Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (60 page)

Even more fearsome for Gita Press than colonial education, was the influence that social reformers—imbued with Western ideals—wielded over the masses. While the reformist agenda was to ‘use the liberal philosophy of the West’ in their nationalist project, the revivalist aim was to use India’s ancient history, its heritage, its religious texts and heroes to ‘culturally train the masses in their own tradition’ to take on the colonial rulers.
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While Gita Press took upon itself the task of educating the masses, its primary focus was the Hindu male child. This education was to begin even before the child went to school, his first step into the outer world. If women were contributors to the nation’s ‘present’, children—specifically male children—were crucial to its ‘future’. Maybe it was concern for the future of the newly born India that was behind the decision to bring out a special issue of
Kalyan
on the male child (
Balak
Ank
) within three years of India becoming a republic, while
Nari Ank
had come out a year after Independence.

By 1953, the year of
Balak Ank
, there was a growing realization among Hindu nationalists that Nehruvian India and its new temples—dams and heavy industry—did not correspond to their vision of a Hindu nation.
Kalyan
’s special issue had a bit of everything to make the male child an ideal Hindu citizen: lessons in morality, politics, religion; emphasis on physical education, religious texts, family values; examples from the lives of leaders like Tilak, Gandhi, Malaviya, Sri Aurobindo, Chittaranjan Das, Subhas Chandra Bose, Napoleon, George Washington, Henry David Thoreau, Bharatendu Harishchandra, Birbal, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and many more.

Hindu Mahasabha leader N.C. Chatterjee wrote about the uncertain and gloomy future of the Hindus, and by implication of India, if the policy of secularism was followed.
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Chatterjee’s article was a rabble-rousing appeal to youth to embrace Hindutva. He said Hindutva had not rejected the importance of secularism and worldly things, but if the nation had to make the right kind of progress the necessary energy would come only from the Hindu dharma.

Chatterjee’s anger was directed at the helplessness of the Nehru government to get Hindus in Pakistani jails released. He said when he raised the matter in the Lok Sabha, the minister in charge of minority affairs only said that he had written to the Pakistan government. ‘At this Gwalior MP Narayan Bhaskar Khare protested, but all that Nehru and his cabinet colleagues could do was to look the other way,’ Chatterjee wrote. He asked the ‘coward rulers who hide behind the notion of secularism’ to protect the interests of the Hindu minorities in Kashmir and East Pakistan.

Chatterjee said India’s future did not lie in communism, Marxism or Gandhism but only in following the principles of selfless service enshrined in the Gita. He appealed to Hindus not to step back as the bugle call for change had been made and the time had come to fight the unholy forces.

RSS leader Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar in a highly complex article explained what it takes to be free from the cycle of rebirth. Asking parents to take up the job of bringing up a child seriously, Golwalkar said an education system that gave importance only to information and learning by rote could not inculcate moral values in a child. Educational institutions, he said, saw themselves as nothing more than factories producing useless servants without any moral values.
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Arguing that creation of a morally superior male child depended on a host of factors ranging from values inherited from parents to the social context he inhabits, Golwalkar gave an instance of how inherited values could be subsumed or corrupted by social influences. Golwalkar said, while attending the funeral procession of Sardar Patel, he found that even as leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and others looked sombre and walked slowly, a section of the crowd was shouting as if in celebration. On inquiry, he was told that the appearance of a film actor in funeral procession had caused excitement among the people, causing them to forget the solemnity of the occasion. Education, Golwalkar said, should strive to build respect for truly great men.

In a short message, N.B. Khare said, as future citizens, male children were the real asset of the nation. Children should be made aware of the consequences of indiscipline and impoliteness that were themselves a result of spouting the slogan of secularism all the time, the existence of cinema halls and lack of religious education in schools.
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Regardless of what Chatterjee, Golwalkar and Khare expected from Hindu youth, the task of cultivating Hindu morality among them had many impediments. Gita Press considered the impact of obscene literature, journals and cinema to be the most damaging of these.

Through three separate articles, the
Balak Ank
mapped the moral danger posed by the printed word and moving pictures. Stories, novels and drama, it was said, were full of obscenities and it appeared that highlighting lust and immorality in literature had become an art form. The article severely criticized the dictum of ‘art for art’s sake’ and argued that such art spelt doom for society.
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Obscene literature worked differently for a young male child and an adult; at a young age the tendency was to learn and imitate: ‘Therefore, if obscenity is dished out to them they will learn it immediately and get habituated to it.’ The perils of such imitation were already evident in the manner in which loyalty to husband (pativrata) was termed as slavery and in the rude behaviour of boys and girls towards their teachers. The article asked how it was possible to maintain high moral standards if obscene literature continued to corrupt young minds.

More than literature, cheap and easily accessible newspapers and journals had become potent vehicles of obscenity, arousing sexual tendencies among young male children. The
Kalyan
article accused them of regularly publishing semi-naked photographs of women along with obscene poems and stories, and questioned their motive in pushing the nation and society into the well of darkness.
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It said once a boy got used to such writings he wanted to read them repeatedly and even secretly. ‘He imbibes bad habits like being disrespectful to elders and teachers, and teases women. Repeated reading of obscene journals arouses him, forcing him to masturbate and that leaves him with sperm- related problems.’ Besides, such moral decay caused boys to become irreverent towards India’s ancient heritage, history, its customs, saints and heroes. The article made a plea for parental control over the reading material that was accessible to their male children.

