Gorakh Dhanda

(Urdu: گورکھدھندا,) Means “complicated business,” popular from Naz Khialvi’s poem “Tum ek gorakh dhanda ho” sung by the legendary Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

I wrote this as a paper for my class about culture industries for my M.A. in media studies program. The topic was unlikley media capitals — not the L.A.s, Mumbais, New Yorks, Londons, etc of the world. Now that I’ve passed the class, I figure this is the perfect afterlife for my paper.

Gorakhpur is a small Indian city close to the Nepal border with a population of about 0.6 million according to the 2011 census data.[1] To put this into perspective, the Mumbai Suburban railway system alone carries more than ten times as many people on a daily basis. Perhaps the most significant impact it has had on Indian culture and history, is by virtue of being associated and synonymous with Gita Press, the world’s largest publisher of Hindu religious texts. Gita Press was founded in 1923, in the town of Gorakhpur in erstwhile British India, and was “envisaged as the Hindu equivalent of a Christian Bible Society.”[2] In the larger context of growing right wing Hindu nationalism, I first wrote this essay for a class assignment about unlikley media capitals. I argue that Gorakhpur is worthy of being considered as a media capital that played a pivotal role in shaping India’s cultural and political economy.

To say that cultural diversity in India can be overwhelming is to say that Mahatma Gandhi was a lawyer; it tells a criminally unembellished tale. That India is a secular and democratic republic is…