Article 25 (2) (b) of the Indian Constitution stipulates that the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jain or Buddhist religion. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 goes into greater detail to define this legal Hindu, by stipulating that Section 2 that the Act applies: (a) to any person who is a Hindu by religion in any of its forms and developments, including a Virashaiva, a Lingayat or a follower of the Brahmo, Prarthana or Arya Samaj, (b) to any person who is a Buddhist, Jain or Sikh by religion, and (c) to any other person domiciled in the territories to which this Act extends who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew by religion. Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar saw this unity and categorisation of Hindus in legalised terms.
However, the movement for cultural unity among different denominations of Hindus had started long back during the freedom struggle. Hindus sought to revive and unite themselves under the aegis of a glorious cultural past which made a case for emphasising the difference between religion and dharma. This led to the idea that acts of Bharteeyata can be performed in unison with the Hindu Dharma only.
Various movements, political ideologies, leaders and masses came together in the freedom struggle movement to realise the union of Bharteeyata and Hindu rashtra. Gita Press (Gorakhpur) occupies an illustrious position among them. It was founded in 1923 by Jaya Dayal Goyandka and Ghanshyam Das Jalan for promoting the principles of Sanatana Dharma. Hanuman Prasad Poddar (1892-1971) was to serve as the founding and lifetime editor of its monthly magazines Kalyan (Hindi) and Kalyana-Kalptaru (English).
With the founding of the Gita Press, thus, an exceptional and unsurpassable movement in popular print culture was started in Bharat. What started with the first translation of Gita with commentary, on a hand press bought for Rs 600 in April, 1923, would grow on to become capacious both in terms of quality and quantity. Gita Press website informs that “Over the years, the institution has made available more than 370 million copies of the Gita, Ramayana, Bhagavat, Durga Saptashati, Puranas, Upanishads, Bhakta-Gathas, and other character-building books in Sanskrit, Hindi, English, Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Bangla, Oriya, Telgu, Kannada, and other Indian regional languages.” The very concern for the diversity of vernacularity in the Gita Press testifies to the emphasis on the celebration of the territorial expanse of the motherland. However, this diversity of language, regional attributes, differences in social practices, and political concerns have been reduced through an emphasis on shared cultural past and religious belief.
Recent Attempts to Malign the Gita Press
Akshaya Mukul, a senior journalist with The Times of India, has authored a book called Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (Harper Collins, 2015). The book was written after Mukul received fellowship from ‘The New India Foundation’ which is based in Bengaluru with likes of Ramachandra Guha as the driving force behind it. The foundation promotes research on the post-independent period, and no surprise that Mukul was advised by Sunil Khilnani (another Nehruvian) to emphasise the post 1947 history of the Gita Press. Can we guess why?
By 2011, when Mukul received the fellowship to start writing on Gita Press, the project of Nehruvian intellectuals in India was completly, consolidated and thriving. This project termed any idea, process, and individual who seemed outside the Nehruvian consensus as ‘communal’. Anyone who seemed to be located in the dharmik (religious), spiritual, Vedantik, and Sanatani domain was dubbed as a bigot and a conservative. Thus, doing the same to Gita Press was effortless for Mukul since a press which predominantly publishes dharmik literature had to be ‘communal’ in a narrowly defined modern India. No doubt that Mukul has incorporated a rich archival work, and has utilised Poddar’s private papers for the first time. But the terms of analysis and categories applied are utterly journalistic and do not comply with the complexities of history. One question could have been “Why despite the alleged agenda of community centric Hindu deliberations, has Gita Press succeeded in selling and circulating its literature in such a huge way?”
Mukul himself informs, in an early Caravan magazine article, which tosses up the problem. To quote him, “Founded in 1926, Kalyan did exceedingly well from the start, with a circulation of 3000 copies each month by the end of its first year: an unbelievable figure for a genre-specific journal.” He goes on to add, “By the end of 1931, its monthly circulation was 16,000. This grew more than 50 per cent in the next three years, to reach 27,500 by the end of 1934.” When Rajendra Prasad visited Gita Press headquarters at Gorakhpur, a pamphlet published in April 1955 informed that the press had printed and sold 27.8 million copies of its publication, which didn’t take a count of monthly magazines. Thus if really Gita Press was an agency of communalism, and a narrowly defined cause for Hindu nationalism as Mukul asserts, how was it successful in selling its dharmik literature, and who all bought it?
Mukul also made many charges without interrogating the historical debates behind them. At one instance he asserts that “The static world of Gita Press wakes up every time when any arm of the state makes a progressive intervention.” Such conformity with existing ‘Nehruvian India’ categories is invalid now. Who is progressive, regressive and conservative in modern India is a yaksha prashna. We have known that categories such as secularism for much to its abuse and fissures, have outlived their significance. And the same is true with acclaimed progressive minds of this country, who fail to question the Muslim clerics on the progress in the Islamic medievalism.
Manifestation of Bharteeyta
The point of departure for any attempt to understand the Bharteeyta as different from Indianness is an emphasis on the dharmik order of this living civilisation. No wonder that the inaugural issue of Kalyan as published by Gita Press carried an excerpt from Mahatma Gandhi’s article from Navjivan and also a message from Rabindranath Tagore. The assemblage and assimilation of cultural belonging and sharing can adjoin everyone which Gita Press has been doing since its founding.
The popularity of press in the masses confirms the fact that we have always lived in the image of our dharmikta and continue to do so. Thus when Ramayan and Mahabharat get telecast on television, one cannot give up the longing of addressing the actors with respect as well. This unique kind of living system which Hindus have built up across the millennia cannot be understood through labels and names. They can only be experienced and transcendence through dharma. While for other few what could be just a text of poetry and prose, believers cannot explain what Goswami Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas is for them. They just venerate it for they believe in its wisdom and potentiality.
So far as maligning efforts of Akshaya Mukul are concerned, his characterisation of Gita Press as a force in the making of Hindu India is equally invalid. Hindus have never defined themselves in the limited categories of nation and state. They have always belonged to the cosmos and emanating atman (soul). One can point out to something which Makarand Paranjape (JNU Professor, author, and poet) quoted author Hindol Sengupta. Paranjape quoted Shankaracharya saying, “Mata cha parvati devi pita devo maheshvarah. Bandhavah shivabhaktashcha svadesho bhuvanatrayamh.” This hymn captures the spirit in which Hindus have since time immemorial located them. So far as identification of self is concerned, Hindu darshana has always started with neti neti. Gita Press has always stood by the same Hindu way of life.
