of Hindu organizations during the agitation against the Hindu Code Bill and in the cow-protection movement. Politically too, the press became more active, openly seeking votes for orthodox organizations like the Ram Rajya Parishad, Hindu Mahasabha and others, as well as expressing strong views against the spread of communism. The Poddar Papers provide an insight into the hitherto unknown central role of the Gita Press in Hindu nationalist discourse.

Poddar also meticulously kept records of his correspondence with leading Hindi writers, intellectuals, artists, political leaders and many organizations. This helps in narrating the relationship Gita Press had with the Hindi literary world and the manner in which it created a visual iconography of the Hindu religion, an exercise that saw artists who later earned a name as Progressives also participate. Further, Poddar’s papers highlight his tumultuous relationship with Gandhi, something that has escaped the scrutiny of scholars of Hindu nationalism.

Through a detailed analysis of primary and secondary sources—mostly the pamphlets, pedagogic in nature, that were brought out by Gita Press and
Kalyan
—we are able to appreciate the important role Gita Press played in creating a unified face of Hinduism. This was done without diluting its stance on core principles of sanatan Hindu dharma such as caste divisions and the responsibilities of women that included grounding the male child in Hindu morality so that he would not lose his bearings in the outer world. Integral to the narrative was the depiction of Muslim men as the ‘other’—‘libidinous, sexually dissipated and voluptuously lustful’
⁶⁷
—from whom Hindu women had to be protected at all costs.

In the overall analysis, the Gita Press project of promoting the supremacy of Hindu identity continues unabated, though without the towering presence of Goyandka and Poddar. The two luminaries continue to dominate the pages of
Kalyan
and other publications. At a time when politics has become more divisive, Gita Press’s template is unchanged, and its political agenda remains undiluted, as does its fond hope that India will one day become Hindu.

 

 

 

Hanuman
Prasad Poddar, the founding editor of
Kalyan
, headed this first-of-its-kind religious journal for forty-five years from 1926 till his death in 1971. By any standards it was a unique feat, and Poddar was no ordinary editor. The tale of the man, the myth and the magic, stretches across 6 kilometres of Gorakhpur. At one end of this stretch stands the office of Gita Press with its colossal ornate gate; at the other, in Shahpur, on the road to Banaras, is Gita Vatika, Poddar’s home for over four decades. Here one feels the holy presence of the man who claimed to have conversed with gods.

The area surrounding Gita Press has a strong Muslim presence in the mohallas of Ghantaghar, Basantpur, Reti and Mirzapur, criss- crossed by serpentine alleys, crowded and noisy. In contrast, Shahpur is by the side of a straight road, an area that is relatively quiet and poor, with open drains, roadside tea stalls and the heavy humming presence of the famed mosquitoes of Gorakhpur.

Inside the press, or outside in its huge bookshop, hundreds of works by Poddar are prominently displayed. But for the visitors who come in droves, Poddar merely remains writer-editor extraordinaire. The absence of even a single book on him reinforces the larger philosophy of Gita Press—religion in defence of society and not for the promotion of an individual.

Poddar’s grandson Rasyendu Fogla, a successful businessman, lives with his family in Gita Vatika and manages a trust that was set up in Poddar’s memory. Gita Vatika publishes scores of books on Poddar, and those of his writings that never got published by Gita Press. Another trust set up earlier, the Radha Madhav Seva Sansthan, is also part of Gita Vatika and has published works on Poddar’s life. At neither Gita Press nor Gita Vatika is Poddar referred to in the past tense. Instead, the title Nityalilalin (ever-present) is used, an exercise in deification.

The story of Poddar here deliberately precedes that of Jaydayal Goyandka, businessman-turned-spiritualist, the man whose vision was behind Gita Press and also Poddar’s spiritual mentor who would not let him stray from his work at
Kalyan
despite temptations to join the nationalist movement or become an aide to Mahatma Gandhi. Since their ‘first meeting in 1910 or 1911 an amalgamation and, as it seems, also a mutual intensification of visions and actions’ had taken place, and as Poddar acknowledged, it was Goyandka who ‘encouraged him in his religious enterprises’.
¹

Goyandka hovered over Gita Press as a divine presence, never involving himself in the mundane task of running its daily affairs. He kept a close watch on its functioning and publications, while giving Poddar all the freedom as editor. Every time Poddar made a request to be relieved of his duties, Goyandka would refuse, saying that both Gita Press and
Kalyan
would be nothing without Poddar and that continuous publication of
Kalyan
was the ultimate dharma for the protection of Hinduism.

Thus Gita Press became synonymous with Poddar, making him a prisoner of the image that Goyandka had created for him. Poddar would sometimes sulk, would leave Gorakhpur and spend long spells in his native Ratangarh, but the work of Gita Press and
Kalyan
and Goyandka’s moral pressure as well as blunt persuasion would draw him back. Goyandka, the mysterious
²
man of the Marwari world, was a grihasta-sadhu (householder-mendicant) who, when not giving sermons, was an incessant traveller in search of spiritual solace. Occasionally, he would be the final arbiter for Marwari families in disputes over the division of businesses and assets. While Goyandka remained the force behind Gita Press, Poddar was its public face.

