Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (55 page)

Unlike the duties of women that have remained cast in stone for Gita Press, some changes have been incorporated in a mother’s duties towards her children. While the emphasis on inculcating values of Indian culture, tolerance, contentment, speaking in swadeshi language (i.e., Hindi) has remained unchanged, an interesting addition is the duty of a mother to regulate what her children watch on television. In the view of Gita Press, TV is a medium that causes tension and promotes materialistic culture, so mothers are first advised to control their own habit of watching TV and only let children view programmes that would help in building their character.
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Women’s Emancipation as a Cause of Moral Decay
Ramnath ‘Suman’, a leading Hindi writer and a friend of both Poddar and Goyandka, was worried about the fast depleting numbers of India’s grihalakshmis (Lakshmis of the household).
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The author of numerous books on women and domesticity,
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Suman strongly disputed that education had brought freedom to women. Despite their membership of clubs and societies, and big lectures on citizen’s rights and freedom, he said, educated women had become ‘more than before instruments of enjoyment for men’.
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Suman said the ‘pilgrim centres of modern civilization’ in which women played a central role, like clubs, cinemas, colleges, beauty parlours, exhibitions like craft fairs, flower shows, baby shows and parties, were proof that they were being objectified. In these ‘pilgrim centres’, well-dressed women were either gazing at men or being gazed upon by them. Suman reduced craft exhibitions to nothing more than a cheap—the entry fee being three annas—opportunity for men to prey on women, even if from a distance. He pointed out that these places were not frequented by women with inner beauty and strength of character.

The premium on physical beauty and fashion in cinema and other facets of the public sphere had a spiralling impact on society, Suman said, that resulted in men seeking only beautiful and fashionable women in marriage, pointing to matrimonial ads in papers as evidence. ‘Civilized and independent modern women have created a thirst for beauty among men. Today it is easier for an ill-behaved but beautiful girl to get married than one who is healthy, hard-working and talented but not so beautiful.’ He further lamented that self-assertive educated women led to disintegration of homes: ‘Grihalakshmis are disappearing and so are grihas (homes).’

Of the various modern ‘pilgrim centres’ listed by Suman, Poddar detested cinema the most. His quarrel was with the intrinsic nature of movies. Even if the script was good and the film had educative value, there was still the emphasis on physical beauty and the possibility of men and women coming closer. He said as long as men played the roles of women it was fine, but when women started acting problems began. ‘Howsoever good the character of a man may be, the constant company of a woman causes lust. Men and women are constructed differently and there is always a desire for physical union, especially when young.’
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He said modern cinema presented pitfalls at every step: obscene songs, sexual jokes, semi-naked dancing, stories replete with immorality, and the suggestive looks and gestures of actresses. Poddar was worried that cinema had moved away from its early missionary zeal and become a moneymaking enterprise in which businessmen were investing crores of rupees. Even educated women, he said, were getting attracted to act in movies with men and willing to sacrifice their family’s honour and prestige.

