01A correct Gita for every home
Jaydayal Goyandka, a cloth merchant from Churu who held satsangs on the Gita, could not find a printed Gita free of errors that ordinary people could afford. With Ghanshyam Das Jalan and other merchant friends he set up a small press in a rented room in Gorakhpur on 29 April 1923. Hanuman Prasad Poddar, called Bhaiji, joined them and from the mid-1920s edited Kalyan, the Hindi monthly whose special numbers on the Puranas, the Upanishads, the Gita and the saints became reference books in their own right. The rule from the start was to print the texts with care, sell at cost or below, and accept neither advertisements nor donations.
02The press today
The rented room grew into a large works on Gita Press Road, entered through a gate built in the style of a temple. Inside, the Leela Chitra Mandir, opened by President Rajendra Prasad, shows several hundred paintings of the lilas of Shri Rama and Shri Krishna. By the press’s own count it has printed more than 40 crore books in more than a dozen languages, among them crores of copies of the Gita and the Ramcharitmanas, sold through railway-station stalls and shops across India and in Nepal. In 2023 the Government of India gave it the Gandhi Peace Prize for 2021.
The life of this place
- 29 April 1923The press is founded in Gorakhpur.
- mid-1920sKalyan begins, edited by Hanuman Prasad Poddar.
- June 2023The Gandhi Peace Prize for 2021 is announced for Gita Press.
The Leela Chitra Mandir and the bookshop are open to visitors; the works lie about 2 km from Gorakhpur Junction.
