“Works break through the boundaries of their own time,” writes Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. “They live in centuries, that is, in great time, and frequently (with great works always) their lives are more intense and fuller than are their lives within their own time.”1 In this survey, we have observed the intense and full life that the Bhagavad Gita has lived, starting from its own time. The life of this work took shape as part of a larger composition, the great Sanskrit poem Mahabharata. The discussion of two important figures of the epic at the onset of a cataclysmal war touched on central themes and tensions within the story. Krishna’s teachings drew on ideas and disputes of classical India, restating and reformulating them into an innovative synthesis. The complexity of Krishna’s message and his reconciliation of multiple religious pathways (as Vivekananda and others have phrased it) spoke powerfully to audiences of the Gita’s own time of composition. It also made for a work rich in significance and susceptible to multiple interpretations.
Although a great work of religious literature speaks within and to its own time of composition, Bakhtin reminds us that such a work cannot be closed off in this epoch. Its fullness, he observes, is revealed only in “great time.” In this continuing life, the work comes to be enriched with new meanings and new relevance by new readers in new settings. Different aspects may come to the fore, and these too become part of the life of the text. In medieval India, new hearers and readers found ways that the work spoke to their concerns. For Vedanta commentators like Shankara and Ramanuja, the Gita addressed central theological debates. In the hands of the Maharashtrian bhakti poet Jnanadeva, Krishna’s Sanskrit dialogue with Arjuna proliferated into a greatly expanded devotional Gita in vernacular Marathi. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India, nationalist writers and political figures revisited the Gita. They promoted it as a central work of an emerging Indian national ethos, and discovered in it strong advocacy for engaged social and political action, although the form that action should take remained a point of heated contention.
Just as religious works may break through the boundaries of their own time of composition, some also reach beyond their original culture. The Bhagavad Gita may have originated in the Hinduism of classical India, but it has assuredly not been confined to it. The Gita’s passage out of India began most notably with Wilkins’s translation, which rendered the Sanskrit verse work into eighteenth-century English prose. The English Bhagavat-Geeta delivered the work to an altogether-new audience that eventually included British colonial officials, German romantics, and transcendentalists in the United States. European observers took the Gita as both an ancient book of timeless wisdom and the primary representative work through which to understand and evaluate Hinduism and Indian religious culture.
Wilkins’s translation was only the first of many. Through its myriad translations into English and other languages of the world in the past two centuries, the Gita has become a global scripture. Some scholarly translations attempt to recover the Gita as a historical composition, but many more seek to present the work as a still-living poem. What that poem wishes most to say, however, remains a matter of diverse interpretation. In modern India and beyond, the Gita also continues to lead a rich performative life, including recitations, musical adaptations, oral explications, and dramatized renderings. Audiences continue to read and listen closely to the Gita and to its new commentators, seeking guidance as they navigate complex worldly lives.
Where will the Bhagavad Gita go in the future? During the several years that I have been researching its past, the Gita has continued to appear periodically in the news. Recent events in India, Russia, and the United States reflect some of the current status of the Gita, and perhaps give some indication of its future directions.
In 2011, V. H. Kageri, an education minister in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, proposed that teaching the Bhagavad Gita be made compulsory in the state school system. The ideal would be to devote one hour per day of class time to the Gita, he opined. His suggestion reflected the Hindu nationalist orientation of the party in power in Karnataka, the Bharatiya Janata Party. “I think it is the duty of every Indian to respect the Bhagavad Gita,” Kageri stated. “I strongly feel that if someone does not respect it they have no place in India. They should leave the country and settle abroad.” For Kageri, the Gita is a key maker of Indian identity. Other groups in Karnataka quickly objected. The Gita is a Hindu religious work, they countered. India is a secular country, and it is inappropriate to require all students to study a sacred text of one religious community. In 2012, the chief minister of Karnataka, D. V. Sadananda Gowda, continued to push for expanded Gita teaching in the public schools, but he adopted a softer rhetorical tact. The Gita, he argued, “doesn’t belong to a particular religion or a sect as its teachings are universal. It aims at refining mankind, and other religions have appreciated its philosophical teachings.” In contemporary India, the question of the Gita’s fundamental identity—whether it be Hindu, Indian, or universally human—persists as a matter of public debate.
Outside India, too, the Bhagavad Gita can provoke controversy. In June 2011, in Tomsk, Russia, state prosecutors brought a case against the Gita. Specifically, they sought to ban a Russian translation of Bhagavad Gita As It Is by Swami Prabhupada on charges of religious extremism. The prosecution contended that the work is extremist because it makes a claim for the exclusiveness of the Krishna religion, is anti-Christian by nature, and fosters social discord, religious hatred, and discrimination. Evidently the case was instigated by the local branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which wished to restrict the proselytizing activities of ISKCON, the Hare Krishna devotional organization. In an earlier case, when ISKCON sought permission to construct a Hindu temple in Moscow, the church opposed it vehemently, labeling Krishna an “evil demon.” The stakes were high. If a book is guilty of religious extremism, then possession of that work becomes a punishable offense.
The case evoked a storm of criticism, and drew Russian and Indian diplomats into the fray. In India, members of parliament vented their anger over the case in the Lok Sabha. “We will not tolerate any move to insult Lord Krishna,” exclaimed one Indian politician. They demanded that the Indian government intervene. The Russian ambassador in India expressed his public regret. He reiterated that Russia is a secular and democratic nation, and stressed that the Gita itself was not on trial, only Prabhupada’s “imperfect” commentaries on it. The Indian ambassador in Russia observed that the Gita was “perhaps the most important and respected scripture in the world.” Russian authorities, he stated, had been urged by Indian officials “at a high level” to resolve the matter appropriately. So in many quarters sighs of relief came on December 28, 2011, when the Russian court in Tomsk rejected the prosecutors’ case. In Russia, neither the Bhagavad Gita nor Prabhupada’s commentary on it is legally considered a work of religious extremism.
In Washington, DC, Tulsi Gabbard was sworn in on January 2013 as the first Hindu member of the United States Congress. Her father is Catholic and her mother is Hindu, and Gabbard says she embraced the Hindu side of her heritage as a teenager. To take the oath of office, Representative Gabbard chose to place her hand on a personal copy of the Bhagavad Gita.
Although no religious ceremony is required, Christian and Jewish members of Congress frequently utilize the bibles of their respective traditions when being sworn in. In 2007 Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, had used a copy of the Quran (and one originally belonging to Thomas Jefferson) for his oath. Gabbard did not characterize the Gita as the “Hindu Bible” but instead described it as a work of personal inspiration. She chose it, she said, because its teachings had inspired her “to strive to be a servant-leader, dedicating my life in the service of others and to my country.” During her service in Iraq, she went on, surrounded by visible reminders of mortality, she derived special strength and reassurance from Krishna’s battlefield teachings to Arjuna on the indestructibility of the soul. Among her favorite Gita verses, she quoted this one: “The soul can never be cut into pieces by any weapon, nor can it be burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by wind” (2.23). Although her Republican opponent had asserted during the campaign that her Hindu faith was incompatible with the US Constitution, no public objection was made to Gabbard’s introduction of the Bhagavad Gita into the halls of the US capitol.
This exploration of the Bhagavad Gita’s biography is part of that life, too. In reviewing some of the ways that the Gita has lived over the centuries, we have seen how the work has spoken in multiple new ways to new audiences. As Bakhtin writes, “There is neither a first word nor a last work…. Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest past will never be grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later dialogue.”2 We may be certain that this text will continue to reincarnate itself in new ways. Or as Vishnu puts it in the Gita Mahatmya, these will all be part of his “highest home” in great time.