Who Wrote the Bhagavadgita

By Meghnad Desai

A humanist critique of the Gita, 'the most influential work in Indian thought'The Gita is an evolving response which deals with the conflicts between Veda and Vedanta and then with the challenge posed to Vedanta by Buddhism. Its shift to Bhakti is the climax of the battle between Brahmanism and Buddhism. There are probably multiple authors of the Gita as shown by stylistic changes and the frequent shift of subject matter. For Meghnad Desai, Gita is a secular text, a result of human creation over several centuries. He also contends that some themes in the Gita reinforce social inequality and lack of concern for the other and to that extent he finds Gita to be toxic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Element
• Release date: Feb 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9789351361664

Meghnad Desai

Meghnad Desai is an economist by profession and taught at the London School of Economics for forty years. He is a keen observer of British politics and participates in it from his perch in the House of Lords. He has written books on economics, Marxism, Islamist terrorism, Ezra Pound and Bollywood. This is his first novel.

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Preface

This has been a somewhat unusual book for me to write. My recent books have come from initial ideas planted sometimes during the 1950s when I was a teenager in Bombay (as it then was). Those ideas were then put aside but slowly germinated in my mind, while I was pursuing my academic career as an economist and returned to the fore after I retired. The Rediscovery of India is one example of this.

This book has very different roots. My family was religious but not orthodox. We did not display our religiosity. We did not smear our foreheads with ashes or sandalwood paste or vermillion. There was no recital of Gayatri or any chanting of any Vedas. By and large, religion was in its modest place and reason ruled our lives. I became an atheist when I was about fifteen and no one seemed to mind.

I did not read the Bhagavadgita till very late in life. I did try to read it when I was young but found it infuriatingly vague. I could not follow the argument and at one stage even tried to draw a diagram as to the logical path of Krishna’s answers to Arjuna’s questions. I gave up. Unlike many people I know, I have never needed any spiritual text for guidance or any guru. I rely on my head which normally sees me through any crises I may run into. So I managed to live many years without reading the Gita.

This book arises from an unrelated event. I had been invited by my friend and the veteran parliamentarian Dr Najma Heptullah to deliver the Maulana Azad Lecture for the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) in 2004. To my surprise, I was asked by another friend, the distinguished writer and elder statesman Dr Karan Singh, to give the Azad Lecture again in 2010. This lecture was preceded by an ICCR Conference on Indian Culture and History to which many scholars from around the world were invited. I enjoyed the papers read at this conference. There were papers on the epics, the Vedas and Vedanta as well as one on the history of Brahmanism. This revived my interest in Sanskrit, which I had studied in college, and in ancient Indian history and culture.

My general perspective on this area was shaped by reading Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi’s book An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1956). I first read about the book in a marvellous review by Adib (Sham Lal) in his weekly column ‘Life and Letters’ in The Times of India soon after the book’s publication. The book was a great culture shock. All the simplicities of the received wisdom about the glories of Indian culture were shattered upon reading Kosambi. The challenge to rethink every aspect of what had been and even now is being advanced as the true state of life and thought in ancient India was urgent and obvious. During the 1950s, the Left played a very creative role in questioning the cosy myths of the glories of ancient India, a task that, alas, has been abandoned. I came away with a profound scepticism about the course of Indian history and a sober rather than an enthusiastic attitude about what it could have been. But only after my retirement did I have the time to think about this issue systematically. The ICCR Conference was the trigger for getting back to those questions that Kosambi had raised in my mind.

Soon after the ICCR Conference, I was invited to speak at the Kosambi Festival of Ideas in Goa in February 2011. I decided to reread Kosambi in search of a suitable topic. It was his critique of the Bhagavadgita which attracted my attention. I made that the theme of my lecture which was well received by the rather large audience (though a fraction of that which came to listen to the Dalai Lama or President Kalam on other days during the Festival). That experience led me to go further into my follow-up of Kosambi’s ideas. I decided the time had come to take up a systematic critique of the Bhagavadgita, partly developing Kosambi’s themes and adding my own ideas.

