Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (53 page)

Poddar did not remain content with the Sarala–Savitri debate in his attempt to counter the spread of the ‘wrong’ type of education in the country. He employed every possible incident that could further his argument against Western education for women. Even a remote incident of marriage between a brahmin girl and a Muslim boy in Poona was used to illustrate the pitfalls of modern education for women. He also extracted other writers’ articles to make his point. One such piece, by Parshuram Mehrotra in
Madhuri
, a literary journal for women, was written in the form of a letter from a sister to her elder brother. The anguished sister, though supportive of women’s education, pointed out three problems: lack of good schools for girls, a curriculum that was too Western in content and the lack of good women teachers. Such education, she said, would wreak havoc in society in general and within the family in particular.
¹¹

Stri Dharma Prashnottari
had gone into multiple reprints by the time Goyandka’s
Nari Dharma
came out in 1938. Delving into similar territories of women’s public and private existence,
Nari Dharma
established Poddar as the milder of the two and even progressive, if such a term could be used in the context of Gita Press. Highly opinionated, judgemental and unambiguously biased, Goyandka did not mince words—his language was direct, sometimes even crude.

Writing to Poddar in highly contemptuous terms about women’s freedom in Europe, Goyandka had expressed fear about what such freedom could do in India ‘where women are so murkh (foolish) that they cannot even count till 100’.
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At the very start of his book he stated that ‘educated women get nasht-brasht (destroyed)’.
¹³
He believed there was a lack of teachers with good character, which led to illicit relationships in educational institutions becoming the norm, though these rarely came out in the open. He stated that such relationships had become common even in temples, places of pilgrimage and religious congregations, and the solution lay in men and women having minimal contact with each other.

Dismissing the solution of having women teachers, Goyandka said it was a difficult task to find those of good character—‘As a result hardly any of the hundreds of girls’ schools in the country are run as per the ideals of sanatan Hindu dharma.’ Goyandka denied there was any evidence in the shastric texts of schools, gurukuls or universities for women or the practice of co-education in ancient times. The education of females traditionally took place in the home, he said.

To educate and build the character, strength and mental purity of girls and women, Goyandka laid stress on hard physical labour. Even harsh words and rebukes by elders were to be considered by a woman as a form of education.
¹⁴

Unlike Goyandka, Poddar was not impervious to the sweeping changes taking place throughout the country. He was aware that, despite the best efforts of Gita Press and other revivalist organizations to push for home-based shastric education for women, the colonial machinery and changing Indian mindset could not be countered. It remained for him to critique the colonial education that sought to destroy the gendered basis of the ghar/bahar (home/world) concept.

In 1936, in an elaborate essay—‘
Vartama
n Shiksha
’—Poddar regretted the new wave of modernity that aimed to put men and women on an equal educational footing, so much so that even women were becoming ‘teachers, clerks, lawyers, barristers, writers, politicians and members of municipalities and councils’.
¹⁵
Such ideas of progress, Poddar said, were turning women anti-God and anti-religion. Though, due to their inherent qualities of gentleness, kindness, devotion and shyness, women had not yet begun defying the tenets of religion like men, Poddar felt that the seeds of such defiance had been sown. The first manifestation of this decline, he said, was that women were becoming less patient.

Modern education, as Poddar saw it, was creating a parallel universe, an immoral one, in which women were writing letters to men who were not related to them, were joking, playing chess and dancing with these men. The most important aspect, Poddar wrote, was the loss of virtue. Never short of instances to prove his argument, he cited a letter in a reformist newspaper of Lahore in which a reader opposed to co- education had written about a report by a lady health officer of a school which indicated that 90 per cent of girls above twelve had become pregnant at some point. Poddar wrote that it was possible this figure was a printing error, but the situation was alarming enough even if 10 per cent of girls were getting pregnant. He said Lahore-like incidents were on the rise because in the co-education system there was a high probability of schoolgirls ‘losing their character’.

