Everyone’s Gita: The Ingenious History of a Holy Text. How simple it is to carry a in my pocket, and when sitting in a park or riding a bus, to open a random page and begin reading. The moment a verse rolls under my breath, I am alert, immersed, and minutes later I emerge clear, steady, some anchor cast. Gripped as I am by the Gita’s power and singular authoritativeness on all sorts of questions, I am also intrigued by the process of its canonization, at how it arrived at its status as the canonical text of . Believed to have been written some 2,000 years ago, the Gita’s original social and religious context is far removed from the context of today. In its original form, it was a small part of the epic, and only one of many texts expounding vedāntic ideas. Yet, the Gita enjoys currency, new translations are released by major publishers every year, renewing and repackaging it into relevance— bookseller Amazon lists over 3,000 entries, indicating a vast and insatiable market. The Gita is believed to be the most translated text after the Bible today.1 The status of the Gita encapsulates a handful of historical problems, of which the foremost is the misrepresentation of Hinduism as one doctrine, or as having one set of beliefs and values. One does not even have to think as far back as the 1st or 2nd CE, when the Gita may have been authored; India’s political boundaries are less than a century old. The Gita may be said to belong to Pakistan, West Bengal, and the Indo-Chine too, but the last hundred years have mapped a region shared by the region now called India, a now called Hinduism, and the language of , and then associated the ownership of the Gita only to their intersection. More historical distortion surfaces when one uses the Gita to understand – or misunderstand – the . Gita presents an abbreviated presentation of the message in the vedānta, or the Upaniṣads, including a handful of verses also occurring in some of the Upaniṣads. If there is one book that covers all the ideas now popularly considered central to the Hindu or the Indian worldview – transmigration, karma, , bhakti and the presence of an essential self and its immortality, it is the Gita. The message of the Gita is a mixed bag. Along with the urging towards equanimity, detachment, self-control and devotion to God, there are contrary messages— the rightness of war and violence because of eternality (2.21) or because the enemy’s fate is already pre-decided (11.33); caste hierarchies, social inequalities and lack of equal opportunity as divine decision

1 Minor, 5.

(Gita 4.13); and inter-caste mixing a guarantor of chaos (Gita 1.40-44). Sanskrit presents yet another problem. Unlike the Mahabharata or which are more assimilated into the spoken languages of the people in the Indic region, the Gita is firmly rooted in Sanskrit. Every Gita commentary, in writing or in speech, presents the Sanskrit text, and then deals with it exegetically. Alongside the aura of Sanskrit is a politically charged context, and the increasingly uncomfortable position of any writer, translator, or scholar who works with Sanskrit. Today, Sanskrit embodies the preservation of rigid traditions, orthodoxy, and the valorization of Sanskrit is a clinging on to Brahmin hegemony, howsoever anachronistic the idea. The status of the Gita, then, despite these problems, becomes all the more puzzling. The establishing of the Gita is striking when one compares it with other texts that were declared cultural windows by orientalists. Texts such as Manusmriti, Śakuntala, Gitagovinda, Medhaduta and -Purana which were disseminated along with the Gita as representations of Indic culture during a colonial era, are now regarded world literature, but have not given rise to a universe in the manner of the Gita. For Śakuntala, new contexts resulted in textual revisions that overwrote the memory of the original; for the Gita, new contexts produce new interpretations which the original text survives. Why did the Gita – and no other text – come to represent a tradition that has an abundance of texts offering spiritual guidance? The Gita’s success story seems built upon chance, convenience, politics, and marketing. This essay investigates the process by which the Gita has achieved canonical status and continues to maintain it— a survey of recent history over the last two hundred years since Wilkins’ translation, followed by the process of interpretation, translation and dissemination by which the Gita was adapted to contexts and made instrumental to ideologies. Based on this historical analysis, the essay reflects about why the Gita – and not any other text in the Indic tradition – lent itself to, and invited, such instrumentality. Gita in the East India company policy How and why the Gita came to be disseminated by the East India Company is a narrative full of irony. Michael Franklin, editor of the European Discovery of India series which compile a group of texts that formulated the representation of India, describes a community of Orientalists engaged with Indian texts, and whose interactions with Indian informants led to

selection of texts.2 Kaśīnātha, a Brahmin pundit in Benaras, furnished Sanskrit manuscripts to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, who composed A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776). Halhed saw the Gita as embodying “the most ancient and pure religious principles of the Hindoos.”3 At the time, Charles Wilkins ran a vernacular printing press in Calcutta and printed Halhed’s A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778). When Wilkins traveled to Benaras, he studied with Kaśīnātha, and then translated the Gita. Warren Hastings recommends that the East India Company publish this translation. In an open letter to the then Chairman of the East India Company, Nathaniel Smith, Hastings writes: I hesitate not to pronounce the Gēētā a performance of great originality; of a sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction, almost unequalled; and a single exception, among all known of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian dispensation, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental doctrines.4

