India: How Gita Press shaped the orthodox challenge to the Hindu Code | Akshaya Mukul (2005)

The Caravan, 01 August 2015
 
How Gita Press shaped the orthodox challenge to the Hindu Code
Akshaya Mukul
WHILE OTHER HINDI JOURNALS of colonial India—whether religious, literary or political—survive only in the archives, to be read by scholars interested in unravelling the heady days of Hindi and Hindu nationalism, Gita Press, with its flagship monthly Kalyan, has grown and prospered as the only indigenous publishing enterprise of the period that continues to this day. With around 70 retail outlets across India, including stalls at many railway stations, Gita Press is a stupendous success in the world of Indian publishing.
 
Founded in 1926, Kalyan did exceedingly well from the start, with a circulation of 3,000 copies each month by the end of its first year: an unbelievable figure for a genre-specific journal. By the end of 1931, its monthly circulation was 16,000. This grew by more than 50 percent in the next three years, to reach 27,500 by the end of 1934. Today, Kalyan has a circulation of over 2 lakh copies monthly, while its English counterpart Kalyana-Kalpataru has a circulation of over 1 lakh.
 
Additionally, Gita Press has triumphed in its key mission: publishing cheap and well-produced editions of the Gita, Ramayana and Mahabharata. A pamphlet published in April 1955, when President Rajendra Prasad visited Gita Press at its Gorakhpur headquarters, stated that the press had printed and sold 27.8 million copies of its publications, excluding Kalyan and Kalyana-Kalpataru, since its founding in 1923.
 
As of last year, the business had sold 71.9 million copies of the Gita; 70 million copies of various works by the bhakti poet Goswami Tulsidas, including the Ramcharitmanas; and 19 million copies of the Puranas, Upanishads and other ancient scriptures. Then, there are its tracts and monographs on the duties of ideal Hindu women and children, of which 94.8 million copies have been sold so far, along with more than 65 million copies of stories from India’s mythic past, biographies of saints, and devotional songs.
 
 
Hanuman Prasad Poddar, the charismatic founding editor of Kalyan, helmed the magazine until his death in 1971.
COURTESY GOKUL GOSWAMI/ RADHA BABA OF GORAKHPUR
The birth and success of Kalyan and Gita Press existed within a triangle, the points of which were the flowering of Hindi and Hindu journals, Marwari munificence, and the blurring of the demarcation between religion and politics, especially in the United Provinces (roughly the present-day states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand). The first of these distinct but interconnected factors involved the consolidation of Hindi, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the language of Hindus; and the rapid growth of its public sphere, in which journals, newspapers, publishing houses and public figures played an important role—with the colonial state keeping a sharp watch through its widespread machinery of informants and tough laws.
 
Second, Gita Press was a Marwari enterprise with a difference, where profit took a back seat. At the forefront was religious philanthropy in the name of saving sanatan Hindu dharma—the unchanging form of the Hindu religion, believed to have existed from time immemorial. In terms of ambition, it was a grand enterprise, unlike anything the Hindi literary world had witnessed until then, or has seen since.
 
Third, and most important, the 1920s were a period of competing political communalism between Hindus and Muslims. The entire nationalism debate was increasingly vitiated by religious schisms, exacerbated by a series of riots over the issue of cow protection, throughout the Hindi heartland of the United Provinces and Bihar. Congress leaders such as Madan Mohan Malaviya, who founded the Hindu Mahasabha, which had many links with Gita Press, and others who were not enthused with Congress politics, lent support to the endeavour. The coming together of sanatan dharma leaders, such as Malaviya, and the Arya Samaj in 1923, at Banaras, and the decision to make common cause on cow protection and reconversion to Hinduism, bolstered conservative Hindu groups further. In 1925, the birth of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, with which Gita Press would later forge a close alliance, completed the scenario in which Kalyan got a firm footing.
 
Gita Press had both the sanction of Indian nationalists, and a deep reach, through Kalyan, into middle-class homes. Nowhere else could you get articles by Mohandas Gandhi, presidents S Radhakrishnan and Rajendra Prasad, the Swatantra Party founder C Rajagopalachari and the Congress party leader Govind Ballabh Pant—as well as Hindutva stalwarts such as the RSS head MS Golwalkar, the Ram Rajya Parishad founder Swami Karpatri Maharaj, and the spiritual leader Prabhudatt Brahmachari—all in one special issue. Considering its significance, the near-total lack of critical evaluation of Gita Press by its contemporaries is surprising; instead, it has been relegated to an odd paragraph, appendix or footnote. Little has been written about how Hindu nationalists used Kalyan’s novelty and reach among the Hindu reading public, with Gita Press and its iconic founding editor, Hanuman Prasad Poddar, as willing partners.
 
