The popularity of Gita Press and how it shaped modern Hindutva

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The other day I was reading journalist Akshaya Mukul’s Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015) at a cafe in south Delhi, when a stranger at the adjacent table asked if he could take a look at the book. A 20-something Gen Z-er, he was surprised to see a detailed history of the publishing firm.

Growing up, he had seen his parents and grandparents buy Hindi books from Gita Press, but had never imagined its impact on the making of modern India. The young man’s perplexity is part of a larger symptom that afflicts generations of highly Anglicised Indians who are deracinated from the diversity of print cultures that thrive in Indian languages. Whatever end of the political spectrum you may be on, there is a grain of truth in the recent debate over the British parliamentarian T.B.

Macaulay’s legacy of English education in India. By distancing themselves from Indian languages, elite urbanites are losing touch with the ground reality of being modern and Indian. A decade ago, when Mukul published his book, which has become essential to understand the rise of Hindutva politics, the current dispensation had just been elected with a landslide victory, displacing the decades-long hold of the Congress.

An uproar rose among liberal intelligentsia and citizenry over what was perceived to be a cataclysmic shift in the country’s secular identity. This theory, as scholars like Christophe Jaffrelot and Ashutosh Varshney have shown, ignores the complex and interlocking political exigencies that led to the formation of independent India. In the last 10 years, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, followed by the Gujarat violence of 2002, have led to flashpoints of mob violence, “love jihad",