Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (59 page)

With the change in editorship of
Chand
(Sahgal had to resign in the face of strong state action and precarious financial position), the radical spirit and mission of the journal lost its direction. Under Mahadevi Varma, who had written some of her earliest pieces for
Chand
and had done the unthinkable in those days by opting out of her marriage, the journal became a women’s magazine. It also became more middle class in its orientation by ‘accepting class and caste distinctions and gender limitations’.

These and other women’s journals became educated and uneducated women’s windows to the world.
¹³⁰
They not only ‘redefined gender roles within the domestic sphere, they also tackled women’s new role as members of a nation-to-be’ and ‘responsible female citizens’.
¹³¹
Despite the fact that it was men who financed most of these journals, they contested and produced a counter to what ‘male reformers had long deemed appropriate for women’.
¹³²

The celebration of colonial education for women by these journals was a major challenge to Gita Press’s mission of creating a world where women were confined to the inner spaces, holding the reins of domesticity and morality, while men were the masters outside.

For Gita Press, religious, social and cultural matters concerning women were important—these were addressed through
Kalyan
, a journal edited by men. A majority of the articles too were written by men, and reminded women about their duties towards family and nation, which could be accomplished only through strict adherence to scriptures and codes. The fact that
Kalyan
could be read by both men and women in the family made its journey into Hindu households easier.
Kalyan
carried the promise of bhakti (worship), gyan (knowledge) and vairagya (renunciation) to all its readers, irrespective of gender.

What also worked to
Kalyan
’s advantage was Gita Press’s attempt to remain apolitical, at least in its first decade. There would be an occasional article critical of the government or the Congress, but the journal ensured it did not run foul of the colonial government as its contemporaries
Chand
and
Hindu Panch
had. It was only in the 1940s that
Kalyan
’s open advocacy of violence was noticed and acted upon by the government. The initial period of non-confrontation, coupled with the wide Marwari network eager to distribute
Kalyan
across India, gave the journal an advantage that none of the women’s journals had. In a few years’ time,
Kalyan
had built an enviable and unheard-of circulation running into a few lakhs.

Gita Press was wise enough not to let men do all the talking.
Kalyan
opened its pages to women writers, even those who had been to Western- style schools and universities. But these women were role models, adarsh nari (ideal women) who were so well grounded in the Hindu ethos that the ‘polluting’ influence of colonial education could not permeate their souls. These were women who, despite modern education, argued in favour of women confining themselves to the private sphere. Their writings in
Kalyan
did not ‘reflect women’s real worlds and their real experiences’.
¹³³

As
Kalyan
did not welcome voices of dissent, the two leading women writers in Hindi of that period—Subhadra Kumari Chauhan and Mahadevi Varma—do not find place in the journal, either as role models or as contributors. Chauhan, a few years senior to Varma at Crosthwaite Girls School, Allahabad, was her close friend. A woman of the public sphere, Chauhan did not let her conservative background act as a barrier to her being a satyagrahi during the nationalist movement and a writer demanding equality for women.
¹³⁴

Varma was a rebel in both private and public spheres. Married at the insistence of her grandfather at the age of nine, she refused to join her husband after completing her graduation. The years at her parents’ home were spent in getting educated and dabbling in literary pursuits. Varma made her mark as a poet and writer in
Chand
, and went on to become one of the big four of the chhayavad movement in Hindi poetry. Breaking away from marriage and remaining single for life made Varma a pariah for Gita Press. Her lifelong work for women’s education through the Prayag Mahila Vidyapith, where she introduced innovations like ‘private study followed by formal certification’,
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challenged the core of the moral order that Gita Press was seeking to establish.

Of the hundreds of women who contributed to
Kalyan
—within the limitations imposed by Gita Press—just three stand out for their achievements outside the home. However, in writing for
Kalyan
, they too confined themselves to subjects and views that did not challenge the journal’s prescribed patriarchal norms for women.

