WHILE OTHER HINDI JOURNALS of colonial India—whether religious, literary or political—survive only in the archives, to be read by scholars interested in unravelling the heady days of Hindi and Hindu nationalism, Gita Press, with its flagship monthly Kalyan, has grown and prospered as the only indigenous publishing enterprise of the period that continues to this day. With around 70 retail outlets across India, including stalls at many railway stations, Gita Press is a stupendous success in the world of Indian publishing.
Founded in 1926, Kalyan did exceedingly well from the start, with a circulation of 3,000 copies each month by the end of its first year: an unbelievable figure for a genre-specific journal. By the end of 1931, its monthly circulation was 16,000. This grew by more than 50 percent in the next three years, to reach 27,500 by the end of 1934. Today, Kalyan has a circulation of over 2 lakh copies monthly, while its English counterpart Kalyana-Kalpataru has a circulation of over 1 lakh.
Additionally, Gita Press has triumphed in its key mission: publishing cheap and well-produced editions of the Gita, Ramayana and Mahabharata. A pamphlet published in April 1955, when President Rajendra Prasad visited Gita Press at its Gorakhpur headquarters, stated that the press had printed and sold 27.8 million copies of its publications, excluding Kalyan and Kalyana-Kalpataru, since its founding in 1923.
As of last year, the business had sold 71.9 million copies of the Gita; 70 million copies of various works by the bhakti poet Goswami Tulsidas, including the Ramcharitmanas; and 19 million copies of the Puranas, Upanishads and other ancient scriptures. Then, there are its tracts and monographs on the duties of ideal Hindu women and children, of which 94.8 million copies have been sold so far, along with more than 65 million copies of stories from India’s mythic past, biographies of saints, and devotional songs.
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