I began my extensive reading of the Gita and was confirmed in my suspicion that it was indeed a very difficult and confusing book. In the last few decades there has been an avalanche of credulity in reading and interpreting the Gita. There are fat volumes by some swami or another offering the true message. I found that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a much more sober approach. Reading Swami Vivekananda or Justice Telang, the first Indian translator of the Gita in English, one finds some scepticism and a lot of criticism of the text. The uncritical modern reading of the Gita as a revealed text spoken by Lord Krishna, and hence above doubt or critical analysis, is not what one finds in the older authors. It is a product of the recent political deployment of Hindu religiosity.

I approach the Gita as a product of human authorship and as such suitable for analysis as any other text such as the Bible. I call my essay a secular critique in the sense of secular as atheist or humanist. In India today, the word secular has been highly politicized and vulgarized. It has come to mean any party which seeks Muslim votes. I take secular in its older sense of being indifferent, if not hostile, to religion.

Of course, nothing can be proved as to who wrote the Bhagavadgita or when it was written. Many people will go on believing that on some historical day on the field of Kurukshetra, early in the morning Lord Krishna recited what has come down to us as Bhagavadgita for the benefit of Arjuna who was reluctant to slaughter his cousins. Arjuna’s doubts were removed and the cousins and others were duly slaughtered. The text has however also been subject to many philosophical and even practical interpretations. It is a text which will go on inspiring many more commentaries. I cannot claim mine to be either final or definitive. It is one more in the long line of such commentaries. My only excuse for writing is twofold. One is to discuss the ambiguities about its authorship and the historical role the Gita may have played in the long battle between Brahmanism and Buddhism, a battle which lasted centuries until Brahmanism exiled Buddhism from India. But more relevant to current events, I want to point out as I do in the final chapter that as a text the Gita is unsuitable to modern India which has committed itself in its Constitution to creating within its territory a world of social equity and democratic freedoms. The message of the Gita is casteist and misogynist and as such profoundly in opposition to the spirit of modern India. I also suggest that some of the many hypocrisies we observe in Indian life today may have their origins in the way the message of the Gita can be read.

I have no expectation that my argument will command universal assent. It is debatable and will be debated. If that happens, my purpose will have been served.

Meghnad Desai

London, Delhi, Goa.

October 2013

1

Introduction

The Bhagavadgita (Gita) is a central text of Brahmanism.¹ Of course, the Vedas are the highest authority being sruti² and the Upanishads rank second highest being smriti. The Gita, however, along with the Vedas and the Upanishads constitutes a basic triad (prasthanatrayi). Unlike the Abrahamic faiths, Brahmanism has no revealed word of God. The Rig Veda is the principal one of the three sacred Vedas. (Atharva Veda, the fourth, is full of remedies for health and charms and perhaps the most practical of them all but is not considered sacred. Manu does not mention it at all in Manusmriti and in the Bhagavadgita 9.17 Krishna mentions only three Vedas omitting the Atharva Veda.)

While all dates are uncertain in the matter of ancient Indian history, it is possible to guess that the Rig Veda dates from about the fifteenth to the ninth century BCE, and has invocations, all too human, to the gods to come and accept sacrifices proffered to them, so that the faithful can prosper. Sama Veda puts the hymns of Rig Veda to music and Yajur Veda is about the ritual ceremonies to be performed when the invocations that the Rig Veda contains are sung at yajnas. The core, therefore, is the Rig Veda with the two others being derivative of it. As Frits Staal has said, ‘The expression sacred book is also an erroneous appellation. It is applicable to the Bible or Qur’an and was insisted upon by missionaries and colonial administrators who could not imagine anything else.’³

The Upanishads contain philosophical arguments of varying lengths. There are 108 in all but about ten are the principal Upanishads. They date from 1000 BCE to around 300 BCE. They relate conversations with some named persons, Yajnavalkya, for instance, but they have no authors. But the Bhagavadgita is taken to be emanating from the mouth of Krishna who declares himself during the poem to be the Supreme God. The Gita can be used in courts of law to swear upon as the Bible or the Quran can be. Indeed, Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu-American to be elected to the House of Representatives in the 2012 elections, took her oath as Congresswoman on the Bhagavadgita rather than the Bible, thus confirming the status of the Gita as the sacred book of the Hindus.