R.S. Subbalakshmi, or Sister Subbalakshmi as she was called, came from an educated family of Madras. Born in 1886 to an engineer father and a housewife mother, she was married at eleven, after little over four years of schooling. Early widowhood brought her back to her parents in Tanjore district. Father Subramania Iyer, instead of following the prescribed rules for widows, chose to educate his daughter. In order to escape the violent reaction his decision created in Tanjore, a seat of brahmin conservatism, the family moved to Madras city. After a mix of home and convent school education, Subbalakshmi did her matriculation and joined Presidency College, drawing the further wrath of conservatives. She was ‘threatened with excommunication, harassed in the streets and ostracized in the classroom’.
¹³⁶

After her graduation, Subbalakshmi opened a school for widows at her parents’ home. With the support of Miss Christina Lynch, inspectress of female education in Coimbatore, Subbalakshmi shifted the school to Triplicane in Madras, where it was run from a former ice house, drawing scorn from the conservative locals. Later, she became the principal of Lady Willingdon Training College and Practice School that trained women as elementary, high school and secondary school teachers, maintaining a balance between teaching in English and moral and religious training. She then opened Sarada Vidyalaya, a boarding school for adult widows. However, this school was run in an orthodox fashion, a contrast with her own life as a widow.

Decorated with the Padma Shri in 1958, Subbalakshmi wrote for
Kalya
n
in the 1930s. But we do not find a single article by her related to the pioneering work she did in women’s (particularly widows’) education. The four articles she penned for
Kalyan
were on the topics of oneness of God, Shiva, Krishna and spiritual power. This choice of subjects by Gita Press was clearly deliberate, ignoring her identity as an educationist.

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was all that Gita Press would not want to see in a Hindu woman. A sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, educated at home by English tutors and then abroad, Vijaya Lakshmi entered public life in the 1930s. In 1937, she was elected to the provincial assembly of the United Provinces and became a minister. She had married Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, a barrister and nationalist, of her own volition and was Western in her outlook. A successful diplomat, Vijaya Lakshmi served as India’s ambassador to various nations. The high watermark of her career was her election as the first woman president of the UN General Assembly in 1953.

Poddar would have never considered Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit as a contributor. But in the mid-1960s, her article ‘
Aaj Ka Bharat
’ (Today’s India) in
Navbharat Times
, a Hindi daily, came to his notice.
Kalyan
reproduced it in full with an editorial comment lauding her for the definition of modernity she had provided.
¹³⁷
Poddar appealed to readers to learn from her article not to confuse everything contemporary with modernity.

Pandit wrote of her varied experiences abroad and how she had not succumbed to the Western lifestyle. In 1954, when she had delivered a lecture to a group of women in Japan, one young woman had asked her: ‘You are wearing the traditional Indian dress. How can you be modern?’

When a question arose as to how to greet Queen Elizabeth of England and other members of the royal family, Pandit said that while many ‘modern’ Indian women resorted to Western methods she stuck to the Hindu system of namaskar and found that many in the gathering followed suit. Further, when the wife of a diplomat got an audience with the Pope and the question of how she should greet him arose, the Vatican authorities told her to do a namaskar.

Wherever Pandit lived, the food in her house, she said, was served even to foreign guests in the Indian thali. Also, she preferred to eat with her hands rather than use fork and knife. She spoke of the mad rush in India to become modern, often reflected in dress, especially of women, and expressed concern that this could lead to the demise of the sari and salwar-kameez.

Pandit was particularly irked that Indians, instead of understanding what had made the Britishers successful in India, merely imitated their manners. The worst reflection of this mindset, she said, could be seen in the way many Indians were discarding their mother tongue in favour of English. She recalled that, despite the importance given to English language and literature in her home, the children were always encouraged to speak with each other and family members in Hindi or Urdu. Pandit wrote: ‘In order to imitate Western manners and customs symbolically, we have abandoned solid values of sanatan . . . What we have embraced in their place does look like part of the new world but I am confident it is not suitable for us.’

