Read Online Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India by Akshaya Mukul - Free Book Online Page A

3,000 copies each month, an unbelievable figure for a genre-based journal. In fact, as was customary in India, most copies were read by more than one individual, being passed from hand to hand, so the actual readership may have been five or six times more. There were instances of rich Marwari businessmen buying
Kalyan
in bulk: Kasturchand Goradia of the firm Shaligram Kasturchand took fifty subscriptions, another reader took ten and some promised to pay double the cover price if the publishers doubled the number of pages. Enthused by the response, a publisher’s note in the seventh issue of the first year promised a change in format and size of
Kalyan
.
    Satsang Bhavan’s venture of publishing cheap but high-quality religious texts and commentaries on them had also grown within a year to eighteen titles, most of them related to the Gita. Then there were titles that adhered to Gita Press’s mission of pulling the Hindu society out of the darkness that threatened sanatan dharma. Texts like
Stri
Dharma Prashnottari
prescribed how women should conduct themselves, and
Sarva Tantra Siddhant Padarth Sangrah
, a collection of Sanskrit texts selected by Gaurishankar, a sanyasi (monk), was brought out to educate school-going children.
     
From Bombay to Gorakhpur
What was supposed to be a short-lived printing arrangement for four or five months between Satsang Bhavan and Sri Venkateshwar Press continued for a little over a year.
Kalyan
shifted to Gorakhpur in 1927 only after the year’s first special issue—
Bhagwan Naam Ank
(Issue on God’s Name)—had been published from Bombay with a print run of 6,000. The issue, devoted to a specific aspect of religion, was a great success and became a trend that still continues. In its review of
Bhagwan
Naam Ank
, the popular weekly
Hindu Panch
prayed for the success of
Kalyan
from its heart. 16
    Within a month, the
Bhagwan Naam Ank
saw a reprint of 2,000 copies that came out from its new abode, Gorakhpur. One ‘Gujarati gentleman from Bombay’ bought 1,000 copies and another reader from Banaras bought 500 copies for free distribution. 17 Gita Press and
Kalyan
were no longer staring at success—they had achieved a feat unparalleled by any other journal of that era.
    Later special issues of
Kalyan
on
Nari
(Woman, 1948),
Hindu
Sanskriti
(Hindu Culture, 1950),
Bala
k
(Male Child, 1953) and
Shiksha
(Education, 1988) are still in huge demand and keep getting reprinted. While the special issue of 1927 had 110 pages, subsequent years saw annual issues running into 700 to 800 pages covering various aspects of sanatan Hindu dharma.
    In 1927, when
Kalyan
shifted to Gorakhpur, this eastern district of the United Provinces was known for sugar-cane farming, sugar factories and a railway junction in the district headquarters that facilitated trade. At the height of the non-cooperation movement, on 5 February 1922, peasants had burnt twenty-two policemen alive in Chauri-Chaura village of Gorakhpur district, leading Gandhi to suspend the movement.
    Chauri-Chaura and Gorakhpur became known nationally and internationally because of this deplorable incident. However, Gorakhpur had also been home to other movements. Through the Nagari movement, Hindi was introduced as a court language in 1900 along with the already existing Persian. 18 In 1913, Gorakhpur’s Nagari Pracharini Sabha managed to get judicial forms printed in Hindi. The next year came
Gyan Shakti
, ‘a literary journal devoted to Hindi and Hindu
dharma prachar
(propagation) published by a pro-government Sanskrit scholar with financial support from the rajas of Padrauna, Tamkuhi and Majhauli as well as some from the
rausa
(notables) of Gorakhpur’, and in 1915, Gauri Shankar Mishra, later a prominent leader of the UP Kisan Sabha, launched
Prabhakar
, the aim of which was to ‘serve the cause of Hindi, Hindu and Hindustan’. 19 While
Prabhakar
closed down within a year and even
Gyan Shakti
was suspended for nearly a year in 1916–17, two