The concept of co-education, Poddar argued, interfered with the basic purpose of education, which is to highlight and draw out the inherent strength of an individual. Since in his view shakti (power) was not evenly distributed between boys and girls, it was wrong to give them similar education in the same schools. Besides, he argued, co-education could bring about great mutual attraction between a boy and a girl, because of the difference in the physical constitution of the two sexes: ‘It is impossible to resist temptation if one stays in close proximity.’

An article on the modern woman in
Kalyan
’s
Nari Ank
(1948) praised the Sanskrit scholar and vice chancellor of Allahabad University Ganganath Jha for his opposition to co-education at the university. Jha also did not allow a dance performance by the daughter of a faculty member and refused to budge despite a campaign against him by the local daily
Leader.
The
Kalyan
article also claimed that Madan Mohan Malaviya regretted the opening of a girl’s wing in Banaras Hindu University.
¹⁶

Extending the ghar/bahar dichotomy, the article designated offices, bazaars, congregations, courts and councils as places for men, and the home for women. The writer asked women why they should waste their time and energy in offices instead of savouring the pleasure of motherhood and the independence of their home. In his view, the purpose of education for women should be to further develop their inherent qualities so that they became good mothers. Like Goyandka, he dismissed the argument that co-education had existed in the gurukuls of ancient India. Poddar too wrote there was no evidence to prove such a claim. Only the daughters of gurus studied with boys, but the relationship between them was of brother and sister. Also, strict surveillance was maintained.

By the time of the
Nari Ank
, Gita Press’s narrative was changing, not so much in its obscurantist tone but in its resistance to the spread of women’s education, as it believed all its fears about Western education for women had come true. Poddar’s ‘
Vartama
n Shiksha
’ was partially reproduced in
Nari Ank
with some new footnotes and an attempt to articulate more practical reasons against giving institutional education to girls.
¹⁷
In a way, the 882-page special issue, Gita Press’s ultimate compendium on women, was an attempt to present a comprehensive sanatani view on questions relating to women. According to the current editor of
Kalyan
, Radheshyam Khemka, the articles in
Nari Ank
compare modern and ancient women.
¹⁸

An article by Kishori Das Vajpayee, a votary of sanatan dharma, writer, poet, teacher, journalist and activist, stated that girls were mentally sharper than boys but softer both physically and mentally. ‘Therefore, a woman who masters a dry and mentally sapping subject like mathematics becomes physically weak and loses shine. Such women present a pathetic picture in domestic affairs. They are always unwell and depressed. Even their relatives are not happy. The purpose of education is happiness.’
¹⁹

This was certainly a novel argument against the education of women. Further, Vajpayee raised a practical fear against women pursuing degrees like BA and MA, saying that it was nearly impossible to find suitable grooms for such girls, who ‘willingly or unwillingly remain unmarried throughout their life and become lonely and helpless’. He advocated that girls should instead acquire qualifications like Vidya Vinodini, Vidushi, etc., that were on offer from institutions popularly called vidyapiths. These institutions imparted education based on the Indian knowledge system, on religion, ancient science, history, culture and a huge dose of morality. Vidyapiths were the sanatanis’ counter to Western-type schools and colleges. Women were meant to be the harbingers of knowledge and purity within the family, and vidyapith education was argued to be complete, one that posed no threat to the family or to the woman herself, yet was sufficient to enable her to successfully carry out her household work and educate her children.

Gita Press also resorted to what had been done in Bengal during the mid-nineteenth century—parodying educated women and ridiculing their efforts to be on an equal footing with men.
²⁰
Who better than an educated woman to take the lead in doing this? Shakuntala Gupta, herself a graduate in Hindi, mocked Western-educated women for adding to the list of unemployed, a category that had so far been exclusively composed of men.
²¹
In a more serious vein, she wrote of the threat these educated women posed to the existing social and moral order. Gupta listed a host of immoral practices among educated women—frequenting clubs and cinema halls, playing cards, drinking alcohol, smoking, eating meat and spending time with men at unearthly hours. Her remedy was complete revision of the curriculum for women, with emphasis on Indian languages, domestic science and parenting.