Poddar was more concerned with spirituality than politics; at times, he even felt the business of running a press frustrated his spiritual aims. However, in the years preceding the independence of India, disillusioned with what he called the anti-Hindu policies of the first Congress government, Poddar made a clear choice to openly support, even get actively involved in, the politics and struggles of Hindu nationalist groups and, later, political parties such as the Jana Sangh. When Hindu nationalist groups began what the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot described as “using ethno-religious appeals to build up agitational movements,” Kalyan became a propaganda vehicle to disseminate their worldviews. The increasingly polarised position of the Gita Press, and its growing importance to the Hindu nationalist cause, can be traced through several such agitational movements, including the opposition to the Hindu Code Bill and other social reforms that sought to reconcile Hindu practices with the rights to equality guaranteed by the nascent constitution of the Indian state.
 
 
Gita Dwar, the gateway to the Gita Press, was inaugurated by President Rajendra Prasad on his visit to Gorakhpur in 1955.
COURTESY SURAJ MISHRA
IN 1929, when the British Indian government passed the Sarada Act, which fixed the minimum age of marriage for girls as 14 and for boys as 18, Kalyan remained silent on the subject. Hanuman Prasad Poddar, who edited Kalyan until his death in 1971, and whose writing still dominates its current issues, was opposed to the law but chose to keep his anger out of the pages of the magazine. He wrote, in a letter to Gita Press’s founder Jaydayal Goyandka, “I am a big opponent of this law not only because it relates to the age of girls but due to its interference in religious matters. There is a need to get this law revoked so that in future no need is felt to legislate on such matters. To break the law and go to jail is the only way out. I think opposing the legislation from a social and religious perspective would not help. The law has to be opposed politically.”
 
But, he further stated, “Kalyan should not get involved in this. Instead, it should concentrate on propagating humanity, ideal behaviour and devotion to gods. Today, Kalyan’s message is spread among thousands of government employees. The moment we turn political they will move away from the journal. It is not about losing subscribers but principles.” Less than two decades later, however, as Hindu nationalism grew more vocal, these principles changed as well.
 
In 1941, the colonial government appointed a Hindu Law Committee to advocate the formation of a Hindu law code. The committee was revived in 1944, to prepare a draft Hindu Code Bill, aimed at modernising the laws of Hindu marriage and inheritance. The political scientist BD Graham, in his 1990 book on the origins of the Jan Sangh, summarised its aims: extending “the rights of Hindu women by enforcing monogamy, recognizing the principle of inheritance through a daughter, and giving a woman complete rather than limited control of her property.” The Hindu Code Bill incensed orthodox Hindus, who saw it as an affront to their religion in the name of social reform. As a grand coalition of myriad orthodox elements emerged, Kalyan became an important voice in the campaign against the bill, not only educating its readers but also exhorting them to protest.
 
An alert Kalyan had kept an eye on a slew of legislation being introduced in the constituent assembly, which had been elected in 1946. One early piece of legislation that had caught Goyandka’s attention related to the payment of compensation to a wife separated from her husband. In August 1946, Goyandka wrote an article in Kalyan titled ‘Hindu Vivah Ki Pavitrata Evam Tatsambandhi Kanoon’—The Sanctity of Hindu Marriage and Related Laws—in which he argued that such “independence is not promised to women in the Hindu social structure. A woman has to live with her father till marriage, with her husband as a married woman and after his demise she has to live either with her son or some other relative. She cannot be independent at any cost.”
 
Goyandka stressed the supremacy of the shastras—which, according to him, already governed each and every aspect of Hindu life—and the inadvisability of tinkering with them. He also expressed his opposition to three more planned laws that would legalise divorce, inter-caste marriage, and marriage within the same gotra—patrilineal kinship group. For Goyandka, these pieces of legislation would not empower women, but would make them morally depraved. Therefore, Hindus had to oppose them unitedly. Goyandka stated that Malaviya, who he believed was the biggest benefactor of Hindus, saw such social legislation as a diversion from more serious problems that plagued the country.
 
