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Everyone’s Gita: The Ingenious History of a Holy Text. How simple it is to carry a Bhagavad Gita 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 Hinduism. 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 Mahabharata 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 India 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 religion now called Hinduism, and the language of Sanskrit, 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 Hindus. 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, dharma, 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 Ramayana 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 Vishnu-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 religions 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.
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