When one talks about the business of publishing in Bharat, Gita Press Gorakhpur doesn’t come across as even a remote contender. The big fat world of Bharatiya publishing dominated by local versions of videshi conglomerates like Harper Collins, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Sage Publications, Hachette, Pan Macmillan, etc, doesn’t seem to have much space for a Dharmik publishing house, that too publishing Hindu religious literature. Ironically enough, books about Hindu Dharma written by woke intellectuals like Devdutt Pattanaik, Shashi Tharoor, etc. are more popular amongst educated Bharatiyas than the original sacred texts of Hindu Dharma. It is these distorted versions of Hindu Dharma that reach the English-educated Bharatiyas, keeping them in a vicious circle of perpetual ignorance and distortion.
But with the consecration ceremony of Ram Mandir (temple) in Ayodhya approaching, the narrative is all set for a radical overhaul. As Hindus not just in Bharat but all over the world get all excited about the mega event, they are making a beeline for buying copies of Hindu epics. The enormous publicity that the Ram Mandir consecration ceremony has generated has led to a renewed interest in the sacred texts of Hindu Dharma not just amongst Hindus but people across religious lines.
Perhaps that’s why, for the first time ever in its history, Gita Press has run out of copies of the Ramcharitmanas edition. Due to the unprecedented surge in demand for its publications, especially the popular edition of Ramcharitmanas, Gita Press has run out copies of the Hindu epic.
According to an article published in OpIndia, Gita Press generally prints 75,000 copies of Ramcharitmanas but they published 1 lakh copies this year. Still, all their stock got exhausted due to unprecedented demand in the run-up to the Ram Mandir Pran Prathishthan ceremony. According to another report on the website of Times Now News, Gita Press has plans to install another printing press worth Rs 9 Crores and is aiming to increase capacity by over 20 percent.
In the meantime, Gita Press has uploaded Ramcharitmanas on their website. The epic will be available for free download for a period of 15 days. The holy book is available for reading in 10 languages including Hindi, English, Gujarati, Oriya, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, Bangla, Nepali, and Assamese. Up to 50,000 people will be able to download the online edition of Ramcharitmanas simultaneously. If the demand and the load further increase, 1,00,000 downloads will be allowed at a time, according to various media reports.
For a publishing house that was barely struggling to survive a few years back, this is indeed a huge turn of circumstances. Gita Press faced a lot of issues in 2015 as its employees went on strike repeatedly demanding higher wages. It is perhaps the only publishing house of Bharat that publishes original and authentic versions of Hindu religious scriptures in various languages, Yet Gita Press has received more brickbats than love. It has often become a victim of acute Hinduphobia and Hindu hatred by woke leftists. A whole lot of woke intellectuals including Congress leader Rahul Gandhi tried to shame Gita Press when the publishing house was awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize by the Bharatiya government in 2021.
The woke media carried various propaganda pieces calling Gita Press anti-Gandhi and called the act of awarding Gita Press akin to awarding Savarkar and Godse. All this hatred for a peaceful and seva-oriented publishing house that has done relentless work for promoting Sanatanti culture and civilizational values, thus countering the threat posed by Abrahamic religions. That is the actual reason that gets woke intellectuals all worked up about Gita Press. How come there exists a publishing house in the 21st century that protects and nourishes Sanatan Dharma instead of degrading and demonizing it, that is the secret subtext of all criticism that Gita Press has received.
Interestingly enough, the anti-Gita Press lobby referred religiously to a book written on Gita Press by Akshaya Mukul and published by Harper Collins: Gita Press And The Making of Hindu India. I haven’t read the book so can’t comment on its contents. But this is a telling commentary on the anomalies of the 21st century Bharat wherein all sorts of literature appropriating institutions of Hindu cultural awakening are available freely and in great demand, but no one actually cares to read Hindu religious texts in original.
All the woke intellectuals vociferously spitting venom against Gita Press by reading Akshaya Mukul’s book or writing books themselves spitting venom against Hindu Dharma encourage a culture of intellectual laziness wherein educated Bharatiyas become dismissive of their own Hindu heritage without knowing anything about it. It is this narrative that the Ram Mandir Pran Pratishthan ceremony is all set to change. As the buzz created around the ceremony makes people eager to read Ramcharitmanas, the buzz generated around Hindu Dharma due to other mega initiatives of the government like the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, Kashi Tamil Sangamam, etc.
While there might be differences of opinion on the way these projects are being conducted, nobody can deny the fact that these initiatives play a major role in carving a Hindu resurgence in the 21st century. Let’s not forget that the whole buzz around Christmas is due to the massive role played by the global popular cultural machinery in propagating those icons and symbols of Christian culture. Unfortunately, our own pop culture machinery like Bollywood hasn’t been able to do the same thing, when it comes to Hindu Dharma.
On the contrary, it has spent massive resources denigrating Hindu Dharma. But once our culture and civilizations start getting viewed as iconic on a global stage, the Bharatiya popular culture machinery will be forced to follow suit. Educated Bharatiyas will start getting drawn to Hindu culture and will show a keen interest in reading the enormous treasure trove of Hindu sacred literature – the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, etc.
The woke leftists have hijacked the cultural and literary institutions of Bharat, creating a culture of mediocrity, and colonial subservience. That is why all sorts of anti-Hindu literature written by stooges of colonialism gets published by the neocolonial press and the woke intellectual circles create a buzzword around such literature, calling it the defining feature of Hindu Dharma.
In the process, the original texts of Hindu Dharma get lost somewhere. That is why many educated Bharatiyas would happily read woke commentaries on Hindu sacred texts by the likes of Devdutt Pattanaik but not read Ramcharitmanas or Bhagavad Gita editions published by Dharmik publishing houses like the Gita Press. It is precisely this narrative that the Ram Mandir Pran Prathishtan ceremony is all set to change. It will create a viable ecosystem for Dharmic publishing houses to enter the mainstream and counter the propaganda of anti-Hindu woke publishers.