For Poddar the seeds of decay had been sown in Europe, where, ‘A woman can joke and play with anyone, drink with other men, go out with them while her father and husband are not supposed to say anything. This is the sign of civilization. O Indian devis who once considered sati supreme, you have lost sight of your pious goal by gravitating towards the well of doom.’
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Using the oft-repeated cliche of female physical weakness that necessitated protection by father, brother, husband or son, Poddar argued that even in Western countries, where women were more independent, they could not venture out like men. This was because women had maternal instincts and had to bear children. Poddar consoled woman for her weakness, saying, ‘in her physical dependence she is free in spirit because of her intrinsic qualities of forbearance, selflessness, tolerance and ascetic fervour. Men may work all their life to acquire these qualities but they rarely succeed.’
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Kalyan’s Nari Ank
extracted short pieces from the writings of diverse people, from noted progressive Hindi writer Premchand who admonished his Indian ‘sisters for borrowing from Western ideals and reducing themselves to instruments of pleasure’
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to Adolf Hitler appealing to German women not to get involved with the outside world but confine themselves to becoming good housewives and mothers.
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An extract from Colonel James Tod and William Crooke’s
Annals and
Antiquities of Rajasthan
praised the domestic happiness and independence of Rajput women who stayed within the home by choice.
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Poddar cited a Labour MP’s speech in the British parliament in which he reportedly said 40 per cent of girls under twenty got pregnant before marriage, and among married women the first child was illegitimate in 25 per cent of the cases. If Poddar was to be believed, the Labour MP had said British society had never before witnessed such moral decay.
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Taking Britain to be representative of the entire Western world, Poddar said that Western family life had been destroyed: ‘Women there are no longer the queens of homes. A beautiful and ideal domestic life is beyond their imagination . . . Lure of individual liberty and free love has made them run from one man to the other. They have to sell their love at various places, knock on the doors of several employers for jobs and return home disappointed after finding “No Vacancy” notices. What kind of a freedom and happiness is this? Unfortunately, Indian women are also moving towards this . . .’

As before, Poddar ascribed the blame to the education system that made women literate but failed to provide complete education or elevate their mind. Real education, he argued, prepared a person to carry out his/her duties as sanctioned by dharma
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In the present context, Poddar was referring to nari dharma: ‘In Europe, women’s education has failed. Had they received education naturally suited to their gender it would have done them a world of good. Unnatural education to women has caused immense damage to them.’

Citing rather strange findings from an unknown source, Poddar said 70 per cent of women in America had been found incapable of performing domestic chores and 60 per cent were single and past the age of marriage (not mentioning what that age was). In the absence of marriage, Poddar said, women acted as they felt, led unprincipled lives and indulged in debauchery. ‘The population of unmarried women is on the rise. They do not have the pleasure of home. In Europe, at least 50 per cent of educated women remain spinsters. Is this all-round development?’

Another matter for concern, Poddar claimed, was the blurring of gender differences—with women taking to physical exercise in a big way, making them more masculine at the cost of their feminine and maternal selves. On the other hand, he noticed, there was a growing tendency among men to beautify themselves like women. Women—whose bodies and minds needed to be disciplined through an exhaustive set of rules ‘to ensure the birthing and nurturing of strong heroic sons for the Hindu community-nation’
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—were not expected to shy away from their duty by assuming masculine traits. However, Poddar as well as the RSS supported the idea of women not being pacifists in the public sphere.
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Poddar said that a woman should become Durga to punish anyone who caused harm to her husband or son; the fierce Hindu goddesses Kali and Durga are worshipped as the Mother.
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For Gita Press, nothing was more serious or posed a greater threat to the religious sanctity of Hindu marriage than divorce. While the dharmashastras ‘liberally permitted the husband to remarry during the lifetime of the first wife’, they denied the ‘remedy of divorce’ to the wife, ‘even when completely forsaken by the husband’.
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Livia Holden makes a compelling argument when she says: ‘It seems, in other words, that the indissolubility of marriage is not particularly mobilized to prevent the celebration of subsequent marriages altogether, but rather to prevent the conceptualization of the Hindu divorce on the woman’s initiative.’
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Gita Press was barely four when the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) was born in Poona in 1927. In the coming years AIWC became the most effective flag bearer of rights for women. In the mid- 1930s, AIWC petitioned the government to set up an ‘all-India commission to consider the legal disabilities of women’.
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Put together in a pamphlet—
Lega
l Disabilities of Indian Women: A Plea for a
Commission of Enquiry
—written by Renuka Ray, legal secretary of AIWC, the thrust was on comprehensive legal reforms for women, especially personal and domestic laws. Following this, several new laws were passed, including the Hindu Woman’s Right to Divorce Act and the Muslim Women’s Right to Divorce Act.

