Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India PDF
Preview Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India
f Ainh ms e trove d original work’ - ft. AKSHAYA MUKUL In the early 1920s, Jaydayal Goyandka and Hanuman Prasad Poddar, two Marwari businessmen-turned-spiritualists, set up the Gita Press and KaLyan magazine. As of early 2014, Gita Press had sold close to 72 million copies of the Gita, 70 million copies of Tulsidas’s works and 19 million copies of scriptures like the Puranas and Upanishads. And while most other journals of the period, whether religious, literary or political, survive only in press archives, Kalyon now has a circulation of over 200,000, and its English counterpart, Kalyana-Kalpataru. of over 100,000. Gita Press created an empire that spoke in a militant Hindu nationalist voice and imagined a quantifiable, reward-based piety. Almost every notable leader and prominent voice, including Mahatma Gandhi, was roped in to speak for the cause. Cow slaughter, Hindi as the national language and the rejection of Hindustani, the Hindu Code Bill, the creation of Pakistan, India’s secular Constitution. KaLyan and Kalyana-Kalpataru were the spokespersons of the Hindu position on these and other matters. The ideas articulated by Gita Press and its publications played a critical role in the formation of a Hindu political consciousness, indeed a Hindu public sphere. This history provides new insights into the complicated and contested rise to political pre-eminence of the Hindu Right. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India is an original, eminently readable and deeply researched account of one of the most influential publishing enterprises in the history of modern India. Featuring an extraordinary cast of characters— buccaneering entrepreneurs and hustling editors, nationalist ideologues and religious fanatics—this is essential (and exciting) reading for our times. AKSHAYA MUKUL id* IltMiilniiia HarperCollins Publishers India First published in hardback in India in 2015 by HarperCollins Publishers India Copyright © Akshaya Mukul 2015 P-ISBN: 978-93-5177-230-9 E-ISBN: 978-93-5177-231-6 2468109753 1 Akshaya Mukul asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. HarperCollins Publishers A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF, United Kingdom Hazelton Lanes, 55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900, Toronto, Ontario M5R 3L2 and 1995 Markham Road, Scarborough, Ontario M1B 5M8, Canada 25 Ryde Road, Pymble, Sydney, NSW 2073, Australia 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA Typeset in 11/14 Adobe Jenson Pro at SURYA Printed and bound at Thomson Press (India) Ltd To My parents Manorama and Madhusudan
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