Let us first address the elephant in the room! Yes, Kalyan did publish an obituary note on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. By the time the most unfortunate news spread in the late evening of January 30, 1948, most copies of February, 1948 issue of Kalyan were dispatched for circulation. The remaining copies were withheld, three extra pages as a eulogy to Gandhi along with his picture were printed, and they were pinned as supplements to those copies before dispatching them. One of the tributes was an essay by Baba Raghav Das, who called Gandhi a living embodiment of sainthood that the author had only studied about in the scriptures. The other tribute by the editor, Hanuman Prasad Poddar (1892-1971), noted, “Gandhi ji had transcended the differences of religion and caste, and he was the real worshiper of truth and non-violence.” The copy of those supplements is still available with Gita Vatika in Gorakhpur.
The above facts were reported by this author in his review of Akshaya Mukul’s Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (Harper Collins, 2015) in Organiser in 2015 only, and again, in an investigative report in Panchjanya in 2018. In the latter, the author himself approached Mukul and made him aware of the evidence reported above, to which he had replied, “My own book reports that there was an article on Gandhi in April, 1948 issue of Kalyan. However, as far as the supplement of February, 1948 issue is concerned, I haven’t come across it.”
Let us, then, make sense of the whole ruckus and rampage when Gita Press, Gorakhpur, was awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize for 2021. The habitual antagonists raised the alarm that Kalyan, Hanuman Prasad Poddar, and Jaya Dayal Goyanka were “anti-Gandhians”, they vehemently attacked Gandhi in the turbulent 1940s, and kept quiet when he was assassinated, and thereby, they were accomplices in the assassination. This line of inference was covertly advanced by Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, which stated, “Gita Press maintained a studied silence on the Mahatma’s assassination… Why was there no mention of Gandhi in the February and March 1948 issues of Kalyan?”
Context and Controversy
In 1923, Poddar and Goyanka established a non-profit and first-of-its-kind publishing house for Hindu religious literature – the Gita Press. The project of Hindu nationalism led by Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lala Lajpat Rai, among others, and promoted by organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha or the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal was taking shape. This new political philosophy demanded that all existing divisions of caste, creed and religious sect needed to be effaced to project the idea of a unified Hindu nation. The Gita Press had a decisive impact in giving shape to this idea.
Poddar was well-known to every nationalist since the young Poddar had been sentenced to 2 years under house arrest for aiding anti-British terrorist activities in Bengal. He was a well-known revolutionary in his young days and was an aid to Aurobindo Ghose. Unsurprisingly, Aurobindo Ghose (Sri Aurobindo after 1926) and Mother (born MirraAlfassa) together contributed more than fifty articles to Kalyan in their lifetime.
Despite a strong foothold, both politically and financially, Poddar went to Gandhi for his blessings before starting to publish Kalyan in 1926. Gandhi gave him two pieces of advice: do not accept advertisements and never carry book reviews. Poddar followed them forever, and they are still being followed today. Kalyan carried several pieces by Gandhi, who also blessed the journal with a handwritten note carried in Bhakta Ank, the annual issue of 1928. Kalyan carried a total of fifty-four articles by Gandhi, according to Poddar Papers, with extracts from Navjivan and Harijan, but mostly commissioned by the magazine. The magazine continued to carry Gandhi’s articles posthumously.
Any Rift with Gandhi?
No doubt, there was also a phase of tension between Gita Press and Gandhi. Mostly, in the 1930s, on the issue of the temple entry movement, and in the 1940s before the partition, a clear rift is seen. However, such an ideological rift was a characteristic feature of the freedom struggle. Moreover, Gandhi continued to contribute articles in Kalyan in the 1940s.
For instance, the temple entry movement as it was visualised in the actions of Narayan Guru, N Kumaran Asan, TK Madhavan, K P Kesava Menon, Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Sree Chithira Thirunal, K Kelappan, and Mahatma Gandhi were differently and diversely strategised and thought about. Poddar and others had a different view on the issue, which frankly, from today’s standards, should be categorised as “conservative”. The same could be said about women’s question and other contentious socio-cultural issues.
Today, there is a well-thought-out campaign to denigrate Gita Press as “anti-women”. A popular tract called Stridharma Prasnottariwas released by Gita Press in 1925 and got a second edition in the same year, totalling a remarkable 10,800 copies. We have to keep in mind the less than 10 per cent literacy rate in Bharat in those years. Who was reading and consuming these “conservative” tracts? If publishing a tract with dialogues between Savitri and Sarala sounds “orthodox” and “anti-women” to a twenty-first mind, doesn’t the vast consumption of the tract say something about the overall ‘history of mentalities’ of the age? Why should we single out Gita Press for the same?
There is no point in defending Gita Press’s historic stances on Hindu Code Bill, its attacks on Ambedkar, and its efforts towards rigid codification of the Hindu way of life-based on Puranas and Dharmashastras. But their calculated slant towards conservatism doesn’t take away from the fact that Gita Press and Kalyan made immense contributions towards nation-making in their own way. Moreover, we shouldn’t be anachronistic and impose the moral judgements of the 21st century on the 19th and 20th centuries when these ideas were being vigorously debated. Don’t the Westernised attackers think of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities while analysing Gita Press? Or, do they remain flummoxed on how a few entrepreneurs printed their books and media to manufacture nationalism in the vernaculars without any consideration of profit?
