Chapter 3 Section 2

Chapter 3 – Section 2 1 New Empires in India

Male Speaker: The Gita is loved as much as it’s revered. Like the Bible or the Quran, people turn to it for guidance, for solace during crisis or to accept and go beyond everyday toil which is amazing for a philosophical dialogue, a book with no plot, no story. PRAYER The Gita is a part of the great Indian epic story of the Mahabharata, the longest poem in the world. It is eight times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. The Mahabharata tells the story of the rise and fall of a great family in ancient India and climaxes with a massive battle, a war to end all wars. Historians believe that this war actually took place in northern India several thousand years ago; however, it’s unlikely that the Mahabharata was composed by a single author, instead the story was passed on orally and so through the centuries it grew. It has been argued that the Gita is one of these editions because it comes at a point of high tension in the story, the very moment before two armies are about to fight. The Gita is 700 verses long. It takes a couple of hours to recite it. Can we really believe that two armies would have waited patiently while this happened? The time element is unimportant. When God speaks to man he doesn’t have to speak in real time. The entire revelation could have taken place in a flash. In Europe, there is a belief that when a man is drowning he relives his entire life in the few moments it takes him to drown. Time can stretch to infinity in a moment of intensity. The Gita here is art because it captures that illuminating flash in words of great beauty and this is important to remember that it’s not just a dry ethical treatise. It is luminous poetry. PRAYER The Gita is always first quoted in Sanskrit which most people in India don’t speak or understand. It is an ancient and sacred language, but the text is made accessible by the innumerable translations and explanations in local languages. This tradition of analyzing the Gita goes back hundreds of years. This is the library of the welcome trust in central London and here we have some of the oldest copies of the Gita in existence. This one here with its beautiful calligraphy dates back to 1488 and this one was copied in Kashmir in the 18th century. These are beautiful treasures in themselves, but the power of the words is even more beautiful and these words were revealed to Europe

Content Provided by BBC Motion Gallery 1 Chapter 3 – Section 2 2 New Empires in India for the first time when the Gita was translated into English by Charles Wilkins in 1785.

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