Political Thought in Action - The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India PDF

Political Thought
in Action
The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India
Edited by
Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji
Political Thought in Action
The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India
Edited by
Shruti Kapila
Faisal Devji
CAMBRID GE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press

4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi 110002, India
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107033955
© Cambridge University Press 2013
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed in India at
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Political thought in action : the bhagavad gita and modern india / edited by Shruti Kapila,
Faisal Devji.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “Reflects on the significance of the Bhagavad Gita for political and ethical
thinking in modern India and beyond and contributes new perspectives to historical,
contemporary and global political ideas”--Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-107-03395-5 (hardback)
1.Bhagavadgita--Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Kapila, Shruti. II. Devji, Faisal.
BL1138.66.P65 2012
294.5’924046--dc23
2012029783
ISBN 978-1-107-03395-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Contributors v
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
1. India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World 1
C. A. Bayly
2. The Transnational Gita 25
Mishka Sinha
3. The Transfiguration of Duty in Aurobindo’s Essays
on the Gita 48
Andrew Sartori
4. Gandhi’s Gita and Politics as Such 66
Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar
5. Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of
Everyday Life 88
Uday S. Mehta
6. Morality in the Shadow of Politics 107
Faisal Devji
7. Ambedkar’s Inheritances 127
Aishwary Kumar
8. Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V. D. Savarkar,
the Bhagavad Gita and Histories of Warfare 155
Vinayak Chaturvedi
9. A History of Violence 177
Shruti Kapila
Index 200
List of Contributors
C. A. Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval

History, Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies and Fellow of
St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. Author of a number
of works on Indian, imperial and global history, his most recent book
is Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire
(2011).
Dipesh Chakrabarty is Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service

Professor at the Departments of History and South Asian Languages
and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Author of a number
of works, his forthcoming books include The Untimely Historian and The
Climate of History: Four Thesis.
Vinayak Chaturvedi is Associate Professor of History at the

University of California, Irvine and the author of Peasant Pasts: History
and Memory in Western India (2007).
Faisal Devji is Reader in Indian History and Fellow of St. Antony’s

College, Oxford University. His most recent book is The Impossible Indian:
Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence (2012).
Shruti Kapila is University Lecturer in History and Fellow of Corpus

Christi College, University of Cambridge. Dr. Kapila works on modern
political thought focussing on violence, revolution and democracy, and
also the history of science, especially psychoanalysis. Widely published,
she is the editor of An Intellectual History for India (2010).
Aishwary Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford

University. Author of a number of articles on intellectual history, he
is completing a book on the political thought of B.R. Ambedkar and
M.K. Gandhi.
vi List of Contributors
Rochona Majumdar is Associate Professor in the Departments of

South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media
Studies at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Marriage
and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009).
Uday S. Mehta is Distinguished Professor in Political Science at

CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Author of a number of books
on political theory, including Liberalism and Empire: Nineteenth Century
British Liberal Thought (1999), he is currently completing a book on
M. K. Gandhi’s political thought.
Andrew Sartori is Associate Professor in History at New York

University and his publications include Bengal in Global-Concept History:
Culturalism in the Age of Capital (2008).
Mishka Sinha received her doctorate from the Faculty of Asian

and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge in 2012. Her
doctoral research was on the history of Sanskrit in Britain and America
from 1832–1939. She currently works on the intellectual history of
Orientalism and translation of ideas across cultures in the colonial
context. In 2012–2013, she will be a Research Associate at the Centre
of South Asian Studies at Cambridge.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the

Trevelyan Fund, the Faculty of History, the Centre for the Research
in Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), the Centre for History
and Economics, the Centre of South Asian Studies and Corpus Christi
College, all at the University of Cambridge. We are also grateful for the
funding and organization provided by the Sister Cities Project of the
journal Public Culture, and the India–China Institute at the New School,
New York. We are indebted to David Armitage, Sunil Khilnani, Arjun
Appadurai and the late Carol Breckenridge.
With a revised introduction here, the essays first appeared as a Forum
in the journal Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press),
7: 2 (2010) and we are grateful to the journal editors for their kind
permission for publication of this book.
Introduction
By turns a child and killer, trickster and philosopher, Krishna’s appeal

in modern India is not just diverse but fundamentally ambiguous.
Unlike his high-minded fellow incarnation Rama, for example, as a
political icon Krishna is so indeterminate as to resist capture by any
party or platform, though not because he expresses the multiplicity of
Hinduism in some way that liberals can celebrate. For rather than being
politically polymorphous, Krishna speaks to us about the possibility of
moral action in conditions marked by discontinuity and the breakdown
of order. Yet the Dark Lord’s behaviour and advice in these conditions,
whose lawlessness defines the story of his life, should not be seen as
describing only the limits or exceptions to a moral rule. Instead, we
want to argue, transformation and rupture constitute the ground of any
politics that can be thought in Krishna’s name. And this volume of essays
makes the claim that politics in modern India has been thought precisely
and primarily in Krishna’s name, with an extraordinary number of the
country’s leaders and intellectuals, starting in the nineteenth century,
attending closely and even obsessively to his advocacy of war in the
Bhagavad Gita. For we shall see that in addition to the violence that
characterizes it, the war described by Krishna provided these men
with a radically democratic way of thinking about politics outside the
hierarchical language of order and stability that is associated with the
figure of Rama.
More than any scripture handed down through hoary tradition for
Indians to meditate upon, the Bhagavad Gita is not only a resolutely
modern text in the way it has been appropriated for politics from
colonial times, but has achieved the equally modern distinction of
representing Hinduism for the world at large. And yet this Hinduism
refers not to some immemorial and peculiarly Indian past, but has since
the nineteenth century offered the Gita’s readers around the world a
x Introduction
way of thinking about their present and future more generally. So in

a recent essay the agent provocateur and philosopher Slavoj Zizek
remarked that the Bhagavad Gita represented the perfect philosophy
for post-capitalist society. This is only the most contemporary and
arguably most controversial understanding of the philosophical
content of the Gita, whose previous commentators have ranged from
Nietzsche to Hitler. Less controversially, the modern composer Phillip
Glass opened his opera Satyagraha with a dramatization of the discourse
between Krishna and Arjuna that forms the Gita’s content as a plea for
a humanist politics. Though it does not offer limitless possibilities for
interpretation, what is certain is that the Gita has acquired an iconic
status in modern times as a set of reflections on ethics, war, justice,
freedom and action, having in the process become one of the world’s
great texts of political thought.
In recent years, intellectual and political historians have become
increasingly interested in the global spread and transformation of
Western ideas in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
empires. Much less attention has been paid to the converse process
by which major traditions of non-Western political thought were
transformed and used to interpret modernity, confront colonial rule
and, in some cases, to transform Western political and ethical ideas
themselves. Much of social and political theory therefore remains
resolutely Eurocentric, and many of the key philosophical texts of
these other traditions have been interpreted simply as productions of
‘religion.’ After the Koran, arguably the most influential non-Western
philosophical text in Asia and across the wider world during the last 200
years, the Bhagavad Gita, ‘Song of the Lord,’ forms the central drama
of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. Unlike its counterpart,
the Ramayana, which tells the story of Rama’s victorious struggle to
re-establish a moral order of which he is the great representative, the
Mahabharata is about a war in which victory has become hollow and
the moral order fleeting. And if Rama is the heroic centre of the epic
named after him, Krishna is constantly appearing and disappearing
in that which goes by the name of a great war, with his actions by no
means anchored to any conventional understanding of morality, law or
politics.
This volume brings together a group of intellectual and social
historians to discuss the way in which modern interpretations of the
Introduction xi
Gita have focussed on war and violence, rather than peace and stability,
as a site for thinking about politics. The essays gathered here look at
the Gita as a philosophical and ethical text both within South Asia and
also on its ‘outward journey’ into Western political debate. Though
part of an ancient epic tradition, the Gita did not achieve its current
eminence until very recently. Its resurgence and reinterpretation,
in short, is coterminous with the formation of modern life and
politics. But if modern commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita cannot
be described simply as participating in some ancient and continuing
tradition, neither should they be seen merely as the epiphenomena
of an abstraction like capitalism that supposedly constitutes the true
reality of Indian society. Indeed there is nothing more traditional in
scholarship that this ultimately theological way of reducing all ideas
to the putative materiality of culture or capital, seen as the unmoved
movers of all human action. The Gita’s colonial commentators were
interested in reconstructing a normative language of ethics and politics
that cannot be understood by way of these always generic and already
known categories, which in any case these men deliberately set aside
in their explorations of the text. For, to them, the Gita did not merely
represent Hinduism or even Indian culture, and so could not be defined
as an aspect of some larger process like that of capitalism.
Telling of the fratricidal war that ushered in the black age of our
present, the Bhagavad Gita takes the form of a dialogue between its
hero, Arjuna, and his divine charioteer, Krishna. Set just before the
apocalyptic battle that will mark the passing of an age, this conversation
occurs in the no-man’s-land between opposing armies, where Arjuna has
halted his chariot to wonder at the senselessness of a war that requires
the killing of his relatives, friends and preceptors. Krishna’s role in the
dialogue that follows is to rouse Arjuna to action by preaching to him
the doctrine of acting out of duty alone, without the desire for any
particular result. It is the sacrifice of such desire, says the Dark Lord,
which can liberate not only warriors but also men and women of all
classes from the chain of cause and effect, allowing action to escape its
own consequences and thus remain inviolate.
While the subject matter of the Gita, as much as of its epic parent, have
enjoyed enormous popularity at all levels of society over the centuries,
becoming part of the common sense of Indians whatever their religious
affiliation, the text of the dialogue was itself given new life during the
xii Introduction
colonial period, when it was praised and condemned by European

or American thinkers in equal measure as the chief philosophical
statement of Hinduism. It was as a transnational document of this kind
that the Gita came to represent Indian or Hindu political thought. And
though other ancient texts, like the Arthashastra or Science of Power,
might vie with the Gita in terms of international celebrity as a text of
political philosophy, only the latter became a source for Indians who
sought to define their politics in its terms. Often rediscovered by such
men in Europe, or even in English translation, as was famously the case
with Gandhi, the Gita managed in this way to transcend its historical as
well as geographical origins.
In commenting upon the Gita, as they increasingly did from
the nineteenth century, India’s literary and political leaders were
participating in a transnational conversation, one that detached India
from its own neighbourhood to link it with a community of readers and
writers in America and Europe. This was quite unlike the trajectory
taken by Islamic texts with a similar colonial pedigree, for instance a
juridical digest known as the Hedaya or even the Koran in its English
translation, whose legitimacy depended upon their recognition by an
audience of Muslims outside India. For the Gita, and with it Hinduism
itself achieved a kind of territorial transcendence, by forsaking the rest
of Asia to join a debate with the West alone, given that the book attracted
little attention in other parts of the world. This debate, moreover, broke
with the exegetical tradition within which the text had previously been
studied.
But at the same time as it allowed Hinduism to become in some sense
a “Western” religion, the Gita also permitted Indian political thought
to part the company of its European equivalent in the use that was
made of it to rethink politics in a novel language of action without
consequence. Indeed, it is remarkable how many of India’s political
and intellectual leaders of the last century and a half wrote detailed
and extensive commentaries on the Gita, which they saw not simply in a
romantic way as some authentic source of statecraft, but as a book that
allowed them to reconsider the nature of politics itself. And the essays
collected here are concerned precisely with this effort to establish a new
tradition of political thought in India, one that took the Bhagavad Gita
as both its source and model. In this sense the text plays the kind of
role in Indian political thinking that Machiavelli’s Prince or Hobbes’s
Introduction xiii
Leviathan do for its European equivalent, being like them a thoroughly

modern work.
As a text of colonial politics, the Gita permits war to be placed at
the centre of debate in a national movement that would not or could
not wage it against Britain. But rather than seeing the attention paid to
war in these discussions as a fantasy of imperialism’s violent overthrow,
interesting about it is the fact that the enemy who must be killed is
always, as was the case with Arjuna in the original, a brother, friend or
teacher. At no point, in other words, do these commentaries define the
political opponent as alien, the problem being always the reverse, that
he is familiar and far too intimate. As if this did not render the political
relationship problematic enough, the text’s modern interpreters rarely
if ever named the colonial power as their enemy, not out of fear so
much as because they were interested in generalizing what they thought
was the political truth enunciated by the Gita into a theoretical one
capable of universal application.
In this way the Gita allowed Indians to think of politics beyond
and after imperialism. Yet such a politics was not conceived as a set
of idealized interactions predicated upon some normative vision of a
national or international order, but instead continued to be spoken about
in terms of the most disruptive violence. Rather than being wedded to
a conventional if not utopian notion of a nationalist future, therefore,
the men and women described in the essays that make up this volume
insisted upon thinking of politics in an open or undetermined way. And
so the war at the centre of discussions on the Gita is not always described
either as one of national liberation or even as an international conflict.
Directed to a future beyond the colonial or national state, these debates
represent the coming into being of a thinking that situates itself in a
world about which nothing is known and everything possible. Only in
such a world, one might argue, is the principle of action without desire
or consequence at all possible.
Unlike many other recapitulations of various classical texts, the
distinctive aspect of the Gita was not in the retrieval of a past or even
a question of origins. Rather its very lack of historicity made the text
potent for the future. As a foundational text of anti-colonial politics, the
Gita thus announced the end of a certain reckoning of time and history.
Again, without being a prescriptive or doctrinal text, it nevertheless
provided a stable point of conceptual reference. Thus, while the
xiv Introduction
questions of ethics, war and action remained constant, there was a

range of multiple interpretations on these issues. Fundamentally, these
interpretations were concerned with the formation of the political. It is
striking that Western canonical thinking on the political took the state as
its central point of reference concerning issues of violence, sovereignty
and authority. Precisely because the realm of the state in India was at
once alien and also the source of colonization, the Gita, with its focus
on fratricidal violence, became the point of departure for questions
both political and ethical. In short, the political, by definition, existed
beyond the state in these formulations. And this meant that freedom
could be thought about in terms of sacrifice rather than survival, and
justice envisaged beyond the language of contract.
An instructive point of comparison in this case would be the
underlying implications of violence and transformation in Thucydides’s
interpretation of the Peloponnesian War that has unsurprisingly
remained productive for Western political theory. Whereas the
fundamental issues in the Greek-inspired literature are the consequences
of human hubris in the destruction of the state, modern discussions of
the Gita, by contrast, first and foremost make God an aspect of the
human through the character of Krishna. This descent of the divine
to an earthly battlefield pointed both to the limits of the human and
to the nature of war as a necessity for the restoration of a moral order
that itself remains unnecessary for morality (dharma) to exist. This
humanization of God in the face of the inhumanity of war allowed for
the relativization and indeed the transcendence of the issues of good
and evil, which could no longer be divided into heavenly ideals and
earthly realities. Rather than being a classical god and hero, Krishna
and Arjuna become, in effect, Everyman and his inspired leader.
This also stood in stark contrast to Christian reformulations of
Western political theory that at least until Nietzsche had struggled
between the imperatives of political necessity and ethical injunction.
The foreshadowing of these deeply modern concerns was precisely
the reason for, and the context in which the Gita acquired a new life
from the late nineteenth century. Arguably, this new life of the Gita
was entirely dependent on modernity itself. The constitutive issue for
all modern commentaries on the Gita thus rested on the question of
human action itself, with neither the frailty of mankind nor God’s
providence being at stake. Instead of a turn towards nihilism, however,
Introduction xv
these commentaries on the Gita aimed to equip human action with

appropriate meaning in circumstances that could in no wise be defined
in terms of moral order. In these formulations detachment emerged as
a dominant condition for human action. At the same time, this allowed
for action to assume different manifestations, ranging between forms
of duty through those of sacrifice, but all highlighting the issues of
violence and non-violence.
This set of essays seeks to intervene in current debates within
political thought and intellectual history and to offer new perspectives
on both. They do so with the presumption that the place of India and
its political thought is instructive for and foundational in the making
of the national and post-national global order. As these essays point
out, neither the diffusion nor the parochialization of Europe and its
political thought was at stake for Indian commentators of the Gita, and
nor is it the aim of this volume to reinscribe the concern with dialogue,
dissent or difference as the primary way of treating colonial, national
and civilizational encounters. Rather this volume tries to engage with
the perspectives on violence, war and sacrifice, the political and the
ethical, which have emerged from India’s love affair with the Bhagavad
Gita over the last century or so and that continue to inform the world
we all inhabit.
1
India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World
C. A. Bayly
In this essay, I take a broad, transnational view of the political and

philosophical debate about India, its history and its place in the world
during the later nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It was this
debate which gave visibility and range to the Bhagavad Gita as a critical
site on which the ethics and politics of Indian society could be discussed
and contested. The Gita needed India to make possible its rise to global
significance much more than India needed the Gita.1 For this was the
period when the concept of dharma itself was being disseminated across
the world by public teachers and cultural apologists such as Keshub
Chunder Sen and Swami Vivekananda. My initial intention was to
try to understand the reception of the Gita in the West through the
works of British officials, theosophists, European supporters of Indian
nationalism, such as Annie Besant, and sympathetic oriental scholars,
such as Friedrich Max-Muller. But it soon became apparent that this
“Western” debate could not be hived off from the internal debate
within India itself about the meaning and relevance of the text.
This, indeed, was an example of the outward journey of Indian
concepts into the global arena of political and moral thought. What we
see is the decomposition of the attempt of earlier European scholars
to create a separate category of Indian “religion” and to constrain it
1
This point, among several others, was sharpened by Arjun Appadurai’s commentary during
the conference at the New School, New York. I owe him warm thanks.
2 Political Thought in Action
within an oriental sphere of passive spirituality in contrast to the active

spirituality of the Christian and rationalist West. The Gita burst out
of its confinement precisely because it spoke to contemporary global
concerns on the following issues: violence and non-violence, the
individual’s duties to society, the boundary between the spiritual and
the social, the significance of individual action as compared with fate,
the role of the founders of nations in history. Not only did Indians
debating the dialogue between Lord Krishna and Arjuna pay careful
attention to the views of Western commentators, but Western scholars
and historians also responded, often unconsciously, to the meaning of
the text for Hindus, as Christian self-sufficiency began to give way to
spiritual relativism after about 1870.
The Context in Indian Intellectual and Social History

The essay focuses on the appropriation and use of the Gita in the liberal
and communitarian tradition in Indian politics and in transnational
humanism.2 By contrast, its importance for the Indian insurrectionary,
Gandhian and Hindutva tradition is discussed in parallel essays by
Shruti Kapila, Faisal Devji and Vinayak Chaturvedi. On the face of it,
the Gita had little to offer the liberal tradition stretching from Locke,
through Mill, to Rawls, which emphasized freedom of the market,
justice and individual liberty. The parallel Indian tradition, stretching
from Rammohan through Gokhale, put more emphasis on sharing,
sympathy and community, while also critiquing colonial and social
despotisms. But the Gita’s relevance to Indian liberal politics is not
obvious either.
2
The literature on the meaning of liberalism is never-ending and descends into semantic
niceties. I have tried to define Indian liberalism in several publications. But here I use it as a
broadly descriptive term, much along the lines of B. B. Majumdar, History of Political Thought:
From Rammohun to Dayananda (1821–84), vol. 1, Bengal (Calcutta, 1934). See, however, E. Paul, F.
Miller and J. Paul, Liberalism Old and New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and
A. Simhony and D. Weinstein, The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); C. A. Bayly, ‘Empires and Indian Liberals’, in Catherine
Hall and Stuart McLelland, eds., Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 74–93. A classic statement of Indian
liberalism would be Surendranath Banerjea, A Nation in Making (Bombay: Oxford University
Press, 1925); or, in a vernacular idiom, Bharatendu Harish Chandra’s speech at Ballia in 1883,
when he asked “Bharatvarsh ki unnati kaise ho sakti hai?” (“How can India make progress?”),
Bhartendu Grantavali, 3 (Varanasi, 1956), 262–67, and stressed the importance of community,
communication and sympathy.
India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World 3
This text, however, could be made particularly serviceable for Indian

liberal reformers and public men attempting to create an ethicized
religion out of a profusion of “Hindu” ritual and cultic practice during
the nineteenth century.
The Gita could be interpreted as validating social and ritual hierarchy.
Indeed, Aishwary Kumar shows that this was precisely why B. R.
Ambedkar, spokesman for the “untouchables”, found it so offensive. Yet,
at the same time, it could be used to gesture towards the incorporation
of popular spirituality into a moderate and rational national religion
supporting a liberal public sphere. The antimony in the Gita between
this-worldly action and contemplation also helped to demarcate the
secular from the religious, another concern of liberal reformers. At the
ontological level, the Gita recognized the existence, even the need, for
the war and killing, constantly exemplified in colonial India. Yet equally,
liberals could use the concept of dispassionate action embedded in the
text to urge political caution at the national and international level, just
as their insurrectionary opponents could employ it to argue for violence
against colonial rule and the Muslim “other”.
Finally, the Gita came to represent a metaphor for liberals in its guise
as a meditation on the “personality” of the state.3 In the European
context, the issue of the state’s “personality” had arisen as a result of
the long conflict between absolutist government and the corporation,
creating a tradition of interpretation running from Hobbes, through
Gierke, to Maitland and the socialists. David Runciman argues that in
this tradition, commonwealths arise out of the capacity of “artificial
persons” to represent natural persons.4 The key word here is “represent”.
The turn away from liberal ideas of contract to the later nineteenth-
century concerns with community and personal and group psychology
re-empowered this debate.
The Indian case was different, but analogous. From classical times it
was taken as axiomatic that society and polity was a “person”, made up
of different elements (Brahman, Kshatriya warrior, Sudra toiler, and
so on). But how far and to what extent could this “person”, the state,
remain a moral being when one element was, for instance, forced to kill
its kinsmen in order to preserve the whole? For the radicals discussed
3
Cf. David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
4
Ibid., esp. 10–11.
in this issue, and even for Gandhi, the colonial state was an evil and
illegitimate body, so the question scarcely arose. But for liberals, the
colonial state was the true “intimate enemy”, corrupt and despotic, yet
capable of acting ethically, if only it could be “injected” with Indian
representation and Indian corporate bodies capable of “dispassionate
action” in the interest of the people.
In a similar vein, nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals also
continuously pondered the nature of the Indian princely state (which
many of them, notably D. Naoroji and R. C. Dutt, served at one time
or another). The “personality” of princely India was both a warning
from the past and a premonition of a certain type of future. The liberal
press was full of stories of conflicts within Indian states where corrupt
rajas killed kinsmen through greed or envy. Would a future Indian state
engage in fratricide of this sort? Or would it perhaps be forced to replay
Arjuna’s story as when, for instance, reason of state demanded in 2009
that the Republic of India effectively sacrifice its Tamil “kinsmen” in
Sri Lanka for regional stability?
The Global Context

