Why attacking Gita Press doesn't augur well for Rahul Gandhi's Congress in 2024 polls

Jun 19, 2023 - 17:30

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Why attacking Gita Press doesn't augur well for Rahul Gandhi's Congress in 2024 polls

Literature is not just words; it is the lifeblood of a society. Literature, as much as it reflects a society, also shapes a people. Literature is not just an innocuous rendition of ideas or innocent capturing of stories, but also a powerful weapon as it shapes the topography of national and individual psyche.

One could gauge the centrality of literature in human life from the fact that, in all cultures and societies, however modern ostensibly, an expecting mother is expected to read and listen to good, positive literature, in the form of songs or stories or books.

This is why all societies have instituted awards to celebrate words and wordsmiths.

This is why, arguably, the most powerful weapon of the British imperialism in India was the English language. It turned us into brown sahibs; white, but not quite. It gave birth to the ideal of the English-educated Indian gentleman, who, though could not rise to be the White sahib, but could lord over his other brown-skinned country kin. In this ideal arose the Indian middle class, not quite the same as now, though similar, which became the comprador/collaborator, and then the saboteur of the British Raj.

The sabotage potential of the brown sahib was also due to the same English language and the liberal-British-Western literature on the basis of which the White Sahib had taken upon him the burden to civilize the ‘backward’ ‘savages’ of the non-Christian world.

Come to think of Lenin-Stalin duo’s language policy, which became the means of colonizing minds to forge a unified Soviet identity. Russification was adopted, clandestinely and openly off and on, to railroad national cultures, to flatten ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic diversities. Language and literature were to be tools to expand and crystallise proletarian non-national Soviet identity. The etatist approach—from latinisation to cyrrilisation—was the panacea for unity.

But, just as in the case of the British colonialism in India, this very Russification of languages also spelled doom of the Soviet Russia, leading to its eventual disintegration.

The Gita Press, however, does not represent any of these tensions or dialectic. It does not speak for any colonisation of the mind or any peoples.

In fact, it expanded the ambit of the Indian culture—essentially a Hindu culture—since 1923—to first fight British colonization that, as pointed was a cultural, and therefore, linguistic imperialism, and then kept making a subliminal appeal to the Indian-ness of Indians, cutting across ideological and party-political lines. I am sure, a Congressman or an RSS pracharak, both read Bhagvat Gita, Ramcharitmanas or Hanuman Chalisa published by the same Gita Press.

The anti-colonial history of Gita Press is a testament to the power of literature, and yet the concomitance of this anti-hegemonic role with Hinduism and the Hindu ethic and philosophy is phenomenal. On its own, it stands testimony to India being a civilisational nation, but the contention here is that Gita Press deserves the Gandhi Peace Prize.

Gita Press was started in 1923 to promote spirituality among Indians by way of Hindu religious scriptures and literature. The Bhagwat Gita played a seminal role in India’s freedom struggle and Gita Press was there to publish innumerable copies of it. Thus far, it has published 16.21 crore copies of Bhagavad Gita, 11.73 crore copies of Ramcharitmanas; 11.42 crore copies of Gita in other Indian languages.

It thus propagated the concept of the karmayogi that, under the British heels, served as one of the most subversive calls to action to the freedom fighters and the nation, at large. Our freedom fighters were devouring Bhagwat Gita in jails and prisons.

Those who were greatly inspired by the Bhagwat were Bhagat Singh, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Annie Besant, C Rajagopalachari, KM Munshi, Acharya Vinobha Bhave, amongmany others.

But, Lokmanya Tilak, the man who launched, in a sense, the real freedom struggle of India, diverging and breaking from the beggary of earlier version of Congress, wrote a commentary, ‘Srimad Bhagavad Gita Rahasya’.

Tilak’s text puts the role of Bhagwat Gita and, therefore, of the Gita Press in incessantly publishing the text, in perspective.

Tilak retrieved Bhagwat Gita from earlier translations that, at the cost of sounding reductionist, restricted the text to its philosophical aspects.

Lokmanya simply interpreted Bhagwat Gita as a call to action—it starts with the inaction of a confused Arjun and ends in super action for the sake of truth. This interpretation was the need of the hour for an India grinding under the heels of a quasi-legal imperial empire. It was a call to break the shackles of servitude and raise the head high in a spirit of total abnegation for the result.

Another stalwart of the Lal-Bal-Pal troika, Punjab Kesari Lala Lajpat Rai compiled his unique interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita in ‘The Message of the Bhagavad Gita’, during exile in Mandalay, Burma.

Now, if a publisher that publishes not for money, but for the propagation of the most honestly peaceful and most inclusive religion and philosophy in the world, does not deserve the Gandhi Peace Prize, it is hard to think who does, at least, when you don’t have an ulterior motive.

There would be no better way to end this article than by quoting Gandhi on Gita. Bhagwat Gita remained Mahatma Gandhi’s solace in his darkest hours. It was his unfailing source of strength and was the most profound influence on his life and character. Gandhi remained a lifelong votary of the concept of ‘nishkamkarma’.

Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, reading the Bible’s new testament with Bhagwat Gita, “Especially, the Sermon on the Mount… went straight to my heart. I compared it with the Gita. The verses, ‘but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak too,’ delighted me beyond measure and put me in mind of Shamal Bhatt’s ‘for a bowl of water give a goodly meal’ etc. My young mind tried to unify the teaching of the Gita, the Light of Asia and the Sermon on the Mount. That renunciation was the highest form of religion appealed to me greatly.” (1948, 92)

Rahul Gandhi’s Congress might have lost sight of the Indian culture and ethos that powered India’s freedom struggle, since it is more of a Nehruvian Congress, than Mahatma Gandhi’s Congress or Lajpat Rai’s Congress or Tilak’s Congress, but the nation has not forgotten the service of Gita Press, especially to Hinduism and the peace imbued pervasively therein.

Since, Gita Press can well be called one of the conscience-keepers of Hindus, attacking it, most of all, for getting a peace prize, may not play out well for Rahul Gandhi’s Congress in the Lok Sabha elections of 2024. Undermining the rich legacy and history of the publisher may well be construed as yet another Hinduphobic stance of the Grand Old party, and of late there have been many.

The author is News Editor, Firstpost. He tweets from @SiddharthaRai2. Views expressed are personal.

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