Gita Press’s critique of literature and journals paled before what it had to say about cinema and film journals, considered the worst vehicle of moral decay among youth.
Balak Ank
claimed there was near unanimity among scholars and learned politicians like C. Rajagopalachari, K.M. Munshi and others that cinema was polluting the minds and bodies of the younger generation.
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Cinema was accused of spawning a craze for fashion among boys and girls, from
Awaara
and
Barsaat
bush-shirts to saris named after successful female actors like Madhubala, Nargis and Suraiya. There were other ways in which cinema was influencing the new generation, the article said. As models for consumer products, actors were omnipresent in everyday life, staring out from soap wrappers, hair oil bottles and even medicines. Their influence had extended to college elections where the support of some actor was needed to ensure victory.

Gita Press, that had worked consciously to popularize Hindu iconography, could not fathom the way film actors had eclipsed gods and sages as icons among the youth. Requesting the government to exercise control on cinema, Gita Press also demanded a ban on film magazines as they made children aspire to a life of glamour and luxury.
Balak Ank
pointed to the growing trend among boys and girls to run away from home to try their luck in Bombay films. Thereafter, lack of work often forced the girls to become prostitutes, while the boys returned home after spending all their money. Readers were requested to discontinue subscriptions to film magazines to exert pressure on their publishers to dilute the content that had destroyed etiquette, modesty and morality among people.

Another article recommended that rather than entertainment, films should become a tool of education for children, as the combination of visuals and sound could help them grasp complex issues easily: ‘Educating the male child can be a comprehensive experiment. It can emphasize many subjects like literature, religion, geography, history, science and commerce . . . Indian economy is not so robust as to allow making of big-budget educational films. Therefore, we need small-budget documentaries that can be taken to the remotest of villages.’
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In his editorial comment, Poddar agreed it would be impossible to ban cinema completely. However, he suggested widespread reforms to make cinema socially relevant: ‘First and foremost, female actors should be thrown out completely. They are the root cause of all evil. Second, films should not consist of anything that perverts the mind. There will be hungama (noisy protest) at first, but then people will get used to the changes. In any case, entertainment value will still be there in films sans the immoral stuff. The Censor Board can also usher in some changes.’
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 Whenever possible, Poddar and people close to him kept a keen eye on movies and their contents. In 1957, Vishnu Hari Dalmia, the eldest child of Jaidayal Dalmia, wrote to then information and broadcasting minister, complaining against film producers who ‘frequently distort mythological stories, on which many of their productions are based’, as a result of which ‘instead of educating the masses in the virtues which our mythology is intended to convey and which draw their inspiration from our ancient literature and culture, they tend to give rise in the minds of the common man disrespect for our religion and our gods’.
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These were Vishnu Hari’s pre-VHP days, but his communal tone and tenor were very much in place. He told the I&B minister that it was ‘tragic that our Hindu society should tolerate a violation of such fundamentals by film producers’. He reminded the minister that ‘in no other community would this be allowed’ and gave instances (without getting into specifics) of Muslims and Christians taking exception to movies that had incorrectly shown aspects of their religions. He called for ‘early and suitable provisions in the regulations governing the functioning of the Film Censor Board’ for attention to be paid to mythological films.

Within a few months, Dalmia had a specific complaint about a film’s distortion of Hindu mythology. The movie was
Rama–Hanuman
Yudh
that showed Rama and Hanuman battling each other, whereas in the Ramayana, Hanuman is an acolyte of Rama. When an outraged Dalmia complained to the Censor Board, the Board replied that reference to such a battle existed in
Sudarshan Samhita
. Dalmia then referred the matter to Chimmanlal Gosvami.
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Within three days, Dalmia was informed by another source that Valmiki’s
Uttar Ramayana
indeed talked of such a battle; still, he wanted to be sure and asked Gosvami to check further.
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In the mid-1960s it was Poddar’s turn to be aggrieved with what he saw on Doordarshan, the state-owned television network. He was upset that immediately after the telecast of the film
Bal Ramayana
, a foreign film called
Bull Fighting
had been shown. In this film a bull was violently incapacitated by a sword and other weapons before being tied to a horse carriage, dragged and killed. The movie, Poddar told I&B minister Satyanarayan Sinha, showed the flesh of the bull being cut and eaten. Claiming that
Bull Fighting
had caused grievous injury to Hindu sensibilities, Poddar requested Sinha to ensure such movies were never telecast in the land of ‘Rama, Krishna and Mahatma Gandhi’.
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To the triad of literature, journals and cinema, Gita Press added beauty products and the obsession to look beautiful as another factor destroying Indian youth, male and female alike. An article in
Balak Ank
exhibited a deep-seated bias against refugees from Punjab, especially girls and women, who were mocked for paying more attention to their outer beauty and less to the soul.
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To make the point, a story was narrated, full of gaping holes, when a few girls living in post-Partition refugee camps were said to have complained to a government official about beauty products being in short supply. The article continued, ‘Even today there are enough instances of such addiction (to products like powder, perfume, cream and lipstick) especially among families that have been uprooted from Punjab. Economically their life is very tough. They regularly face shortage of food and clothes, but still spend a major chunk of their income on beauty products.’

The use of beauty products, the article continued, was not only a drain on a family’s finances but also destroyed character and health. However, at the base of this criticism was insecurity about women crossing the threshold of patriarchal control, which led to an argument of the type common among male and female guardians of morality even today: ‘These women decorate themselves like butterflies and roam in the market without covering their head and with naked arms and half- naked body. Then they complain of men leering and teasing them. What else can be the motive behind becoming an object of exhibition?’

Repeating the old argument that women should dress up only for their husbands, the same article made another offensive statement: ‘I remember that in our childhood there was a notion that a woman who wears make-up and gaudy saris and shamelessly mixes with men has to be a prostitute. But the manner in which girls of respectable families come out in public today—even prostitutes did not behave like that 25–30 years ago.’