Outside India, the wider context for the appropriation (often the
distortion) of the Gita was the epistemological retreat of Christianity
and the rise of relativism in both social and scientific theory. This is
not to say that Christianity declined in power or became less aggressive
over this period. Yet its very worldwide expansion and ambivalent
complicity with imperialism forced Christians to recognize other
spiritualities, and the Gita seemed a readily packaged representation
of the “Indian” spirituality which was setting out to capture the world’s
attention. It was not easy to denounce the Gita for advocating “inhuman
slaughter” when Krishna’s advice to Arjuna to kill his kinsmen was set
against Ecclesiastes 3:1: “To every thing there is a season, and a time
to every purpose under the heaven . . . A time to kill and a time to
heal; a time to break down and a time to build up.” Hidden within
the Christian programme there also lurked what might be called the
“Las Casas Paradox”5 : if “the native” could ultimately be converted to
Christianity, then her soul had to possess some intuitive understanding
5
Bartolomeo de Las Casas was the sixteenth-century Dominican priest who urged the Spanish
church and secular authorities to recognize that the Amerindians also had souls.
of God, however mired it was in error and sin. If so, what was the status
of this prior or natural spirituality?
Nineteenth-century evolutionary historicism inevitably relativized
Christianity, therefore. Believers could assert that Christianity stood
prior to all heathen religions, which had merely assimilated and distorted
its texts. Alternatively, they could argue that all other religions were
imperfect, but moving inexorably towards Christian perfection. But in
either case, these assertions opened themselves to immediate challenge
on textual, historical and philosophical grounds. Once comparative
criticism became the order of the day, it was easy enough to show that
Christianity was truly the “Dharma of distraction”.6 So what came to
be called “Fulfilment Theology” in the later nineteenth century was
forced to take note of the Gita and other non-Christian texts.7
Meanwhile, far beyond the boundaries of orthodox Christianity,
theosophists found the text an ideal exemplar of their romantic spiritual
historicism, which represented a kind of fantastical Darwinism, devoid
of natural selection. Farther away yet from the centres of Western
theistic and rationalist thought, what was interpreted as the Gita’s
combination of political pragmatism with a sense of mystical spiritual
unity appealed to a whole range of insurgent intellectuals: followers
of Nietzsche; orientalizing gay experimenters and novelists, such
as Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood;8
mystical aristocratic nationalists, notably W. B. Yeats;9 and New Age
idealists such as Aldous Huxley. “Further out than Pluto”, there was the
Austrian intellectual turned house painter, Adolf Hitler.
The Gita and The Tensions of Indian Modernity

Conventional accounts of the original historical context of the Bhagavad
Gita agree that it must have emerged at a period of tension within
6
For the background see Richard Fox Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian
Polemics in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Vienna: Institute für Indologie der Universitat wien,
1981).
7
The best recent discussion of Fulfilment Theology is in Hayden Bellenoit, Missionary Education
and Empire in Late Colonial India 1860–1920 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007).
8
Antony Copley, Gay Writers in Search of the Divine: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writings
of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006).
9
Michael Collins, “Rabindranath Tagore and the West, 1912–41”, unpublished D.Phil. thesis,
Oxford University, 2008.
the various ancient Brahminical traditions.10 The “traditionalists” who

stressed the need to continue to perform Mankind’s prescribed rites,
duties and sacrifices within family and society were confronted with a
movement that lauded the vairagi life of wandering and homelessness
in the interests of spiritual self-discipline. Should one remain a
householder or become a renouncer? This social dilemma was deepened
by a philosophical conundrum. To be a sacrificer in this world—as
householder Brahmin or warrior—implied personal commitment to
a particular end. Yet this in itself guaranteed that one could never
escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and its attendant suffering. Only
by realizing Brahman in one’s own true nature could one achieve
permanent liberation and bliss. This was most likely to be achieved by
total renunciation. Yet in that case, how could human society, which
itself represented part of the workings of Brahman within creation,
itself continue to evolve?
At the supposed time of the writing of the Gita, these may have
appeared as starkly alternative lifestyles and the purpose of the dialogue
was to square the circle by posing the possibility of dispassionate action,
but action within this world. The warrior (Arjuna) could act, even to
the extent of taking the lives of his own kinsmen, provided this was
done in a spirit of detachment. He had to perceive that all life was one
and that Brahman was both endless and unchanging. At later period of
Indian history, institutional, as opposed to philosophical, resolutions of
this conflict over the inner meaning of karma (action) were apparently
developed in the lived sequence of brahmacharya (student–renouncer),
grihasta (householder) and vairagi, the olderman who finally gives up
family attachment.
It is easy to see why, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the
Bhagavad Gita once again came to be seen as a particularly apposite
field for philosophical, social and political debate in India.11 Firstly, in
conditions of foreign invasion and massive political, economic and
intellectual change or collapse, that classical sequence of lifestyles
became difficult to maintain, even though some members of the
wealthy classes continue to take to a life of mendicancy after the age of
fifty. The Gita’s compromise—action within the social world, but action
taken in a spirit of detachment—seemed particularly attractive.
10
W. J. Johnson, “Introduction”, The Bhagavad Gita (Oxford World’s Classics) (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994, 2004), vii–xx; I am also grateful to Dr Eivind Kahrs for help on this
historical issue.
11
I owe this point to Shruti Kapila.
Secondly, the revival of the tradition of Vedanta, notably through the

life and work of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, posed the possibility
of a new form of social and political renunciation and so raised again
the issue of the extent of one’s duty to society. Thirdly, the assault
on Brahminical ritualism, both by Dayananda and the Arya Samaj
and, more radically, by Jotirao Phule and the incipient non-Brahmin
movement, held out the possibility of a popular spirituality. This had
also been raised obliquely in the Gita, where devotion to the supreme
deity (Krishna) was enjoined on the whole of Mankind.
At an even more general level, the Gita provided a cosmic resolution,
as it were, of the apparent differences between proliferating philosophies
and religious traditions. Rather than being an example of moral
confusion, textual interpolation or the essential irrationality of the
Indian Mind, as several earlier European oriental scholars asserted, the
Gita instead represented a series of creative juxtapositions to reveal an
underlying unity. As Bimanbehari Majumdar put it, “Indian scholars...
find no difficulty in reconciling the Transcendence and Immanence
of God as preached in the Bhagavad Gita.”12 Thus “theism sat with
pantheism, Samkhya philosophy with Vedanta and Saguna with
Nirguna”. In the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries the Gita
could equally be enlisted to resolve contradictions between devotion
to one’s individual dharma and the life of the nation, or between the
Indian national destiny and the destiny of humanity as a whole.13
The Gita seemed to offer some kind of antidote to the barbarism of
modernity. As Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan commented after the trauma
of the First World War, Arjuna’s distress was a “dramatization of a
perpetually recurring predicament”.14 Earlier, Aurobindo Ghose had
affirmed that Krishna’s teachings would help to resolve the “practical
crisis in the application of ethics and spirituality to human life”.15 He
observed that throughout history, and never more obviously than in the
present age, the appeal to “soul force” ran the danger of “mobilising the
12
Bimanbehari Majumdar, Krsna in History and Legend (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1969),
39.
13
See S. Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism’,
Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 109–27.
14
Majumdar, Krsna, 38.
15
Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita (First Series) (Calcutta, 1949), 15; these essays were originally
published in the Arya, Aug. 1916–July 1918.
aggression of new empires”.16 Christianity, striving against the brutality

of Rome, had itself become an aggressive force for empire-building:
“the very religions organise themselves into powers of mutual strife and
battle together to live, to grow, to posses the world”. Only by knowing
the god in oneself, as enjoined by the latter chapters of the Gita, could
this fate be avoided.
Finally, the underlying scheme of the Gita was very attractive
to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy and
science, both in India and abroad. The text taught that the original
Amorphous Unity was transformed through time into a multiplicity
of difference, but that the meaning of this Unity could be recaptured
through spiritual discipline. Philosophers as varied Henri Bergson, T.
H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet themselves sought the ideal unity
behind the complexities of positivism and they also believed that being
and consciousness evolved and changed over time. The Gita could
even, with some intellectual effort, be squared with the notion of the
evolution towards complexity of the “Unknowable”, the let-out clause
in the sprawling thought of Herbert Spencer, chief philosopher of the
Anglo-Saxon world, who in other respects seemed to be a materialist.
The Gita as a Transnational Public Text

From the time of Charles Wilkins’s English translation of 1783, the
Gita, which already had a much earlier Portuguese translation, became
the subject of scholarly curiosity. It was mined by Sanskrit scholars for
philological material, praised by freethinkers for its superior morality
and denounced by orthodox Christians as an imposture. In the 1830s
and1840s, American “Transcendentalists”, notably Emerson, Thoreau
and Conway, influenced by German eighteenth-century thought, tried
to create a non-doctrinal religion of humanity, forsaking Unitarian
Christianity.17 They turned to the Gita as a text which taught the unity
of spirit and matter.
The Transcendentalists, however, were an elite group of artists and
intellectuals. It was only after 1870 that the Gita rose to prominence
Ibid., 56; see also Andrew Sartori in this issue.

16
See e.g. Charles Capper and Conrad E. Wright, eds., Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist
17
Movement and Its Context (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999); John T. Reid, Indian
Influences in American Literature and Thought (Delhi: Indian Council of Cultural Relations, 1965),
18–34, on Emerson, Thoreau, et al.
in the transnational public arena to acquire a degree of significance

scarcely less than that of the Bible or the Koran. At one level, this can
simply be explained by the appearance of F. Lorinser’s German edition
(Breslau, 1869), with its suggestion that the Gita was a late text of about
300 ad which showed the distinct influence of Christianity.18 It was said
to be a Vaishnavite bhakti (devotional) text in which “the writers had
transferred to Krishna much of what the Christians wrote and believed
of Christ”. Inevitably, this provoked widespread polemic. The leading
contemporary Indian Sanskrit scholar, R. G. Bhandarkar, responded
that the dating was absurd because Krishna had appeared hundreds
of years earlier in the Mahabhasya of Patanjali. K. T. Telang, nationalist
political economist, attacked the Christian interpretation even more
vigorously, arguing for a multiple liberal historicism, in which Indian
culture and spirituality, like the Indian economy, had developed parallel
to the civilizations of the West, rather than in thrall to them.
The growing emphasis on the part of Christian officials and scholars
on bhakti as the acceptable dimension of Hinduism privileged, as
William Pinch has argued, the neo-Christian interpretation of this
movement.19 In different ways, this is common to the work of local
magistrate F. W. Growse and language scholar George Grierson, who
saw Nestorian Christian influence in the Gita.20 This trend of thought
was brought together by the Oxford Sanskritist Monier Williams, who,
like some of his Hindu contemporaries, saw Vaishnavism as the true
national religion of India.
All this, however, only explains the timing of the Gita’s outward
journey, not the reasons for it. More significant, the 1870s were a
turning point in the interpretation of the meaning of religion at a world
level. By this date, early nineteenth-century Western attempts to exalt
Christianity as the only true religion had failed. The evangelical charge
had faltered. Biblical textual criticism had undermined the notion of the
infallibility of the Gospels and other aspects of the Christian tradition
as surely as it had been used to erode the authority of the Koran and
the Hindu epics. The rapid expansion of a “sociological imagination”
in Europe and India had given way to the idea that all Mankind had a
18
Cf. Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalisation of Hindu Traditions: Bhartendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-
Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 394.
19
William R. Pinch, ‘Bhakti and the British Empire’, Past and Present 179 (May 2003), 159–97.
20
Dalmia, Nationalisation, 399.
basic religious instinct even if it developed at different speeds in different

societies. Two broad intellectual developments marked the transition:
what I will call romantic counter-Christianity and the emergence of
Christian Fulfilment Theology.
Romantic counter-Christianity represented a variable mix of
spiritualism, revolutionary anti-clericalism and amoral individualism,
all of which flourished in the seas of moral alienation characteristic
of the new industrializing European and American cities. Numerous
Victorian intellectuals sought to “re-enchant” the world. In the United
States the absence of a state church allowed the development of many
quasi-Christian sects during the so-called “second great awakening”
after 1840.21 Spiritualism’s idea of the afterlife of the soul proved
hospitable, in turn, to theosophy and then to various Hindu Vedantist
“missionaries” who visited the country after 1890.
The intelligentsia of continental Europe had already seen many
editions of key Sanskrit texts, notably the Manusmriti and the Gita.
Writers as varied as Jules Michelet and Ernst Renan applauded the
grandeur of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in part because they
could be used to relativize the Bible and orthodox Christianity, which
after the revolutionary surges of 1848 and 1870 were seen by many
intellectuals as opponents of human progress. One fascinating maverick
on the fringes of this group was the French author Louis Jacolliot, who
had visited India and was attracted in equal measure by the eroticism
and spiritualism that he claimed to have found there. Jacolliot wrote
Le spritisme dans le monde (1880) and Chrishna et Christna (1887), in which
he claimed to use the Gita and other texts to show that Christ’s life
was based on an ur-memory of the previous life of Krishna.22 This
trope neatly inverted Lorinser’s position. An intellectual charlatan,
or, to be a little kinder, a fantasist reminiscent of the Anglo-German
Francis Wilford 50 years earlier, Jacolliot was astonishingly influential.
His work was favourably commented upon by Dwarkanath Mitter,
a commentator on Manu, who wrote, “Manu inspired Egyptian,
Hebrew, Greek and Roman legislation; and his spirit still permeates
the economy of European laws.”23 Friedrich Nietzsche read Jacolliot’s
21
Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols. (London and New York, 1926).
22
David Smith, ‘Nietzsche’s Hinduism, Nietzsche’s India: Another look’, Journal of Nietzsche
Studies 28 (2004), 37–56.
23
Cited in Tribune (Lahore), 10 Nov. 1883.
translation and commentaries on the Manusmriti and the somewhat

distorted understanding of Hinduism and Buddhism that he adapted
from Jacolliot was enlisted in his campaign against the “slave” religion
of Christianity.
The new Christian Fulfilment Theology, the second context for
the Gita’s outward journey, argued that Christianity was not so much
the only true religion, but more the end point at which all religions
converged. Fulfilment Theology embodied a primitive form of social
anthropology, so that its proponents could investigate features common
to Islam, Hinduism and Christianity. Yet, as suggested above, it also posed
a serious threat both to orthodox Christianity and to the assumption
of Western cultural supremacy that was still ultimately based on it.
If it was true that all mankind nurtured the basic seeds of religious
truth, why should we assume that Christianity was the seal of religions?
Why not Islam or a revived Vedantism, or as the theosophists argued,
a universal religion that was still in embryo and would be propagated
by a soon-to-appear Great Teacher? In retrospect, the desire to show
the historical priority of Christianity and its precursor, Judaism, was a
desperate move to head off the relativism that arose from the corroding
effects of biblical textual criticism and the birth of social anthropology.
For, as Friedrich Max-Muller wrote of the Christians who attacked his
understanding of the origin and growth of religion, how could they
“believe that over the centuries and in all the countries of the world,
God has left himself without a witness, and has revealed himself to
one race only, the most stiff-necked of all the Semitic races, the Jews of
Palestine?”24 Of course, this apparent “cosmopolitanism” also leaves
a chilling reminder that those left out of its Aryan inclusiveness might
one day have their necks broken.
It was, however, the theosophists, the third medium of its outer
journey, who played the greatest part in diffusing the Gita throughout
India and bringing it to the attention of the wider world. Their
engagement with the text is amply discussed in Mishka Sinha’s essay
in this issue. But two further points can be made here. First, it was
the para-scientific nature of theosophy which appealed to people both
inside and outside the subcontinent and, in parallel, it was the “cosmic
relativism” of the Gita which made it so hospitable to a global scientific
Bryan Turner, “The Early Sociology of Religion”, in Bryan S. Turner, ed., Anthropological
24
Religion, vol. 3 (London, 1992, repr. London, 1997), vi.

culture, which was turning towards relativity in both the human and the
physical sciences.25 Annie Besant, for instance, refuted the orientalist
trope that the doctrine of karma encouraged fatalism. The aim of
both Hinduism and also “modern science”, Besant claimed, was not to
renounce activity, but to find when it is best carried on: “a law of nature
is not a command, but a statement of conditions”.26 This, once again,
echoed Krishna’s advice. Theosophical liberal humanism, therefore,
set itself in the context of the contemporary scientific trend towards
relativism, conditionality, uncertainty and a concern with personality.
Second, the Gita could be enlisted in the broadly liberal politics
espoused by theosophists. The text could be used to argue for
dispassionate and rational political action in the context of certain
karmic conditions, as opposed to the emphasis on immanent
knowledge, blood and culture associated with the neo-Vedantists of the
so-called “extremist school”. Politically, theosophy could also employ
the Gita to reinstate India at the apex of historical civilizations and to
denounce imperialism. Thus, Besant stated that the knower of karma
must “carefully study the national conditions into which he is born” so
that he can help the nation by knowing himself: “The rise and fall of
nations is brought about by collective karma.” Thus, for instance, the
expulsion of the Moriscos and the slaughter in the New World had
visited bad karma on Spain, recently crushed in war by the United
States. Besant went on to make a particularly arresting link between
religion and eugenics in the case of Britain. The country’s bad karma
arose, she argued, from unjust colonial conquest. The souls of “all
the dead natives” from all over the world gravitated towards England,
“where they take birth in slums, providing a population of congenital
criminals and the feeble minded”.27 Spiritualism and the new eugenics
were thus happily united.
India, by contrast, had suffered centuries of bad karma because
of the oppression of its aboriginal tribes by the ancient Aryans and
the everyday curse of untouchability.28 Determined action against this
and other evils would lift India again to the highest point of humanity.
Besant concluded by quoting the Gita. The cosmic energy had always
25
See S. Kapila, “The Eventuality of Science in India”, Isis forum, May 2009.
26
Annie Besant, A Study in Karma (Adyar: Theosophical office, 1917), 153.
27
Ibid, 174.
28
Ibid.
existed and would always exist, but action still responds to particular
conditions. We must know ourselves and change the world by forging
together will, thought and action into a potent karmic cause. For, as man
transmutes his desires into will, he rules his stars. Besant published this
tract as her Home Rule leagues mobilized against the British in 1916.
Lord Krishna as Hero

The saviour–hero was a major theme of theosophy, but it also emerged
in a more robust version in the thought of many other Indian and
foreign intellectuals. Along with the Bhagavat Purana, the Gita was the
key source for various reconstructions of the nature of Krishna that
occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, by the
end of the nineteenth century, Krishna himself had become a virtual
political actor. The Krishna who both travelled to the West and also
became the dominant figure in Indian intellectual circles was not the
village deity beloved of the gopis or female cowherds, but a political and
moral leader in the style of Carlyle’s Muhammad.
Ironically, it was the Christian orientalists, notably Lorinser, who
stirred up the debate by asserting not only that the Gita was a latter-day
creation and marred by inconsistencies and interpolations, but that the
figure of Krishna was itself a bowdlerized version of Jesus Christ.29 As
we have seen, his position was vigorously rejected by scholars such as
K. T. Telang. But several rather different representations of Krishna
emerged from these Indian debates. There was, for instance, the
revamped rustic deity of north India represented above all in the work
of Bhartendu Harischandra of Benares. Here Krishna’s dallying with
the gopis, with its eroticism toned down, was reaffirmed as an aspect
of the folk culture of lila or enjoyment in “Hindustan profonde”.30 In
contrast, there was the petty figure, virtually ignored in the works of
Phule, for whom Krishna was merely a Kshatriya king misled by the
caste hierarchy imposed on him by the self-seeking Brahmins.31
A more favourable picture emerged within the Arya tradition.
Dayananda was ambivalent about both the Gita and Krishna,
coming in time to believe that the text’s apparent endorsement of
29
30
“Krishna Carita”, Bhartendu Samgraha, ed. Hemant Sharma, 5th ed. (Varanasi, 2002), 182–8.
31
Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, ed. G. P. Deshpande (Delhi: Leftword Books, 2002), 72.
the caste hierarchy cancelled out its positive features, notably its call
to enlightened action.32 By the 1890s, however, a new and dominant
version of Krishna had emerged not only from the Arya Samaj but also
in Bengal. This new warrior–philosopher Krishna arose from internal
Indian conflicts, especially conflicts over caste hierarchy. But it was also
influenced by analogous Western compulsions to seek the historical
Jesus who, through the concept of sacrifice, merged imperceptibly with
great national heroes, such as Garibaldi, Gordon of Khartoum or Scott
of the Antarctic. Lajpat Rai, for instance, entirely rejected the frivolity
and sensuality of the gopi stories and asserted that “even though Shri
Krishna was not an incarnation of God, but only a human being, he
was a model human being”.33 He was a rationalist political reformer,
one of the ‘great men of the world’, whose modern representatives
included Mazzini and Dayananda himself. This accorded with the
stern figure of the historical Krishna represented in works such as the
Krishnacharitra of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo’s Essays
on the Gita and various Bengali plays.
In these latter works, as Majumdar noted, Krishna was depicted as
a farsighted statesman who had attempted to unite India by bringing
together regional kingdoms, and even, in one interpretation, making an
alliance between upper and lower castes. So Krishna’s dallying had to
become completely innocent play, “like European ballroom dancing”.
Nevertheless, Bankim’s attempt to portray Krishna as a kind of Indian
Gladstone ran into some difficulties in light of the extended list of his
wives and also the assertion in the Vishnu Purana that he had fathered
180,000 sons. Bankim showed, with admirable statistical precision, that
since Krishna was a historical figure, this was impossible. It would have
amounted to 7.5 sons per day of his creative life, leaving little time for
nation-building. Bankim’s was a rationalistic tale of the emergence of
the nation through history, but for him Krishna was more than an Indian
King Alfred or even a Gladstone; he was also a great philosopher, an
Indian Aristotle, “the wisest and the greatest of the Hindus”. Here the
Krishna of the Gita merged with the Krishna of the Puranas.
Bipan Chandra Pal took a similar position. Krishna was
the ideal of the Indian type of humanity. In his life and teaching, India has
found the master key to her nation building, and a rational synthesis of all
J. T. F. Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati; His Life and Ideas (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1978), 273.
32
The Collected works of Lala Lajpat Rai, ed., B. R. Nanda, vol. 1 (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,
33
2003), p. 434.
the outer differences and conflict of her diverse races and communities and
the confusions of her numerous cults, cultures and religions.34
In the prevailing nationalist and historicist mood, it was important

for Indians to envision a great originary national hero, common to
the whole subcontinent. Evidently, Ashoka, as a Buddhist, and Akbar,
as a Muslim, would not really fit the bill. The liberal nationalists,
notably Surendranath Bannerjea, had fixed on Mazzini, prophet of
Italian unification, as both a philosopher of immanent religion and a
nationalist warrior.35 In 1870 Banerjea had lauded Mazzini’s example
of nation-building to India in almost exactly the same terms that
Bipan Chandra employed of Krishna. So Krishna became a kind of
indigenized Mazzini, while the Gita became a divine Indian avatar of
The Duties of Man.
Yet the great statesman could never quite displace the religious
teacher. By the close of the First World War, the theosophist and
psychologist Bhagawan Das had gone back to Lorinser’s question of
the relationship between Jesus and Krishna. It was true, he argued,
that Jesus had urged the wronged man to turn the other cheek, while
Krishna had urged Arjuna to kill the foe. But these teachings were
perfectly in accord with each other. A violent response was only bad if
the wrong had simply been done to oneself. But it was fine to kill “when
the wrong is done to another who depends on you”.36 Jesus would have
approved of Krishna, Bhagawan Das believed.
Krishna’s reign as the austere hero of India and the world or as
muscular Jesus was never unchallenged, of course. Scarcely had the
Christian orientalists’ attempts to downgrade him by revealing the prior
influence of Christ ceased, than secular Western historians of classical
India began to chip away at his pedestal with ethnographic tools.37
They argued that Krishna, “the Dark One”, had, in fact, been a minor
aboriginal tribal deity, who only rose to prominence late in the day. The
focus again switched from the Gita back to the Puranas and the parts of
the Mahabharata which Bankim and Lajpat Rai had wished to ignore.
34
Bipan Chandra Pal, Sri-Krsna (Calcutta, 1909), 7–8.
35
Banerjea, A Nation in Making, 33, 40, 130, 192; Eugenio Biagini and C. A. Bayly, eds., Giuseppe
Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
36
Bhagawan Das, “Krishna: A Study in the Theory of Avataras” no. 2, Hindustan Review 41–2
(1920), 15.
37
The attempt by Westerners and then by Indian historians to annex the

god to the state-making process in India continued to stir anger and
controversy in India right up to the time when Majumdar published his
Krsna in History and Legend. This remained a contentious, transnational
debate.
The Gita and The New India