Far removed from the world of Subbalakshmi and Pandit was Raihana Tyabji, whose Radha–Krishna relationship with Poddar has been dealt with earlier. Her life deserves a full book, but here I confine myself to her writings in
Kalyan.
She was, of course, best known as author of
Th
e Heart of a Gopi
published in 1936, an eternal classic that was translated into many European languages and widely quoted in varied fora, from ‘academic studies of Hinduism and websites on spirituality to a blog on God and even the official George Harrison messageboard’.
¹³⁸

Of the nine pieces she wrote for
Kalyan
, at least four were directly about Krishna, written in a highly evocative, conversational style. In contrast to Raihana’s numerous letters to Poddar, that often talked of her innermost feelings, her articles drew a ‘metaphorical veil’ over her personal experiences, yet are ‘valid accounts’ of these.

Coming from a family where women had been at the forefront of breaking the barriers of patriarchy, Raihana not only participated in the national struggle but supported the Sarda Act of 1929. This reformist streak in Raihana as well as her single status are possible reasons why Poddar did not commission her to write on women’s issues either in
Nari Ank
or any other issue of
Kalyan.

The restriction of its discursive sphere to women writers of a certain kind—firm followers and practitioners of the male-created code—kept
Kalyan
in the good books of its readers, many of whom looked to it for moral and spiritual succour as long as Poddar was alive. It was this conservatism that would attract women readers of
Kalyan
, struggling to come to terms with the changes in society, to share their angst with Poddar either through private correspondence or through the pages of
Kalyan.
Poddar took their faith in him very seriously.

Take the case of Anasuya Devi who wrote to Poddar of her terrible experience. She told him that in certain cities innocent and unsuspecting women were being picked up and taken to army camps by female agents. Once in the camp, she wrote, the women were made to sleep with jawans—each woman was expected to have sex with twenty-four jawans for fifteen minutes each. According to Anasuya, the women were paid Rs 10 per jawan, and in the morning they would be sent back. The women agents who procured these helpless women were paid Rs 100. Anasuya wrote that she could not believe that the Indian government would stoop to this level of moral decay, and was also at a loss to comprehend how soldiers, entrusted with the task of defending the nation, could indulge in such an activity. She said at this rate India would become Pakistan, and requested Poddar to intervene.
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Anasuya’s threat to commit suicide may have propelled Poddar to write to the then defence minister Swaran Singh: ‘Her tearful appeal to me to save her sisters from this fearful and hateful situation has led me to approach a man of high character and strict discipline like you for doing the needful in the matter which demands immediate and strong attention.’
¹⁴⁰

Poddar reminded the defence minister of the ‘proud reputation of the Indian army, which never indulged in the molestation of women even of conquered territories’. He demanded an inquiry into Anasuya’s allegations and, if found true, an immediate end to the practice with ‘iron hands’. Swaran Singh’s reply, if any, is not among the Poddar Papers, but what is established is the public perception of Gita Press as defender of the virtue of Hindu women.

 

Education of the Male child
The moral universe of Gita Press had women at its core, while men and children, the male child to be specific, inhabited the concentric sphere around. Women with their knowledge of the religious texts were supposed to foster the right atmosphere in the home and keep their men from getting carried away by Western influences so that they remained loyal to Hindu values and morals. An abiding concern of Gita Press was that colonial education had led Hindu men to forget their religion and that the strength of the community was weakening as a result.

Gita Press considered the entire nation as a classroom, and its journal
Kalyan
and hundreds of other publications as the means of pedagogy.
¹⁴¹
The exercise of training and educating the Hindu male child was undertaken in parallel to the colonial education that he was getting in school, that allowed for ‘no possibility of the inclusion of the indigenous knowledge and cultural forms.’
¹⁴²