The German philosopher William von Humboldt called it ‘the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known language’.⁴ When the Atom bomb was first tested in the deserts of New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist who led the project, recited the first line of verse 11.32⁵ from the Gita to invoke the terrifying sight unfolding before him.

The Gita is, perhaps, the best known book of India and as S. Radhakrishnan put it ‘the most influential work in Indian thought’.⁶ Unlike the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Gita is short and concise, a book of just 700 verses that one can compactly carry in one’s pocket and even memorize in its entirety as many have done.

The Authority of the Gita

Even so the authority of the Gita is anomalous. As the respected translator of the Mahabharata, J.A.B. van Buitenen, has said:

Even before it [Gita] was composed or ‘revealed’ (c.200 BC is a likely date) orthodox thought had defined the nature and scope of revelation in such terms as might well have excluded the Gita, or firmly consigned it to a lower level of authority where it would have withered away or at best retained as a sectarian work of limited appeal.⁷

He explains that revelation was for the orthodox Brahmin sruta – something which was heard; it was ‘a body of knowledge orally transmitted by a teacher to his pupil who had thus heard it’. What was heard was the Brahman. ‘It was without an author, human or divine, since it was part of creation; moreover, were it authored it would of necessity be flawed by the author’s imperfections and its authority diminished.’⁸

The Gita does not satisfy such norms. It has a beginning as it forms a part of the Bhishma Parva in the Mahabharata, being the chapters twenty-three to forty. It is authored, presumably by Krishna who recites it at the start of Kali Yuga,⁹ the last and the least virtuous of the four Great Ages (yugas), hence a late arrival in Hindu cosmological calendar. However, ‘...(T)he Gita has authority for all the wrong reasons; because it has a person as its author, because it was the product of time, and because it has no regard for sruti...We have in the Bhagavadgita a new sort of revelation: personal, historic and original.’¹⁰

Of course what makes the Gita sacred despite such limitations is that presumably the Supreme Lord himself in his avatar as Krishna recited it for the benefit of his friend Arjuna. Even though it may be ‘personal, historic and original’, it is because of this unique characteristic of having divine authorship that the Gita has become the best known and the most commented upon text over the centuries. Its status was confirmed by Shankara’s commentary in the ninth century CE. While Shankara refers to commentaries before his own,¹¹ his is the first and most authoritative commentary. Indeed, Swami Vivekananda thought Shankara might even have written the Gita himself. Thus, he says in his Thoughts on the Gita, ‘(T)he book, Gita, had not been much known to the generality of people before Shankaracharya made it famous by writing his great commentary on it... Some infer that Shankaracharya was the author of the Gita, and that it was he who foisted it in the body of the Mahabharata.’¹²

That is unlikely though Vivekananda does raise the possibility of a human authorship of the Gita which is one of the themes I wish to pursue here. He also says the Gita may have been ‘foisted... in the body of the Mahabharata’. This is yet another trail I shall pursue. Questions of authorship and of the place of the Gita in the Mahabharata are crucial to treating the Gita as a human rather than a divine text. We should be able to ask of the Gita the same questions as have been asked of the Bible or the Quran, for instance.¹³ I come to such issues below.

Gita in Ancient Times

One of the puzzles about the Gita is that there are few mentions of the Gita before Shankara wrote his commentary. References to the Gita before Shankara are indirect and elliptical. K.T. Telang in his prose translation published in 1882 mentions Banabhatta who worked in the court of Harshavardhana in seventh century CE as referring to the Gita in an elaborate analogy in his celebrated Kadambari: ‘Anantagitakarnananditanaram’ which has two parallel meanings. For the palace it describes ‘in which people were delighted by hearing innumerable songs’ and as applied to the Mahabharata ‘in which Arjuna was delighted at hearing the Anantgita’.

According to Telang,