On 9 December 1784, Hastings explains his motives behind this recommendation in a letter to John Scott: My letter to Mr Smith introducing Mr Wilkin’s Translation of the Gheeta is also Business, although began in Play. It is the effect or part of a System which I long since laid down, and supported for reconciling the People of England to the Natives of Hindostan.5

Thus serving a fortuitous combination of play and business, and construed as corresponding to the Christian spirit, the Gita embarked on a journey to bridge cultures. Wilkins’ translation met with enthusiastic response in Europe. Johann Gottfried von Herder thought the Gita “linked the Hindu doctrine of the universal soul with the pietism of an intimate God and the mystery of union.”6 The British dominated the tradition of scholarship and translation of the Gita from 1785 through 1905. A Latin translation by August W. Schlegel was published in 1823 and later became Emerson’s first contact with the Gita. In 1846, Christian Lassen revised and expanded Schlegel’s translation. Translations that followed were by John Davies (1882), Sir Edwin Arnold (1885) which later became MK Gandhi’s first contact with the Gita, and William Q. Judge (1890). After 1905, however, and up to the beginning of the Second World War, French and especially German scholarship emerged prominently.7

2 Franklin, 2001. 3 Ibid., xxi 4 Franklin, xxii, italics mine 5 ibid, vii 6 ibid., xxii 7 Larson, 517.

The Gita captured the imagination of the Orientalists and German Romantics, and then was re-assessed as immoral by utilitarians. Reviewing Humboldt’s lectures on the Gita in 1826, G.W.F Hegel discussed deficiencies in Indian morality. He is troubled by the reasons for Arjuna’s doubts: “Great importance is attached to the conversion of this tie into a superstitious context, into an immoral belief in the dependence of the soul’s fate after death.”8 This was also when McCaulay’s “Minute on Education” was established, with its low evaluation of Sanskrit literature, and emphasis on an Anglicized education. Gandhi writes, in Experiments with Truth: “In those days Christian missionaries used to stand in a corner near the high school and hold forth, pouring abuse on Hindus and their Gods. I could not endure this.”9 In this fraught context, the Gita provided a basis for an active response to British rule. Gita in India’s freedom struggle Gandhi’s first acquaintance with the Gita, in 1888-89, was through Edwin Arnold’s 1896 English translation The Song Celestial.10 Reading the English translation motivated Gandhi to read Gujarati translations, and to study Sanskrit. He was deeply impressed, and the Gita replaced all other scriptures for him: “If all the other scriptures were reduced to ashes, the seven hundred verses of this imperishable booklet are quite enough to tell me what Hinduism is and how one can live up to it.” Further, Gandhi focused attention on the 72 verses of Chapter 2, and identified the last nineteen verses of this chapter as representative of Gita’s message. He wrote: “These stanzas are the key to the understanding of the Gita. I would even go so far as to advise people to reject statements in the poem which bear a meaning contrary to that of these nineteen stanzas.”11 Focused on select parts of the Gita and denying its other parts, Gandhi’s interpretation attracted criticism, questions and appeals to explain himself through translation. When Gandhi called for a strike on 8th May, 1919 and suggested that people should fast and read the Gita, he was challenged about its appropriateness; he then explained the war in the Gita as an allegory: “the war going on in our bodies between the forces of Good (Pandavas) and the forces of Evil (Kauravas).”12 He read the war as a struggle between dharma and adharma, and the central message of the Gita as “anāsakta” (detachment). By following the true message of the Gita, one would be automatically non-violent. In the

8 Hegel, qtd. In Sawhney, 96. 9 Gandhi, Autobiography, 33 10 Desai, The Gita according to Gandhi 11 Gandhi, Collected Works L1, 344, qtd by Jordens, 93. 12 Jordens, 89.

