Let me begin by acknowledging that this is a first-rate piece of scholarship which will be one of the standard works on the subject for a long time.

The subject I am referring to here is not just the Gita Press which the title refers to, but the intellectual underpinning of the Hindutva movement as it unfolded in the 20th century. In many ways, it reminds me of an unrelated book, Ayodhya: The Dark Night (about the Babri land grab) in the way it reveals how putrid and unknown some aspects of Hindu nationalism are.

This book is about the thinking man's Hindutva. It is about true Indian conservatism. What does it mean to be conservative and to be 'of the right'? This book tells us unambiguously it means to preserve our ancient traditions and our culture, no matter how regressive they may be in the modern world.

It is about two publisher-businessmen-writers (also agony aunts for your spiritual problems) who pushed the message of Hindu nationalism from their press. Of these two Marwari men, one was first attracted to Gandhi and then put off by his caste reforms. He, Hanuman Prasad Poddar, is clearly unhinged, having the sort of spiritual epiphanies that would have been seen as messianic in a monotheistic nation. These epiphanies do not make him gentle: Poddar is an enthusiastic supporter of keeping Dalits out of temples and rejects the idea of dining together with them.

The book illuminates that time in India's history where much of our mythmaking happened. The idea and the definition of a Hindu identity as sharply posited against Islam and Muslims are a gift of this period. Much of this may be attributed to the Gita Press. It has put out over 150 million copies of various religious titles, primarily the Gita and the Ramayana of Tulsidas. This is astonishing for a country historically low in literacy and even lower in deploying its ability to read on actual texts.

This is coupled with a magazine called Kalyan (still extant) that reaches 200,000 homes. I did not know that it had an English edition that reached 100,000. These are staggering numbers, given how kooky the content of the magazine is.

The Hindu right's positions on cow slaughter we are familiar with because the results and the damage are still with us. But it is instructive to see how deranged their positions on other things are.

It will not surprise the reader that Gita Press has a strong dislike of modern and English education, that it has a problem with cinema, and that it has attacked birth control. I was not surprised to learn either that it was in favour of child marriage, and so opposed to the law Muhammad Ali Jinnah brought about (called the Sarda act), which banned child marriage in India.

As is the case when men of any religious persuasion embark on spreading morality, the female and her behaviour is roped in. One of the most horrifying chapters is the one on family values ('The moral universe of Gita Press').

In our parts politics is inseparable from religion and culture. The press has made common cause with the Hindutva movement and is united in its political view with the Jan Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

I was struck at how the press owners and their writers are preponderantly Bania and Brahmin. This has been a tradition for quite some time and the early part of the 20th century, according to this book, saw magazines which were aimed at reform in Marwari and Aggarwal society which were financed by Marwaris but were edited by Brahmins.

This caste-specific composition affected the press' output, naturally. Pushing the traditionalist positions on Hinduism also meant pushing caste. Mukul tells us that "much of the Gita Press's critique of the Hindu Code Bill stemmed from its opposition to lower castes gaining liberty of access to upper-caste homes through marital alliances that had the sanction of law".

It is frightening and sobering that the Hindu political consciousness should have come out of such criminal nonsense. Our misfortune is the inability of our middle class to see it clearly for what it is. This work would open their eyes if they would read it.

This is, as I said, a scholarly work. In his bibliography, writer Akshaya Mukul lists two dozen works in Hindi under the secondary sources alone. The English ones run into well over a hundred, and each page and almost every paragraph shows the depth of the research. It is not easy to be entertaining with subjects as grim as the ones the author tackles, and the book is heavy going in parts, given the vast and in fact Tolstoyesque cast of characters, which include many national figures, including G.D. Birla, Ramnath Goenka, among others.

Author Mukul is a journalist. For those who constantly complain about the poor quality of our media (and I am one of them), this work will come as a surprise. If people of the calibre of Mukul are part of India's mainstream press, it cannot be as bad as it is made out to be.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist

