Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (7 page)

The internment order signed by J.G. Cummings, secretary to the Government of Bengal, said: ‘. . . in the opinion of the government of Bengal, there are reasonable grounds for believing that Hanuman Prasad Poddar . . . has acted, is acting and is about to act in a manner prejudicial to the public safety’. Poddar was then directed to report to the superintendent of police of Bankura, where the SP ordered Poddar to live in the house of Adhar Chandra Rai—letting the police have free access to his room at any time. His movements were limited to a small area around the house, and he was banned from interacting with anyone ‘not permanently domiciled within the limits of village’. Significantly, he was not allowed to speak with schoolchildren, students or schoolteachers.
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In January 1917, news came that Ramkaur was seriously ill, and on 12 January Poddar was given a week’s parole to visit her. She passed away in December 1917, when Poddar was given two weeks’ parole ‘to put his affairs in order’. The government turned down his request for a third parole in April 1918, and in May 1918 came the order that he was not to ‘enter, reside or remain within the confines of the province of Bengal’.
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After fifteen months of internment, his wife Ramdei was allowed to join him.

Poddar’s life had taken a different direction during the confinement in Simlapal; as he later admitted, the experience brought him closer to God. He would also never forget how the Marwari world of Calcutta had shunned his family. His distant cousin Jaydayal Goyandka (whose alter ego he would become in the future), Banarsidas Jhunjhunwala (member of the Marwari Sahayak Samiti and Poddar’s co-accomplice in the Rodda Conspiracy but not an accused), and friends Jhavarmal Sharma and Ramkumar Goyanka were the few people who had visited his family and helped them. The rest of the Marwari world of Burrabazar, led by the elders, had been busy shedding its revolutionary skin.

Less than a month after the arrests, the Marwari community had sought the help of Sir Kailash Chandra Bose to restore their standing with the British government. Bose was invited as a special guest to the meeting of the Marwari Association. Outgoing president Rai Bissesar Lall Halwasya Bahadur set the tone when referring to the arrests, saying, ‘Marwari community is deeply attached to the government and we therefore hope that the arrested young men will be fully able to vindicate their character.’ More important, he exhorted young Marwaris to ‘remain free from the contamination of political thoughts and ideas of harmful nature’. In his speech, Bose ‘dwelt on the loyalty of the Marwari community, which he said was always regarded as an object of admiration by the other communities’. He ‘regretted the recent arrests of some Marwari youth, and hoped that this would prove only a solitary instance’.
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Thus, the one revolutionary act of the Marwaris was suppressed by the dominant conservative elements in the community with a zeal that was no less revolutionary. The protagonists of the Rodda Conspiracy were exhorted to keep away from politics for the rest of their life. G.D. Birla was soon back in Calcutta and got active with business and community affairs through the Marwari Relief Society. He became one of Gandhi’s closest aides and a proponent of ahimsa. Himmatsingka, then a law student, was to become a prominent lawyer, while Poddar would be the stormy petrel of religious publishing in the country.

 

Bombay: A New Direction
With the externment order in hand and a young wife and a half-sister to take care of, Hanuman Prasad Poddar now faced the problem of finding work. The Marwaris of Calcutta had already distanced themselves from him, so the family headed for their native Ratangarh, but work did not come.

One day a letter arrived from Jamnalal Bajaj, asking Poddar to come to Bombay. Bajaj promised to get Poddar started in business in this commercial centre. What awaited Poddar when he arrived in Bombay in 1919 was a huge network of intellectuals, political leaders and philanthropists; also a new Marwari world less closed than that in Calcutta, owing to its new-found wealth from industry and interaction with the wider world. This account of Poddar’s Bombay years is entirely based on interviews he gave to close aide Gambhirchand Dujari, which also formed the basis for Poddar’s biography by Bhagwati Prasad Singh.

Jamnalal Bajaj, the leading light of the Bombay business world and one among the few industrialists who were close to Gandhi, stood by his promise to Poddar, though the latter’s experience of business was scant. In fact, most of the accounts on Poddar are silent about his independent business in Calcutta, though he himself mentioned to Gambhirchand Dujari that he had a jute business in Dacca in partnership with Naurangrai Ramchandra, and that during one of his business trips there in 1912 he had met Ma Anandamayi.

