Remember Bapu? He was in Munnabhai

The Gandhiji-founded Navjivan Mudranalaya — the iconic printing press whose works aspired to empower every Indian to fight for freedom, justice and opportunity — is battling to survive the onslaughts of technology and irrelevance.

Gandhiji had set up the press to produce two weeklies, ‘Navjivan’ and ‘Young India’, after other printers refused to touch the project, fearing British reprisals. But today, Gandhiji’s thoughts have been released from copyright restrictions and the press faces daunting competition from multinational publishing giants. As a result, Gandhiji’s epic campaigning for free speech is going to cost you now. Navjivan sold his enduring classic, ‘My Experiments with Truth’, for around Rs30. Now it will be marked up several times over.

Members of the Board of Trustees of Navjivan Institution, the umbrella organisation that includes the printing press, feel that the institution doesn’t need a printing facility anymore. They say that they can continue publishing books and anthologies of Gandhi’s writings (and also books on Gandhian thought) by outsourcing the printing work to other printing houses.  The employees of the Mudranalaya, however, allege that the management is systemically closing down the printing press to get rid of them.

The managing trustee of Navjivan Institution, Jitendra Desai, said, “Navjivan doesn’t need a printing press now. We may close it down when the permanent workers retire. We are not recruiting new people. There is some labour problem and we have some cases pending in the High Court too.”

Desai further said that there were complaints about workers shirking work. “We introduced some incentive schemes to encourage them to work harder but there was no improvement in the situation,” he said. “We will continue publishing books and anthologies under ‘Navjivan Prakashan Mandir’. We will give the contract for the printing of the books to private printers. We have already outsourced some of our work such as book-binding. Closure of our printing press will not push up the price of our books.”

It is interesting that when Mahatma Gandhi first took over the editorship of ‘Navjivan’ and ‘Young India’ and started publishing them in Gujarati and English, respectively, he had to outsource their printing to other printers in Ahmedabad. The reason was that Navjivan didn’t have its own printing press.

However, the private printing houses of the time printed the first few issues of the two weeklies but refused to print them later out of fear of punishment by the British. It was then that Mahatma Gandhi set up Navjivan Mudranalaya with Ansuyaben Sarabhai donating Rs10,000 for the purpose.

As the circulation of the two weeklies rose, Navjivan Mudranalaya also flourished and, by the end of 1929, it was worth Rs1 lakh. Later, Gandhi founded a trust — Navjivan Institution — and made Navjivan Mudranalaya, and Navjivan Prakashan Mandir (the book publishing department) a part of the trust. The workers of the printing press accuse the trustees of deliberately trying to close the press. Deepak Trivedi, secretary of Navjivan trust employees union, said there had been no recruitment of any new staff for the Navjivan printing press in the last 28 years.