Men and women went to the temple to see their Hindu Gods. It was only after 1923, that the Gods began to visit the houses of Hindi reading believers through the pictures depicted in the religious books published by Gita Press. They are the biggest publisher of Hindu religious books.
Gita Press Gorakhpur was one of the first in the business to popularize the image of God by what we now know as Calendar Art. Through the art in their popular household magazine Kalyan, the printing press aims to “promote and spread the principles of Sanatana Dharma” to the public. As we dig deeper into the art of Gita Press we find massive undertones of Hindu Nationalist agenda with casteist colours.
Even after a complicated relationship with Mahatma Gandhi and the subsequent arrest of the publisher Poddar in the Gandhi assassination case, the press was awarded the coveted Gandhi Peace Prize 2021. There are many instances of the press using its vehicles to oppose Gandhian beliefs not just through their articles and opinion pieces, but also through their art and imagery.
The Controversial History of Gita Press and Mahatma Gandhi
The founding editor-in-chief of Kalyan – the monthly magazine of Gita Press – was Hanuman Prasad Poddar. Poddar was a staunch believer of Hindu nationalism, the ideals of which were often expressed in the magazine itself. Hanuman Prasad Poddar or Bhaiji has an interesting history in relation to Hindutva and Gandhi. The founding editor of -the Gandhi Peace Prize nominee- Gita Press had strong connections with Gandhi but oddly enough was a staunch critic of Gandhian beliefs. Most importantly, his disapproval of Gandhi’s stance on the Poona Pact and Harijans entering the temple.
“Writing to (Jamnalal) Bajaj from Gorakhpur, he said,‘I cannot understand many of Bapu’s ideas and works. In many cases, my heart openly opposes them. They create problems for me. But then Bapu is Bapu. After all, what has [one’s opinion on] Mahatma Gandhi’s views to do with bhakti to Bapu.’” (Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, 2015)
Poddar had openly worked with organisations such as RSS and Hindu Mahasabha – both of which would later on come under severe legal scrutiny following suspicion of involvement in Gandhi’s assassination. 25,000 people were arrested which included Hanuman Prasad Poddar and Jaydayal Goyankar due to the involvement of Hindu Mahasabha and RSS in the killing of Gandhi. The two were also accused by G.D. Goenka, the famous industrialist, of spreading “Shaitan Dharma” (evil religion) in the name of Sanatana Dharma.
As Kajri Jain writes in her 2007 work “Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art”, “Its (Gita Press’) charter, emanating from the socially reformist but religiously conservative culture of urban Vaishnava community organizations (Bayly 1983; Dalmia 1995), was the mass dissemination of its version of ‘‘Hindu’’ religion and morality through cheap and widely distributed publications such as Kalyan. A major part of Kalyan’s appeal was its colour illustrations. These publications became staple reading for Hindi-literate families”
Art Of Gita Press
The founding members of Gita Press Jaydayal Goyanka and Ghanshyam Das Jalan were Vaishnavite Hindus who favour idol worship and believe in the image of God. Therefore, it was important for them as a publishing house to spread an image of God in every worshipping household. Lucky for them, at the time of Gita Press’ establishment i.e. the 1920s and 30s, chromolithography was seeing its boom in India.
Lithography is a printmaking process that essentially uses flat stone with designs carved on it in order to make prints. Chromolithograph which was first introduced in the 19th century was the method to make multicoloured prints. One of the early lithographic presses of India was the Calcutta Art Studio which chiefly produced mythological prints. The process made it easy for the publishers to print copies and spread the image of God. This form of mass-producing images of Gods that can be cheaply available to the general public is known as Calendar Art.
Tapan Basu writes in “Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags”, “Calendar Art[…]Slickly produced in a variety of garish colours, at one time they could be seen all over North Indian cities and towns and also in many villages. They could be pasted anywhere – on vehicles, offices, houses, or on school blackboards. Their reach extended much beyond that of posters or wall-writing. They swamped individuals in their ubiquity, contriving a sense of the irresistible tide of Hindutva.”
Thus, the spread of the image of God through Calendar Art became an important mission for the founders of Gita Press. Through, Kalyan, they were able to achieve said goal. Kalyan has over 2.5 lakh subscribers all over India and has to date sold over 17 crore copies. The magazine over the years has had many famous names as contributing authors ranging from the likes of Munshi Premchand, and Harivanshrai Bacchan to Mahatma Gandhi himself thanks to Poddar. Moreover, the press also had a plethora of notable artists working for them such as Nathdwara painters, Satyendranath Banerjee, Ordhendra Coomar Gangoly, Savitri Khanolkar, D.D. Deolalikar and many more.