 

Hanuman Prasad Poddar: Birth and Childhood

The word Poddar is derived from the Persian term potdar—‘pot’ meaning treasury or storehouse and ‘dar’ its keeper. It was a title common during the Mughal period, conferred on those manning the resources of rulers, be it food or the treasury. The title was commonplace in the principalities of Awadh till the abolition of zamindari in 1950.
³
Officials involved in transferring revenue collected from the tehsils to state and Central governments were called Poddars.

Hanuman Prasad belonged to the Bansal gotra (exogamous sect) of Marwaris, and the family traced its roots to Ratangarh in Bikaner. His grandfather Tarachand was a prominent businessman of the town who, unlike many from his community, had not stirred out of Ratangarh in search of better business opportunities. Married with two wives—something of a family tradition—Tarachand had a son by each of them. In later years, Tarachand broke his rule against going to videsh (‘foreign land’, a common term for any place outside Ratangarh and Bikaner) and allowed his elder son Kaniram to branch out on his own. However,
Desh Ke Itihas Mein Marwari Jati Ka Sthan
, a definitive history of the Marwaris, states that members of the Poddar clan had already moved to Calcutta’s Burrabazar as cloth merchants.
⁴

Three days’ camel ride from Ratangarh brought Kaniram to Kuchaman railway station from where a circuitous route through Calcutta took him to Shillong. Through the large Marwari network Kaniram was aware of the opportunities in this cantonment town. Marwaris like Navrangram Agarwala of Churu (Rajasthan) had already made a name for themselves in Assam from the mid-nineteenth century as traders and suppliers of British military rations.
⁵

The business prospered and soon more Poddars from Ratangarh joined Kaniram in Shillong. But there was a vacuum in his life: he and his wife Ramkaur Devi did not have a child. A lady with religious and spiritual bearings, Ramkaur had sought the blessings of shamans and mystics, with no result. The fear of the business scattering without a successor to hold it together led the couple to formally adopt Bhimraj, Kaniram’s younger brother. Kaniram and Ramkaur bequeathed the entire business and property to the younger brother who managed the Calcutta end of Kaniram’s business that was expanding throughout eastern India. The adoption had the blessings of their father Tarachand Poddar and prominent members of the Marwari community and close relatives.

Ramkaur’s childless state was known to her family guru Meher Das, a Vaishnavite, as well as many god-men of the Nathpanth (Ratangarh had been the seat of the Nathpanthis and various Hindu religious sects for 600 years). A series of yagnas (offerings to fire) invoking Lord Vishnu, followed by feeding of the poor and brahmins, saw Meher Das predict to Ramkaur that her sister-in-law-turned-daughter-in-law Rikhibai, the wife of Bhimraj, would be blessed with a son. The prophecy of the godlike character of the yet-to-be-born Poddar came from another god-man, Motinath Maharaj aka Tuntia Maharaj, who had considerable influence on the Bikaner royal family.

Motinath said Rikhibai’s son would have three distinguishing marks: the holy mark of Shri on his forehead, hair on his shoulders and a mole on his right thigh. Besides this, the baby would be born with a wire-like object in his mouth and only after this was pulled out would he cry. Various accounts of Poddar’s birth—published, written and unwritten—highlight how he was born with exactly these marks, indicating an extraordinary life ahead. His aunt-cum-grandmother Ramkaur, an ardent Hanuman devotee herself, named the boy Hanuman Bux—changed to Hanuman Prasad many years later when he was a young man working in Calcutta. Till her death Ramkaur always reminded Hanuman how he was the gift of God and ordained for big things.

Thus, the deification of Hanuman Prasad Poddar had begun even before his birth on 17 September 1892 to Rikhibai and Bhimraj Poddar. His birth—the first son after a long time—brought collective joy to the Poddar clan. The family business of food supply to the British army’s Eastern Command had brought considerable wealth and heft to the Poddars, but the lack of a successor had been a cause of concern. The joy was short-lived as Rikhibai succumbed to illness in 1894, leaving behind two-year-old Hanuman Bux to grandmother Ramkaur’s care.

In 1896, an earthquake devastated Assam. Two of Hanuman Prasad’s cousins died and he barely managed to survive. Ramkaur naturally ascribed the child’s survival and extrication from the rubble to his magical powers. The earthquake impacted the Poddar family business severely. Kaniram, who was contemplating shifting to Calcutta, passed away in 1899. His adopted son Bhimraj moved to Calcutta with his new wife and family. Hanuman Prasad was left alone in Shillong with his grandmother. A series of tragedies followed in the family that saw seven-year-old Hanuman Prasad relocate to Ratangarh with his grandmother.