In Bombay, Bajaj helped Poddar start various ventures, from a brokerage firm in partnership with Gulabrai Nemani dealing in cotton, to share brokerage with Srinivas Das Balkrishnalal Poddar, owner of the firm Tarachand Ghanshyamdas, and finally a linseed brokerage firm with Bajaj’s brother-in-law and chief accountant Chiranjilal Jajodia.

Business in Bombay did not enrich Poddar, but it helped him in one significant way. The new avatar ensured that the order banning him from entering Bengal was withdrawn. However, Calcutta would never be his home again.

Poddar built up a large social network of friends, admirers and acquaintances in Bombay through the spiritual world of satsang, bhajans and the All India Marwari Aggarwal Mahasabha started by the Bombay Marwaris in 1919, of which Poddar became the regional secretary in 1920.

Goyandka visited Bombay in 1922 with his entourage for a religious discourse—a defining moment for Poddar. Gradually he became involved with discourses on the Gita. Occasionally, satsangs would take place in the Marwari school where Ram Manohar Lohia was a regular at Gita classes. Goyandka’s Satsang Bhavan came up in the wadi (estate) of Shivnarain Nemani, a prominent Marwari businessman, actively involved in the Marwari Aggarwal Mahasabha. Soon, Satsang Bhavan in Kalbadevi became a regular stop for religious men from all over India. Thus began Poddar’s tryst with the spiritual world that would become his life. Also, the network he built with gurus and sanyasis would later provide
Kalyan
with ready-made contributors.

One interesting friendship he built in Bombay during his religious discourse days was with Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, the doyen of Hindustani classical music and an exponent of the Gwalior gharana. When Poddar met Paluskar in Bombay the latter was already established as a master vocalist and was running the hugely popular Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, first set up in 1901 in Lahore along with a printing press to publish books on music. Born into a family of kirtankars (singers of kirtans, religious songs) in Maharashtra’s Kurundwad, Paluskar met Poddar at one of the religious discourses of which kirtans formed an important part. Paluskar would sing as well as give talks on the Ramayana. Poddar saw Paluskar mesmerize thousands of people at the Ahmedabad Congress in 1921. A regular at Congress sessions, Paluskar would open the proceedings with ‘
Raghupati Raghav Raja
Ram
’ and the version popularized by him was Gandhi’s favourite.

Paluskar took Poddar under his wing, visiting him regularly to give him music lessons. Though Poddar’s involvement with myriad issues left him no time to complete his musical training, his private papers claim that one of the bhajans he wrote—‘
Mere To Ram Naam Adhar
’—became a favourite with Paluskar who would begin every discourse with it. Paluskar set up an ashram in Nasik named Ram Naam Adhar. The association between the two continued for a long time, Poddar using his wide Marwari network to help Paluskar tide over serious threats from creditors, attending his concerts and his discourses at the Allahabad Kumbh Mela of 1930, which also saw the daily presence of Madan Mohan Malaviya and Jawaharlal Nehru’s mother Swarup Rani.

Paluskar died in 1931, and in 1956 Gita Press published
Sangeet
Ramcharitmanas
, a collection of eighty-nine songs composed by him based on the
Ramcharitmanas
, consisting of khayal, thumri and dhrupad.
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It is likely that Ghanshyam Das Birla’s youngest son Basant Kumar Birla bankrolled the publication. Junior Birla repeatedly wrote to Poddar throughout 1955, requesting him to write the foreword to the book. Initially, Birla had wanted to publish the book in Calcutta and leave the distribution to Gita Press as it ‘was famous for making religious and bhakti books available to the general public’.
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He also requested Poddar to sell the book at a cheap rate. But later, the whole process of publication was left to Gita Press. At Birla’s request, Banaras Hindu University had already made the musical notations of the work.

Meanwhile, misfortune continued to haunt Poddar’s personal world. His first child with Ramdei, a son born in 1920, passed away after eighteen months. He arranged the marriages of his two younger sisters, Annapurna and Chanda, in 1919 and 1922 respectively. Soon after, Chanda committed suicide by jumping into a well at her in-laws’ house in Bombay. Poddar’s private papers are largely silent about the reasons for her death, except for admitting that Chanda’s in-laws were unhappy with her for some reason. Poddar decided not to pursue the case of his sister’s untimely death and told the police that she had slipped into the well by mistake.