freedom movement, Gandhi made communal recitation of the Gita an activity in his ashram. Historian Ashish Nandy points to MK Gandhi’s deployment of the Gita as pivotal to the consolidation of its status: “It was through Gandhi that Gita came closest to being a canonical text in Hindu consciousness.”13 Troubled by variant interpretations of the Gita, one of the Gandhi’s contemporaries, , studied the text independently and translated and commented on the Gita. Tilak was one of the leaders of the extremist group in the Indian National Congress. Tilak was called the “father of Indian unrest,” not satisfied with relative autonomy, and demanded complete political autonomy and national independence. His book, titled Śrīmad Bhagavad Gita Rahasya was subtitled Karma-Yoga Śastra. Unlike Gandhi’s Gita, Tilak’s Gita provided precedents for violent anti-British activity. In 1897, in his journal Kesari, he cited the Gita to absolve Shivaji, the Maratha King, from the murder of Afzhal Khan. Tilak and other extremist nationalists embraced the concept of a political missionary who has to resort to violence as part of duty (dharma). Gandhi’s and Tilak’s positions are dramatized in Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Ghare- Baire (Home and the World), a story set in Bengal during the swadeshi movement. In Tagore’s novel, the Gita features in the words of revolutionaries whose principles are up for question. Sandip, a revolutionary, says: We are riding on the crest of patriotism and religion with equal passion. I am fully carrying on the fad of the nation, and simultaneously using religion as a pretext to do so. We want both Bande Mataram and the Bhagavad Gita. Consequently, neither of them is comprehensible to us.14

A conflict is being presented here. Religion has been used in the service of the nation, and humanistic principles forgotten. Later in the story, Amulya, a young firebrand who works with Sandip enacts this conflict: Amulya took out a pocket edition of the Gita from the pocket of his kurta and kept it on the table, and then took out a small pistol and showed it to me. He did not say anything. (Bimala): “God forbid! He had not hesitated for a moment to contemplate killing our elderly cashier. [….] He could not really fathom how real the elderly cashier was in the world; he only saw an empty sky in its place. That sky had no life, no pain – but only the worlds of a shloka from the Gita: He who kills the body kills nothing.15

13 Nandy, qtd by Sawhney, 86. 14 Tagore, Home and the World, 115 15 ibid., 214.

Tagore’s novel shows how conflicting interpretations of the Gita directly led to a bloody history. Just as Gandhi formulated his political strategy on the basis of the Gita, so did his assassin Nathuram Godse. At the High Court deposition on 8th November 1948, Godse chose to represent himself, and did not plead innocent. In his defense-speech, he explained his reverence for “Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture,” and cites the Gita: killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and relieved . killed Kansa to end his wickedness; and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations including the revered Bhishma because the latter was on the side of the aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed a total ignorance of the springs of human action.16

Was Gandhi more interested in religion and renunciation than politics? Building on Jordens’ discussion about the evolution of Gandhi’s ideology, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar examine Gandhi’s writing before and after 1920, and conclude that Gandhi was not trying to spiritualize politics, but using the Gita as a talisman.17 It was a personal project by which the satyagrahi who entered politics could protect himself while being immersed in political action. This, then, was Gandhi’s way of accepting politics as it was. The Gita’s utilization in the nationalist movement is ironic, since it was introduced by the British, and came to many of the nationalists by way of English. Aghehanda Bharati, in “Hindu Renaissance and its apologetic patterns” discusses how concepts come to be seen as authentic and traditional after they are validated outside the tradition. He coins a term for the phenomenon, “pizza- effect,” referring to the transformation of the Italian pizza by way of World War I and USA, to a highly elaborate dish of many sizes, flavors and hues, and its subsequent re-establishment at a higher status in Italy. As per Bharati’s theory, one may say India discovered that part of its own heritage which was approved by the Empire. Conversely, the Empire gave the Colony a selective memory of heritage by which it wanted to be overthrown. The enthusiastic reception to the Gita outside India produced a counter-intensity within India. The Gita in America The Gita’s trajectory took a different direction outside India. In “Transcendental Brahmin: Emerson’s “Hindu” Sentiments,” Steven Adiasmito Smith describes Emerson’s

