A Secret History of Modern India?

Francesca Orsini

o you remember Professor Devdas

Dharamdas Trivedi aka DDT from
Mahboobs film Andaaz? The
portly figure in a suit and solar topi who
insists on speaking shuddh Hindi and
enters the film exclaiming Paap, ghor
paap, mahapaap is the voice of conservative society who frowns at Ninas dosti
with Dilip (you cannot play a foreign/
vilayati raag on an Indian harmonium).
Yet menacing as he sounds, in the film
Professor DDT remains a figure of comedy,
a self-serving and servile hypocrite who
demands unlimited hospitality and is a
world apart from the films glamorous
ambience of parties, modern city life,
and free interaction between young men
and women. But what if Professor DDT
took/had taken over the film, banned
dance parties and replaced them with
satsang and bhajan sessions, quickly
married off Nina and Rajan, and turned
Rajan and Dilip into pious and industrious
young men, devoted to business and cow
protection? This is what reading Akshaya
Mukuls book on Hanuman Prasad Poddar
and the extraordinary success story of
the Gita Press of Gorakhpur feels like.
We are now very familiar with the
history of Hindu nationalism and its
various institutional bodies from the
late 19th century to the tragic killing of
Gandhi in January 1948, the following
years of political wilderness before its
resurgence in the 1980s and its present
Raj (but who can call it Ramrajya?).
We know about the ideology and
broad appeal of Hindu nationalism and
its mobilisation and capillary presence,
from urban mohallas to Adivasi areas.
But reading the history of the Gita Press
and its relentless anti-modernism, particularly in the decades between the 1950s
and the 1970s, feels like watching the
reverse side of Nehruvian India. In the
Hindi world this was the time of Progressive writing and Modernism (Nai Kavita),
of Nai Kahani and its exploration of the
30

book reviewS
Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India
by Akshaya Mukul, Noida: Harper Collins India, 2015;
pp 539, Rs 799.

frustrations of underemployment, the

tensions of new gender relations, and
the ups and downs of city life. It was also
the exciting time of modern Indian theatre, of thriving magazines like Dharmyug
and Saptahik Hindustan, and of extraordinarily diverse and experimental talents
like Phanishwarnath Renu, Dharmavir
Bharati, Krishna Sobti, to name just a few.
None of this cultural ferment transpires
in the pages of the Gita Presss monthly
journal, Kalyan. Its main critique is directed at modernity tout court, and any sign
of secularisation and welfarism, from
changes in gender roles to challenges to
family, caste, and religious authority are
perceived as dangerous threats to the
stability of Hindu dharma.
Poddar wrote in a letter in 1964,
Members of my own family despite knowing of my status act in a contrary fashion.
They go for movies, eat bread that is maybe
made by Muslims and untouchables. They
use glass utensils, eat each others jhootan
(leftovers), do not greet elders and do not
offer evening prayers. I observe all this and
cannot do anything about it.

Blurring the difference between secularisation and secularism, Kalyan attacked

the latter as responsible for the former.
Scintillating Read
This remarkable book is the result of
Mukuls wonderful discovery of Poddars
papers and his admirable persistence in
gradually gaining access to and trawling
through them. Yet the book carries this
archival weight lightly and makes for a
scintillating read. At its core stand two
Marwari figuresthe more shadowy Gita
Press founder Jaidayal Goyandka, a
businessman-turned-spiritualist, and the
indefatigable Hanuman Prasad Poddar,

who edited Kalyan from 1926 till his

death in 1971. Both came together, after
having worked as businessmen with
mixed success in Assam and the Central
Provinces, in the heady world of Calcutta,
where a small section of the Marwaris
had got involved in the subversive fringes
of nationalist politics. The Sanatan Dharm
Pushtikarini Sabha (Association for the
Nourishment of the Eternal Religion)
was one such small group that combined
religious fervour and activism for issues
like cow-protection with anticolonial
politics. Through the Sabha, Poddar
entered the world of Hindi journalism and
met important figures like Madan Mohan
Malaviya and Gandhi. He even had an
unpleasant brush with the police in connection with the Rodda Arms robbery case.
(He would be briefly arrested again together
with thousands of RSS and Hindu Mahasabha men in the aftermath of Gandhis
assassination.) This time, important Marwaris helped smooth over the case and
free the young Marwaris (G D Birla himself
was almost implicated). This was the
Calcutta Marwari youths single moment
under the revolutionary sun (p 43).
Poddar and Goyandka met again in
Bombay, where they found a huge network of intellectuals, political leaders
and philanthropists; also a new Marwari
world less closed than that in Calcutta
(p 47). Here, thanks to Jamnalal Bajaj,
Poddar got access to Tilak and became
close to Gandhi. Though Poddar distanced himself from the Congress in 1921
in favour of the Hindu Mahasabha and
broke with Gandhi over the issue of Dalit
access to temples in 1932, personal relations between them retained some
warmth, and Mukul shows that letters,
excerpts, and articles by Gandhi continued
to be published in Kalyan.
If the industrialist Poddar was closest
to was Ramkrishna Dalmia, for whom he
seems to have been a kind of personal guru,
politically he was generally close to the
Congress right (Malaviya, K M Munshi,
Sampurnanand, and P D Randon) as well
as to M S Golwalkar, Swami Karpatri,
and those involved in cow-protection
and Vishva Hindu Parishad politics like
Jugal Kishore Birla and Goyandka and