The wave of reforms, even if half-hearted and seldom implemented, was enough to disturb Gita Press.
Kalyan
carried a piece by Ruprani ‘Syama’, a graduate, who ridiculed the view of divorce as a marker of civilized society.
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Syama wrote that talking of divorce in India, the land of sati and jauhar, was an insult to its women. Marriage in India was not a contract but a blending of two bodies and souls in which the woman completely merged herself with her husband, became part of him without caring for her own identity. Calling a woman who divorced her husband the daughter of either a demon or an animal, Syama said that, in a Hindu marriage, the woman was not only an object to satisfy her husband’s sexual needs but was meant to serve him selflessly, as had been the case since the dawn of civilization. The abala (weak) woman underwent pain, humiliation, oppression, but the joy of becoming a mother was the ultimate reward that outweighed all the suffering. Of course, Syama only talked of giving birth to a balak (male child) when describing the heavenly experience of being called maa (mother). She stressed throughout that the position of a woman in society was of a volunteer (swayamsevika) who did selfless service, not for recognition or money.

Syama contrasted the pious woman with one who sought divorce on the grounds that her husband abused or beat her, or had gone astray. In Europe and America, she said, newspapers were full of reports of divorce because marriage in that part of the world was a contract. ‘As long as I get food, clothes and freedom, I belong to you. The day freedom is curtailed there would be no relationship between us. Such self-obsessed, uninhibited women are a blot on the nation and society. They become rolling stones and either commit suicide or regret their acts for the rest of their lives.’ Divorce, she wrote, was an immoral act resorted to by women who wanted to move from one man to another. This entailed loss of character or satitva, a heavy price for a little freedom, which exposed the woman to sexual predators and often forced her to seek customers in the marketplace.

She also chided men for seeking divorce on the grounds that their wives were quarrelsome, insensitive or made life hell for them. Her advice that men should become like Lord Rama if they wanted their wives to act like Sita. Syama advised them to treat their wives with sensitivity and win them over to the right track. But this advice to men was brief; it was woman who was the villain in a divorce.
Divorce came in for more criticism by Poddar in the late 1940s when the Nehru government was pursuing the Hindu Code Bill. Unlike the colonial period, when resistance to government’s social legislation could be couched in the garb of nationalism, the government of free India had to be opposed differently. Therefore, Poddar’s anti-divorce argument that had so far heavily relied on religious texts to show it as an alien practice unknown to the Hindu world was expanded now to include Western views on the evils of divorce. He cited the Pope’s concern about rising divorce rates in Europe. One M. McIntosh, a lady, was quoted as saying that the life of a man and a woman depended on two things, marriage and home, but the evil of divorce was destroying both of them. Another individual, a Doctor Denevel, stated that marriage meant responsibility and keeping a little window of divorce open could lead to regular attempts to escape from this responsibility.
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Poddar admitted that women, whether wives or widowed sisters, were at the receiving end of male oppression. But he was quick to argue that such cases were rare and the state should not bring in new legislation just because a few individuals/families had lost track of the adarsh (ideal), of respecting and caring for women.

In any case, using a veiled threat, Poddar argued that the divorce law if enacted would be more harmful to women than men. More men would resort to divorce, as moral decline was far greater among men than among women. He called on women to oppose the proposed legislation, regretting that educated Indian women were mistakenly welcoming it as a sign of progress.

 

Widowhood
In the December 1949 issue of
Kalyan
, Poddar’s column ‘
Kaam Ke
Patra
’ featured a letter from a widow belonging to an affluent family.
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All of twenty and mother of a child, her family wanted her to get married again, which she was resisting. She sought Poddar’s help, asking him what the shastras said about widow remarriage.

In his reply, Poddar lauded her ‘high thoughts’, saying that her resistance showed she was born in the tradition of Sita and Savitri, and encouraging her not to succumb to family pressure. Her present state of widowhood, he said, was the result of actions or sins of the previous life and the only way to emerge out of that condition could be through good deeds and worshipping God.