"Many Hindus, including Mahatma Gandhi, have done highly selective and allegorical readings of the Gita. Gandhi even made it stand for peace and nonviolence. The message of the Gita, he wrote, is that spiritual fulfillment comes from selfless work; we must cultivate non-attachment to the outcome of our action—which doesn’t mean indifference to the outcome, only the lack of hankering after and brooding over it. If one follows this ‘central teaching of the Gita,’ he added without explaining why, ‘one is bound to follow truth and ahimsa [nonviolence]’. Gandhi translated the Gita from Sanskrit to Gujarati; in his introduction, he writes, ‘Krishna of the Gita is perfection and right knowledge personified.’ Shortly after though, he concedes that the Gita’s stance seems opposed to ahimsa, but then offers a painfully convoluted apology for it, citing different standards back then and calling for poetic license—going as far as saying that we don’t need to probe the mind of the author too much! This suggests that he had at least struggled with the Gita.
Gandhi’s case reminds us that what people take away from a scriptural text is inseparable from who they are and what they bring to it. Which makes me wonder about Swami Vivekananda who seems to have betrayed no struggle with the Gita, let alone the need for an apologia. Instead, with an almost thuggish glee, he coldly rubbished Arjuna’s doubt, calling it a case of fear, jitters, and unmanliness that Krishna promptly fixes by awakening his latent power. Radhakrishnan, beneath his scholarly veneer, is not much better; to him the pursuit of duty for duty’s sake is the unequivocal call of reason, and Krishna is ‘the voice of God echoing in every man’ (why not also Arjuna?).
Until its elevation by modern European scholars as the ‘Hindu Bible’—an aspect of their constructing ‘Hinduism’ as a coherent religion they could relate to—the Gita was revered by only a small minority of Indians. Sadly, it has attracted very little critical attention in modern India—I mean the kind that sacred books of many world religions have. In approaching the text, too few Indians have cut through the fog of reverence that surrounds it. Among them was the historian DD Kosambi (1907-66), who wasn’t too impressed by the Gita. In Myth and Reality (1962), he observed that a ‘slippery opportunism characterizes the whole book’. BR Ambedkar (1891-1956) saw it as Brahmanism’s response to the rising fortunes of Buddhism. In his essay, Krishna and His Gita, Ambedkar wrote, ‘The philosophic defense offered by the Bhagavad Gita of the Kshatriya’s duty to kill is, to say the least, peurile.’ The journalist and secular humanist VR Narla (1908-85) called its moral perspective ‘retrograde’. In The Truth About the Gita, Narla argued that the book condones violence and wholesale slaughter; Krishna was Machiavellian, who employed trickery, deceit, falsehood, intimidation, and blackmail to get Arjuna to overcome his moral qualms."
- Namit Arora @ Q3D
Gandhi’s case reminds us that what people take away from a scriptural text is inseparable from who they are and what they bring to it. Which makes me wonder about Swami Vivekananda who seems to have betrayed no struggle with the Gita, let alone the need for an apologia. Instead, with an almost thuggish glee, he coldly rubbished Arjuna’s doubt, calling it a case of fear, jitters, and unmanliness that Krishna promptly fixes by awakening his latent power. Radhakrishnan, beneath his scholarly veneer, is not much better; to him the pursuit of duty for duty’s sake is the unequivocal call of reason, and Krishna is ‘the voice of God echoing in every man’ (why not also Arjuna?).
Until its elevation by modern European scholars as the ‘Hindu Bible’—an aspect of their constructing ‘Hinduism’ as a coherent religion they could relate to—the Gita was revered by only a small minority of Indians. Sadly, it has attracted very little critical attention in modern India—I mean the kind that sacred books of many world religions have. In approaching the text, too few Indians have cut through the fog of reverence that surrounds it. Among them was the historian DD Kosambi (1907-66), who wasn’t too impressed by the Gita. In Myth and Reality (1962), he observed that a ‘slippery opportunism characterizes the whole book’. BR Ambedkar (1891-1956) saw it as Brahmanism’s response to the rising fortunes of Buddhism. In his essay, Krishna and His Gita, Ambedkar wrote, ‘The philosophic defense offered by the Bhagavad Gita of the Kshatriya’s duty to kill is, to say the least, peurile.’ The journalist and secular humanist VR Narla (1908-85) called its moral perspective ‘retrograde’. In The Truth About the Gita, Narla argued that the book condones violence and wholesale slaughter; Krishna was Machiavellian, who employed trickery, deceit, falsehood, intimidation, and blackmail to get Arjuna to overcome his moral qualms."
- Namit Arora @ Q3D
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