Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Francesca Orsini
book reviewS
Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India
by Akshaya Mukul, Noida: Harper Collins India, 2015;
pp 539, Rs 799.
april 2, 2016
vol lI no 14
EPW
BOOK REVIEW
Vishnu Hari Dalmia. Though Mukul explores the attraction Poddar held over/
for women in some detailparticularly
Raihana Tyabji and the American Irene
Wolfingtonhe is more elusive about his
general charisma. Poddar was clearly an
extremely able and trusted mediator, a
prolific and articulate writer firmly rooted
in devotion and ritual practice, and a
well-connected and untiring campaigner.
Later photographs show him as a kind of
guru; he gave spiritual instruction and
advice to his readers in a monthly column;
the few spiritual discourses available on
Youtube are low key but reveal a firm
voice dispensing spiritual certainties.
Central Space in World of Hindi
Through the sheer scale and reach of their
operations, the Gita Press and Kalyan
occupy a central space in the world of
Hindi (and partly English) religious publishing in the 20th century. Religious
texts and pamphlets had appeared as
soon as printing became socialised and a
commercial enterprise in the 19th century,
as witnessed by the number of Urdu and
Hindi editions of Puranas, Ramayanas
and the songs of Bhakti poets. Apart
from the publications of local religious
establishments (maths, khanqas, etc),
other remarkable publishing ventures
include those of the Arya Samaj and the
Belvedere Presss Sant Vani series.
(Mukuls contention that the dissemination of religious texts by established
publishers like Naval Kishore Press
whose publications moreover petered out
in the early 20th centur ywould have
left no space for other religious publications in north India (p 21), seems unwarranted. There was always space for religious publications!) Some religious organisations, like the Bharat Dharma
Mahamandal of Banaras, ran journals,
though on a limited scale, but on the
whole mainstream Hindi journals tended
to follow Mahavir Prasad Dwivedis policy
of keeping religion out of their pages.
The Gita Press success rested, as Mukul
shows very well, on the twin bases
of Kalyan and of very cheap standard
editions of key religious texts, mainly the
Gita (71.9 million copies by 2014), Tulsis
Ramcharitmanas (70 million, with modern
Hindi and/or English translation), the
Economic & Political Weekly
EPW
april 2, 2016
vol lI no 14
BOOK REVIEW
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april 2, 2016
vol lI no 14
EPW