Akshaya Mukul is the writer of “Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India”. We at Abir Pothi sat down on a one-to-one conversation with the Ramnath Goenka Award-winning author to get an in-depth perspective into the art of Gita Press. He says, “The technology of Chromolithography helped Kalyan and various other publications of Gita Press to bring Gods to our homes. In that sense, we don’t know how Ram looks, do we? We don’t. We only know it through the drawings of Gita Press and various other publications. But Gita Press became popular so we know more of the imagery of Gita and Ram or Sita or Krishna through that. It was all happening in the background of a technological change of Chromolithographs.”
Moreover, the defining factor or the primary selling point of the Gita Press is the spread of the values of “Sanatan Dharma” into ordinary homes of upper and lower-caste Hindus. At the time and even today, there is a large section of Hindus who are not allowed in temples. Gita press while being avid followers of the fourfold caste system wanted or rather needed Kalyan in every household including Dalits. “The same Gita press which didn’t believe in allowing access to Harijans to temples, didn’t mind their images being sold to anyone, any Hindu- upper caste or lower caste. Now, a Harijan who can’t go to a temple and still believes in Ram can have the image of Ram in his house. He will see the image of Ram in Kalyan, he will tear off that page and keep it. So there is a bit of a contradiction happening here. You do want to spread the voice of Sanatan Dharma but at the same time you don’t want a large section to enter the temple, so how do they access god? They access god through images which Gita Press is reproducing on a mass scale and reproduction- which is happening thanks to chromolithography which allows one to make 1000s of copies. In this process, Gita Press manages to retain its belief in the four-fold caste system and still managing to spread the image of god amongst everyone- those who will not come to the temple will have access to the image.” says Mukul.
One of the most intriguing features of the paintings of Gita Press is that each colour holds its own individual significance. As Mukul tells us, “ For every painting, Saffron was a symbol of renunciation, meditation and asceticism and green was for nature, peace, tranquillity and life, it is said goddess Durga apart from red was also depicted in green. Red is the holiest of the colours and carries the greatest significance, used on all auspicious occasions, the colour of tilak is red, it signifies valour, and this is the reason why Hindu women put red sindoor. It took it to an absurd argument which was that women with sindoor would not become victims of sexual crimes as even the criminal considered them pious and chaste. Yellow was the symbol of knowledge, wisdom and conscience. Blue was the symbol of strength. So when you see their(Gita Press’) iconography you see what colour represents what, it’s not happening randomly. So much significance was given to the dialectics of colour.”
The casteist and Hindu Nationalist belief of Poddar was not only evident in his writings of Kalyan but also in the illustrations in the magazine. On this, Mukul says, “One of the telling images of Gita Press in the very early days of Kalyan, sometime in 1928, when Kalyan was 2 years old and Gita Press was 5 years old, their issue on bhakt-the Bhakt Ank, there is a very telling image which holds an illustration of Brahmin or Chandal, and it says, ‘Brahmin ko pehele bhagvat darshan’ (Tr: Brahmins deserve to see the God first). So even in the imagery, they had illustrations with pictures like such which shows Brahmin having a vision of God while a semi-clad chandal was shown bewildered and struggling below. So even through images they were a) trying to make God popular, b) they were also presenting – through their larger iconography – their belief in the caste system.”
As Kajri Jain writes in her book, “illustrated magazines were to become a pre-eminent site for the consolidation and expansion of sectarian and regional identities and for the elaboration of what constituted ‘‘Western’’ modernity and ‘‘Indian’’ tradition.” Kalyan and Gita Press played a crucial role in shaping the cultural landscape of India during the 19th and 20th centuries. It not only provided a platform for artists and writers to express their creativity and showcase traditional Indian art forms but also disseminated religious ideologies of the far right as a fee. Through the art of Gita Press, we not only see a spread of the images of God and religion but also an upper-caste ideology that fails to progress as centuries pass.
References
- Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, Akshaya Mukul 2015.
- Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calender Art, Kajri Jain 2007
- Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, Tapan Basu 1993
- Pinney, Christopher. “The Nation (Un)Pictured? Chromolithography and ‘Popular’ Politics in India, 1878-1995.”
- Gitapress.org
Read Part 2:
10 Famous Artists Who Worked for Gita Press and Leela Chitra Mandir
Vaishnavi Srivastava is a learning writer, a keen researcher and a literature enthusiast. She is a Sub-editor at Abir Pothi.
