Gita Press to receive Gandhi Peace Prize: A brief history of the publishing house

Gita Press, Gorakhpur, has been selected for the Gandhi Peace Prize for the year 2021.

A jury headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi unanimously selected Gita Press for the award after due deliberations on Sunday (June 18) “in recognition of its outstanding contribution towards social, economic and political transformation through non-violent and other Gandhian methods,” the government said in a statement.

I congratulate Gita Press, Gorakhpur on being conferred the Gandhi Peace Prize 2021. They have done commendable work over the last 100 years towards furthering social and cultural transformations among the people. @GitaPress https://t.co/B9DmkE9AvS

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 18, 2023

A publisher of Hindu religious texts, Gita Press was established in 1923, and is presently one of the world’s largest publishing houses. Including copies of its monthly magazine, Kalyan, it has thus far sold approximately 93 crore copies of over 1,850 religious books, in 15 languages. Notably, Gita Press has sold over 3.5 crore copies of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, and over 16 crore copies of Shrimad Bhagvad Gita.

Its website says that its “main objective is to promote and spread the principles of Sanatana Dharma” in the general public through its highly “subsidised” publications of “the Gita, Ramayana, Upanishads, Puranas, discourses of eminent saints, and other character-building books and magazines”. Scholar Paul Arney has referred to the publisher as the “leading purveyor of print Hinduism in the twentieth century”.

Gita Press will receive the citation but not accept the Rs 1 crore cash award that comes with the Gandhi Peace Prize. “We never take any awards or donations. In this present case, we are going to receive the citation but we will not accept any award-money as receiving a cash award will be against our principles”, Gita Press manager and spokesperson Lalmani Tiwari told The Indian Express.

We take a brief look at Gita Press and its journey to become one of the world’s largest publishing houses.

Founding of Gita Press

Gita Press was founded officially in 1923 by Jaydayal Goyandka, a Marwari businessman from Bankura, West Bengal. However, the seeds for the idea were sown over a long period of time, during Goyandka’s business travels.

A trader in cotton, kerosene oil, textiles and utensils, his work took him all over the place, from small towns like Chakradharpur (now in Jharkhand) and Sitamarhi in Bihar, to cities like Kharagpur and Calcutta. A religious man, Goyandka formed groups of friends in these towns, mostly other businessmen, who joined him in satsangs (religious congregations), discussing different religious texts, most importantly, the Bhagavad Gita.

However, there was a problem. Goyandka and his friends yearned for an authentic translation of the Gita, along with a faithful commentary. After initial attempts to get the text published by an external publisher failed, Goyandka decided to start his own publishing house.

Ghanshyamdas Jalan, Goyandka’s friend and a businessman from Gorakhpur, offered to set up the press in his hometown. By April 1923 Gita Press was ready to print its first translation of the Gita with commentary, on a hand press bought for Rs 600.

Gita Press takes off with Kalyan

But it was only in 1926 that Gita Press truly came to life as a serious player in the fast-emerging Hindi publishing world of the early twentieth century. According to Akshaya Mukul, author of Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015), this was with the beginning of its monthly magazine, Kalyan, the first monthly journal to be devoted exclusively to Hinduism.

This put Goyandka’s organisation in the centre of a number of important socio-political developments of the time. Mukul points at a couple of important factors.

First, was the consolidation of Hindi as a language – specifically, as ‘a language of Hindus’ – and the rapid growth of its use in the public sphere by the end of the nineteenth century. More importantly, the rise of competing political nationalism among Hindus and Muslims in the period, created a space for an entity like Kalyan to rapidly expand by acting as a vehicle to spread the Hindu nationalist message.

In its initial years, Kalyan was helmed by Hanuman Prasad Poddar, a rising Marwari leader with links to Hindu Mahasabha. Under Poddar, Kalyan took the message of sanatan dharma to the hinterland through its extremely accessible pieces on Hindu scripture. Moreover, Poddar was not wary of being political – Kalyan also put forth ideas of nationalism, and what a modern Indian state would look like.

Cultivating the feeling of being Hindu

Kalyan, along with the publication of cheap yet high-quality editions of the Ramayana, Gita, Mahabharata, Puranas and other Hindu religious texts made the Gita Press one of the most important institutions in modern Hinduism and Hindu nationalism.

Monika Freier, in her paper “Cultivating emotions: the Gita Press and its agenda of social and spiritual reform” (2012) wrote that one of the key reasons behind Gita Press’s success was its ability to reconcile “reformist organisations” like the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj, and “traditionalist organisations” like the Hindu Mahasabha and Bharat Dharma Mahamandal.

Freir argues that Gita Press founders deliberately avoided writing on the differences between different Hindu sects and schools of thought, instead offering “a framework for emotion cultivation that could serve as an ideal point of reference and identification for the Hindu community as a whole.”

Gita Press today

Today, Gita Press is one of the world’s largest publishers and the only indigenous publishing enterprise of colonial India that continues to thrive in the 21st century. Its books are published in 15 languages including English, Urdu and Nepali, with 20 retail outlets and over 2500 book sellers in India and abroad selling them. And it is growing like never before.

During the pandemic, when publishers across the world were facing major crises, Gita Press grew. Speaking to The Indian Express, spokesperson Lalmani Tripathi said that “such is demand from everywhere these days that we are often unable to meet it. In the financial year 2022-23, we have sold over 2.40 crore copies of our books for nearly Rs 111 crore.”

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As per Tripathi, Gita Press sells nearly 10 lakh copies of Ramcharitmanas every year. Moreover, Kalyan presently has a print order for approximately 1.60 lakh copies. Over the years, it has sold over 17 crore copies of Kalyan.