[Reader-list] first posting

[Abhik Samanta]

Hello everyone this is my first posting, extremely sorry i am so late, hope
its not too late.



The project that i suggested would involve an exploration of the printed
matter of the Gita Press as media. An exploration of an act of
communication, which in this case, is designed as a commodity that is priced
at the range of basic necessities. For instance, when they first came out,
the editions were called 'gutkha' otherwise used for alight intoxicant. In a
world where expressions are demanded, so that their conformity can be had,
the poignant moment when the object of expression is configured becomes very
precious. This is well realized by global agencies who feel the need to
generate demand. What remains is the expression itself with the urgency to
retain its partiality or overcome it with the object it is meant for. This
choice, the realization of which is crucial in resisting demands on
expression, is also the site on which  banality, which must accompany a
claim on expression, can be found. This is because expression is essentially
a choice , but not the absence of it. Understanding being important in such
a situation, one could explore the history of banality itself as found in
the cheap pamphlets of the Gita Press.

 The Gita Press commodities became an expression when Hanumanprasad , on the
advice of Gandhi, declared in the first issue of his journal*
Kalyan*(though not yet a part of the press but later on its chief
organ)
that no advertisements would occur, to which he added his own idea that this
would include books and hence no literary criticism. It was thus exclusively
a part of a language of need as the image of a commodity. An expression of
nationalism. The denial of other commodities belied its banal
character(pricing) while on display with them on bookshelves in stations or
large market areas.

However  the expression, as being that of nationalism, becomes complete only
when it explains itself as being the words of God as articulated by
Hanumanprasad primarily as also by his preceptor Jayadayal Goyandaka and
occasionally his friend Radhababa and later on by Swami Ramsukhdas who died
recently. This is why it is part of the language of need, which remains even
today as a language of nationalism. But, this is the site where the products
become banal. Denial of nationalism or iself is how it becomes national just
as it is a commodity that denies others.

This was how Hanuman thought his commodity would be sold. Meaning how it
would be exchanged. The act of exchange being an expression of nationalism.
The commodity would then be consumed. This separation is another inversion
of the order of demand where the moment of exchange moves closer and closer
to the moment of consumption. Exchange here is rather a disjuncture. For
what is consumed does not relate only to the nation. As a commodity it seeks
the body of the reader located amidst colonial journeys of work and travel.
This was the marketing strategy of Hanuman, better described as a strategy
of distribution for it sought to reach or capture at the moment of fatigue
in course of engagement in the time of work. The word fatigue stumbles into
the way spiritual categories are described in corporeal language in the
idiom of the Press.



                      The preoccupations of the world are very bad,
therefore he must deal with them and not leave anything behind… Just as a
man gets ready for a railway journey by buying a ticket and preparing to
board the train , so must  a man deal with his commitments, then there will
be nothing to worry about. (*Kalyan* August 1926,p.52.)



Consumption is a corporeal act, which can only be described as training for
the real thing. Reading is akin to an act of hearing or an act of seeing.
For, the major portion of tracts like *Shriramchintan* are printed in
question answer form where answers are long and made with reference to a
central text like the Ramcharitmanas or anywhere from the corpus of sacred
words of Hinduism. Hanumanprasad describes what he sees in an act of
elaborated translation. He is merely a guide who writes short essays on the
historicity of the Ramayana. Excerpts from letters to people asking
questions  also included making the tract a documentary or testimony of the
corporeality that he claims. The reason why he has to make it so is the real
claim that Hanuman makes in his confessed location in the transmission of
the message. The claim which is the source of and solution to fatigue is the
existence or flow of dark or bad times. The colour of the images on the
cover which attract the buyer become meaningful only with the darkness
described inside. Considering that Hanuman was the designer and not the
painter blackness can be seen as coeval to blindness. The Gita Press
pictures can perhaps be seen as emerging from 'the blackness of Allah'   to
borrow a picturesque phrase from the otherwise bland Orhan Pamuk novel *My*
*Name* *is* *Red*. Here again the viewer becomes becomes introduced to
darkness only when he or she becomes a buyer. This puts off the earlier
denial of being a commodity into an ironical existence which is another
source of colour.

The aim of this project would be to see how these pictures come into being
or attain colour and light in their location as commodities.

An expression is more of  denial, and farthest from a demand for conformity.
Hence when there is an explanation of demand, on its rejection, it is not an
expression but a means of perpetuating conformity. The object of expression
is absent all the same. In which case expression can only seek to unite with
the body of the speaker from which the demand was made.
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