The other day I was reading journalist Akshaya Mukul’s Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015) at a cafe in south Delhi, when a stranger at the adjacent table asked if he could take a look at the book. A 20-something Gen Z-er, he was surprised to see a detailed history of the publishing firm. Growing up, he had seen his parents and grandparents buy Hindi books from Gita Press, but had never imagined its impact on the making of modern India.
The young man’s perplexity is part of a larger symptom that afflicts generations of highly Anglicised Indians who are deracinated from the diversity of print cultures that thrive in Indian languages. Whatever end of the political spectrum you may be on, there is a grain of truth in the recent debate over the British parliamentarian T.B. Macaulay’s legacy of English education in India.
By distancing themselves from Indian languages, elite urbanites are losing touch with the ground reality of being modern and Indian.
A decade ago, when Mukul published his book, which has become essential to understand the rise of Hindutva politics, the current dispensation had just been elected with a landslide victory, displacing the decades-long hold of the Congress.
An uproar rose among liberal intelligentsia and citizenry over what was perceived to be a cataclysmic shift in the country’s secular identity. This theory, as scholars like Christophe Jaffrelot and Ashutosh Varshney have shown, ignores the complex and interlocking political exigencies that led to the formation of independent India.
In the last 10 years, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, followed by the Gujarat violence of 2002, have led to flashpoints of mob violence, “love jihad”, lynching of alleged cow slaughterers and “bulldozer justice”. But the seeds of division were planted long back and watered through the years, as Mukul’s exhaustive research reminds us.
“The persistence of Gita Press is remarkable,” as he says during a recent meeting in Delhi. “The so-called WhatsApp uncles and aunties didn’t turn rabid overnight.”
Going through the archives of Kalyan, the enduringly popular magazine published by Gita Press, feels like looking into a mirror. If you thought love jihad was a recent development, read the invective-laden articles that Hanuman Prasad Poddar, the founding editor of Kalyan, wrote against the Hindu Code Bill, championed by B.R. Ambedkar in the 1950s. As early as 1968, Kalyan bemoaned that secularism was a “curse” that created two categories of citizens: “Indians” and “Hindus”. A 100 years later, the vocabulary has evolved to include terms like “sicklulars”, “libtards” and “urban Naxals”.
Between independence and liberalisation, the appeal of magazines like Kalyan remained with sections of the population who continued to read in Indian languages. But Gita Press presciently began to publish a sister magazine, Kalyana Kalpataru, in English in the 1930s.
Shortly after his book came out, Mukul was invited to Chennai to speak about his work. “The talk was attended by elite women of the city who had been faithful readers of Kalyana Kalpataru for many years,” he says. The influence of Gita Press, which is believed to have been mostly confined to north India, had clearly transcended barriers of geography and language.
Growing up in 1970s Ranchi (then in Bihar, now part of Jharkhand), Mukul remembers Kalyan being ubiquitous. “Children read it for the stories of gods and goddesses, women read it for edicts on Hindu rituals,” he says. “Older readers of the magazine saw it as a community-based religious journal published by the Marwaris, not as a political mouthpiece.”
Gita Press originated in Calcutta (now Kolkata), patronised by the uber-rich Birlas and Dalmias, and later moved its offices to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh. In the early years, names like M.K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore graced its pages, though the bulk of their writing was adopted from already published pieces. These luminaries appeared alongside right-wing ideologues like Madan Mohan Malviya, Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Karpatri Maharaj, who was especially strident about Hindu supremacy and the primacy of the sanatan dharma.
The list of contributors went on to include peculiar characters over the decades. From the venerated Munshi Premchand, whose views couldn’t be farther from Kalyan’s, and Ramananda Chatterjee, Poddar’s friend and president of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1929, to oddballs like Raihana Tyabji, a devout worshipper of Lord Krishna, and an American godwoman who went by the name of Irene Mata, it was a motley crew.
The ambiguity in Poddar’s views, dithering between Islamophobia to strategically calling for communal harmony, was reflected in the Kalyan’s table of contents: Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, everyone wrote in it as long as they stuck to theological ruminations. Among Indian politicians, Jawaharlal Nehru steadfastly refused to contribute, though in an undated letter believed to be from the 1950s, G.B. Pant, who was Nehru’s home minister, offered to confer a Bharat Ratna on Poddar, which the latter declined.
If Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy (1983) presents a lens to understand the psychological cost of colonialism, a work like Gita Press helps the contemporary reader connect the dots between their post-colonial past and present. To what extent have the values and ideals of the sanatanis evolved? Have their regressive beliefs been erased or merely dimmed?
To take the case of the status of women, one of the constant bugbears in Kalyan, the misogyny enshrined in heterodox religion has been far from eradicated despite decades of activism for women’s rights. Honour-based violence is part of our lexicon now. In 2011-21, official reports of domestic violence against women in India rose by a staggering 87%. As for child marriage, according to 2019-21 data, 23% of women between the ages of 20-24 were married before the age of 18. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Going back a century, in 1926, the year Kalyan was launched, Gita Press published a 46-page monograph titled Stri Dharma Prashnottari (Questions and Answers on Women’s Dharma) written by Poddar. Framed as a dialectic between two women, Sarala (the innocent) and Savitri (the virtuous), it is a compendium of dos and don’ts for Hindu women in order to remain pure and untainted. Copiously citing texts like Manusmriti, Poddar lays down an elaborate code of conduct for women to perform their duties towards the men in their lives—father, husband, son, and others.
From injunctions to not wear bangles made of lac (believed to contain animal products ) to setting a limit to their education, from opposition to laws giving women equal rights of inheritance to insisting “Indian sati does not want to hear anything untoward about her husband, even if he is the meanest and the worst human being,” Podder established a benchmark for unjust practices.
While for liberal elites, such injunctions feel ludicrous, for a vast majority, these beliefs have ebbed only in terms of their intensity. That this pamphlet remains hugely popular (“still in print, over a million copies having been sold over the decades… currently priced at ₹5,” as Mukul writes) is proof that the past remains alive and kicking in our so-called progressive present.