But again, a note of ambivalence crept in.
Nari Ank
carried a laudatory article on Anandibai Joshi, India’s first Western-educated woman doctor and a cousin of Pandita Ramabai, ‘a reputed champion of Indian women’s education’.
²²
Joshi, praised by Gita Press for leading the life of a devout Hindu wife as a student in Pennsylvania, USA, had been at the receiving end of conservatives in India—she and her friend, the Marathi novelist Kashibai Kanitkar, had been stoned for wearing shoes and walking out with umbrellas, two symbols of male authority.
²³
But this fact was not mentioned in the Gita Press narrative.
²⁴
The article also deliberately papered over the reasons that forced Joshi to go abroad for medical education.
The
Kalyan
article on Joshi was a mere translation of parts of her biography by Caroline Healey Dall,
²⁵
with significant omissions. It spoke of how she carried her saris, glass bangles, sindoor and photographs of gods and goddesses to the USA, thus preserving her Hindu identity as a woman and a wife in a foreign land.
Kalyan
chose to ignore portions of Dall’s book where Joshi criticized Hindu priests as ‘prejudiced and corrupt’—‘I dislike them as a class.’ The article thus presented a one- dimensional image of Joshi as a woman wedded to her cultural ethos, when she was also a freethinker with an eclectic taste in books, authors and ideas.

Kalyan
’s
Nari Ank
did not confine itself to Indian women like Joshi, but also gave space to Western female icons who had chosen to spend their life in the service of mankind. So we find profiles of Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth Fry and Helen Keller. Notably, Poddar had earlier written a booklet on European women to propagate the values of the Victorian age among Indian women.
²⁶

 

Marriage and Domesticity
In 1929, writing to an unidentified woman who was in a bad marriage and who seemed to have bared her pain and sought his advice, Poddar displayed the conflict between his sanatani Hindu core and pretentious reformist face.
²⁷
Possibly the woman had experienced physical torture at the hands of her husband, which made Poddar hesitate to give the usual advice that she should display the classic tolerance of Bharatiya matri jati (Indian mothers). Addressing the woman as behen (sister), Poddar took an unprecedented stand, saying that he would not find it wrong if she walked out of the marriage and left her husband’s home.

But then his sanatani self got the better of him, and Poddar cited the glorious tradition of sati dharma (sati in this context exemplifying wifely devotion) among Indian women as the reason for his hesitation in advising her to leave her husband. As if to console her, Poddar predicted doom for the husband, but this was a ploy to reignite the sati in her. ‘God only knows the evil plight that awaits such a man. I am hesitant to spell it out as the Indian sati does not want to hear anything untoward about her husband, even if he is the meanest and the worst human being.’

After creating considerable confusion about what he stood for, Poddar dished out the standard sanatani fare and told the woman to have faith in God and to pray, not for his end but the end of his base thinking. Though Poddar had earlier supported the idea of the woman leaving her matrimonial home, he now painted a picture of a highly immoral outside world, one she should not step into. So, in the end, he left the woman to languish in her abusive marriage.

Poddar’s position was hardly surprising. For him, Hindu marriage was a religious rite, a spiritual quest that did not require registration or a contract of the type prevalent in marriages of other religions, as there was no question of it breaking. The relationship between husband and wife did not end with death, as marriage was between two bodies and one soul: ‘This oneness is what makes the Hindu marriage special.’
²⁸
This construct of the sanctity and eternity of marriage was the driving force behind Gita Press’s opposition to widow remarriage.

It was not mutual love between a man and a woman that formed the basis of a marriage, Poddar believed. Instead, marriage was a means to moderate sensual desire and pleasure and to exercise self-control, so that a man could move towards renunciation. He advised boys and girls to marry according to the wishes of their family elders, to consider marriage a religious ritual, not to marry outside caste and religion, not to go in for registered marriages and to spend less on the ceremony. He also wrote against newlyweds going on a honeymoon.
²⁹