16 Godse deposition speech 17 Chakrabarty-Majumdar, 345.

context in America: Orestes Brownson, fellow member of the Transcendental Club founded in the fall of 1836, describes the interest in India that was then in the air. He reports a reaction against the “Materialism” of the Protestant churches, English Utilitarians, and the bloody events of post-revolutionary France. Transcendentalist longed for a renewed spirituality: They turned back and sighed for the serene past, the quiet and order of old times, for the mystic land of India, where the soul may dissolve in ecstasy and dream of no change.18

Here, the Indic civilization Hegel had criticized as ahistorical was ideal because it was ahistorical. Emerson’s early information on India had included a range of materials – translations by Charles Wilkins, William Jones, mythological narratives with many “superstitions,” articles on Rammohan Roy’s defense of the original exalted tenets of Hinduism, and so on. But India’s superstition was to be brushed aside to rediscover a civilization that was really glorious. India and America shared a common ground as past and present colonies of India, and America could be a model. He wrote that “[f]reedom, both political and ideological, is possible for India if she follows “Columbia’s [America’s] example.”19 Emerson bought in to the romantic idea about a spiritual India. He first read fragments of Schlegel’s Gita in 1821, and ten years later, read a summary in Victor Cousin’s Cours de Philosophie in 1831. Cousins presented the Gita as an exemplar of “mystical philosophy.” Smith summarizes: “It resolved the balance between action and inaction, doubt and faith, speculation and action, matter and spirit; [….] beyond the ephemeral world […] the “eternal principle” resides.”20 The material of the Gita went towards the formation of a political philosophy for Emerson. Emerson and Thoreau became a fountainhead for American literature, and it is in this juncture that their involvement with the Gita becomes crucial— for Gita’s future globalization. Thus, within India the Gita became a symbol of spiritual identity, while globally, it became a symbol of spiritual universality. In 1944, a translation was published in Hollywood by a guru and a movie star and with an introduction by Aldous Huxley. -Christopher Isherwood’s The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita brought a new flair to the Gita. Huxley makes references to Plato, Mahayana Buddhism, St John and other sources across cultures, and then folds them all into one concept: “But under all this confusion of tongues and myths, of local histories and particularist doctrines, there remains a

18 Emerson, qtd by Steven Smith, 153. 19 Ibid., 153. 20 Ibid.

Highest Common Factor, which is the Perennial Philosophy in what may be called its chemically pure state.” This perennial philosophy makes it “perfectly possible for people to remain good Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or Moslems and yet to be united in full agreement on the basic doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy.” Huxley then connects this concept of perennial philosophy to the Gita, calling it the “one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.” In the translator’s preface, the approach of letting Sanskrit terms stay in Sanskrit is explained both from a sense of the untranslatability of the Gita, as well as from a sense of bewilderment at the “outlandish” names of the characters on the battlefield. This is a translation strategy Schleirmacher would call domestication, rather than foreignization. The Gita was translated to suit the international audience. Gita in Hindu identity Rather than evoking a national identity, the Gita today evokes a Hindu identity. One often hears quoted, ’s statement that Hindu men needed an intense regimen of “beef, biceps, and the Bhagavad-Gita.” Another statement by Vivekananda that has become a popular quote is about manliness: “It is a man-making religion that we want. It is man-making theories we want. I want the strength, manhood, kshatravirya, or the virility of a warrior.”21 This is the same Vivekananda who spoke at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions, and said he was proud to belong to a religion that taught the world tolerance and universal acceptance. In this speech, he condemned “sectarianism, bigotry and its horrible descendent, fanaticism.”22 Obviously, Vivekananda’s statements about the Gita are in the context of the freedom movement, and not to be understood outside that context. The Gita that once served the nationalist movement now serves campaigns to establish Hindu identity. The Gita, which never once uses the term “Hindu,” is now in the service of Hinduism. In March 2010, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh called for the inclusion of Gita in the school curriculum.23 This Hinduism also crosses political boundaries: in June 2010, when the new and first woman elected Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobaggo, Kamla Persad-Bisssessar took her oath on the Gita, the media declared it a sign of the future of Hinduism.24 Gita in the market

21 Vivekananda, 1970, qtd by Gilmore, 185. 22 Vivekananda, Parliament of World Religions speech 23 Times of India, March 2, 2010. 24 http://www.news.gov.tt/index.php?news=3991