After 1905, the Gita was drawn into a new set of debates, of somewhat
greater moment than the question of psychic relocation to the great
cave under Central Asia which had concerned the theosophists and
their opponents. In the first place, the text became a field of battle
between colonial officials and missionaries and Indian political radicals
who used Krishna’s advice to Arjuna to legitimize the use of violence
in the freedom struggle. As Farquhar put it, “Even the Gita was used
to teach murder. Lies, deceit, murder, everything it was argued may
be rightly used” in the political struggle.38 Bipan Chandra Pal and
Aurobindo Ghose both appeared to support this radical interpretation
in their statements on the Gita and the nature of Krishna. But political
notoriety of this sort was only one aspect of the text’s continuing
visibility.
It is worth considering again why the Gita and the Vedanta more
generally continued to make their “outward journey” in the period
after the First World War. Theosophy had lost some of its momentum,
though it continued to attract new audiences, particularly in the New
World and Australasia. The liberal humanism which had appropriated
and used the Gita both in India and outside was scarified and weakened
by warfare and the popular upsurge. The events of the war, however,
sharpened the conflict between idealism and materialism. Equally, the
slaughter of the war damaged the notion of a benign personal God
and the idea of grace. But it also gave rise to a return to the idea of
immanent spirit at the same time as it gave an impetus to the idea of
class conflict. In Western universities and scholarly circles, rationalist
scepticism, embodied in figures such as Bertrand Russell or C. E. M.
Joad, contended with late idealism represented particularly by William
James. There were, in addition, some crossover figures, such as Joseph
38
J. N. Farquhar, Gita and Gospel (Madras: Thacker, Sprink, 1907), 364.
Needham—biochemist, historian of science, idealist, Anglican Christian

and communist. For Needham, history saw the common evolution of
both spirit and matter, but cataclysms such as revolutionary rupture
and war had to be built into this progression. Violent change acted to
“burn off ” redundant material, just as layers of dead cells were stripped
away as a living organism or group of cells emerged.
It is not surprising that Indian philosophy continued to have an
appeal in this ideological climate. Purporting to bring together spirit
and matter, action in this world and the world of withdrawal and
meditation, the Gita continued to attract interest and veneration. It
was not surprising that contemporary India’s greatest interpreter of the
Gita, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, was brought from Mysore to Calcutta
as Professor and then to the Spalding Chair of Philosophy at Oxford in
1932. Radhakrishnan argued that the Gita was superior even to Kant.
The latter had argued that man was free only in the noumenal realm,
but not in the phenomenal realm. The Gita allowed man “freedom
even in the phenomenal realm with a choice to resist impulses, check
passions and lead a life regulated by reason”.39
The question of violence and political action also continued to draw
attention to the text of a whole range of politicians from Gandhi and
Tilak and members of the revolutionary Anusilan Samiti (as discussed
by other essays in this issue).40 Orthodox admirers of Gandhi such
as Madame Sophia Wadia purported to see in the Mahatma the
embodiment of Krishna’s advice to Arjuna, and the true inheritor of
the Indian renaissance that had begun with Rammohan.41 Man could
become god, and this would be the end point of human evolution. But
this could only occur if the search for spiritual salvation was brought
together with the service of society. She advocated what she called
Buddhi Yoga, spiritual discipline combined with social action, a force
that would bring together rich and poor, as the Gita was held to raise
both Chandala (untouchable) and Brahmin.
Two significant, but starkly different, commentaries indicate the
continuing journey of the Gita both “outward” to the wider world
39
Sarvepalli Gopal, Radhakrishnan: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1992), 25.
40
Earl of Ronaldshay, The Heart of Aryavarta: A Study of the Psychology of Indian Unrest (London:
Constable & Co., 1925), 125.
41
Sophia Wadia, “The Place of the Gita in the India of Today, Hindustan Review 67 (1935),
166–70.
and “inward” within the subcontinent. The first was D. G. Mukerji’s

translation, The Song of God, published in 1929. The book was
dedicated to Jawaharlal Nehru of Prayaga (the Hindu name for the
city of Allahabad). This text became implicated with the international
propaganda offensive associated with Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience
movement. Its purpose was to convey “to the American reader the
poetic and spiritual significance” of the Gita, “the key to the Hindu
character”. Gandhi, “the most conspicuous Indian of our time”, it
proclaimed, had affirmed that the text dictated the major decisions of
his life. But the introduction to Mukerji’s translation also transposed
the debate between contemplation and action to the India of the Great
Depression.
Along with its eulogy to Gandhi’s spiritualism it contained a
justification of “the age of industrialism in which the philosophy of
action is appropriate to so large a part of the human race”. Indeed,
another reason for presenting [the Gita] to the American mind lies in its
philosophy of action, the most eloquent and subtle ever written. Since
nearly all Americans lead active lives, this book holds truth for them, to
which many, beginning with Emerson, have paid homage.42
Its motto, “it is better to do than not to do”, was the motto of the
American people. In effect, the Gita was here being used to accomplish
yet another intellectual and spiritual reconciliation, this time between
Gandhian “neighbourliness” and Nehru’s panacea of individual action,
science and industrialization.
The Gita’s continuing “inward” journey during the interwar period
can be illustrated by a strikingly different publication, the introduction
to Shri Bhagavad Gita by R. J. K. Shastri of Kathiawar. This work
attests, first, to a series of anomalous internal battles among India’s
intellectuals. The editor referred to a number of recent authors who
had allegedly denied the reality of Arjuna’s distress on the battlefield.
This, he proclaimed, was evidence of the decline of Indian emotion due
to the inroads of the materialistic civilization of the West.43 The issue
of literalism also arose. B. G. Tilak had doubted whether all the stanzas
could have been imparted by Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, The Song of God: Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita (London, 1929), xlv.
42
Shri Bhagavad Gita, Revised and Edited by and with Its Gloss Siddhi Datri by R. J. K. Shastri (Gandal,
43
Kathiawar, India: Rasashala Aushadhashram, 1937).

because it would have taken too long as the restive armies strained at
the leash. Tilak was here employing a version of the positivistic textual
criticism that had become common since the days of Lorinser. But this,
said Shastri, denied the depths of Arjuna’s distraction and the greatness
of Krishna’s teaching. Besides, the dialogue would only have taken an
hour at the most, leaving plenty of time for the battle.44
Second, however, R. J. Shastri’s introduction glided into the esoteric.
It referred to the reverend Guru Achutya Swami, who had lived in
Girnor twenty-six years earlier.45 The Swami had been an expert in
yoga, tantra and various other sciences. He knew the past, present and
future. He possessed tantric perfection and supernatural powers, such
as the ability to move invisibly through the sky. Most tellingly, when
he was aged 125, he still looked like a youth of twenty-five years of
age. The key to his powers was the fact that he continuously recited
the version of the Gita that Shastri was putting before his Kathiawar
readership.Works with introductions such as this—and there were many
in indigenous languages—are a salutary reminder that interpreting the
Gita was far from being the sole preserve of transnational intellectuals
such as Radhakrishnan, or even Gandhi. It was also a text deeply
implicated in the world of popular religious beliefs and empowerments.
Even in the modern period, the Gita, like the Bible and the Koran,
was simultaneously being abstracted into the world of high political
theory and being appropriated by the world of charms, magic and the
supernatural.
Radhakrishnan: The Ends of Indian Liberalism

It was Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan who brought the debate on the Gita
between Indian philosophers and its Western interpreters within a
single frame. But after 1940, philosophy gave way to public action and
the Gita itself took on a new, more active role again. As an ambassador
of the new India to various international bodies and the Soviet Union,
he transformed the morality of dispassionate action into a doctrine for
international diplomacy.
On the one hand, Radhakrishnan used the tools of Western
philosophical analysis to confer what he saw as scholarly rigour on the
44
Ibid., 22.
45
Ibid., 25.
Indian classics. His commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita (1948), the

Upanishads and Brahma Sutra are said to be the most exact. On the
other hand, he sought equivalence between the Western and the Indian
tradition by insisting that Western philosophy and political theory itself,
despite its claims to objectivity, was essentially a product of the Christian
and Jewish theological traditions. This was obviously true in the case
of the Western philosophers who most influenced him in the Oxford
idealist tradition, such as T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet, and
more distantly Hegel. Yet Radhakrishnan would also have extended
the analysis even to apparently agnostic or anti-religious philosophers
and sociologists such as Kant, Marx, Nietzsche or Durkheim. Later, in
the 1950s and 1960s, the Oxford analytical tradition, represented by R.
M. Hare and J. Hart (aside from Elizabeth Anscombe, with her Roman
Catholic sensibility), had no doubt come to emphasize rationality and
the meaning of language as the foundation of Western philosophy.
Yet many analysts would now agree with Radhakrishnan about the
importance of implicit ideologies of salvation even in the Marxist,
Nietzschean and Durkheimian traditions. Alongside his philosophical
universalism, Radhakrishnan insisted on the importance of instinctive
thinking as opposed to the purely rational, a concept which was perfectly
compatible with the idea of devotion to the Lord in the Gita.
Radhakrishnan conceived himself as a warrior for immanent religion
in a world degraded by materialism and human arrogance. This was
the theme of works of his such as The Religion We Need (1928) and his
Hibbert lectures of 1932, published as The Idealist View of Life (1932).46
But perhaps the most striking (if philosophically less rigorous) of his
works arguing this case was his Kamala lectures in Calcutta University
of 1942, published as Religion and Society (1947). The lectures were
originally given against the background of the Japanese invasion of
South East Asia and India and the build-up to Gandhi’s Quit India
movement. They were published, however, as the war ended, the United
Nations was founded and Radhakrishnan became India’s representative
to UNESCO.
The world needed religion. The context was its “perilous condition”,
“the disaster of our [Indian] race”, “economic misery” and the
See also his own translation and commentary on the Gita: S. Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavadgita
46
with an Introductory Essay, Sanskrit Text, English Translation and Notes (London, 1948). This was
dedicated to the “late Mahatma Gandhi” and pointed to the text’s importance during the
wartime and postwar period.
unprecedented pace of revolutionary change.47 There was a “lag between

social institutions and the world purpose” for even nationalism was not
a “natural instinct”. Radhakrishnan’s religion was not a soteriological
form of devotion to a loving external Creator. It was instead in the
Vedantist tradition, the “god in man” which had to be released from
the arrogance of the “herd animal”, which he had become.48 He quoted
the Gita: “when men deem themselves to be gods on earth . . .when
they are thus deluded by ignorance, they develop a satanic perversity
that proclaims itself absolute both in knowledge and power”.49
Freedom evolves, to apply Daniel Dennett’s phrase to Radhakrishnan.
Yet this is not the freedom of the dialectical materialist tradition. Material
conditions do not create ideas. On the contrary, as Hegel asserted, “the
ideal is the creator of the real”.50 Intelligence and instinctive reason,
indeed the “sacred flame of spirit”, must be brought back into the frame
of philosophical analysis, for individuals in groups or classes do not act
simply on the basis of material interests. As he told his Calcutta audience,
“Those Indians who are attracted by the Marxist social programme
must reconcile it with the fundamental motives of Indian life.”51
At the same time as rejecting materialism, Radhakrishnan was
making a case for the new world institutions within a Vedantic-cum-
Hegelian tradition. The World Spirit, he argued, needed to evolve
rapidly in order to accommodate and direct the massive changes which
were afflicting the world. These were atomic warfare (inserted when
the 1942 lectures were later published), extreme nationalism, Marxism
and Western secularism. The combination of these threats seemed on
the point of bringing all peoples to a common crisis. As in the Gita,
Mankind must step back, contemplate and act with dispassion to bring
about a new world order. We should
withdraw from the world’s concerns to find the real, and return to the world
of history with renewed energy, which is at once spiritual and social [and]
which is likely to be the religion of the new world, which will draw men to a
common centre even across the national frontiers.52
47
S. Radhakrishnan, Religion and Society (London: G. Allen and Unwen, 1947), 10; originally
given as lectures in the University of Calcutta and Benares Hindu University in 1942.
48
Ibid., 16.
49
Ibid., 22.
50
Ibid., 30.
51
Ibid., 40.
52
Radhakrishnan, Religion and Society, 49.
Implicitly, then, the League of Nations had failed because its key
actors such as Britain, Japan and the European powers had not acted
with dispassion. They had sought to create a council of humanity but
had clung greedily to their colonial conquests and local rivalries. The
Atlantic Charter, a noble document, was sullied by Churchill’s insistence
on the inferiority of Asians and Africans, a British version of Hitler’s
race theory.53
Any supporters of the Forward Bloc or communists not yet in gaol
in mid-1942 who heard Radhakrishnan’s Kamala lectures might well
have felt that they were being engulfed by a tidal wave of equivocation.
Yet Radhakrishnan was attempting to create the kind of reconciliation
between apparently opposing philosophical views that animated the
Gita itself. Wilhelm Halbfass later accused Radhakrishnan of distorting
classical doctrines: “traditional Hinduism was not used to making explicit
adjustments to ‘current historical situations’ or current knowledge”.54
But who can tell? Certainly, Halbfass himself seems to underplay the
inherent and intentional flexibility of Indian philosophical concepts,
when he posits a model of fixed “traditional Hinduism” being impacted
upon by a dynamic Western and Christian tradition during colonial rule.
Radhakrishnan’s project was designed to create a humane
hermeneutic, encompassing all the great philosophical traditions. Its
flexibility was its great strength. It attempted to avoid the demonic
enthusiasms and moral aggression common to politicized forms of
Judaism, Christianity and Islam (and eventually, it should be added,
politicized Hinduism). It also avoided the pathetic obsession with
power and the state that has transfixed the Western traditions of civic
republicanism, German idealism and Marxism. Ultimately, a series of
political theories read out of the Bhagavad Gita and its associated texts
seemed rather appropriate for a massive, diverse and religiously plural
polity about to embark on a precarious journey into a world where
transnational ties were still in their infancy. It also provided intellectual
solace for many thinking people, both Indian humanists and outward-
looking foreigners, who prized certitude, but were suspicious of certainty.
For “he who knows Brahman is Brahman”.
Yet by the 1950s the Gita’s own life as a major text in political
thought was almost over. Indian political thought as a whole had begun
Ibid., 83.
53
Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York: State University of
54
New York, 1988), 253.

to retreat to the newspaper, the television screen, the lecture room

and, more recently, the blog.55 The Gita resumed its more limited life
as an object of religious meditation and a classical icon. In its public
role it was now overshadowed by the Artha Shastra and, even more
so, by the Ramayana, which became a reference point for Hindutva,
politicized Hinduism. The reasons for the Gita’s eclipse were complex.
The status of the Brahman and the Kshatriya, the main audience for
the Gita, dwindled in Independent India, particularly when they, and
the text itself, were assailed by an insurgent low-caste movement of
which Ambedkar was the main representative.56 The Gita seemed less
relevant to the Vaishyas (merchant castes) who inherited the world in
the 1960s. It could not really speak to the shopping malls, outsourced
call centres and fast-food outlets that burgeoned towards the end of the
twentieth century. For India, now a rising world economic and political
power, no longer needed the Gita as it had done in theVictorian and
interwar eras. In the wider world, meanwhile, communitarian liberals,
insurgent radicals and New Age popular philosophers found different
master-texts and less demanding Indian gurus than the Gita’s Lord
Krishna as the age of W. B. Yeats and Aldous Huxley gave way to the
age of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
Afterword
Shruti Kapila set me the task of thinking about the outward journey
of the Bhagavad Gita into the wider world as a transnational text of
political, as much as religious, significance. This has proved fruitful in
so far as it has balanced my recent concern with Indian liberal political
economy and “benign sociology”. Figures such as R. C. Dutt and
K. T. Telang were central to the controversy about the special needs
of the Indian economy under colonialism, yet they also entered the
debate about the spiritual and civilizational priority of the Gita. The
spheres of religion and political economy were conceptually and
historically linked for them, as for other contemporary intellectuals.
The Gita, like most religious texts, was open to an enormously wide
range of interpretations. It was amenable to a reading that stressed
55
An argument advanced by Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Yogendra Yadav, conference for Centre
of Policy Studies, New Delhi, Kesaroli, Jan. 2009.
56
See Aishwary Kumar in this issue.
compromise, between the spiritual and practical modes of life, between

contemplation and action, which could be bridged by “detachment”.
The idea of the movement of Spirit through history also inspired both
Indian and Western liberal commentators, who were bound together
by a profound progressive historicism. The issue of killing and rupture
in the text could be downplayed safely in their interpretation and left
to insurrectionists, zealots and policemen, as have been equivalent
passages in the Bible and Koran.
Nevertheless, I end with a sense of unease. The account I have
given might seem broadly to be a nice and humane story. But, in
common with Richard Dawkins, I am frightened by organized text-
based religions, particularly when they become politically normative.
The Gita, of course, is not the Ramayana, which, as noted above, has
proved a much more potent and dangerous enemy of Indian secular
liberalism, and of Muslims in particular, in the hands of the proponents
of Hindutva. Yet even the Gita could be put to more sinister uses. The
saintly Radhakrishnan once praised the insurrectionist, anti-Muslim
RSS for its discipline and “detachment”, to the ire of Jawaharlal Nehru.
Again, a collection of the speeches of the Hindutva ideologue V. D.
Savarkar was lauded as the “Geeta of Hindu sanghatan [unity]”.57 Works
that claim unique insight into man’s condition—and all foundational
religious texts do this—exude a dangerous certainty, a tendency to
moral exclusionism and the possibility of political manipulation for
murderous ends. Not one of them is anything more than a man-made
narrative of power, whatever balm religious leaders try to bathe us in.
Hindu Rashtra Darshan (A Collection of Presidential Speeches from the Mahasabha Platform) (Bombay:
57
Khare, 1949), Introduction, ii.