Jorawarmal’s school in Ratangarh, the first he went to, equipped the child with the mahajani system of accounting and its variants practised in different parts of Rajasthan. But formal education would elude him. He resisted Ramkaur’s attempt to send him to an Urdu-medium school in her parents’ town, Amritsar. Even at the age of seven, he felt Urdu education was against Hindu culture and the samskaras (ritual practices) of his family and community. His Ratangarh stay brought him close to the various god-men his grandmother had sought blessings from before his birth. It is here that he first read the Gita. Memorizing verses from the text fetched eight-year-old Hanuman a gift of fruits from Swami Bakhnath, one of whose followers later took him on as a disciple after a formal ceremony. These were the years of Hanuman’s initiation into elaborate brahminical rituals like the sacred thread ceremony that Marwaris (originally of the vaishya class) had adopted in the late nineteenth century as part of their further reorientation in terms of caste from kshatriya to brahmin.
⁶
This involved vegetarianism and wearing of the sacred thread.

Hanuman was married in 1904, at the age of twelve, to Mahadevi, daughter of Gurumukhraj Dhandaria of Ratangarh. In later years, Poddar would make much of his family’s, especially his grandmother’s, benevolence in persisting with the marriage despite Mahadevi having been afflicted with smallpox that had scarred her face. After the wedding, Hanuman Prasad moved with his wife and Ramkaur to join his father’s cloth business in Calcutta. This would completely change the course of young Poddar’s life. Calcutta, the capital of India was the omphalos of the British Empire in all respects—political, social and economic.
⁷
The next few years would see Hanuman Prasad lead the multiple lives of a businessman, God-seeking bhakt, man with literary aspirations and a revolutionary to boot.

 

Calcutta: Politics and Sedition
Hanuman Prasad’s initiation into religious, cultural and later political life in Calcutta was through the Sanatan Dharam Pustkarini Sabha that his father had set up along with Madangopal Kothari, Shivnarain Vyas and Shivprasad Acharya. Though small in scale and operation, the Pustkarini Sabha was part of the larger trend of revival movements that stressed the articulation of orthodox Hinduism through such bodies.
⁸
Such sabhas had started appearing from the end of the nineteenth century.

Bhimraj’s Pustkarini Sabha invited god-men and preachers for satsangs and lectures, and these interactions strengthened Hanuman Prasad’s interest in the ritualistic form of Hindu religion, the Gita as the final arbiter of human life and issues like cow protection. These were to form his lifelong mission at Gita Press. It was in this period too that Hanuman Prasad met Jaydayal Goyandka.

If Goyandka and the Pustkarini Sabha instilled in Hanuman Prasad a belief in the superiority of sanatan dharma, his membership of the Hindu Mahasabha taught him how the objects of reconversion and cow protection could be achieved through communal political mobilization. Also, as a young delegate at the Calcutta Congress session in 1907, Hanuman Poddar had been influenced by the ‘extremist’ group led by Bipin Chandra Pal. So by the time he had his first interaction with Mahatma Gandhi, Poddar’s political world view had already been firmed up. When Gandhi arrived from South Africa in Calcutta through Rangoon in 1915, Poddar as a Mahasabhaite welcomed him at the Alfred Theatre and presented him with a memento. A unique, often tempestuous, lifelong relationship was later forged between the two.

Calcutta also provided opportunities for Hanuman Prasad to associate with journalists and leading lights of the Hindi world at the forefront of the acrimonious debate on Hindi–Hindustani. Many of these relationships are documented in the privately held rich personal archive at Gita Vatika, especially with Laxman Narayan Garde, editor of
Bharatmitra
and a regular contributor to
Kalyan
,
⁹
and Ambika Prasad Vajpayee, bank-clerk-turned-journalist, editor of
Nrsimh,
and later the political paper
Svatantra
who remained Poddar’s friend and a contributor to
Kalyan
.
¹⁰
Vajpayee had a role to play in Poddar’s attraction towards Tilak’s Home Rule League. Then there was Jhavarmal Sharma, editor of the conservative Marwari paper
Calcutta Samachar
; and the tallest of them all—Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, editor of the prestigious
Saraswati
, who after retirement wrote for
Kalyan
and corresponded at length with Poddar.
Calcutta Samachar
later became
Hindu Sansar
, a daily that was deeply immersed in the ocean of sanatan dharma.
¹¹

Poddar’s biographies—published and unpublished accounts based on extensive interviews with him—mention his closeness with editors of Bengali newspapers. His earliest acquaintance was with Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, editor of
Sandhya
, and a Brahmo and a Catholic at various stages of his life. He was also secretary of the Printers’ and Compositors’ League set up in 1905 at the height of the Swadeshi movement.
Sandhya
’s ‘uninhibited use of the language of the streets and its vitriolic and often vulgar abuse of the feringhee and all who aped his ways’ as well as its open invocation to readers to ‘remain a Hindu and a Bengali’ would be reflected in Poddar’s writings in
Kalyan
during the years of Partition and early Independence.
¹²