On 21 February 1947, the four-member Hindu Law Committee, chaired by the Calcutta High Court judge BN Rau, submitted its report to the government. The historian Geraldine Forbes wrote in her 1996 book, Women in Modern India, that the Rau Committee’s report “masterfully blended two views of Hindu society”—it “nationalized the women’s rights movement, claiming that it would be possible to combine the best elements from the ancient Hindu texts with legal principles suitable for contemporary society.” A bill based on the report was introduced into the Central legislature.
 
In her 2012 book, Debating Patriarchy, historian Chitra Sinha detailed how the controversial Hindu Code Bill “introduced two types of marriage: the sacramental and civil,” promising a great deal of freedom and flexibility in marriage and divorce—a paradigm shift that immediately invited the ire of Hindu traditionalists. Even those who had the sacramental, traditional marriage could have it civil-registered; this would enable either partner to subsequently seek divorce. The bill also did away with polygamy, made impotency grounds for divorce, and did away with restrictions on marriage between people of different castes or of a shared gotra.
 
In terms of inheritance laws, Sinha notes, the Hindu Code Bill emphasised individual rights and blood relationships. Thus “the widow, the daughter and the widow of a predeceased son were brought at par” with those who received property through the traditional law of inheritance, through agnates.
 
The Hindu Code Bill was shelved, but taken up again in independent India, in April 1948. Kalyan’s response was swift and direct. The June issue carried a detailed piece of commentary referring to the Hindu Code as “A Plan for the Destruction of Hindu Culture.” The article’s unnamed author stated that the proposed legislation was the handiwork of people who knew nothing about the shastras, but were so influenced by Western civilisation’s according of primacy to physical needs that they were out to destroy the Hindu jati.
 
BR Ambedkar, who was then the law minister, was the primary target of the criticism. Kalyan had been harsh to him in the past for demanding equality for untouchables, and this time, too, the article made highly disparaging, casteist remarks about him. Sir Sultan Ahmed, a former law minister, who introduced the bill in the legislature in 1944, was not spared either.
 
The magazine claimed that the bill was being forced through parliament despite a clear lack of support for it, which it said the Rau Committee had realized when it travelled across the country eliciting people’s opinions. The committee’s report had been submitted in the face of strong opposition from one of its members, the former Calcutta High Court judge Dwarka Nath Mitter, who was an expert on Hindu law. The journal relied heavily on Mitter’s dissenting note, which in turn may have been the result of witnessing “such strong opposition to the reforms suggested,” as Sinha noted in her book. Mitter had maintained an exhaustive record of the deliberations of the Hindu Law Committee, and of the views of both opponents and supporters of various provisions of the bill. He had come to the conclusion, as noted in his dissenting statement, “that the majority of the Hindus incline to the view that the codification of Hindu Law is neither possible nor desirable.”
 
For Gita Press, Mitter’s chronicle of public hearings on the Hindu Code Bill—including opposition by orthodox groups such as the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Akhil Bharatiya Dharma Sangh, the Akhil Bharatiya Varnashram Swaraj Sangh and various Jain associations—was a godsend. Kalyan used it to make the point that the votaries of the Hindu Code Bill were in a hopeless minority. The journal also emphasised the opposition to the bill by leading conservative politicians such as Malaviya and Kailash Nath Katju, and by women novelists like Anurupa Devi of Bengal. “Are they all bereft of wisdom?” the June 1948 diatribe against the bill asked. “Are only a handful of reformists wise?”
 
In response to the progressive argument that legislating the Hindu Code would promote caste and gender equality in society, the same article asked if equality had brought happiness in the Western domestic world. “The abundance of unmarried women, innumerable abortions, rising divorce rate, women working in hotels and shops in complete disregard to their honour and purity are telling us loudly that Western civilisation is a curse on women,” it argued. “The system created by the sages and saints for Indian women at home and in society was endowed with their knowledge.”
 
Realising that its arguments against the bill would have even greater resonance among orthodox sections of society if articulated through the Hindu–Muslim prism, the article presented the legislation as a Muslim assault on Hindus’ domestic domain. Thus, the provision for giving a daughter inheritance rights to her father’s property was seen as a straight lift from Muslim law: “Since the bill is the brainchild of Sir Sultan Ahmed it is natural such a provision has been made.” Kalyan painted a dreadful picture of the repercussions of daughters getting inheritance rights. “The battle between brothers will now become a battle between brother and sister. Daughters may get rights from their fathers, but will have to give away similar rights to their husband’s sisters. There will be no benefit, but the peace and tranquillity of our homes will vanish. Daughters live with their husbands. How will if benefit the family if they get a share of their father’s wealth?”