2
The Transnational Gita*
Mishka Sinha
The Gita lends itself easily to interpretation.1 The tractability of the

Gita has vital roots in ambiguities inherent to its structure and its place
within the Mahabharata epic: the heterogeneity of its narrative material
suggests that rather than being a unified composition, the Gita may be a
combination of older sections with later interpolations,2 and, moreover,
may itself be a late insertion into the fabric of the Mahabharata. The
Gita’s adaptability to different kinds of philosophical interpretation is
fundamentally shaped by the fact that its composer(s) reconciled within
it several philosophical darśanas, including fundamental concepts from
Saṅkhya and Yoga, with newer devotional aspects associated with the
rise of Bhakti traditions. Within the Brahmanical tradition the text
* Grateful thanks are due to Professor David Armitage for his kind comments and invaluable
discussion of this paper, which were integral to the shaping of its final form; to Dr Shruti Kap-
ila, Dr Faisal Devji and Professor Sir Chris Bayly for their generous help, and to Dr Vincenzo
Vergiani and Dr Prashant Kidambi for their extremely useful suggestions.
1
I am indebted to scholars who have explored the Gita’s interpretive flexibility in discussions of
its reception within transnational contexts, especially Gerald James Larson, “The ‘Bhagavad-
Gita’ as Cross-cultural Process: Towards an Analysis of the Social Locations of a Religious
Text”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43/4 (Dec.1975), 651–69; Eric J. Sharpe, The
- Western Images of the Bhagavadgii-ta-, a Bicentenary Survey (London: Duckworth, 1985);
Universal Git a:
and Catherine A. Robinson, Interpretations of the Bhagavad Gi-ta- and Images of the Hindu Tradition:
The Song of the Lord (London: Routledge, 2006).
2
Larson, “The ‘Bhagavad-Gita’”, 659, suggests that the Gita was composed between 200 bce
and 200 ce. Angelika Malinar recognizes 400 bce to 400 ce as a broader general period of
composition.
further possesses a certain ambiguity of status: despite being of smarta3

rather than śrauta4 origin, the Gita was given a special position, and
treated as distinct from most other smrti literature by commentators
as early as Śaṅkara in the ninth century. This quality of being assigned
semi-doctrinal status while being neither scripture nor revealed religion
has, as shall be seen below, persistent echoes in the Gita’s reception in
the modern period.
This essay traces the metamorphosis of the Gita from a text of
contained circulation within an enclaved Brahmanical tradition in
India, through a period in which it was the subject of circumspect
curiosity and limited interest, into a text of transnational significance.
In Truth and Method,5 Hans-Georg Gadamer argued for a philosophical
hermeneutics which assumed a historically effected consciousness
(Wirkungs-geschichtlichen Bewußtsein) for any interpreter of a text. Therefore
the interpretation of a text requires and results in a fusion of horizons
(Horizontverschmelzung), that of the text and that of the interpreter himself,
each informing and articulating the other. My reading of the history of
the Gita’s interpretation suggests that a third “horizon” or plane of
reference must be recognized: a historical consciousness, present within
both interpreter and text, of previous interpretations and their contexts,
which affect and are retrospectively affected by each new interpretation
of the Gita. Thus if the text and the interpreter of the text each has
a history, the interpretation and reception of the text also has its own
history, which must be taken into account. The third horizon, that of
reception, enters the Horizontverschmelzung and alters the conditions
under which interpreter and text encounter each other, and the manner
in which both are eventually encountered by the reader. The various
interpretations of the Gita discussed here, which were written in the
period between 1880 and 1910, are related by family resemblances that
pertain to specific qualities: namely the allegorical representation, the
assumption of universal relevance and the production of transcultural
significance through collaborative and contrapuntal engagements
between Indian and Western translators. Collectively, they form a
composite horizon of interpretation which continues to be inherited
3
Remembered/traditional.
4
Heard/revealed.
5
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. from the German, trans. ed. by Garrett Barden
and John Cumming (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975).
The Transnational Gita 27
by new readers and interpreters as a historicized presence of a defining

interpretive past.
There is a moment of critical mass in the history of the Gita’s
reception. A brief perusal of any international bibliography of the Gita
reveals that from about 1880 the number of translations of the Gita
began to rise steeply, both in English and in other European languages,
while translation into Indian vernaculars also increased at the same
time.6 At this juncture the text began to occupy a new cultural space
within a transnational context, and initiated the construction of a
popular tradition in the West.
Scholars have previously noted the importance of the sudden
increase in translations of the Gita from the 1880s,7 and the importance
of the history of the Gita’s translation and interpretation in the West
to its significance within Indian national history and the history of neo-
Hinduism.8 However, this essay argues that the manner in which the
Gita was received and understood as a cultural, religious, spiritual and
philosophical text was transformed over a comparatively brief period, in
a process which had an enormous and yet largely unrecognized impact on
the reception and interpretation of the Gita from the twentieth century.
The primary elements of the argument of this essay are as follows:
∑ Instead of a smooth trajectory of increase and expansion in the
period after 1880 as previous studies have suggested, there was
a specific and exceptionally generative period of about three
decades between 1880 and 1910, during which the scope of the
Gita’s influence and the potential for its interpretation underwent
a radical metamorphosis.
∑ This transformation was a consequence of the Gita’s translocation
into an international context, yet it was produced through a
dialogic and dialectical transnational process within which Indian
and European/American translation and commentary informed,
and intervened in, each other’s interpretations.
∑ Finally, the process of translation effectively isolated and
emphasized two particular qualities which have since become
unquestioned assumptions for most modern interpretations of
6
E.g. J. C. Kapoor, Bhagavad-Gita, An International Bibliography of 1785–1979 Imprints (New York:
Garland Publishers, 1983).
Sharpe, The Universal Gi-ta , 62–3.
7 -
8
Larson, “The ‘Bhagavad-Gita’”, 665–6; and Introduction to Robinson, Interpretations.
the Gita. These are, first, that the Gita is essentially an allegorical
construction, which uses symbols and metaphors to put across
hidden truths of spiritual significance; and, second, that it is a text
of universal relevance.9
The shift in interpretive meaning which transformed the Gita
between 1880 and 1910 occurred through the mediation of several
translations, often in concourse with each other. These, and the
interpretations and receptions accompanying them, had the cumulative
effect of constructing a new set of assumptions and frameworks for
receiving, interpreting and understanding the Gita. In other words, a
“community of meaning” was evolved through an integrally dialogic
process, which not only changed the reception of the Gita in the West
but also played an important role in repositioning the Gita within
the formation of neo-Hinduism, as well as in the Indian national
movement.
The Early History of Translation

When Charles Wilkins translated the Gita into English in 1785, under
the aegis of the East India Company, it amounted to a paradigm shift in
the history of the interpretation of the Gita and the intellectual history
of Western knowledge of the East. Wilkins’s translation “carried the
text over”10 into a new cultural context, giving it unprecedented scope
for an extraordinary breadth of meaning and influence.
Wilkins’s Bhagavat Geeta or the Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon was the
first text widely known to have been directly translated from Sanskrit
into a European language.11 The Bhagavat Geeta was thus received in
Europe with curiosity and interest as the first textual example of Indian
culture directly encountered there. The curiosity occasioned by the
Gita was to be its defining characteristic for most of its first hundred
years in the West. As a result, its content was eclipsed by the novelty
of its context and the popular interest in the language and culture of
recently acquired British territories in India.
9
The boundaries of this “universality” depend on the interpretive context – for example,
whether they extend to include all Hindus, or all Indians, or all humans.
10
Taking the Latin word translatio.
11
Charles Wilkins, Bhagvat Geeta or the Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (London: Nourse, 1785).
Charles Wilkins and Warren Hastings, Governor General of Bengal

from 1773 to 1785, and chief supporter and instigator in Wilkins’s
Sanskrit researches, began their comments on the Bhagavat Geeta by
emphasizing its “curiosity” as a cultural object. They surmised correctly
that this aspect would ultimately prove the most significant attraction for
their readers in England.12 Hastings and Wilkins’s attempts to provide a
wider sense of the text’s value as literature and as philosophical doctrine
within its own cultural context13 found a largely hostile reception. They
were charged with proposing to “exchange the most metaphysical of...
[their] ... own received doctrines, for others so much more abstruse, that
the utmost stretch of mind on this hemisphere cannot comprehend”.14
For early readers the primary value of texts retrieved from the unkown
past of the distant East lay in their ability to convey pleasure and pique
curiosity by emphasizing the difference between their readers and the
people who produced them. As an early review put it, in the “history of
the human mind, our curiosity is irresistibly attracted by those pages,
which exhibit manners and opinions far removed from our own... [to
which] we liken with peculiar pleasure”.15 Ultimately, its reviewers
reckoned, the Gita’s importance lay not in any intrinsic quality it may have
possessed, but in its value as “a curious specimen of mythology and... an
authentic standard of the faith and religious opinions of the Hindoos”.16
Despite a favourable initial reception, Wilkins’s translation did not
achieve lasting popularity in its early decades. In 1846, the editor
of a multilingual edition of the Gita which had been produced for
missionaries in India observed that his own book filled an important gap,
since, despite its being long held in high repute, the English translation
of the Gita had now become scarce.17
The wider audience for Wilkins’s work in Britain, apart from those
with scholarly, missionary or commercial interests in India, was an
important section of the literate public. Until well into the second half
12
See p. v of Hastings’ “Introduction” and p. xvi of Wilkins’ “Translator’s Preface”, in the 1849
reprint of the original text, edited by Rev. J. Garrett.
13
“Remarks on the Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon”, Gentleman’s Magazine LV/12/2 (Oct.
1785), 955–7.
14
Anonymous review, Gentleman’s Magazine 55/12 (December 1875), 955–57.
15
Monthly Review 1 (1785), Article II, 198–210 and 295–301.
16
Ibid.
17
Rev. J. Garrett, ed., The Bhagavat Geeta or Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon in Eighteen Lectures. Sanskrit
Canarese and English in Parallel Columns. The Canarese newly translated from the Sanskrit, and the English
from the translation by Sir Charles Wilkins (Bangalore: Wesleyan Mission Press, 1846).
of the eighteenth century the majority of this readership was primarily

interested in traveller’s tales, however wild and fanciful.18 Yet their
guaranteed audience was equally an indication of an eclectic curiosity
about the manners and customs of non-Christian peoples and faraway
lands, which was broadened and educated by the literary and linguistic
discoveries of the late eighteenth century, but which, by the 1830s, was
on the decline.19 After Macaulay’s crucial 1835 “Minute on Indian
Education”,20 with few exceptions, academic and scholarly interest in
India also lost ground, as the ascendancy of evangelical groups and
Utilitarian ideals, and the influence of James Mill, shaped the temper
of British intellectual attitudes to India.21
In this, Britain was the exception in nineteenth-century Europe, and
even though the scholarly pursuit of Sanskrit studies and Indology in
America was established later than in Europe, there, too, intellectual and
cultural interest in India increased throughout the century. However,
despite being the first Sanskrit text to be widely accessible in the West,
the Gita was easily outdone in its impact in Europe as well as in America,
in the early period of Western translations from Sanskrit, by Sacontalá or
the Fatal Ring, William Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s play, published
in 1789. Jones was one of the earliest European scholars to note the
correspondences between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and to suggest a
common origin for these languages.22 The idea of an Indo-European
18
See, for example, J. Z. Holwell’s Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the
Empire of Indostan, 3 vols. (London, 1765–71).
19
This is well illustrated by the diminishing numbers of articles on India in British journals, such
as the Edinburgh Review, for instance, from the early 1800s to the 1830s.
20
T. B. Macaulay was a Whig politician, historian, and, from 1834, member of the Supreme
Council of India. His “Minute on Indian Education” (1834) persuaded the Governor-General
to adopt English, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic, as the medium of instruction in higher
education in India. The Orientalists, including scholars and government officials such as H. H.
Wilson, had maintained the importance of instruction in Indian languages, and of the need to
educate Indians about their own texts and traditions. Macaulay, who was unversed in oriental
studies, argued that modern European knowledge was superior to Asian knowledge, and that
proficiency in English would be of greater benefit to Indians than Indian languages. Macaulay’s
minute laid the foundation for higher education in India as well as a colonial system based on
the cooperation of English-speaking Indians: it also catalysed the sharp decline in the value
assigned to Indian languages, culture and history in Britain for the next century and more.
21
James Mill, The History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1817).
22
Jones was one of the earliest scholars known to have noticed the philological relationship,
although it may have been noted previously by medieval scholars working in Persian or Arabic.
There is at least one European contender for Jones’s status: see John J. Godfrey, “Sir William
Jones and Pere Coeurdoux: A Philological Footnote,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 87/1
(Jan.–March 1967), 57–9.
“mother-tongue”, with Sanskrit as the favoured contender, shaped the

course of nineteenth-century oriental studies, seeding a new “science”
of comparative philology which became a defining scholarly enterprise
for a century absorbed with questions of origins, and interconnections
between language, race and culture. The early fascination with classical
texts such as Sacontalá was replaced by a deepening obsession with the
older literature of the Vedas and Vedanta, fuelled by the publication
of the Oupnek’hat (1802–4), a Latin adaptation of the Upanis.ads by the
French Jesuit philologist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron.23
The Gita had neither the literary polish and skilful composition of
classical literature, nor the sublime metaphysics of the Vedas, with their
aura of grand antiquity, and hence remained for three-quarters of a
century both less well known and less frequently translated than these.
Wilkins’s English translation was retranslated into Russian and French
and soon after into German and Greek. However, the earliest direct
translation from Sanskrit into German was not published until 1834,
whilst the first direct French translation was done in 1861 by Emile
Burnouf, the less-famous younger brother of Eugène Burnouf, Sanskrit
professor at the Collège de France. The first direct translation of the Gita
into a European language after Wilkins’s was by August von Schlegel,
who held the first chair in Sanskrit in Germany. Schlegel published a
Latin translation of the Gita in 1823 along with the first critical edition
in Sanskrit by a European. Unlike Wilkins’s Gita, Schlegel’s critically
edited text represented a scholarly tradition of interest in Sanskrit and
Indian philology and philosophy which had come of age. Schlegel’s
text showed that Wilkins’s translation contained several inaccuracies,
yet it was not followed by a new English translation for 70 years.
The “recovery” of Sanskrit and its literary corpus and traditions for
the West by the East India Company became a symbol of both British
political and economic power and the ability and authority it conferred to
gather for Western civilization not only material largesse but also fabulous
cultural wealth. The most vivid contemporary representation of the
symbolic power of Sanskrit translation, and of the Bhagavad Gita as
the exemplar text brought forth by this power, was in William Blake’s
drawing The Brahmins (1809), which showed Charles Wilkins working on
his translation of the Gita with a group of Brahmins attendant upon him.
Anquetil-Duperron’s version was based on the Persian translation written or commissioned

23
by Dara Shukoh.
Blake’s drawing suggested that the importance of the Gita lay in

its significance as an object of secret knowledge recovered through
intellectual labour and imperial triumph from its hitherto unknowable
form within a previously hidden tradition. With few exceptions, for
most of the first hundred years after it became available in the West,
this summed up the major significance of the translocated Gita in its
international context.
Metamorphoses of the Gita: 1880–1910
In the almost hundred years between 1785 and 1880, there were two
extant translations of the Gita in English, Charles Wilkins’s, and one
brought out in 1855 by J. Cockburn Thomson—a former student of H.
H. Wilson, the first Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford. In the five
years between 1880 and 1885 three new translations in English were
published in Britain.
The steep increase in the number of translations of the Gita from
the final decades of the nineteenth century onwards reflected an
unprecedented expansion in its popularity and influence. This was a
result of a series of independent and yet in some ways related translations
and interpretations of the Gita which, in conjunction, transformed its
meaning and interpretation for the modern world. The effects of this
transformation were as vital to the reception of the Gita in India as they
were in the West.
Although there were other popular translations of the Gita during
this period, they did not, in my opinion, contribute as much as did
the four described below to the Gita’s modern metamorphosis, nor did
they reflect the qualities which may be taken as family resemblances
appearing in, and connecting, these four interpretations, each of which
is integral to modern interpretations of the Gita: the emphasis on
allegory, the assumption of universality, and the presence of a dialogic
communication between Indian and Western interpreters which shape
these interpretations.24
24
The only exception is Swami Vivekananda’s interpretation of the Gita in lectures delivered in
Europe, America and India, which shares these characteristics. However, Vivekananda’s Gita
was more important to the reception of the text within neo-Hindu movements in India than
in a transnational context.
Sacred Books of the East

The Bhagavad-G -itaˉ, translated by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, was
published in 1882 in the eighth volume of the Sacred Books of the
East, edited by Friedrich Max Müller. In the 1870s, when the series
commenced, there was a growing public appetite for doctrines which
could provide frameworks for the movements of heterodox spirituality
that rose in an implacable tide at the end of the nineteenth century.
Publishers recognized a new and profitable market and Nicholas
Trübner was an important early player in the game, publishing The
Sacred Anthology: A Book of Ethical Scriptures,25 edited by Moncure Conway,
and dedicating a specialized Oriental Series to literary and religious
texts from Eastern traditions.
Max Müller’s choice of the term “sacred books” had a special
significance for the inclusion of the Gita in the series. Rejecting the
word “Bible” as a generically applicable term, and describing his search
for a broader one, Müller stressed an important distinction: “there are
many books sacred which are not canonical, and it was in order not to
exclude them from my Series, that I prefer the title Sacred Books of the
East”.26 This was an important difference since Müller could not have
included the Gita or the Vis.n.upura- n. a in his series had they had to fit
the category of canonical. Müller, like his nineteenth-century German
teachers, saw authority and importance as inextricably connected with
age and antiquity. In a letter to William Gladstone, Müller wrote that
he wished to direct the other’s interest to the “real India”, in which lay
the primitive origins of European culture:
It was a misfortune that all the early publications of Sanskrit texts belonged
really to the Renaissance of Sanskrit literature.. . [the] older literature in
India, the Vedic and the Buddhistic... is [where]... we can watch a real
growth from the simplest beginnings to the highest concepts which the
human mind is capable of...27
25
The Sacred Anthology: A Book of Ethical Scriptures Collected and Edited by Moncure Conway (London:
Trübner and Company, 1873).
26
Friedrich Max Müller, The Life and Letters of the Honourable Friedrich Max Müller in Two Volumes
Edited by His Wife (Bombay, London and New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1903),
M¨uller to Moncure Conway, 5 Jan. 1883, 2: 135.
27
Müller to W. E. Gladstone, 18 Jan. 1883, Life and Letters, 2: 138.
Yet while it was not canonical, nor vital to the understanding of India, in
Max Müller’s estimation, the Gita was sacred in the Sanskrit tradition,
and hence, despite not being especially interesting to most nineteenth-
century scholars, it was included in the series.
Kashinath Trimbak Telang had previously published a verse
translation of the Gita in Bombay, but the version for the Sacred Books
was in prose, and included the Anug-ita- and the Sanatsugat - -iya. Telang
was one of only three non-Western contributors invited to write for the
series, and one of two Indians, the other being the celebrated R. G.
Bhandarkar. Most other contributors were internationally recognized
scholars while Telang was comparatively obscure. Telang’s translation
combined a thorough knowledge of the Sanskrit tradition with a
philological and historical method very much part of a nineteenth-
century European mode of scholarship; it was meticulous and scholarly,
but lacked significant literary or poetic qualities that might have drawn
a wider audience. Yet Telang’s Gita turned out to be amongst the more
popular books in the series, selling over two hundred copies.28
Forty-nine volumes of Sacred Books were eventually published
in two series between 1879 and 1910. The cost of publishing this
extraordinary and expensive project was borne by Oxford University
Press together with the British Government in India.29 To foreground
and frame the special nature of his project, Max Müller, as a member
of the board of delegates at the press, suggested that a new category of
publications be instituted which would be published not for profit but
for the “advancement of sound learning”.30 The Oxford Clarendon
Press was accordingly instituted.
It is important to further contextualize Max Müller’s project, and
the new authority it conferred on the Gita, by its inclusion in another
emergent institutional innovation. The transformative integration and
reconstitution of oriental studies within British institutions of higher
education occurred as part of a larger transformation taking place
in the medieval British universities and British academia at this time.
The important changes in academic institutions in America during the
nineteenth century followed the development of professorial “research”
28
N. J. Girardot, “Max Muller’s ‘Sacred Books’ and the Nineteenth-century Production of the
Comparative Science of Religions”, History of Religions 41/3 (Feb. 2002), 227 n. 27.
29
Müller, Life and Letters, 2: 10.
30
Girardot, “Max Muller’s ‘Sacred Books’”, 228 n. 29. See Max Müller, “Statement to the
Delegates of the Oxford University press, 1878,” OUP Archive.
universities in Germany.31 In Britain, the 1870s, when Max Müller had

reached the height of his academic and social influence, were the cusp
of the change; taking Oxford as the exemplar, “there was a dramatic
passage from the restrictive Anglican clerical, classical, and upper-class
trappings of traditional education to a newly liberalized, nationalistic,
competitive, and middle-class professional system”.32
Telang’s Gita received few public reviews. The reviewers of The
Song Celestial, published three years later, all noted previous translations
of the Gita by Wilkins, Cockburn Thomson and John Davies (1882);
yet although Arnold himself mentioned Telang’s translation as well as
the other three, none of Arnold’s reviewers mentioned Telang. The
only reference I have found in contemporary popular journals and
newspapers to Telang’s Gita is a piece of witticism in a brief article
entitled “A Serious Series”:
A “Series of Sacred Books of the East,” edited by Professor Max Mueller, is

now being published. One of the volumes contains the Satapatha-Brahmana
according to the text of the school of Madhyandin; another comprises the
“Pattimokkha” (who was he bye-the bye and why did he mock Patti?); while
in volume eight is found “The Bhagavadgita with the Sanatsug - -
atiya, and
-
the Anugit a” translated by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, M.A. Fancy sending
your servant to a bookseller’s to ask for such works! Why, she would be sure
to drop half a dozen syllables on the road.33
Was the general reader disconcerted by the strange syllables composing

Telang’s name which added to the unfamiliarity of the Gita, or were the
“serious” scholarly trappings of the text not suited to a mass audience?
Notwithstanding its reception, through being included in the Sacred
Books, Telang’s Gita was absorbed into an integrated institutional
structure which altered the text’s presence in its international context.
The Sacred Books represented a highly ambitious academic, cultural
and political publishing project. They were selected by Max Müller to
represent a specific construction of sacredness that conferred upon the
texts he included a separate kind of social, cultural and institutional
authority which they reciprocally manifested and defined.34 Published
within such a structure the Gita became part of a new transnational,
31
Girardot, “Max Muller’s ‘Sacred Books’”, 215–16.
32
Ibid., pp. 215–16.
33
Funny Folks, 3 June 1882.
34
This is noted by Girardot, “Max Muller’s ‘Sacred Books’”, 220.
established and authorized canon that could foundationally define what

constituted an internationally recognized sacred tradition.
The publication of the Gita in the Sacred Books was a collaborative
process involving an Indian translator and a Western figure of institutional
authority who was at the same time a renowned popular authority on
India. Their dialogical interaction gave the Gita a new universal sanction.
The Song Celestial