Personal tragedies, minor or major, would not deter Poddar from his public role, be it as a prominent figure in the Marwari world—their business, social or even private space—or at the national level on diverse issues like cow slaughter and the Hindu Code Bill. In Bombay, Poddar had acquired some reputation as a spiritual man. In the Poddar Papers there is an interesting set of questionnaire prepared by sociologist G.S. Ghurye and his research assistant R.V. Athaide of the School of Economics and Sociology, University of Bombay. The undated questionnaire ‘desired to ascertain the attitude of the educated in Bombay to certain religious and social problems’.
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Questions ranged from a person’s belief in God, relation between God and the universe, reconciliation between infinite wisdom, goodness and omnipotence of God to the existence of physical, social, moral and metaphysical evil to belief in life after death and relation between religion and science. Poddar’s response, if he gave one, is unavailable, but the questionnaire points to his formidable reputation. Thus Bombay became the site of his debut as a successful social and religious entrepreneur as he took up the editorship of the newly launched
Kalyan
in 1926. Poddar’s eight- year stint in the city ended in 1927.

 

Relations with Gandhi
Being close to Jamnalal Bajaj gave Poddar access to leaders like Tilak and Gandhi whom he had met and aspired to interact with while in Calcutta. Tilak became an acquaintance in Bombay, and Poddar mentioned in the interview for his biography that he had attended the Amritsar session of the Congress in 1919 as a Tilak supporter and openly sided with him when the resolution on Congress’s response to the Montague–Chelmsford reforms was being debated. Poddar also claimed he was with Tilak when he breathed his last in August 1920. This claim cannot be verified, but one possible reference is found in Dhananjay Keer’s highly adulatory biography of Tilak. Keer states that two days before Tilak’s death at Sardar Griha in Bombay, among the hundreds of people who trooped in to see the Maratha leader was one Marwari who distributed a thousand rupees among the poor.
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Poddar’s second claim—that Tilak had changed the opinion set out in his book,
Arctic Home in the Vedas
(1903), that the Vedas were composed in the Arctic (the original home of the Aryans, according to Tilak)—cannot be verified either. Poddar said that when Tilak died he had a revised manuscript ready, and that it disappeared.

But the most significant long-term relationship Poddar forged in Bombay due to his proximity with Bajaj was with Gandhi. Since their first meeting in Calcutta, Poddar had gone through a political baptism—joining revolutionaries, being imprisoned, attending Congress sessions and becoming close to the extreme elements within the Congress party. Meanwhile Gandhi had gained in stature—he was already the Mahatma. The relationship built between Poddar and Gandhi in Bombay was entirely on a personal plane; their divergent views on the Gita, Hinduism, Congress politics and minority and caste questions would occasionally come to the fore, but a degree of civility always existed. It is only in the early 1940s that Poddar’s angry disillusionment with the Congress and Gandhi would become evident in the pages of
Kalyan
.

Personally, Gandhi was extremely fond of Poddar. In a 1935 letter from Wardha, Gandhi expressed ‘happiness and satisfaction’ with Poddar’s views. ‘Sometimes I feel a man like you should stay with me. Bhai Jamnalal (Bajaj) also wants this. But wherever you are if you are mentally with me it is like staying with me. What you are doing through
Kalyan
and Gita Press is a great service to God. I feel I am part of what you are doing because you consider me your own and I consider you mine.’
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The relationship between the two had deepened in 1932 during the second civil disobedience movement, when Gandhi was lodged in Yerwada jail along with close associates Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Narayan Desai. His youngest son Devdas, of whom he had high expectations,
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had sought Gandhi’s permission to marry Lakshmi, daughter of C. Rajagopalachari. Soon after, Devdas was arrested and sent to Gorakhpur jail where he fell seriously ill with typhoid. Devdas’s deteriorating health put Gandhi through a great deal of stress. Adding to his worry was the fact that his letters were taking inordinately long to reach Devdas, being held up by censors.
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Poddar, who had moved to Gorakhpur in 1927, was remembered and his help requisitioned. Gandhi sent a frantic telegram on 16 June to Poddar: ‘Send Devdas temperature. Do you see him daily. How long suffering.’
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