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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
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Bhagavata and other Puranas, Hindi

versions of the Mahabharata and of
Valmikis Ramayana, and long-lived
tracts of spiritual and moral instruction
of women and children (94.8 million).
These are stupendous numbers that
reveal a persistent and capillary presence
over almost a 100 years, thanks also to
the presence of Gita Press book stalls in
stations and at fairs. It is likely that if
you read Hindi, you will own a Gita Press
book (I do). Because the prices are kept
so low, this is not a multi-million making
business, though. As Mukuls book
shows, its real engine has been untiring
religious activism and propaganda.
The bulk of the book is dedicated to
Kalyan (initial run in 1922: 11,000 copies;
current run: 2,00,000, plus 1,00,000 for
the English version: Kalyan Kalpataru),
and it draws particularly upon its massive
annual issues, visheshank, some of which
have remained in print and gone through
multiple editions. How to do justice to such
a huge output? Mukul takes a number of
approaches: after giving us a history of
Poddar, Goyandka and the Press, he surveys the different kinds of contributors
before focusing largely on Kalyans politics
and gender views. Two chapters detail its
vocal opposition to everything from Dalit
temple entry to the Hindu Code Bill, the
Constitution, secularism and communism,
and its tireless support for cow-protection
(under the SGMS, the Sarvadaliya Goraksha
Maha Abhiyan Samiti, until the violent
demonstration in Delhi on 7 November
1966 that left eight people dead and put
a temporary dampener on the campaign),
for the Vishva Hindu Parishad, and for
the campaigns to restore the birthplaces of Ram and Krishna.
Drawing in detail from Kalyan articles
by Poddar and other contributors,
Mukul shows how centrally involved the
journal and Poddar were in all Hindu
right politics before and after 1947. Kalyans anti-communism found expression
in denunciations of godless Soviet Russia and in the claim that the Gita propounded a higher communism because
it did not exclude god. In the late 1960s,
Kalyan accused Indira Gandhis government of turning left, which involved
considering madira (alcohol), maans
(meat), machhli (fish), mudra (money)

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and maithun (sex) as liberating agents

(p 334). Poddars hurt sense of missed
entitlementwere Hindus, why arent
we deciding everything and setting all
the parameters in independent India, of
course from our inherently benevolent
attitudestrikes a very familiar echo.
Attitude towards Women
The chapter Moral Universe of Gita Press
focuses largely on the Gita Presss attitude
towards women, as revealed in Poddars
advice to women readers in distress and to
evergreen titles like Stri Dharma Prashnottari (Questions on womens dharma)
and Goyandkas Nari Dharma (Womens
Dharma, first published in 1938 and still
in print). The viewsfulminations against
modern education for girls, against
womens work and movement outside
the house, against womens interactions
beyond the familyare neither new
nor original. What is striking is rather
their longevity and continuity despite
all the social changes that have happened all around. I was reminded of Paola
Bacchettas work on RSS women activists
and the RSS camp in Nisha Pahujas 2012
film The World Before Her, both of which
show Hindu nationalist girls and women
learning to become tough, to fire guns
and shout violent slogans while parading
on the streets, yet voicing conservative
patriarchal ideas about womens roles
that they themselves are transgressing.
Mukuls focus on politics and gender
means that the specifically religious views
of Kalyan and the Gita Press are treated
more tangentially. On this topic the most
lucid assessment is still Monika Horstmanns 1995 article, Towards Universal
Dharma: Kalyan and the Tracts of the Gita
Press (in Dalmia and von Stietencrons
Representing Hinduism, Sage), where she
noted the modernity and selectiveness of
Kalyans approach to tradition, so that the
Vedas are invoked but not studied, and everyone, after a modest protestation of ignorance, can expound confidently on dharma.
In line with Hindu nationalist rhetoric,
most Kalyan issues and articles make an
initial show of openness and inclusiveness
followed by exclusivist views and strident
attacks. Kalyans 1955 special issue on
Sant poetry is a case in pointhundreds of
poet-saints draw a crowded upside-down
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map of India, yet little of their stringent

critiques of caste or religious authority
emerges to mar the overall picture of
devotion and unity.
All in all Kalyan and Kalyan Kalpataru
seem to have worked as platforms for a
wide range of sometimes unlikely contributors who greatly exceed the boundaries of Hindu nationalism, from Gandhi
and Premchand, Nirala and Harivansh
Rai Bachchan, to Woodroffe, Keith, and

32

Greaves. Yet some contributors also chose

Kalyan to express their most conservative views. Thus the great Hindi scholar
Vasudev Sharan Agrawal asked that the
Indian state adopt dharma as its leading
principle, on the basis that dharma is allencompassing and higher than individual
creeds and sects (maths and sampradays),
and that creeds and sects contrary to
dharma should be considered unlawful
(Horstmann 1995: 298).

This is a rich and timely book. It

shows what a rich archive Kalyan and
the Gita Press offer for the study of contemporary Hinduism and for Hindu
right views on everything from education to children, from caste and society
to politics.
Francesca Orsini (fo@soas.ac.uk) teaches at
the School for Oriental and African Ideas,
University of London.

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