Edwin Arnold’s translation, The Song Celestial, allowed the Gita to
enter a broader public consciousness. Arnold’s poem was in the
grand tradition of Dryden’s translation of Virgil, which brought the
original closer to the reader, rather than bringing the reader closer
to the original, as Goethe had described as the ultimate stage of
translation in his Notes and Queries appended to the West–Eastern
Diwan. Rather than attempt to reproduce the Gita “as it was”,
The Song Celestial reinvented and, in some contexts, replaced it.
By the time The Song Celestial appeared in 1885, Edwin Arnold was
already a highly regarded Victorian poet, well known for his oriental
verse. In a Liverpool newspaper, published on New Year’s Eve 1885,
The Song Celestial is mentioned under the Literature Section of a
listing of the past year’s important events, appearing beside works by
Tennyson, Swinburne and George Meredith.35 Arnold’s most popular
work was The Light of Asia (1879), and although The Song Celestial never
matched the popularity of the earlier poem, Edwin Arnold played an
essential part in the transformation of the modern Gita. Arnold had
been principal of the Government College in Pune, before a successful
journalistic career in London with the Daily Telegraph where he rose to
the position of editor-in-chief. Yet his prominent public image arose
from his involvement with two grandly ambitious and acquisitive
colonial projects: the journalistic assignment of H. M. Stanley which
he helped to arrange, and his promotion of a proposed Grand Trunk
railway across Africa.
The Song Celestial garnered public notices across England and Ireland,
many of which noted Arnold’s contribution in making Eastern texts
accessible for a newer, broader audience. A reviewer in the Birmingham
Daily Post wrote,
35
“The Year 1885”, Liverpool Mercury, 31 Dec. 1885.
In an especial sense Mr. Arnold has been a revealer to his generation. To what
extent... Oriental literature [has]... been accessible to the learned among us
we do not know; but to the mass of the English reading public they [oriental
works] have been as though they were not... Mr. Arnold has in mellifluous
verse placed before us... some of the works of utmost popularity and authority
in the East... He now adds this noble poem...36
But the demand for oriental works amongst “the mass of the... reading
public” was rising; as the Freeman’s Journal, published from Dublin,
remarked in August 1885,
Undoubtedly Eastern Literature is being popularized, a taste for its study is

rapidly developing. In recent years, books... have unlocked the closed doors
of Indian philosophy and literature... Of the present poem, the Bhagavad
Sita [sic] of the great Hindoo epic, the Mahabharata—there are already
three English translations... But... Mr. Arnold brought to his task literary
acquirements... supplemented by... special knowledge as an Orientalist...37
By the end of the century the Gita, in the form of The Song Celestial,
had become a naturalized Victorian text. In December 1899, M. H. Gill
and Son, a Dublin bookseller, posted in a local paper recommendations
from amongst its collection of books especially “[s]uitable for
Christmas Presents”. The Song Celestial, at two shillings, was among
the most competitively priced of those listed.38 Unlike the reviewer of
Wilkins’s Gita, who had thought the primary function of The Bhagavat
Geeta to lie in satisfying its readers’ curiosity about the exotic East, one
hundred years later a reviewer of The Song Celestial saw it as a book for
a spiritual truth-seeker, irrespective of religion or culture. Yet the poem
is also simultaneously read as a text whose pleasure lies in its value as
an aesthetic object. Both characteristics seemed to be easily reconciled
within the Gita’s new identity:
The Song Celestial is not a book to be hastily read and thrown aside, and those
who only want to be amused will do much better with a three-volume novel.
But to the real enquirer, the searcher after truth, the profundity of the work
will be as welcome as its rare finish and beauty will make it to those who are
chiefly interested in literary excellence.39
36
Birmingham Daily Post, 13 Nov. 1885.
37
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin, Ireland), 28 Aug. 1885.
38
“Advertisements and Notices”, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin, Ireland),
Saturday, 9 Dec. 1899, classified advertisements.
39
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin, Ireland), Saturday, 9 Dec. 1899.
Yet high Victorian evangelism was still a part of late nineteenth-century

Britain. Suspicion of and even revulsion against Hinduism existed side by
side with the enthusiasm for alternative spiritual paths and the lingering
Romantic fascination with the exotic. For many who recalled the darker
rumours about contemporary Hinduism, Edwin Arnold’s task was to
rescue the better portion of Hindu philosophy from its unpleasant and
even threatening context and present it, shorn of dubious associations,
to his discerning public:
Mr. Edwin Arnold[’s translation] . . . will do more for the English reader
than any amount of metaphysical or historical disquisition to open a way
into the mysterious labyrinth of Eastern speculation. The grandeur of
the forest, into which he clears a smiling pathway, conceals the confusing
and noxious undergrowth where the unclean and venomous and ferocious
forces are at work... [the text] does not introduce any of the well-known and
popular and degrading forms of the Krishna legend. . .40
Arnold’s poem allowed the Gita to be received by a new public

audience. Within months of the appearance in print of The Song
Celestial, the Leeds Public Library had announced it as one of their
latest acquisitions.41 A large part of the new and growing readership
of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries was composed of
borrowers of books and journals from local libraries, and it was this
audience, who would either not have had access to or simply not chosen
to read previously available translations of the Gita, which received
Arnold’s late-Victorian version with evident enthusiasm.
The text had become part of a common pool of reference, entering
a kind of generalized literary consciousness in Britain. By means of
Arnold’s poem, the Gita began to occupy a much more fluid space.
It became capable of slippage, out of a specific cultural context and
meanings bounded by that context, into a literary form, where it and its
meanings could be read much more loosely, as allegory, its images taken
as metaphors, and its religious, doctrinal elements as purely symbolic
signifiers.
The Gita was no longer a “sacred” or religious text from a specific
non-Western tradition, but something more universal. In its new form
it could be received as poetry and a kind of non-denominational
40
Leeds Mercury, 25 July 1885.
41
“Local Notes and Queries”, number CCCXL, Leeds Mercury, 18 July 1885.
religious philosophy. The identifiably late-Victorian form and language

endowed it with a new kind of life which drew it out of its older skin
and contributed to its remaking as a chimerical, transcultural object.
Gandhi and The Song Celestial

Arnold’s poem, The Song Celestial, gave the Gita a pan-Victorian identity
which appealed not only to readers at home, but to a transnational
audience from across the empire. While this essay has not the scope
for a history of the Gita in the context of Indian nationalism and neo-
Hinduism, there is an important link between Arnold’s poem and one
of the most significant representations and uses of the Gita in India
in the twentieth century—as Gandhi’s textbook of non-violence. This
needs exploring here because of its role in the dialogic nature of the
Gita’s transnational development, which comprehended Indian and
Western interpretations and their integral consciousness of each other
and affected the Gita’s modern interpretive history.
In 1925, Gandhi published an article on his interpretation of the
Gita in his nationalist weekly journal, Young India, where he described
his earliest encounter with the text. I quote from it at length because it
illuminates the significance of Arnold’s influence:
My first acquaintance with the Gita was in 1889, when I was almost twenty.
I had not then much of an inkling of the principle of Ahimsa . . . Now whilst
in England my contact with two English friends made me read the Gita
. . . My knowledge of Sanskrit was not enough to enable me to understand
all the verses of the Gita unaided . . . They placed before me Sir Edwin
Arnold’s magnificent rendering of the Gita. I devoured the contents from
cover to cover and was entranced by it. The last nineteen verses of the
second chapter have since been inscribed on the tablet of my heart. They
contain for me all knowledge . . . I have since read many translations and
many commentaries, have argued and reasoned to my heart’s content but
the impression that first reading gave me has never been effaced . . .42
The article is set out as a response to a question which had been

raised about the true teaching of the Gita: whether it represents an
injunction to violence or to non-violence. This is a question to which
it was vitally important for Gandhi to provide a public answer, one
which would effectively resolve in his own favour the struggle between
M. K. Gandhi, “The Meaning of the Gita”, Young India: A Weekly Journal VII/46 (12 Nov.
42
1925), 385–6.
Gandhi’s ideology of non-violence and that of those nationalist leaders

who sought to use the Gita to support their argument for necessary
violence. Gandhi presented his case, entering the fray with a line that
echoes one of the most popular injunctions of the Gita, to perform an
- karma—“Mine is but to fight for my
action without attachment, nis.k ama
meaning, no matter whether I win or lose. . .”43 —a brilliant reminder
of Gandhi’s commitment to the teaching of the Gita.
The extraordinary effectiveness of Gandhi’s argument in this essay
lay in his willingness to read the Gita as a literary work, while he argued
for the imposition of a singular interpretation (of non-violence) on a
text which he presented as the central spiritual doctrine of his creed.
He made it clear that he saw the Gita as allegory:
And who are Dhritarashtra and Yudhishtira and Arjuna? Who is Krishna?
Were they all historical characters?... I regard Duryodhana and his party as
the baser impulses in man, and Arjuna and his party as the higher impulses.
The field of battle is our body. An eternal battle is going on between the
two camps and the Poet seer has vividly described it. Krishna is the Dweller
within, ever whispering in a pure heart.44
Gandhi emphasized the Gita’s origins as a literary production by a poet,

rather than a religious revelation by a form of the Supreme Being. He
argued for a critical reading of the Gita’s epic context and declared that
the Gita’s meaning must not suffer from what formalist critics would
call the “intentional fallacy”: in Gandhi’s analysis the poem had a
semi-mystical capacity to transcend its writer’s intended meaning. “You
might . . . say that the Poet himself was not against war or violence .
. . But . . . The poet. . . is not conscious of all the interpretations his
composition is capable of. The beauty of poetry is that the creation
transcends the poet”.45 While the Gita was interpreted allegorically
before the nineteenth century, from this moment, with the influence
of Arnold’s poetic representation, and, as we shall see, theosophical
renderings, allegorical interpretations of the Gita were privileged over
others, and Gandhi gave them defining currency.
43
Ibid., 385.
44
Ibid., 387.
45
Ibid., 386.
In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote that the friends who introduced

him to the Gita in the form of Arnold’s poem were Theosophists.46
They introduced Gandhi to Madame Blavatsky and Mrs Besant, and,
although Gandhi “politely declined” his friend’s invitation to join
the society, he read, “at... [their] instance, Madame Blavatsky’s Key to
Theosophy.”47 Gandhi wrote of the book that it “stimulated in... [him]
the desire to read books on Hinduism”.48 Gandhi’s version of the Gita
shows evidence of his Theosophical readings as well as the influence of
Edwin Arnold.
The Theosophical Turn

The years between 1880 and the first decade of the twentieth century
saw the emergence and structural and ideological consolidation of
the Theosophical Society in America, India, Britain and continental
Europe. Peter van der Veer has convincingly shown that the evangelical
tendencies of the Victorian age, which were amongst the strongest
influences on imperial culture and policy in the nineteenth century,
were most radically opposed not by liberalism, which he accurately sees
rather as sharing many evangelical premises, but by unorthodox religious
movements, including spiritualism and Theosophy.49 Many of these
movements combined religious radicalism with strong political leanings
towards various forms of nonconformist, antinomian sympathies, and
anti-imperialist rhetoric. The Gita could be integrated by Theosophy
as part of what appeared to be a radical spiritual quest which sought to
achieve results well beyond merely spiritual realms.
The Theosophical Gita was the most important chapter in the
formation of the transnational Gita—a modern, multiformed text
which could be contingently comprehended according to interpretive
contexts, and universally applied to global spiritual conditions, whilst
remaining rooted to its essentialist origins in a fabulously reconstructed
46
M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiment swith Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai
(Ahmedabad: Navjivan Book Trust, 1930), 35.
47
H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company and
New York: W. Q. Judge, 1889).
48
Gandhi, Autobiography, 35.
49
Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 59–60.
purely Hindu past. The Theosophical representation of the Gita placed

it within a properly transnational context, being collectively constructed
and publicized through the text’s interpretations by both Indian and
Western members of the Theosophical Society. They included T. Subba
Row, an early Indian initiate, whose lectures on the Gita in 1886, at Adyar,
conjectured that Krishna in the Gita represented Logos, while Arjuna
represented the monad, or man; Mohini Chatterji, whose translation
of the Gita was published by Trübner in 1888; and William Quan
Judge, secretary of the American section, whose Essays on the Gita (1890)
presented an entirely allegorical interpretation of the Mahabharata.
There were two characteristics which, mutatis mutandis, tended
to be present in all of the Theosophical Gitas. These were, first,
the assumption that the Gita was primarily an allegorical text to be
symbolically interpreted, and, second, that it was a text of universal
spiritual significance. These interpretive principles were apparent
in Gandhi’s reading of the Gita and Edwin Arnold’s translation.
They were also used in contemporary Hindu interpretations, such as
Vivekanada’s, where the universal aspect took on a double significance:
the Gita was simultaneously the universal Hindu text, the essence of
Hinduism and as such pertinent to all Hindus, and an essential spiritual
text for all humanity. However, the Theosophical adoption of these two
interpretive principles gave them a far wider reach and significance in
a much broader international context.
Annie Besant, Madame Blavatsky’s successor in Britain and
India, used her allegorical reading of the text in the service of her
political commitment, constructing an ingenious parallel between
the Mahabharata war and the Indian freedom struggle. Instead of
an internecine war for succession between close kin, the war in the
Mahabharata became a struggle by Arjuna “to destroy a usurper who
was oppressing the land; it was his duty as prince, as warrior, to fight for
the deliverance of his nation and restore order and peace.”50
Besant’s interpretation, in her translation as well as her Hints on
the Study of the Gita, was the most successful and most widely read of
all the Theosophical Gitas. She used her influence to drive home the
universalist assumptions which were by now becoming characteristic
of the text: “To speak of the Gita is to speak of the history of the
50
Annie Besant, The Bhagavad Gita or the Lord’s Song (Madras: G. A. Natesan and Company, 1907),
iv.
world. . . How great is the Song of the Lord, all nations with one voice
acclaim. . . in every country [it] has awakened some echo in receptive
hearts.”51 Theosophy’s impact was extraordinary not only because of
its geographical spread, but also because it extended across multiple
fields of influence: cultural, intellectual, aesthetic and, crucially in the
case of India, political. The Gita became a central text of Theosophy
and through its intercession the Gita could reach a transnational,
transcultural audience, acquiring new, spectacularly effective, forms
and meanings in the West as well as in India.
Edwin Arnold’s translation of the Gita showed that a literary
representation, with the characters as archetypes or abstract ideals,
and the action as purely symbolic, was the most easily communicable
and widely acceptable telling of the text. Gandhi and the Theosophists
followed where he had led and found the allegorical method apt to their
requirements. Through the continuing impact of interpretations on
generations of new readers and translators, these characteristics would
become part of the essential meaning of the text for interpreters from
India and the West, as the Gita gained ever-growing popularity from
the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth.
The Gita in the Twentieth Century

Two translations of the Gita in the twentieth century reveal the
influence of inherited ideas and interpretations from the nineteenth
century. Each is the product of collaborations between Indian and
Western translators, and the authors of each unquestioningly accepted
the assumption of universal relevance that the Gita began to acquire in
the period between 1880 and 1910. Both translations were concerned
with the symbolic possibilities of the text; however, the interpretation
accompanying the second translation represents the culmination of the
process begun by the literary and allegorical interpretations of Arnold,
Gandhi and the Theosophists, by turning the ordinary, surface meaning
of the Gita on its head.
The two collaborative translations of the Gita which are the subjects
of this section appeared in 1935 and 1944. Each could lay claim
simultaneously to the spiritual authenticity of the East, and the cultural
Annie Besant, “First lecture”, in idem, Hints on the Study of the Bhagavad Gita (Adyar: Theosophical
51
Publishing House, 1973), 1–2.

authority of the West, by bringing together Indian translators—Hindu

swamis visiting the West—and prominent Western authors.
In 1932, W. B. Yeats met Purohit Swami through Thomas Sturge
Moore, who hoped to garner Yeats’s support for the swami’s book on his
spiritual experiences as an “Indian monk”. Yeats was impressed by the
swami’s descriptions of his own transcendental experiences, and agreed
to write an introduction for the book.52 Yeats now took on the task of
helping the swami to publish further books; he approached Faber and
Faber, where T. S. Eliot was editor, hoping that Eliot would publish
the swami’s books and provide introductions for them, endowing them
with inestimable value in an international market. In the literary world
of modernist London, T. S. Eliot had a special status, as an interpreter
of arcane knowledge, as well as an authority, amongst Western writers
and critics, on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. However, Eliot was not
convinced about the marketability of the swami’s books. In a letter to
Purohit Swami written in 1934, Eliot wrote that he was not sure he
believed all the swami’s tales of Indian mysticism, and was even less
sure of what a British audience would think of them. About the Gita,
he added,
to the ordinary occidental reader who has no first hand experience of

Indian thought, and no real perception of the seriousness of the subject, the
Bhagavad-Geeta is likely to seem at first sight repetitious and prolix. I believe
that it might seem so to me, if I had not many years ago read it in the
original.53
Despite Eliot’s reservations, Faber took on the publication of four

books by Purohit Swami, apparently on the condition that they be
either introduced by or in some way associated with the name of W. B.
Yeats.54 Apart from an anonymous review of Yeats and Purohit Swami’s
translation of The Ten Principal Upanisa. ds, in a Faber catalogue for 1937,
Eliot did not provide a written endorsement of any of the swami’s
books.55 He did not write a preface to Purohit Swami’s translation of
52
Purohit Swami, An Indian Monk (London: Macmillan, 1932).
53
T. S. Eliot File, Purohit Swami Collection, Nehru Memorial Archives, Delhi (unpublished
letter from T. S. Eliot to Purohit Swami, 1 Nov. 1934).
54
T. S. Eliot File, Purohit Swami Collection, Nehru Memorial Archives, Delhi (unpublished
letter from T. S. Eliot to Purohit Swami, 7 May1937).
55
The Ten Principal Upanishads, trans. Purohit Swami and W. B. Yeats (London: Faber, 1937).
the Gita although there is evidence that he had been approached by

Faber to write one and may have initially considered doing so.56
Eliot and Yeats exemplified in turn two kinds of response to the Gita
in the West—the scholarly, which had been more prominent for most
of the nineteenth century, and the popular, which rose to dominate the
field from the 1880s.
Yeats devoted much of the energies of his last years to the publication
and promotion of Purohit Swami’s work. Introduced to Hinduism
by an Indian Theosophist in 1886, Yeats was later a member of the
Theosophical Society for a number of years. From an early age, Yeats
had sought initiation into a spiritual path which would lead him to
revelations of arcane mysteries and mystical truths which he believed
to exist on a hidden plane, a spiritus mundi, which was everywhere
and yet not apparent. His interests in Theosophy, spiritualism and
Purohit Swami’s books were all motivated by this search. He was far
less concerned with the scholarly accuracy of the swami’s translations
than with the spiritual truths they seemed to embody, an attitude which
characterized the popular tradition of interest in Hinduism and its
texts, with its fluid and amorphous synthesis of influences and ideas.
On the other hand, Eliot inherited his approach to Indian philosophy
and its texts from his teachers at Harvard, who treated them as scholarly
sources, to be understood within a specific cultural and religious
context. Despite poetic references to the Gita in the Four Quartets and
in an unpublished section of The Waste Land, as well as a statement
that he believed the Gita to be the next greatest philosophical poem
after Dante’s Divine Comedy, Eliot did not want to be involved in the
production of a popular translation of the text. Unlike Yeats, he was not
convinced that the Gita’s proselytization in the West as a generalized or
universal spiritual doctrine was either desirable or possible. While Yeats
accepted the late nineteenth-century idea of the Gita as a universal text
which was full of symbolic significance, an aspect which appealed to
Yeats’s occult proclivities, Eliot remained unconvinced by the idea of a
universal religion. Amongst most twentieth-century Western readers of
the Gita, Eliot was increasingly in the minority.
56
The Geeta: The Gospel of the Lord Shri Krishna, trans. from the original Sanskrit by Shri Purohit,
Swami (London: Faber, 1935). The possibility of Eliot’s writing such a preface is mentioned
in the Purohit Swami collection, Nehru Memorial Archives, Delhi (unpublished letter from
Richard de la Mare to Purohit Swami, 9 May 1935)
In 1944 the Gita appeared in a translation by Swami Prabhavananda

and Christopher Isherwood.57 Like Purohit Swami, Prabhavananda
had travelled westwards to proselytize Hinduism. It was a tradition
which may have had its earliest success in Swami Vivekananda, but its
most influential and effective representative came later in the person
of A. C. Bhaktivedanta and his International Society for Krishna
Consciousness. Prabhavananda gathered a circle of influential acolytes
around him in California. One of these was the English novelist,
Aldous Huxley, who introduced Christopher Isherwood to the swami.
Isherwood and Prabhavananda’s translation of the Gita was one of
several collaborations undertaken by the swami with various Western
writers. Yet The Song of God had a special advantage. As well as being
co-authored by a famous author, it carried an introduction by the even
more celebrated Aldous Huxley.
Huxley’s Introduction to The Song of God became as famous as the
book for which it was written. In it, he expounded the principles of a
universalist spiritual tradition he called the “perennial philosophy”, of
which he claimed the Gita to be an exemplar text:58 “In Vedanta and
Hebrew prophecy, in the Tao Teh King [sic] and the Platonic dialogues
. . . the Perennial Philosophy has spoken almost all the languages of
Asia and Europe and made use of the terminology and traditions of
every one of the higher religions”.59
The universality of the Gita was re-emphasized through its
representation as part of the “perennial philosophy.” It was the
“compendium of the whole Vedic doctrine . . . the focus of all Indian
religion”,60 but contained “enduring value”, “not only for Indians, but
for all mankind”.61
Through its inclusion in this new paradigm, the Gita could now
function paradoxically both as a central symbol of neo-Hinduism,
and as an exemplar text of a transnational universalist philosophy and
spirituality.
57
The Song of God: Bhagavadgita, trans. by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood,
with an Introduction by Aldous Huxley (Hollywood: M. Rodd Co., 1944).
58
The next year, Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1945),
devoted to explicating its history and underlying principles.
59
Aldous Huxley, “Introduction”, Song of God, 11–12.
60
Ibid., 13. Huxley quotes Ananda Coomaraswamy on the Gita.
61
Ibid. This is Huxley’s own conclusion.
Aldous Huxley’s Introduction brought to light the distance travelled

by the Gita from its original literary and spiritual context, and illustrated
the breadth of possible meanings which could be assigned to it, and the
Gita’s amenability to allegorical interpretation was taken by Huxley to
its utmost limit: “The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most systematic
scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy . . .[for] a world at
war. . . it stands pointing, clearly and unmistakably, to the only road of
escape from the self-imposed necessity of self-destruction.”62 Writing in
the midst of a war of destruction and violence on an unprecedented
scale, Huxley reread and reimagined the Gita in a role which not
only subverted its prime injunction to kill, and accept the necessity of
killing, but converted it into a pacifist manifesto, a means of escape
from violence.
Conclusion
Telang’s Bhagavadgita, published in Max Müller’s Sacred Books,
Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial, the loosely connected Theosophical
interpretations with their family resemblances, and Gandhi’s Gita,
which drew from Arnold and the Theosophists, all these, published
between 1880 and 1910, individually and in succession contrived a
hegemonic form for a transnational Gita. Each contingently contributed
to an interpretation which emphasized the Gita’s allegorical qualities
and symbolic significance, as well as its universal relevance. As the final
section has shown, the majority of translations that followed were to
assume these qualities to be intrinsic as well as essential to the text. In
some sense the horizon forming the historical consciousness of these
previous translations has been blurred into the horizon of the text itself
within the consciousness of modern readers and interpreters of the
Gita.
62
Ibid., 23.
3
The Transfiguration of Duty in Aurobindo’s