If Aldous Huxley insisted that the Gita belongs to the world, and if some Hindus today insist that Gita belongs to Hinduism, capitalism insists Gita belongs to the market. Reading the introductions of turn-of-the-century translations shows new concerns. Ashok Kumar Malhotra expresses pedagogical concerns in his 1999 Transcreation of the Bhagavad Gita. Malhotra’s book is structured like a school textbook, with a story outline, list of characters, a summary before each chapter, an afterword about various philosophical positions, or interpretations of the Gita, and an appendix on explanations for some of the terms related to the ethical, philosophical and religious content. Malhotra has relied on an undergraduate student editor who whetted the translation to delete all words that might not be in the vocabulary of a typical undergraduate student. Malhotra’s emphasis on skill is echoed by most translators today. Translators today discuss their frustrations with previous translations, and try to present a more lucid, accurate, textured, or poetic text. In the introduction to his Gita (2008) George Thompson discusses his dissatisfaction with the accuracy of meaning in metrical translation, and the loss of poeticism in prose translations. Graham Schweig’s Gita (2007) articulates product differential forcefully. Schweig attempts to make this translation “a reincarnation of the mood and feeling of the original Sanskrit verse.” He aims to give the reader “an immediate grasp of the ideas of the Gita” and claims that his translation is “very faithful to the original text and reflects some of the literary qualities of the original, yet which can be easily read and grasped.” Schweig notes that he uses gender-free language, does not convert the negative words into positive words, does not ignore articles, repeats the repetitions in the original, thus displaying an earnest respect for the form and content of the original text, as well as for political correctness. Gita translations are not a zero-sum game. The pie seems expansive, with a vast general audience and multiple target readers. George Thompson’s Gita calls it “ideal for students in many fields and disciplines including – because it explains the core principles of Vedic philosophy – dedicated practitioners of yoga.” Most translations are priced between the 15-20$ range, the price of a paperback book of fiction. These books also compete with free online translations, including Bhaktivedanta’s Gita As It Is. Available free online, this translation may seem a devaluation of the product; in fact, the product here is not the Gita, it is Iskcon. The Gita is being used as a promotional incentive to attract people to Isckon. The website features information (advertising) about Iskcon, and the Gita is an application that carries the user to this ad. The Iskcon Gita aims to promote a specific product, Krishna consciousness. In doing so, it increases awareness of the product line of Hinduism anyway.

This strategy is comparable with the free distribution of the Bible or the Qur’an. The book is a marketing tool and a media vehicle, and its purpose is proselytizing, the finding of new consumers and the sale of a doctrine. The Gita is now also an advertisement platform. The secret of Gita’s pluralism How could a single work become such a flexible platform for so many ideologies? Rather early on in the Gita, Krishna presents two distinct paths, gñāna (knowledge) and karma (activity, duty, ritual) as two valid paths. Seeking clarity, Arjuna asks Krishna, “your mixed messages confuse / please tell me one thing straight / what will take me further” (3.2). Krishna’s response is somewhat equivocal. He recommends both, but above all, he recommends detachment. Not doing anything does not free one from karma, and renunciation does not guarantee liberation. There’s more, and that is the path of bhakti (devotion). All of these paths are referred to as “yoga.” All of this is radically different from classical Hindu beliefs. A liberal text: The Gita model is at variance from the classical tradition as found in the Dharmaśāstra. The classical Brahmanic model of a person’s life-cycle was that of one path, leading from studentship (brahmacarya) to householding (gṛhastha) to renunciation (sanyāsa) and then to forest-dwelling (vanaprastha). According to the Gita, anyone at any stage in life could hope for and strive for liberation. The classical Brahmanic organization of society was the varṇa (caste) system, in four categories: the brahmin, the kṣatriya, the vaiśya and the śūdra. This was not overturned by the Gita, because Krishna declares that he has created the system based on guṇa, or nature (18.41). This gave divine and natural sanction to the system. At the same time, liberation was not denied to anyone. Actions are governed by prakriti (nature) which has guṇas (qualities) – sātvic, rājasic, and tāmasic. The main character, Arjuna, was a kṣatriya, and to find liberation, he had to do nothing beyond what he normally would do. In fact, Krishna specifies that it is better to do one’s own duty well than another person’s duty badly (3.35). All that one has to do to qualify for liberation is to develop a shift in how to approach life, especially through detachment. This was the new credential, a way to beat the system. To top that, a devotee could take an even faster shortcut to God’s heart. Offering all actions to God with devotion was a guaranteed way to please Krishna and earn grace. This, then, was a text that did not interfere with status quo, actually upheld the social order of varṇa, as well as presented a solution away from oppression. A text that suited the spirit of reform, and that the nationalists found palatable. In his essay, “Hindu Rennaissance and its Apologetic Patterns,” Aghehananda Bharati discusses this curious mix as intrinsic to revivalism. Quoting