Becoming and Being Hindu
Despite the half-truths of exclusion and communalism that are being levelled on Gita Press today, it was an anchorage that encouraged and accepted a myriad of ideas. While the spirited missionaries of newfound faith enthusiastically compare ‘Gandhi’s Hinduism’ with ‘Savarkar’s Hindutva’ and whatnot, in essence, the Hindu faith has always remained about acceptance and incorporation. Gita Press, from its initiation till date, is a case in point.
A cursory look at the list of contributors to Kalyanand Kalyana-Kalpataru shows how ‘Being Hindu’ was central to the Indian freedom struggle. From Mahatma Gandhi, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo and Mother, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, Annie Besant, Rajendra Prasad, Pattabhi Sitaramayya, Purushottam Das Tandon, KanhaiyalalManeklal Munshi, Sampurnanand, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Kailash Nath Katju, PurshottamdasThakurdas, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Acharya Narendra Dev, Raghuvira, SwamiKarpatri Maharaj, Kaka Kalelkar, Vinoba Bhave, Radha Kumud Mookerji, Satyendra Nath Sen, CF Andrews, Kshitimohan Sen, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, Ganganath Jha, Amar Nath Jha, Munshi Premchand, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Mohammad Hafiz Syed, Syed Kasim Ali, and many more contributed articles to these alleged “communal” publications. Any informed reader could judge that these are the names of heavy-weight politicians, academics, social activists, on the one side, and an almost whole gamut of political ideologies and religions, on the other. Of course, Jawaharlal Nehru and Communists remain notable exceptions!
How do we make sense of so many important contributors in the pages of Kalyan? Should all these contributors be levelled “communalist” or “conservative” because an author and a few political parties think that Gita Press was established to serve only Hindu Mahasabha and Sangh Parivar? Were Gandhis, Tagores, and Aurobindos by writing on Hindu dharma and Bharat in Kalyanserving RSS?
We have to understand and appreciate that the Indian freedom struggle was a much more complex phenomenon than how it is depicted today. The struggle was not solely political or constitutional, but, more importantly, cultural. Decolonisation and its more popular synonym Swaraj were not realised through Lahore Session, 1929 or Karachi Session, 1931 alone, but institutions like Gita Press and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan (established 1938) also played a crucial role in it.
More than just Kalyan!
With the founding of the Gita Press, 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. 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 the other character-building book. Moreover, these publications are made available in Sanskrit, Hindi, English, Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Bangla, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, and other regional languages.
Think of the importance of Ramacharitamanas and how it became a text of resistance against colonialism. When Malaviya made a call for Manas Prachar– the promulgation of Tulsi’s epic—the Gita Press answered his call by churning out low-priced Manas editions of every size and description, sponsored contests to test children’s knowledge of Manas verses, encouraged mass recitation programmes and frequently published written exegesis by eminent Ramayanis like Jayramdas “Din” and Vijayanand Tripathi. Such contributions of Gita Press are so vast and many that they cannot be listed here due to space constraints.
How by incorporating the advice of Mahatma Gandhi to bolster a “non-capitalist” swadeshi print culture, and by continuously publishing Kalyan and Kalyana-Kalpataru, together with an abundance of Dharmic literature produced at a ‘no profit, no loss’ basis for a century, has Gita Press now landed into controversy? It leaves one astounded. In the last few years, taking forward the legacy of the Atal Behari Vajpayee Government (1999-2004), which had awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize to Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan in 2002, Modi Government has awarded institutions like ISRO (2014), Vivekananda Kendra (2015), Akshaya Patra Foundation and Sulabh International (2016), Ekal Abhiyan Trust (2017), and now Gita Press, Gorakhpur (2021). To create a controversy on it by unnecessarily politicising the issue, and then writing a response like this one to remind people of the Gita Press’s contribution has become a characteristic of the times we live in! Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Kshitimohan Sen, and CF Andrews considered Gita Press and Kalyan as a spiritual and cultural manifestation of Bharat, but unfortunately, the Left-Liberals and the Congress call giving the Gandhi Peace Prize to Gita Press a ‘travesty’.
Contributors in Kalyan and Kalyana-Kalpataru
Mahatma Gandhi, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo and Mother, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, Annie Besant, Rajendra Prasad, Pattabhi Sitaramayya, Purushottam Das Tandon, Kanhaiyalal Maneklal Munshi, Sampurnanand, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Kailash Nath Katju, PurshottamdasThakurdas, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Acharya Narendra Dev, Raghuvira, Swami Karpatri Maharaj, Kaka Kalelkar, Vinoba Bhave, Radha Kumud Mookerji, Satyendra Nath Sen, CF Andrews, Kshitimohan Sen, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, Ganganath Jha, Amar Nath Jha, Munshi Premchand, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Mohammad Hafiz Syed, Syed Kasim Ali, and many more.
First Editorial of Kalyan
The first number of Kalyan appeared in 1926. Its programme was spelt out in the editorial by Hanuman Prasad Poddar.
“All deserve Kalyan- their welfare and emancipation. It is the general desire of one and all. The publication of Kalyan is a recognition of this need. The person who has been given the responsibility of editing Kalyan knows this fact well. He is not qualified and hasn’t the ability to discharge this responsibility; he is far away from the ideal of Kalyan, but he does feel the necessity and urge for this ideal.”
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