Essays on the Gita
Andrew Sartori
I
Aurobindo Ghose had spent his childhood in England safely insulated
from Indian influences. There he had received a classical education,
studied on scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, and gone on to
stand for the Indian Civil Service examinations with great success—at
least until the riding test, for which he failed to appear. Returning to
India in 1893, he took up service under the Maharaja of Baroda, in
western India, where he renewed the studies in Sanskrit and Bengali,
and began his initial foray into anticolonial politics with the publication
of a series of provocative essays in Bombay’s Indu Prakash criticizing
the Congress for its mendicant attitude towards the British rulers.
In 1905, India’s first substantial attempt at mass mobilization
emerged in response to the partitioning of Bengal into two separate
provinces by the British. The ostensible reason for the partition was
administrative convenience, but critics were quick to point out that
there was no reason, other than divide-and-rule manipulation, not to
have created new administrative units out of the large non-Bengali
populations incorporated into the Bengal Presidency (in Bihar and
Orissa) rather than splitting Bengal proper down the middle. The
partition provoked a broad-based condemnation from all the major
The Transfiguration of Duty in Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita 49
sections of the predominantly Hindu educated middle and upper classes

of Bengali society, sparking calls for a boycott of British manufactures
and concerted support for indigenous (swadeshi) products in their stead.
Aurobindo responded to the Swadeshi crisis by returning to Calcutta,
and emerged as a key organizer and articulate press publicist, both in
Bengal and nationally, of the “Nationalist” or “Extremist” faction of the
Swadeshi movement. Extremists went far beyond the call to abrogate
the partition and promote indigenous industry, programmes they shared
with the older, “Moderate” leadership. Supported by fellow Extremists
in Maharashtra and the Punjab, Aurobindo and his allies demanded a
boycott of all British institutions with a view to immediate Indian self-
rule (swaraj) that would establish the conditions for economic, social,
political and spiritual autonomy for the nation. While formally and
pragmatically committed to non-violent forms of “passive resistance,”
Aurobindo also became involved in the activities of secret societies
dedicated to martial training and anti-British conspiracy— which in
turn led to his arrest in 1908 on charges of planning and overseeing
a terrorist attack on a British judge. Acquitted for want of evidence
in 1909, but still the object of considerable legal attention, Aurobindo
fled to the French territory of Pondicherry, south of Madras (Chennai),
where he increasingly focused his attention on his spiritual practice,
becoming the renowned “Yogi of Pondicherry.”1
The Aurobindo Ghose who composed his long series of Essays on the
Gita from 1916 to 1920 was thus in the process of re-creating himself—
from radical nationalist to cosmopolitan guru. The essays were originally
published in the Arya, a vehicle for his philosophical writings that he
cofounded in 1914 at the suggestion and with the editorial cooperation
of the minor French occultist, socialist, and pro-Swadeshist, Paul
Richard, who had met Aurobindo on a trip to Pondicherry in 1910,
and of Richard’s mystic wife, Mirra Alfassa, the Parisian Bohemian
daughter of Sephardic Jews with whom Richard had returned in 1914
to once again unsuccessfully seek election to the French Chamber
of Deputies. Returning to Pondicherry permanently in 1920 after
some intervening years in Japan, Alfassa would, as “The Mother”
1
For a discussion of this phase of Aurobindo’s career see Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The
Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993);
and Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), Chap. 5.
(a title bestowed on her by Aurobindo), gradually assume the leadership

of the increasingly international Aurobindo Ashram, while Aurobindo
himself mostly withdrew into seclusion from around 1926. Much later,
in 1964, it was Alfassa who would conceive a plan for the radically
cosmopolitan experimental city of Auroville. But already in 1914, the
Arya was not only being launched on a national stage (predictably given
Aurobindo’s profile as a nationalist leader at this time), but it was to be
published simultaneously in English and French editions, which, along
with the discipleship of two Europeans, marked a decisive transition in
Aurobindo’s profile from nationalist politician to international spiritual
guru.2
This essay is an attempt to make sense of the Essays on the Gita in
intellectual-historical terms. The nationalist appeal to religious discourse
has been commonly understood to be the result of the continued hold
of traditional categories on an incompletely modernized (“transitional”)
society. Even a scholar as sophisticated as Sumit Sarkar could
occasionally come close to implying such an approach, with both his
attribution of an atavistic quality to the Swadeshi leadership’s appeal to
religion and his emphasis on its invocation of tropes of heteronomous
subordination to divine will.3 This old developmentalist argument,
however, self-evidently stumbles in relation to Aurobindo himself,
given that his highly anglicized father’s efforts to remove him utterly
from the sullying touch of India placed him at a substantial distance
from the religious traditions in which he would subsequently immerse
himself. Alternatively, the nationalist appeal to religious discourse is
understood to be a means of mobilizing an incompletely modernized
society. In this case, Aurobindo’s appeal to religious discourse would
not be understood to express directly a traditional attachment to
Hinduism, but rather would be a function of a traditionalism that
sought to utilize religious discourse as a means to appeal to others who
remained subject to its appeal and its authority. These others are either
2
“Documents in the Life of Sri Aurobindo: Sri Aurobindo, The Mother and Paul Rich-
ard, 1911–1915,” available at http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/research/show.php?
set=doclife&id=29. See also Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Co-
lonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 94–6; and Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities:
Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006), 118–26.
3
Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House,
1973), 107–8, 313–16.
the national-popular generally (to use Partha Chatterjee’s Gramscian

formulation), or the narrower stratum of the rural upper-caste gentry
to whom the predominantly Shakta religious imagery (focused on the
primal Mother as the incarnation of divine power) was more likely to
appeal (in contrast to the largely Vaishnavite lower castes and the mass
of Muslim cultivators in eastern Bengal).4 But the authoritative appeal
of the Bhagavad Gita as a master text of Swadeshi thought is harder
to fit into this narrative: firstly, because it is clearly a Vaishnavite, not a
Shakta text; and secondly, because even within the domain of Bengali
Vaishnavite religious discourse, the Gita, with its austere Krishna,
was hardly a text with a great deal of established appeal in a regional
tradition that privileged rather the Bhagavata Purana, with its more
frolicsome Krishna.
Of course, we could also read Aurobindo’s thought as actuated
by the crisis of the colonial intellectual, who must authorize his own
discourse by appealing to the very colonial authority that seems to de-
authorize his right to speak. Aurobindo stands forth as an especially
acute case of this kind of ego deformation, since he was an anglophone
educated entirely in England, who had to embark on a deliberate
programme of language-learning to recuperate his nationality.5 The
larger question, however, is whether we are to understand the otherness
appealed to as the standpoint of the anticolonial intellectual as internal
to the problematics of colonial discourse (a projection of Orientalist
discourse), or as a response to the actualities of an encounter with the
non-West. From this latter perspective, Aurobindo might be treated as
a philosopher or political theorist making substantive arguments in his
own right.6 But here we are clearly faced with a choice: either Aurobindo
was someone who espoused certain truth-claims that we can respond
4
Haridas and Uma Mukherjee, India’s Fight for Freedom: Or the Swadeshi Movement, 1905–1906
(Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1958); Barbara Southard, “The Political Strategy of
Aurobindo Ghosh: The Utilization of Hindu Religious Symbolism and the Problem of
Political Mobilization in Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 14/3 (1980), 353–76; Partha Chatterjee,
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).
5
Leonard Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876–1940 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1974); Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 85–100; and Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the
Colonial World, Chap. 2.
6
Peter Heehs, “Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography,”
History and Theory 42 (May 2003), 169–95; Sugata Bose, “The Spirit and Form of an Ethical
Polity: A Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 129–44.
to as if we were his contemporaries, or he was a figure who mediated

between the European intellectual world he was educated in and the
Indian textual traditions into which he came to immerse himself as part
of a concerted effort to “create an alternative language of discourse.”7
If Aurobindo was turning to religious discourse as a means to articulate
a response to the actuality of his experience of Indian difference,
then we are left to ponder whether the formal content of anticolonial
discourse merely expresses a simply descriptive or diagnostic response
to the realities of Indian difference, in which case Aurobindo is to be
treated as a philosopher to whose truth-claims we might respond as
our postcolonialist contemporary. But if Aurobindo’s encounter with
the non-West assumed a structured set of meanings that were fully
intelligible within the European intellectual context and yet nonetheless
also generated in the non-Western context of colonial India, then we
must understand Aurobindo as a historical figure responding to the
specificity of his context—and we must give a historical account of the
context to which he was responding in order to understand the meaning
of the substantive claims he was making. From this perspective, we
can only treat Aurobindo as a substantive intellectual by locating him
within the historical context in response to which he was framing truth-
claims that systematically elided the contextual specificity of their own
reference.
It was this last approach that I elaborated in my recent book, Bengal
in Global Concept History, and which I will also presume as the framing
skeleton for the discussion that follows. This essay begins by positioning
Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita in the larger context of the nationalist
discourse that emerged, with the Gita as its self-declared bible, in the
later nineteenth century in Bengal. The nationalist argument about
religion actually rested on deeply anthropological and sociological
premises that effectively nested the claims for Hindu India’s privileged
specificity within an essentially universalistic and entirely translatable
set of problematics. I then go on to argue, however, that Aurobindo’s
Essays on the Gita in fact represented a subtle but profound break from
this broadly Swadeshist national project in its assertion of a radically
cosmopolitan and future-oriented spatio-temporal horizon, and I
locate that break in the radical failure of the Swadeshi mobilization.
The journey from nationalist to spiritual guru is thus read not as a
7
Nandy, Intimate Enemy, xvii.
transition from particularism to universalism, but as a movement

from a construction of the primacy of national particularity out of
fundamentally universalistic premises to an emphasis on cosmopolitan
universalism propelled by a regionally specific history.
II
It would be far too simple to narrate Aurobindo’s career as a

straightforward transition from narrow nationalism to cosmopolitan
spiritualism. Aurobindo’s own intellectual orientations were formed
early during his youth in Britain, where he lived from the age of seven
until he returned to India at the age of twenty-one. The broad currents
of British romantic culture-criticism and British idealism clearly colour
his surviving juvenilia.8 When Aurobindo discovered the Indian cause
while a student at Cambridge, he would enter into a commitment to
the “Extremist” brand of nationalism through a strikingly Arnoldian
engagement with colonial issues, concerned above all with the
constitution of an ethical, rather than merely mechanical, state, grounded
in the life of the people.9 And it was in following through this idealist
train of thought that he would become ever more deeply entrenched in
the discourse of Hegelianized Vedanta that emerged to prominence in
the pre-Swadeshi and the Swadeshi years. In other words, Aurobindo’s
Indianism and Asianism emerged from the very beginning out of
markedly cosmopolitan intellectual contexts and concerns. In keeping
with the general thrust of Swadeshi ideology, the very orientation to
national particularity was constituted out of ideological themes that
were far from peculiarly “Indian” in their provenance, and that were
deeply universalistic in their conceptual foundations: an ethical critique
of commercial and civil society, an idealist critique of materialism and
a historicist critique of abstraction.10
8
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 1, Early Cultural Writings (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo
Ashram Trust, 2003), 3–85.
9
I discuss his early essays, New Lamps for Old, in more detail in Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept
History, 139–42.
10
See Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, Chap. 5; and Andrew Sartori, “Beyond Culture-
Contact and Colonial Discourse: ‘Germanism’ in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Intellectual History
4/1 (April 2007), 77–93.
To understand this convergence of universalism and particularism,

we might take a step back for a moment to consider the theological
writings of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in the 1880s—most
importantly, his Dharmatattva: Anushilan (The Essence of Dharma:
Cultivation), his Krishnacaritra (The Character of Krishna) and his
(unfinished) commentary on the Bhagavadgita—which were themselves
important and recognized precursors to Swadeshi thought’s ubiquitous
preoccupation with the Gita. Bankim had sought to elaborate an
emphatically theistic theology based on the solemn Krishna of the
Gita rather than on the more frolicsome Krishna of the established
Gauriya tradition of eastern India. But the foundation on which he
had established this religion was a strikingly universalistic philosophical
anthropology. In fact, so thoroughly anthropological was Bankim’s
conception of religion that he would declare that the
dharma proclaimed by the Gita is for all men. It is the best dharma for him
who believes in reincarnation just as well as for him who does not. It is the
best dharma for him who is devoted to Krishna as well as for him who is
not. It is the best dharma for him who believes in God, and also for him
who does not.11
As such, this “dharma” (ethical obligation, rule of action, but also

the standard modern Bengali translation for “religion”), grounded as it
was in the very essence of humanity, “is eternal, and so is its connection
with society. It can never be the intention of God that the dharma
proclaimed by him is dharma only for some specific society or condition
of society.”12 All human beings had as their dharma the harmonious
cultivation of the totality of their innate faculties through the totality of
dharmic works—encoded in a conception of the fourfold caste (varna)
system liberally interpreted not in terms of an actual social arrangement
but as a typology of actions. Krishna represents the ultimate ideal for
emulation through the practice of bhakti (devotion), through which all
human works and thoughts are dedicated towards, and thus tend to
move towards, his many-sided yet harmonious perfection. When the
Gita taught nishkama karma (desireless action), it essentially intended that
man should forgo the desire for the fruits of action (i.e. the desire for
pleasure) in the name of the pure activity itself— understood as a form
11
Hans Harder, ed., Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srimadbhagabadgita: Translation and Analysis (New
Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 60.
12
Ibid., 42.
of anushilan (practice), through which human faculties were exercised

and thereby cultivated in a manner that increased the individual’s
worldly agency, secured lasting happiness through the pure performance
of the act itself, and at the very same time brought man closer to god.13
Arjuna’s duty to fight at Kurukshetra, despite his misgivings, stemmed
from his dharma, which required him to overcome his laudable feelings
of pity and revulsion to defend society from its dissolution into chaos:
it is one’s dharma to protect to the best of one’s abilities one’s right

sanctioned by dharma. . . If people, self-interestedly depriving others of
their rights, are allowed to freely rob and thereafter enjoy others’ property,
then society cannot last for even one day. In such a case all humans would
suffer infinitely.14
And from this defence of property we move philosophically to an

even more fundamental defence of society, which is “necessary for the
practice of dharma,” and without which “man is like an animal.”15
Since society provided the condicio sine qua non of the cultivation of
humanity, the defence of society was a primary dharmic duty; and
since the form that society took was the national organism, it followed
that, “except for devotion to god, the love of one’s country is the most
compelling dharma of all.”16 Through devotion to one’s country, one
approached the highest form of freedom—a positive freedom grounded
in individual worldly agency and in the collective self-determination of
a cooperative and coordinated national life.17
Pursuing this argument even more radically, nationalists like
the Aurobindo of the Swadeshi years would not only elaborate a
commitment to the particularity of the nation as guarantor of human
sociality, but would further push the commitment to the particularity
of national traditions and national forms of life as individualized
expressions of the universal. The particularity of the nation lay not just
in the form of a rational social interest, as in Bankim, but at a deeply
affective level of solidarity that preceded the individual and constituted
individuality’s condition of existence. The history of the nation became,
13
Ibid., 105.
14
Ibid., 37–8.
15
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Dharmatattva: Anushilan, in Bankim Racanabali: Sahitya Samagra,
ed. Bishnu Basu (Calcutta: Tuli-Kalam, b.s. 1393), 658.
16
Bankim Racanabali, 661.
17
Cf. Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, Chap. 4.
from this perspective, the history of the objectification of Spirit. The

self-positing activity of the divine assumed historically particular forms
through the long process by which human collectivities had asserted
their own subjective autonomy (culture, civilization) through a history
of subordinating nature to human ends—of rendering the world more
and more an expression of, rather than a reality antithetical to, Spirit.
The result was a theological conception of a thoroughly immanentist
monism formed from a synthesis of German idealism, advaita (monist)
and vishishtadvaita (qualified monist) Vedanta and Tantrism. To the
abstraction of homogeneous empty time, Swadeshi discourse opposed
the concretion of national histories. Against the unmediated relationship
of individual to absolute, Swadeshi discourse emphasized the role of
social and representational mediations. Against the individual pursuit
of self-interest in civil society, Swadeshi discourse posited the self-
sacrificing social being. Against the heteronomy of political-economic
“laws” and imperial scales of economic interdependence, Swadeshi
discourse opposed the national will expressed through the organic
form of a strong autarchic national state. And finally, against the liberal
commitment to abstract rights and private interests identified with the
British and their anglicized babu epigones, Swadeshi discourse sought
to pitch the power and energy of the people as a whole, drawing the
idiom of its political voice from the latent immanent propensities of
what it posited as the inner essence of the authentic-popular. Even as
Swadeshists sought to emphasize the deshi (native), their commitment to
the particularities of the nation remained deeply universalistic in impulse
throughout this period—a deep cosmopolitanism indexed most clearly
in the recurrent invocation throughout these years, in Aurobindo’s
political writings as much as in anyone’s, of India’s, or Asia’s, emerging
global destiny as salvational spiritual leader to a debasedly materialistic
(Western) world.18
III
Now seen in the context of this history, what Aurobindo’s Essays on
the Gita read as is a sophisticated and self-conscious articulation of
the theological underpinnings of the Swadeshist vision at their most
fundamental. Aurobindo’s commentary on the Gita proceeds first from
18
Ibid., chap. 5.
a typical insistence, also fundamental in Bankim’s commentary, that the

text’s importance lies not in a largely futile attempt to capture “its exact
metaphysical connotation as it was understood by men of the time”
when it was composed, but rather in the renewal of its relevance through
the extraction of “the actual living truths it contains,” shorn of the
historical and metaphysical specificities in which it has been successively
clothed by past generations; amplified through the allegorical recovery
of anachronistic invocations of practices like sacrifice, the caste order,
the doctrine of the historical avatar and the subordination of women;
and rendered “in the most natural and vital form and expression we
can find that will be suitable to the mentality and helpful to the spiritual
needs of our present-day humanity.”19 The Gita, however, represented
not just one more philosophy among the many philosophies of ancient
India, but rather the overcoming of the partial truth of each through
a “wide, undulating, encircling movement of ideas which is the
manifestation of a vast synthetic mind and a rich synthetic experience
. . . It does not cleave asunder, but reconciles and unifies” through a
“universal comprehensiveness.”20 Aurobindo’s elaboration of the text
is thoroughly dialectical in presentation, seeking to systematically
subsume the duality of purusha (self) and prakriti (matter, nature) from
Sankhya philosophy, the realization of unity with the absolute from
Yoga, the idea of sacrifice from Mimamsa, the idea of using the
dualistic nature of reality as an approach to the absolute from Tantra,
the ideal of the boddhisattva’s dedication to universal redemption from
Mahayana Buddhism, and, overarching all of them, the monism of
Advaita Vedanta. But in emphasizing this synthetic quality of the Gita’s
philosophy, he presents the text as the possible foundation not for a return
to the ancient, but rather for a “new age of development” in which
humanity would look to its “perfection and its highest spiritual welfare,”
building its spiritual life “out of our own being and potentialities” rather
than the “being, knowledge and nature of . . . the men of the past”:
We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future . . . But
just as the past syntheses have taken those which preceded them for their
starting point, so also must that of the future. . . proceed from what the great
bodies of realized spiritual thought and experience have given.21
19
Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1944), 5–8,
19–20; and cf. Harder, Srimadbhagabadgita, 41–2.
20
Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 10.
21
Ibid., 13–14.
The Gita was thus to be understood at once as itself a moment in which

the philosophy of history had made itself felt in the history of Indian
philosophy, and as the foundation for a present renewal of a philosophy
of history whose future horizon was to be opened rather than limited
by the recovery of that past moment.22
This assertion of the future was itself linked to another deeply
Hegelian theme, the assertion of the radical freedom of human
subjectivity, not as antithetical to objective circumstances, but rather as a
project to be realized as lived reality through the ongoing transformation
of objective circumstances into an expression of subjective freedom.
Aurobindo articulated this through a discussion of two classical triads,
each understood as a dialectical and subsumptive movement: the three
qualities of prakriti—tamas (darkness, inertness, ignorance), rajas (activity,
passion) and sattva (purity, reality)—and the three forms of yoga—karma
(action), jnan (gnosis) and bhakti (devotion). Man begins in sensory
ignorance, in which he is closest to the inertial state of the material world,
passively taking the immediacy of experience—both in terms of the
object world and in terms of the egotic self—for truth. Man then seeks
to give expression to his capacity for will, desire and mastery, becoming
an agent who acts upon the world and on others, subordinating tamas
to rajas. And finally man seeks to know and understand the world and
himself, seeking to subordinate both tamas and rajas to his sattvik qualities.
The intersection of rajas and sattva in turn sets man on the paths of
yoga, through which man strives to achieve a unity with truth, having
recognized that truth is not immediately identical with the phenomenally
given, including the egotic self that both wills and seeks to know. “The
Soul. . . is a spiritual being apparently subjected by ignorance to the
outward workings of Prakriti and represented in her mobility as an
acting, thinking, mutable personality, a creature of Nature, an ego.”23
At this stage, man becomes capable of karmayoga, the attempt to achieve
union with God through the desireless performance of works as a
sacrifice to the divine Self, whom he confronts as an external other to
his egotic self just as Arjuna confronts Krishna in a conversation that
allegorizes the internal drama of self-realization.24
22
Manu Goswami in currently working on an account of a major shift in temporal horizon in
early twentieth-century India, in which the disjuncture between Bankim and Aurobindo could
be readily subsumed.
23
Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita Second Series (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1942), 197.
24
Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita First Series, 52–53.
Next, when it gets behind all this action and motion, it finds its own higher
reality to be an eternal and impersonal self and immutable spirit which has
no other share in the action and movement than to support it by its presence
and regard it as an undisturbed witness.25
Here man passes to jnanyoga, in which man renounces not only the fruit
of works, but also the claim to be their doer. Man achieves something
like a state of unhappy consciousness, in which the assertion of the
transcendence of self over the world is achieved through the renunciation
of worldly agency, and the relegation of the world to a state of absolute
otherness to Self.26 “And last, when it looks beyond these two opposite
selves, it discovers a greater ineffable Reality from which both proceed,
the Eternal who is Self of the self and the Master of all Nature and
all action.” Not only is this Eternal Self the master of nature, but it is
also the origin and spiritual support of all nature, and hence “himself
all energies and forces, all things and all beings.”27 “[T]he supreme Self
has to be seen as the supreme Purusha governing this Prakriti, of whom
the soul in Nature is a partial manifestation, and by whom all works are
directed, in a perfect transcendence, through Nature.”28
In this last step, devotion to the Supreme Self who is within all
beings does not negate works or knowledge, but rather raises, vitalizes
and fulfills the knowledge of the divine and then in turn unites this
knowledge through devotion with works of which the egotic self is no
longer the doer, but which are performed by man as a self-conscious
and disinterested moment of the Supreme Self incarnated, as Prakriti,
in concrete form. And once Nature itself is understood as Spirit, it itself
can be understood doubly, as at once a lower form that is bound to
maya, or the illusion of phenomenal multiplicity, and a higher form in
which Prakriti is the dynamic expression of Purusha and as such must
be recuperated to the spiritual autonomy of the Self.29 This in turn sets
in motion a distinctly evolutionary and progressive history, in which
human life takes the necessary form of “a struggle, a battle between
what exists and lives and what seeks to exist and live and between all
25
Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita Second Series, 197.
26
Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 52–3.
27
Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: Second Series, 197–8.
28
29
Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: Second Series, 198.
that stands behind either.”30 This struggle of Self against ego, and of
impersonal law against desirous will, not only sets in motion a movement
from heteronomous individuality to an autonomous freedom that aligns
man with history and sees man grow ever more proximate to divinity,
but also sees the increasing realization of man’s divinity not just in the
sequestered domain of the otherworldly, but in a thoroughly this-worldly
apotheosis—the practical rather than merely intellectual recognition
of Nature as Prakriti as Purusha as Purushottama (the Supreme Self),
and the dialectical unity of one’s higher Self with both Brahman (the
impersonal Absolute, eternal and unchanging) and Ishvar (the divine
personality, endowed with will and agency). The result is a “higher Law
by which the soul shall be free from this bondage of works” grounded
in the conflicts and ignorance of ordinary human existence “and yet
powerful to act and conquer in the vast liberty of its divine being.”31
IV
Aurobindo had famously celebrated Bankim’s genius on more than one
occasion during his actively political period, hailing his contributions
to national renewal in the 1890s, and going on to recognize his
philosophical contributions to the nationalist cause in the Swadeshi
years. Bankim had crucially recognized that national strength relied on
moral strength, that moral strength relied on self-sacrifice, self-discipline
and organization, and that these in turn depended ultimately on the
infusion of “religious feeling into patriotic work. . . In Dharmatattwa the
idea and in Krishnacarit the picture of a perfect and many-sided Karma
Yoga is sketched, the crown of which shall be work for one’s country
and one’s kind.”32 So it might come as something of a surprise to find
that the one commentary to which Aurobindo explicitly contrasted his
reading of the Gita in his own Essays was in fact Bankim’s:
The Gita can only be understood, like any great work of its kind, by studying
it in its entirety and as a developing argument. But the modern interpreters,
starting with the great writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji who first gave to
30
Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 58. For a discussion of the theme of ethical struggle in
Aurobindo’s post-Swadeshi writings, comparing Aurobindo’s concept of arya to jihad, see Bose,
“The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity.”
31
32
Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, 91–119, 639–40.
the Gita this new sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an almost exclusive
emphasis on the first three or four chapters,
especially their emphasis on the idea of equality, the necessity of acting,