N.J. Smelser, he says: A revival, as we use the term, involves an enthusiastic redefinition of religious methods, but not a challenge to basic religious values, states a general rule. The parlance of the Hindu Renaissance deemphasizes ritual, caste, and "superstitions," and it frequently plays down "religion." These are devices of linguistic dissimulation, generated by "basic religious values" as reinterpreted in the Renaissance. They neither imply the rejection of these nor the espousal of new, opposing values.

A short text: The Gita was already a major religious text in India long before the Orientalists discovered it. It was considered one of the “Prasthānatrāyi,” the other two being the Brahmasūtrās attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, and the Upaniṣads. All these works had an extensive commentarial tradition. Indian philosophy brought two distinct interpretive positions to the Gita; one via Śankara (8th CE) focused on gñana-yoga and advaita (non- dualism), and one via Madhva, on dvaita (dualism), which lent itself to the devotional. A third approach was the viśiṣṭa-advaita (qualified non-dualism) by Rāmānuja. The Prasthānatrāyi were semi-philosophical and turned away from vedic ritualism. It is now thought they were all authored or compiled around the time of the rise of Buddhism in India (5th BCE onwards), sharing a repertoire of ideas with Buddhism. They would all have been equally appealing to one who had come out of the European Englightenment. However, the Upaniṣads and the Brahmasūtrās are not as handy as the Gita. In 700 verses, the Gita is containable in pocket- sized editions the size of the Bible. There are over a hundred Upaniṣads, of which thirteen were considered the principal Upaniṣads. Many of them include bewildering cosmology, numerous vedic dieties and incoherent narratives, it is simply not possible to distill them into one text. The Brahmasūtrās do attempt to reconcile the diverse statements in the various Upaniṣads and the Gita by placing each teaching in a doctrinal context, but they are terse and incomprehensible without various commentaries. By comparison, the Gita has a single, connected narrative. There are two characters in the “action,” which is really a non- action. There is not much of a plot, no change of scene, and the entire text is really a monolog posing as a dialog. Most importantly, there is one deity, who seems more or less approachable. In simple Sanskrit, the Gita is easy to read with a dictionary. The verses of the Gita are metrical, employing a couple of basic meters, and enabling easy memorization. Free of context: As a self-contained text or book, the Gita is actually out of context, cut off from the narrative of the Mahabharata where it first occurs. Krishna plays a devious role in the war of the Mahabharata, encouraging the Pandavas to utter falsehood and belie trust to gain

advantage. Droṇācārya’s death – murder – in the Droṇaparva is a climactic moment for this role. When Droṇā begins to overwhelm the Pandava troops, Krishna advices the Pandavas that Droṇā will not fight if his son Asvatthāman is killed, and suggests that someone say so. Arjuna dissents. Yudhiṣṭira hesitates but condones, and Bhima acts upon it – killing an elephant whose name happens to be Aśvatthāman. Upon hearing the news, Droṇā reacts violently, and then turns to Yudhiṣṭira for confirmation, because he trusts him to speak the truth. Krishna says, to protect them from Droṇā, a falsehood is better than truth. Yudhiṣṭira lies. His chariot, which until then has been in a semi-divine state of being afloat, abruptly falls to the ground. When Droṇā dies, Arjuna declares that he and the entire Pandava army are condemned to hell by the way the act is performed. This episode is one of many in the Mahabharata in which the reader can either consider Krishna duplicitous, or as a divine being who employs skillful means; either way, his word is not to be taken at face value. This textual context is overlooked when translators and commentators of the Gita get into hermeneutic tangles over Krishna’s words, or when they deliberate which one path ought to be privileged over the other. If the Gita was already regarded as a self-contained text and one of the three Prasthānatrāyi, its consecration as a holy book strengthened this false notion beyond repair. Krishna’s tactics may also be seen as a precedent for the variety of tactical and context-influenced interpretations of the Gita. The many paths suggested in the Gita leave the text open for interpretation, and make it a wide-ranging discussion within the Mahabharata. Arjuna’s moral stance remains full of doubt, as the narrative of the Mahabharata shows. At the end of the Mahabharata, when everything is in ruin and Krishna’s life comes to a close, signaling the end of an era, what we have left is śānta-rasa, and a profound sense of detachment. One wonders, had the Gita not been isolated from its textual context and presented as representative of Indian philosophic ideas, would Hegel have been disturbed about moral deficiency, and would the nationalists have found a platform in it? Merely representing a civilization with a deep history of narratives is bound to create distortions; a text violently plucked out of context presents a further contrivance. Hegel’s expectation – and disappointment – suggests that he was looking for a moral compass from a narrative that is rather complex, and while an openness to interpretation is gained in the Gita, complexity is lost. Huxley’s declaration that the Gita stands for perennial philosophy is an adulatory remark, but a testament to this loss, as is Emerson’s sense that the Gita’s message was “the eternal principle, and “beyond the ephemeral world.” In the selecting and editing process that produced the Gita, the complexity of the Mahabharata is hidden from view. The Gita’s ahistoricity, while continuing to be problematic, serves the Gita’s propagation and makes it easy to deploy on

multiple platforms. The nationalists approached the Gita to find a model for dharmic action; today, the book is marketed as a guide to living well. Conclusions The history of Gita’s interpretations seems governed by ideology of the context— orientalism, colonialism, and nationalism, even religious revivalism and cultural imperialism. Orientalist contact gave it a representative role as an Indian and Hindu text, the nationalist contact conferred a canonical status, and the global contact made it universal. The material of the Gita pertains to cultural beliefs, and the inconsistency – or multiplicity and indeterminacy – of its content, and its lack of textual context, invite instrumentality. At the same time as Gandhi, Tilak, or Emerson utilized the Gita to reflect on their context and formulate their ideologies, they revealed their context. Interestingly in the case of the Gita, if the interpretations form a text, they do not erase the source-text. Unlike many texts that get revised over time, and unlike legends, epics and myths which undergo revision and may even become unrecognizable over time, the Gita continues to persist alongside its translations. The Hebrew Bible lives at some remove from the English Bible, the Gita is never too far or hard to reach. The Qur’an is officially untranslatable, and that is said to protect its original form; the Gita is over-translated and still maintains its original form. The new attention being given to translation in the international market also push the reader towards the source-text, so easily available online. Roman diacritics makes it possible to know how the original sounds, and extensive interlinear guides help grasp word-by-word meaning. Commentaries published in India tend to include the Sanskrit text, whether in Nāgari, Roman diacritics or other scripts. If the ‘brahmarpaṇam’ verse, offering food to Brahman before eating it, was a part of brahminical ritual before eating, now it is practiced on a large scale. Gita chanting classes, music CDs, and public forums keep the ‘word’ of the original immediate, and preserved, ever ready for new contexts. Contrived, emptied, inscribed into multiple discourses, the Gita nourishes an expanding galaxy. There are two ways to respond to the outcome: one, to be bewildered and even outraged at the ‘use’ or ‘exploitation’ of the Gita as a platform for a range of agendas; two, to marvel at the phenomenon. Read Michael Pollan’s book Botany of Desire, and you realize the reciprocal relationship between human beings and plants. Pollan demonstrates how some plants survive and propagate themselves by fulfilling humankind’s basic yearnings, it would be difficult to decide who uses whom. This is the power and ingenuity of the Gita.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bhaktivedanta (trans.), Bhagawad Gita As It Is. New York: MacMillan, 1972.

Malhotra, Ashok Kumar (trans.), Transcreation of the Bhagavad Gītā. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1999.

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Godse, Nathuram. Deposition Statement of Nov 8, 1948 in Murder Case, Printed Volume II, Criminal Appeals Nos. 66-72 of 1949, Punjab High Court, Simla. May It Please Your Honour. Gopal Vinayak Godse. Pune: Vitasta Prakashan, 1977. E-text from Center for Research Libraries.

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