and the disinterestedness of action (nishkama karma):
The rest of the eighteen chapters with their high philosophy are given a
secondary importance. . . This is natural enough for the modern mind which
is, or has been until yesterday, inclined to be impatient of metaphysical
subtleties and far-off spiritual seekings, eager to get to work and, like Arjuna
himself, mainly concerned for a workable law of works, a dharma. But it is
the wrong way to handle this scripture.33
Aurobindo was certainly not suggesting that the Gita’s emphasis on

the centrality of works should be read allegorically as a reference to
preparation for a renunciative, otherworldly spirituality.34 In the end,
Aurobindo firmly endorses, as the highest teaching of the Gita, worldly
activity that is at once in accordance with the will of the divine and
based on one’s self-conscious identity with the divine—a return to
action as a higher form of karmayoga that has subsumed both jnanyoga
and bhaktiyoga into itself; or, more accurately, a form of bhaktiyoga
whose vehicle is worldly action. And in practice, karmayoga meant the
recognition that all forms of action—whether grounded in tamas, in rajas
or in sattva—could become means to the immediate realization of the
immanence of the divine. So whence his critique of Bankim’s reading
of the Gita as a doctrine of duty? Or, to put this another way, how
had the Aurobindo of the post-Swadeshi period, at the same time as
elaborating the conceptual impulses of Swadeshi thought, also broken
with his own earlier nationalist commitments?
For Bankim, the dilemma that confronted Arjuna at Kurukshetra
(the great battle between the rival cousins of the Mahabharata, before
which Arjuna balked at the immanent slaughter of his kinsmen) was
essentially one between svadharma (one’s own particular obligations)—
i.e. as a Kshatriya, engaging in a just war in defence of society and the
dharmic order—and adharma (not-dharma)—i.e. giving in to the fear of
causing his relatives’ deaths. It is a dilemma of duty against sentiment, of
self-sacrifice for the social good against the self-indulgence of personal
33
34
Ibid., 41.
attachments.35 But for Aurobindo, Kurukshetra represented something

much more profound indeed: “a practical crisis in the application of
ethics and spirituality to human life.” For at Kurukshetra, a man who
is habituated to acting in accordance with the “Shastra, the moral
and social code” of “dharma, that collective Indian conception of the
religious, social and moral rule of conduct, and especially the rule
of the station and function to which he belongs” as a member of the
Kshatriya caste whose duty it is to uphold the law as worldly rulers,
suddenly finds
that it has led him to become the protagonist of a terrific and unparalleled
slaughter, a monstrous civil war involving all the cultured Aryan nations
which must lead to the complete destruction of the flower of their manhood
and threatens their ordered civilization with chaos and collapse.36
It is, in other words, a scenario where a man
hitherto satisfied with action and its current standards . . . finds himself
cast by them into a hideous chaos where they are in violent conflict with
each other and with themselves and there is no moral standing-ground left,
nothing to lay hold of and walk by, no dharma.37
Arjuna “can find nowhere the dharma, nowhere the valid law of action.”
It is not Bankim’s easier conflict of svadharma and adharma that he faced,
but rather a conflict of dharma and dharma, where there is no ethical
course of action available, and the only solution is in fact “to give up all
dharmas except the one broad and vast rule of living consciously in the
Divine and acting from that consciousness.”38 Arjuna was being thrust
by his situation out of the realm of social values and into a necessary
confrontation with the transcendent.
For Bankim, the devotion to god had as its necessary correlate a
devotion to dharma and to patriotism, and this was certainly something
that the Aurobindo of the Swadeshi era had no hesitation in affirming.
And nor surely would the post-Swadeshi Aurobindo simply renounce
the nation-form as a medium of human progress. But the vision of
Kurukshetra portrayed in the Essays on the Gita seems to present a vision
35
Harder, Srimadbhagabadgita, 76–7.
36
37
Ibid., 34–5.
38
Ibid., 36.
of political action that only affirms the national in a strictly contingent

manner—not as duty to the actual but as a moment in an unfolding of
the universal. As a book of “spiritual life” rather than “practical ethics”
that “replaces the conception of social duty by a divine obligation,” the
Gita does not call for the renunciation of duty, but rather calls on us to
recognize that duty is a “relative term and depends upon our relations
to others,” whereas the divine law “depends on no social relation or
conception of duty but on the awakened inner perception of man, the
moral being.”39 Duty has its place in worldly affairs, but the divine should
not be reduced to a merely social relation—on the contrary, the social
relation should be raised to the divine. As such, Bankim’s conception
of devotion as bound to human happiness and social harmony was “to
subordinate the higher plane to the lower.”40
The very force of Bankim’s theological argument was that human
spirituality was immanent to ethical life and hence sociality, that devotion
to Krishna as a many-sided ideal for emulation and devotion to society
as the coordinated harmony of the totality of human action amounted
to the same thing. This was surely what made Bankim such an icon
in the Swadeshi era, however much various Swadeshists might demur
from the letter of his theological and historical arguments. But the
post-Swadeshi Aurobindo’s juxtaposition of ethics and morality would
seem to put the social at a crucial distance from the divine— not in an
absolute sense of renunciation, but rather in the sense that the social
was something that would have to be transformed by its subsumption
to Spirit in ways hitherto unimagined within the merely national scale
of life. The social and the spiritual had been torn as under in a manner
utterly incommensurable with the logic of Swadeshism, for which the
new politics was itself to be an expression of socially immanent forms
of ethical life that were at once universal in their human significance
yet parochially national in their form of expression. Whereas for the
Swadeshi Aurobindo national life provided an immanent foundation on
which to build the future, for the post-Swadeshi Aurobindo national life
could only be a medium to something greater and more encompassing
of which it could not be the measure.
After his acquittal in the Alipore bomb case, Aurobindo would no
longer participate in the national–political in the active way he had up
39
Ibid., 47–49.
40
Ibid., 48.
through the Swadeshi years: “When he came out of jail [in 1909] Sri
Aurobindo found the whole political aspect of the country altered,” he
would later recall in the third person; “most of the Nationalist leaders
were in jail or in self-imposed exile and there was general discouragement
and depression.” Faced with the collapse of both the Swadeshi leadership
and the social support that had buoyed it, he retreated to Pondicherry,
absorbing himself in
the practice of Yoga. . . He dropped all participation in any public political

activity, refused more than one request to preside at sessions of the restored
Indian National Congress and made a rule of abstention from any public
utterance of any kind not connected with his spiritual activities.
His new work lay instead in the spiritual realm, whence, rather than
renouncing his interest in India’s or the world’s fate, he would direct his
energies beyond his own search for spiritual realization, using “spiritual
force and silent spiritual action” to help lead “all life and all worldly
activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to
base life on the Spirit and give it a spiritual meaning.”41
The failure of Swadeshi was for Aurobindo a Kurukshetra, in which
the social realm, national life, proved inadequate to ethical politics, leav-
ing unmoored a Swadeshism grounded conceptually in the immanent
ethical life of the popular. The forces of the popular were to be the spir-
itual arsenal with which the Swadeshi nationalist would battle Western
materialism and its colonial manifestations. Despite the Swadeshi invo-
cation of the national–popular as the standpoint for a critique of the
Western propensity to privilege selfish interests over higher ethical and
spiritual principles, the wider populace in Bengal appeared remarkably
intent on pursuing precisely a politics of self-interest. They practically
repudiated the politics of sacrifice endorsed by Swadeshists as both the
foundation of their political practice and the ethical core of indigenous
civilization that gave that politics its purchase—buying imported goods
because they were cheaper, attending colonial educational institutions
because they promised better prospects than their newly established
nationalist alternatives, and, in the case of many Muslims and some
members of the lower castes, repudiating the claims of the nationalist
Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, vol. 26, On Himself, Compiled from Notes and Letters (Pondicherry:
41
Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), 34–38.

leadership to represent their interests and instead demanding minority

representation and colonial policies that would promote their sectional
interests against the wealthier and better-educated Hindu gentry of
the region. This not only represented a practical threat to the viability
of the Swadeshi political project; more fundamentally, it threatened
to evacuate the popular of ethical significance, and thereby to destroy
the very conceptual coherence of the Swadeshi political project. It was
this peculiar moment of political isolation—an isolation not merely of
failed hopes or of thinned ranks, but of diminished coherence, of a
radical destabilization of the Swadeshist standpoint of critique—that
marked the beginning of Aurobindo’s launch into cosmopolitan gu-
rudom, which is to say, his detachment of the categories of Swadeshi
spiritualism from the immanence of the national–popular and its pro-
pulsion into the cosmic–futural. It was a moment of political failure,
but also a spectacularly productive moment intellectually not just for
Aurobindo himself, but for many of the Swadeshi Extremists.42 But we
must not understand this as a simple transition from nationalist particu-
larism to cosmopolitan universalism. Rather we can trace a more com-
plex shift from an ideological position whose orientation to particular-
ism was grounded in universalistic principles to an ideological position
whose orientation to universalism was contingently grounded in the
particularity of the political history of early twentieth-century Bengal.
42
See Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, Chap. 6.
4
Gandhi’s Gita and Politics as Such*
Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar
I
Immediately after the Amritsar Congress of December 1919, Gandhi
joined issue with the Indian nationalist leader Balagangadhar Tilak, or
Tilak Maharaj, or the Lokamanya (as he was popularly called), on the
question of the nature of modern politics. He cited Tilak as someone
whose understanding of politics was opposed to his:
Lokamanya Tilak represents a definite school of thought of which he makes

no secret. He considers that everything is fair in politics. We have joined
issue with him in that conception of political life. We consider that political
life of the country will become thoroughly corrupt if we import Western
tactics and methods.
Opposing the idea that it could be “proper” for leaders of political

parties “to use others as tools so long as there are any to be used,”
Gandhi recommended that the ‘right course” would lie in taking care
to “purify our politics.”
Tilak disagreed with Gandhi’s understanding of his—Tilak’s—
conception of political action. “[Y] ou have represented me as holding
that . . . everything [was] fair in politics. I write . . . to say that my
view is not correctly represented herein. Politics is a game of worldly
*
Thanks are due to Leela Gandhi and Sanjay Seth for helpful criticism.
Gandhi’s Gita and Politics as Such 67
people and not of Sadhus [renouncers; holy men].” A “sadhu,” Tilak

suggested, using a supposedly Budhhist maxim, was someone who
sought to conquer anger. “I prefer,” he said, “to rely on the maxim
of [the god] Shri Krishna,” who tailored his responses to particular
devotees by keeping them “in perfect harmony with the manner of
their own approach.” “Any further explanation of the difference,” said
Tilak in conclusion, “will be found in my Gita-Rahasya.” In riposte,
Gandhi explained his differences even further.
With deference to the Lokamanya I venture to state that it betrays mental

laziness to think that the world is not for Sadhus . . . when I wrote the
sentence about everything being fair in politics according to Lokamanya’s
creed I had in mind his oft-repeated quotation “tit for tat.”
Gandhi proceeded to explain why in his view sadhus should not keep
out of politics. “The epitome of all religions,” he wrote, “is to promote
Purushartha [Hindu ideas regarding the ends of life], and [to become]
Sadhu, i.e. to become a gentleman in every sense of the term.”1 One
did not have to cease to be a truly gentle person simply because one had
embraced politics.
Dhananjay Keer, who reports this exchange in his 1959 biography
of Tilak, points to the apparent fallacy in Gandhi’s logic: “Tilak said:
‘Politics is a game of the worldly people and not sadhus.’ Gandhiji put
a wrong interpretation . . . when he said [i.e. quoted Tilak as saying]:
‘Sadhus have no place in the world!’”2 And Keer then goes on to provide
this gloss on the difference between Tilak’s and Gandhi’s positions.
According to Tilak, he says, “sadhus ought not to pollute themselves by
contact with the worldly game of politics”;
However high on a moral plane a man might be it would be impossible

for him to achieve the desired goal in this matter-of-fact world without
sacrificing some of his saintliness, but in so doing the object of the saintly
man ought to be selfless. This is what Tilak meant.3
We can distill from this account two positions as to how the

question of being a moral person—the sadhu—in the domain of
1
Dhananjay Keer, Lokamanya Tilak: Father of Our Freedom Struggle (Bombay: S. B. Kangutkar,
1959), 413–14.
2
Ibid., 414.
3
Ibid., 414.
politics may have been seen in this argument between Gandhi and
Tilak. Tilak was not arguing against morality per se. His position, in
Keer’s interpretation, was that even the most moral of people had
to compromise their principles at times—get “polluted,” as Keer put
it—in pursuing political objectives. Tilak’s one important requirement
from the ethical politician, however, was that even such compromise
would have to be strictly “selfless,” that is to say, they must not bring
any personal benefits to the person who knowingly compromised his
morality in the interest of achieving a political gain. The compromise
was merely an act of recognition on his part of the intrinsically worldly
nature of politics. One could be ethical in the political domain but one
could not escape being worldly. A sadhu, on the other hand, would be
absolutely uncompromising about his other-worldly values and would
thus be unfit to play the political game. He saw Gandhi in the image
of this figure of the sadhu. Gandhi would not approve of violating
his own values if even such violation were required in some higher,
public and unselfish interest. He would rather change the very nature
of politics itself. The task, as he wrote in responding to Tilak, was to
“purify politics.”
This exchange took place in 1920. We begin our discussion of how
Gandhi read the Gita with this story because many commentators on
Gandhi’s reading of this text have worked with a stated or unstated
assumption that “purifying” or reforming the very nature “politics”
was Gandhi’s lifelong mission. Many aver that Gandhi was a saint
in political garb or vice versa. Note, for instance, an observation by
Bradley S. Clough who writes on the authority of the historian Judith
Brown that Gandhi’s prolific discussions of the Gita in the years from
1920 to 1936 show “that at this point in his life, religion was more
important to Gandhi than politics, though she [Judith Brown] is quick to
acknowledge that the two would become inseparable for him.”4 Clough
puts Gandhi’s reading of the Gita squarely within this interpretive
framework: “Further evidence that Gandhi was using the Gita to create
the marriage of politics and religion, for which he is so well known, is
that he and his fellow satyagrahis carried copies of the Gita with them
4
Bradley S. Clough, “Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Bhagavat-Gita,” in Stephen J. Rosen, ed.,
Holy War: Violence and the Bhagavat Gita (Hampton, VA: A. Deepak Publishing, 2002), 61.
on his famous ‘salt-satyagraha’ in 1930.” 5 We offer a different argument

about the Mahatma’s use of the Bhagavad Gita.6
In parenthesis, we should clarify that whether or not Tilak and Gandhi
challeged liberal conceptions of citizenship or politics, whereby politics
becomes an area where rules enable groups or individuals to pursue
their legitimate interests, is not the principal question animating this
essay. It is an important question but it does not interest us here except
tangentially. The so-called Extremists such as Tilak and Aurobindo
espoused a romantic and moral conception of political action as action
in strictly public interest and surely looked down upon action based on
self-interest as less moral. In that sense, they would have been opposed
to any interest-based idea of politics. Gandhi’s personal values also
would not have chimed with the liberal talk of pursuit of self-interests.
But our point is different. It is to make a distinction in the history of
Gandhi’s relation to politics before and after, roughly, 1920. Gandhi
before the 1920s may have fundamentally agreed with Tilak et al. in
finding self-interest-based action morally unappealing. He would have
spoken of “reforming politics.” But we argue that Gandhi’s discussions
of the Gita in the 1920s actually show that he made a twofold move in
the later period: he accepted politics for what it actually was—an arena
for pursuit of self-interest by groups and individuals, and hence sought
in the Gita the means that would protect a satyagrahi like him from the
venality of this domain while allowing him to be fully involved in it.
Gandhi’s use of the Gita thus marks a departure from the age of Tilak
and Aurobindo and he may have been the first national politician to
accept Indian politics as it actually was (including strands of liberalism),
and the Gita was the text that enabled him to do that.
Our approach takes into account the importance of the political
context in understanding why Gandhi interpreted the Gita the way
he did in the 1920s. We suggest that Gandhi’s relation to politics was
an evolving one and that his commentaries on the Gita in the 1920s
are instructive in this regard. It is a well-known fact that Gandhi’s
first encounter with the Gita occurred in 1889 when two theosophist
5
Ibid., 61.
6
Our approach also connotes some friendly disagreements with certain strands of the argu-
ments presented in Ajay Skaria’s thoughtful essay “Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Ques-
tion of the Ashram,” in Saurabh Dube, ed., Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globaliza-
tion (Delhi: Routledge, 2009), 199–233; and in Partha Chatterjee’s influential book Nationalist
Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed, 1986), 109.
brothers invited him to read the text in Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation.
But, as J. T. F. Jordens has emphasized, Gandhi’s “own interpretation
of the Gita started only after his return to India in 1919, and was fully
and definitively articulated by 1925.” 7 Between 1926 and 1932, writes
Clough, Gandhi “devoted three works totaling roughly 360 pages
to translating and commenting on the Gita,” mainly “in response to
questions from ashramites at his Satyagraha Ashram.. . in Sabarmati.”8
These were the years when Gandhi’s involvement in Indian politics
was at its most intense. Not only is this political context crucial to
any non-theological discussion of Gandhi’s interpretation of the
Gita—on this many would agree with us; but, in addition, we actually
find it intellectually unhelpful to freeze Gandhi into the picture of a
man who—as in his moment of conversation with Tilak—could not
or would not distinguish between religion and politics by wanting to
purify and spiritualize the latter. In what follows, we put forward a
different hypothesis. We argue that Gandhi’s comments on the Gita, in
particular the ones he made in the 1920s, actually suggest that his idea
of “purifying politics” underwent a remarkable transformation after
the Non-Cooperation movement.9 Not only did he move away from
the idea of purifying politics, he actually found in the Gita a means
of protecting himself (and those like him) from the corrupt practices
of politics while being immersed in political action. In other words,
unlike Tilak and Aurobindo, the Gandhi of the 1920s did not look
on political action as such as something capable of being inherently
ethical—he did not demand of a Jinnah, Subhas Bose or an Ambedkar,
for instance, that they be ethical on his terms; his question rather was:
how would someone like him struggle to pursue the highest end of
life, moksha, while engaged full-time in political action? The object
of his moral exercise was not the political domain as such—which
remained an area where worldly interests clashed—but the very self
of the “political missionary” (more on this expression later). The aim
7
See J. T. F. Jordens, “Gandhi and the Bhagavadgita,” in Robert N. Minor, ed., Modern Indian
Interpreters of the Bhagavadgita (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 88, 90.
8
Clough, “Gandhi,” 61.
9
Reading Faisal Devji’s essay in this volume, one could date the change in Gandhi’s relationship
with politics to his great disappointment over the violence of Chauri Chaura and the consequent
withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation movement. The disappointment, in our terms, led to the
realization that while satyagraha necessarily involved deep engagement with politics, politics
could not be transformed wholesale into the business of satyagraha.
of reading and discussing the Gita daily was to transform the text into
the satyagrahi’s talisman. There was no longer a project of “purifiying”
politics. Rather, the project was constantly to purify, and thus shield, the
self of the satyagrahi who entered the political fray as part of necessary
action in life. This, we may say, was Gandhi’s way of accepting politics
as it actually was.
II
Many a Hindu nationalist in the early decades of the twentieth century
had used the Gita as a source text for political philosophy. The text
itself was rediscovered, so to speak, in the colonial period, thanks to
the interest it had generated among different sections of European
and American readership—colonial officials, missionaries, romantics,
transcendentalists, and others.10 The text had been interpreted before
by “ancient” and “classical” Indian interpreters but, as Eric Sharpe
reminds us, before the 1880s it was “the Krishna of the Puranas [who]
had the upper hand on the charioteer-god of the Gita in the wider
community of Vaisnavism; while in Shaiva and Shakta circles the emphasis
lay elsewhere.”11
Reading the Gita for ideas about what might constitute proper action
in this world was something Gandhi shared with other nationalists of the
turn of the century: Tilak, Aurobindo, and the so-called Extremists in
India and Europe. As early as 15 June 1897, on the occasion of the Shri
Shivaji Coronation Festival, Tilak’s journal Kesari discussed the murder
of the Mughal general Afzal Khan by the seventeenth-century Maratha
king, Shivaji. Justifying the ethics of Shivaji’s actions the Kesari raised
the question: “Did Shivaji commit a sin in killing Afzal Khan?” “The
answer,” it said, “can be found in the Mahabharata itself. Shrimat Krishna’s
teaching in the Bhagavat Gita is to kill even our teachers and our kinsmen.”
And, as if to anticipate what Tilak said to Gandhi in 1920, it added,
10
On this see Eric J. Sharpe, The Universal Gita: Western Images of the Bhagavatgita–a Bicentenary
Survey (London: Duckworth, 1985). See also Christopher Bayly’s contribution to this volume.
11
Sharpe, Universal Gita, 67, 85. For a handy treatment of the “classical” Indian interpretations of
the Gita see Arvind Sharma’s The Hindu Gita: Ancient and Classical Interpretations of the Bhagavatgita
(La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986); and his translation of and introduction to Abhinavagupta
Gitarthasangraha (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983).
No blame attaches to any person who . . . is doing deeds without being

motivated by a desire to reap the fruit of his deeds. Shri Shivaji Maharaja
did nothing with a view to fill[ing] the small void of his stomach [from
interested motives]. With benevolent intentions he murdered Afzal Khan
for the good of others...
It ended with a call: “Get out of the Penal Code, enter into the extremely
high atmosphere of the Bhagavat Gita, and then consider the actions
of great men.”12 Tilak would, of course, go on to write his magnum
opus Gita Rahasya in the Mandalay Jail “in the Winter of 1910–1911,”
wherein he would argue, against the venerable Shankaracharya and
other ancient and modern commentators, that the Gita is “essentially a
treatise on Right or Proper Action (Karma-Yoga).”13
Sharpe is correct to observe that the “overtly political period in the
history of Gita interpretation was not of long duration and its extremist
phase was even shorter, lasting no more than half a dozen or so years.”14
The tendency was at its most intense around the period of the Swadeshi
movement in Bengal (1905–8) when the Congress split into its so-called
Moderate and Extremist wings. For example, Savarkar’s introduction
to his Marathi biography of Mazzini that was published from Poona
in April 2007 “emphasised the importance of elevating politics to
the rank of religion.”15 Sharpe is helpful with some of the dates here.
Between 1905 and 1910, Aurobindo “wrote and spoke repeatedly
about the Gita,” as in the journal Bande Mataram of 26 December
1906: “Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from battle as a
sin, and aggression as a lowering of morality.”16 Aurobindo’s references
to the Gita became more intense in tone after May 1909, when he
was acquitted in the Alipore conspiracy case. In his famous Uttarpara
speech of 30 May 1909, he spoke of the conversion-like experience he
had on reading the Gita in jail (Sharpe thinks his familiarity with the
12
Sharpe, Universal Gita, 71.
13
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Srimad Bhagavatgita-Rahasya or Karma-Yoga Sastra, 2nd edn, trans.
Bhalchandra Sitaram Sukhtankar (Poona: Tilak Bros., 1915), “Author’s Preface,” xix, xxv. See
also Shruti Kapila’s essay in this volume and Sanjay Seth, “The Critique of Renunciation: Bal
Gangadhar Tilak’s Hindu Nationalism,” Postcolonial Studies 9/2 (June 2006), 137–50.
14
15
Indulal Yajnik, Shaymji Krishnavarma: Life and Times of a Revolutionary (Bombay: Lakshmi
Publications, 1950), 261.
16
Sharpe, Universal Gita, 78. Sharpe makes the point that Aurobindo did not know much Bengali
or Sanskrit around 1903 and his interpretation of the text may have been influenced by Annie
Besant’s expositions. See ibid., 80.
text was shallow before). Aurobindo spoke of Lord Krishna demanding

“of those aspiring to do His work . . . to renounce self-will and become
a passive and faithful instrument in His hands . . . I realised what the
Hindu religion meant.” Krishna had granted him this vision and said,
“I am the nation and its uprising and I am Vasudeva.”17 In this phase
of his life, he equated sanatan dharma with nationalism and described
the latter as “not a mere political programme [but] . . . a religion that
has come from God.”18 Aurobindo would go on later to propound a
more philosophical interpretation of the Gita, influenced, it seems, by
his reading of Nietzsche, whereby the Gita would be seen as the call to
enjoin the strife of life in a determined and practiced “state of inner
poise.”19 But that is a different story and a very different chapter in the
history of modern Indian interpretations of the Gita.
This much, however, is clear: that in the first decade of the twentieth
century, Tilak, Aurobindo, and many other so-called Extremists tended
to equate their ideal definition of political action with the karma-
yoga which they claimed constituted the core of the spiritual message
encoded in the Gita. To act for all, which is what the nationalist aspired
to do, was to act in accordance with the Gita. Even violence, when it
was strictly unselfish and was in the interest of “all,” could constitute
proper action. The ideal political activist had the Gita as his political-
philosophic guide. During his “last couple of years of activity in Bengal,”
says Sharpe, Aurobindo emphasized the karmoyogin aspect of the Gita.
To his brother, Barindrakumar Ghosh, a radical political activist of
the Swadeshi years, the Gita was as important as the manufacture of
bombs.20 This philosophy that equated ideal political action with the
conception of action upheld in the Gita finds a sharp expression in
what Aurobindo wrote in an article published in the journal Karmayogin
shortly before he abandoned his political career:
Mr. Risley repeats a charge we have grown familiar with, that the Gita has
been misused as a gospel of Terrorism. . . The only doctrine of the Gita the
17
Ibid., 79. The whole speech is reproduced in The Penguin Aurobindo Reader, ed. Makarand
Paranjape (Delhi: Penguin, 1999), pp.18–27.
18
Cited in P. M. Thomas, 20th Century Indian Interpretations of Bhagavatgita: Tilak, Gandhi & Aurobindo
(Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1987), 81.
19
See, for example, the essays “The Core of the Teaching,” “Kurukshetra,” and “Man and the
Battle for Life” in Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1966),
28–34, 35–41, 41–8, and Andrew Sartori’s essay in this volume.
20
Terrorist can pervert to his use, is the dictum that the kshatriya must slay as a
part of his duty and he can do it without sin if he puts egoism away and acts
selflessly, without attachment, in and for God, as a sacrifice, as an offering
of action to the Lord of action. If this teaching is in itself false, there is no
moral basis for the hero, the soldier, the judge, the king, the legislature which
recognises capital punishment. They must all be condemned as criminals
and offenders against humanity.21
A similar reading of the Gita inspired those members of the India

House in London, Krishnavarma and Savarkar the most noted among
them, who, contemporaneously with Tilak, Aurobindo and Bipin
Pal in India, sought to liberate the country through violent means.
Like Tilak, or perhaps inspired by him, they also used the episode of
Shivaji’s killing of Afzal Khan as an example of the kind of action they
claimed was supported in the Gita. “Every student of Indian history,”
noted Krishnavarma, “knows that Shivaji, the founder of the Mahratta
Empire, assassinated Afzal Khan and thus winning the practical
supremacy in Southern India earned for himself the respect and
esteem of all Hindus.” Citing India’s “ancient history and literature,”
they argued that “political assassinations are not foreign to the religious
principles of Indians . . . Rama and Krishna, who are popularly regarded
by Hindus throughout India as incarnations of the Deity, are chiefly
remembered for killing the tyrants Ravana and Kansa respectively.”
The British viceroy had described revolutionary violence as “hideous
crimes” which were “contrary” to Indian “precepts and instincts of
humanity and. . . loyalty.” This group of activists argued instead that
there was a long tradition of rightful violence in India, from the days
of the Mahabharata to the 1857 “War of Independence. . . miscalled
by the English the Indian Mutiny.” “We know,” wrote Krishnavarma,
mixing the Gita with an implicit theory of natural rights,
the English themselves beheaded their own king Charles I, the French
guillotined Louis XVI, the Hindus acted similarly in more ancient times
as stated above. . . We need therefore hardly emphasize the point that it is
natural for every people to use violence in order to counteract violence.22
In conceiving the man of action as envisaged in the Gita, the

London group of revolutionaries created the figure of “the political
21
Cited in ibid., 82.
22
Indian Sociologist, Jan. 1913, 2.
missionary” on which Gandhi may have partially modelled his idea of

the satyagrahi (without the Extremists’ emphasis on violence, of course).
The May 1907 issue of the Indian Sociologist (a magazine whose debt to
Herbert Spencer was announced in its title) published a letter by an
anonymous writer who described himself as “one who is prepared to
be a political missionary.”23 The editor’s note described the author as “a
highly distinguished Master of Arts of an Indian University” who was
now “fitting himself for the duties of a Political Missionary by studying
history and politics and by acquiring collateral culture in Europe,
and as a true son of India he is prepared to devote all his time and
energies to his country’s cause.” A society of “political missionaries,”
observed the anonymous writer (we now know that this was Har
Dayal), was crucial to the cause of “national unity and independence
in India.” Such an individual “must believe in the profound truth that
life is a mission.” Recalling the words of Sri Krishna from the Gita,
“Karmanyevadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana” (“do your duty
regardless of consequences”), the writer of the letter exhorts “zealous
nationalists” to fulfill the aspirations of the teeming millions of India by
adhering to “the ideal of renunciation” familiar to “every Hindu child.”
The political missionary would be ever-ready to “spurn all prospects of
worldly advancement,” and dedicate their lives “to the service of the
Fatherland with a solemn sense of their responsibility.” They should
not be deterred by the “timid prudence” of their “nearest and dearest
relatives,” and nothing would be dearer to them than the “cause” which
would replace their “father, mother, brother, and friend.” They must go
about their task with a “religious earnestness and with a spirit of self-
denial.” “They should grieve, like Commander Hirose of Japan, that they
have only one life to give to their country.” A political missionary must
“renounce all personal property, follow no profession, and devote all his
time and energy to the movement.” Second, a political missionary must
“study the history of his own country” as well as the history of national
movements in Europe, so that his enthusiasm was backed up with a
spirit of rational inquiry. He should also “possess adequate knowledge
of the economic and political problems that New India is called upon
to solve.” Third, the political missionary must embrace celibacy. Like
Mazzini he should be “wedded” to the country. His sense of duty to
Indian Sociologist, May1907, 19. Earlier, in Nov. 1905, an article in the Indian Sociologist had made
23
a categorical distinction between Tilak, whom it described as an “unbending patriot,” and

Gokhale, whom it called a “professional politician.” See “The President-Elect of the Indian
National Congress: Contrast between Mr. Gokhale and Mr. Tilak,” Indian Sociologist, 4 Nov.
1905, 42–44.
the nation should “cancel all social obligations. . . domestic cares, and
anxieties” that might divert the mind from the pursuit of the struggle
for national liberation. Finally, such “young men” should not be “too
calculating in temperament.” At this hour of national crisis, when the
nation’s existence as a “social organism” stood threatened, the political
missionary should “act in the spirit of heroes, not shopkeepers.”24
III
Gandhi would borrow much from Tilak and the India House group
in London while remaining implacably opposed to their passion for
violence. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, he shared
their basic premise that political action, in its highest form, ought to
be shaped by an ascetic and spiritual impulse. David Hardiman makes
the perceptive suggestion that in writing Hind Swaraj (1909) in the
form of a dialogue (between the editor and reader) Gandhi probably
mirrored—at the same time as he enunciated a critique of them—the
political and intellectual concerns of the London group of militants
associated with the Indian Sociologist. This group, as Hardiman reminds
us, “as a whole advocated the use of terrorism and violence against
the British in India. Clearly, Gandhi saw it as his task to refute their
belief in this strategy.”25 When we analyze Gandhi’s ideas about yoga,
karma, the ideal individual, and the ends of human life as explained
in his comments on the Gita, it becomes clear that the Extremists
constituted his purvapaksha. Yet his imagination of the satyagrahi was a
foil to the Extremists’ ideal of the “political missionary” and his ashram
in many ways was like the “Society” discussed in the pages of the Indian
Sociologist.
It is, of course, true that Gandhi retained—at some abstract level—
the principles he adumbrated in Hind Swaraj in 1909. As he himself
wrote to Nehru in October 1945, “I still stand by the system of
government envisaged in Hind Swaraj.”26 But a careful reading of his
24
Indian Sociologist, April 1907, p. 20. Indulal Yajnik, in Shaymji Krishnavarma, 200, names Har
Dayal as the writer of these lines. The article in the Indian Sociologist even put forward an
institutional structure for the training of political missionaries. For details see Indian Sociologist,
June 1907, 23–24.
25
David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Times and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas (London: Hurst
and Company, 2003), 67–68.
26
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, 5 Oct.1945, 149.
1920s discourses on the Gita shows a very significant shift in how he

situated himself with regard to politics. His practical mission, as we have
said, was no longer to “purify” or spiritualize politics as such. He was
more concerned with the question of how he and others—such as the
individuals in his ashram, for instance—who had vowed to be satyagrahis
would protect their own selves from the corruption and venality that
were inevitable in the political sphere while being immersed in it.
Reading and contemplating the Gita every day was that indispensable
inoculation that he thought would immunize the satyagrahi against the
virus of moral corruption. Gandhi was thus one of the first nationalists
who, while seeking both involvement in and protection from the murky
world of politics, accepted that world as it actually was.
There was a big difference, for instance, between 1909 when he
wrote Hind Swaraj, a text that articulated his principled opposition
to parliamentary democracy, and the 1920s. In the latter period,
Gandhi, for all his lack of faith in the parliament as an institution, took
leadership of a nationalist movement where he had to negotiate how
the Congress would parley for a central place in a quasi-parliamentary
politics determined by elections, representation, and the politics of
numbers that the British-Indian constitutional reforms had introduced
in the years between 1919 and 1937. The stinging criticism that Gandhi
penned in Hind Swaraj of the parliamentary form of government is
worthy of recall:
That which you consider to be the Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile

woman and a prostitute. Both of these are harsh terms but exactly fit the
case. That parliament has not yet of its own accord done a single good
thing, hence I have compared it to a sterile woman. The natural condition
of the Parliament is such that, without outside pressure, it can do nothing.
It is like a prostitute because it is under the control of ministers who change
from time to time. Today it is under Mr Asquith, tomorrow it may be under
Mr Balfour.27
Anthony Parel, a recent editor of Hind Swaraj, seeks to save Gandhi from
himself, saying that this passage “should not be interpreted to mean that
Gandhi was against the institution of parliament.” He mentions Gandhi’s
1920 statement that what he wanted for India was “a parliament chosen
by the people with the fullest power over the finance, the police, the
27
Ibid., 30
military, the navy, the courts and the educational institutions,” and that
in 1921 he actually advised readers of Hind Swaraj that his corporate
activity was devoted to “the attainment of parliamentary swaraj in
accordance with the wishes of the people.”28 Parel overlooks the letter
from 1945 (which he reproduces in his selection) wherein Gandhi
affirmed his faith in the “system of governance” envisaged in Hind
Swaraj, and that system was not parliamentary democracy. Besides, the
phrase “in accordance with the wishes of the people” could very well
be read as a statement of his deep acceptance of the reality of colonial
constitutional reforms—for it was these reforms rather than Gandhi’s
own vision that were setting the ground rules of politics in India. This
is what we describe here as Gandhi’s acceptance of Indian politics as
it actually was, and his parting of ways with the imagination that had
deeply influenced the Extremists and his own thinking in the period
before—politics itself as an ethical or spiritual or religious project.
But this acceptance of politics did not mean that Gandhi, as an
individual satyagrahi, would compromise his own values in any way, not
even if such compromise could be shown or perceived to be in the
interest of “all” and thus scrupulously unselfish. If anything, politics
would be the field in which he would practice satyagraha and encourage
other satyagrahis to do the same. But he did not, unlike the Extremists
of yesteryear, expect to reform the political sphere in its entirety by
defining political action as essentially ethical. He would accept that
there would always be other legitimate players in politics who would
play by rules very different from his. A satyagrahi’s duty to himself was
therefore to ensure that he remained himself while fully immersed in
political work. This protective work of “self on self ”—in the same way
as a fireman needs to know and wear his protective gear while dealing
with fire—was the ever-incomplete exercise for which the Gita was a
daily resource.
It is therefore not surprising that the primary and intended audience
for Gandhi’s daily discourses on the Gita should be his ashramites,
potential and actual satyagrahis, and others who wrote to him seeking
guidance in conducting their own selves. But the majority of people
involved in the political process at any one point in time would not be
satyagrahis and would not have constituted his intended audience. It was
28
Ibid., 30; editor’s note, 39.
the satyagrahi who needed, and indeed was committed, to do this work
of “self on the self ” as an everyday preparatory exercise for surviving
in the world of politics.
The distinction we are highlighting here between political action and
the techniques of the self that a satyagrahi needed to adopt in order
to engage in political action can be tracked in Gandhi’s discourses on
the Gita. Gandhi sometimes expressed his sense of being an outsider
to politics by describing politics as a “botheration.”29 As he observed
during one of his major political campaigns, “the work of social reform
or self purification. . . is a hundred times dearer to me than what is
called purely political work.”30 Rather, his aim as he discussed it in his
reflections on the Gita in hundreds of letters, as well as in the Discourses,
was to lay out the methods by which an individual could prepare himself
for participation in politics. The ideal satyagrahi would remain unsullied,
calm, and controlled—the sthitaprajna described in the Gita—even as
he engaged in the strife of politics. Politics could not contaminate his
being. To this end, the Gita served Gandhi as his “spiritual dictionary,”
“our guru,” “our mother” who would keep her children “safe if we
seek shelter in her lap,” and his “kamadhenu” (the cow that grants all
wishes).31
The first strategy in Gandhi’s reading of the Gita was to treat the
text as an allegory. The move was not new, having been pioneered
in the nineteenth century by Indian theosophists.32 Following in their
footsteps, Gandhi also regarded the battle between the Kauravas and
the Pandavas as an allegory for the battle “between the innumerable
forces of good and evil which become personified in us as virtues and
vices.”33 This strategy enabled him to read the Gita as a text with which
to examine one’s “inner self.” As he noted in the early chapters of
the Discourses, “We shall leave aside the question of violence and non-
29
Tom Weber, “Gandhi Moves,” in Debjani Ganguly and John Docker, eds., Rethinking Gandhi
and Nonviolent Relationality (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 85.
30
Ibid.
31
Cited in J. T. F. Jordens, “Gandhi and the Bhagavadgita,” in Robert Minor, ed. Modern Indian
Interpretations of the Bhagvadgita (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 88; Collected Works of Mahatma
Gandhi (hereafter CWMG), 55:10 Feb. 1932–15 June 1932, 33.
32
Sharpe, Universal Gita, 90–94, 103–5, 116–17. Sharma, Abhinavagupta Gitarthasangraha, claims
that this strategy had precedents in the precolonial Indian interpretive tradition.
33
That the theosophists were one of the first groups in the late nineteenth century to describe the
Gita as principally an allegorical text is well established in the researches of Sharpe. Sharpe,
Universal Gita, pp. 90–94,103–5, 116–17.
violence and say that this dharma-grantha was written to explain man’s
duty in this inner strife.”34 Or, as he put it on 9 March 1926,
The chief aim of the epic, however, is to represent the most invisible of all
invisible wars. It tells of the Arjuna and other Pandavas in our minds who
are battling with the Kauravas in it. The moral problems which confront
one in this inner war are far more difficult than those of a physical war. . .
The Gita shows how we may emerge safe from it ... Krishna is the atman in
us, who is our charioteer.35
The move to read the Gita as an allegory was inherently an anti-

history move as well. The battle of Kurukshetra was not, in Gandhi’s
reckoning, “a battle which took place so many thousand years ago; it is
one which is raging all the time, even today.”36 The vivid details of cities,
communities and individual characters might mislead the lay reader
into imagining that Vyasa was describing a historical battle. But a closer
engagement with the text, argued Gandhi, brought about the realization
that “the description of the battle serves only as a pretext.” In reading
the Gita in this manner Gandhi marks a sharp distinction between his
approach to the text and that of his political predecessors, particularly
the Extremists. The latter had read in the Gita a spiritual justification
for violent political actions of the past (such as Shivaji’s against Afzal
Khan) or of the future (their own against British rule). “When I was
in London, I had talks with many revolutionaries,” recalled Gandhi.
Shyamji Krishnavarma, Savarkar, and others used to tell me that the Gita
and the Ramayana taught quite the opposite of what I said they did. I felt then
how much better it would have been if the sage Vyasa had not taken this
illustration of fighting for inculcating spiritual knowledge. For even when
highly learned and thoughtful men read this meaning in the Gita, what can
we expect of ordinary people?37
34
CWMG, 37: 11 Nov. 1926–1 Jan. 1927, 75–76.
35
Ibid., 88–89.
36
Ibid., 76.
37
CWMG, 37: 11 Nov. 1926–1 Jan. 1927, 82. A biography of Savarkar gives this interesting
account of a meeting between Gandhi and Savarkar in London. Gandhi dropped in at the
India House one Sunday evening when Savarkar was cooking prawns. On Gandhi’s declining
to eat prawns, Savarkar is reported to have taunted him by saying, “this is just boiled fish. . .
while [we] want people who are ready to eat the Britishers alive (zo angrezo ko zinda aur kachcha
chaba sake. . .).” Harindranath Srivastava, Five Stormy Years: Savarkar in London, June 1906–June
1911 (Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1983), 28–29.
But if the Gita was not a historical text but an allegory of battles eternal
in the soul of man, what use was it? The Gita “is very much concerned
with practical life,” Gandhi would insist. “A dharma which does not serve
practical needs is no dharma, it is adharma.”38 But in what way could this
poetic and philosophical text be practical? Again, Gandhi’s discourses
clearly show that the Gita served not only as a tool for examining our
“inner strife” but also as a manual for “inner striving” as well. Thus:
The Mahabharata is a unique work and in it the Gita has a unique place.
Describing a physical battle, it gives an account of an invisible fight and
shows through it that in the physical battle not only those who lose but
even those who win are defeated.. . This does not mean that we should stop
striving.39
One thus always owes a responsibility to oneself that must be the ethical
basis of the work of self on self:
In the Gita, the author has cleverly made use of the event [of the war] to
teach great truths. If the reader is not on his guard, he may be misled. The
very nature of dharma is such that one may easily fall into error if one is
not vigilant.40
Gandhi extracted from the Gita some very particular techniques that
the true satyagrahi would have to adopt in order to be protected from
politics while being thoroughly political. “In present-day politics,” he
wrote,
there is no good at all and plenty of evil, for it is full of flattery and one is not
protected from dangers, but, on the contrary, surrounded by them. It does
not help us to realize the atman; in fact we have lost our soul.41
A most important task was to follow the principle of sticking to one’s

true dharma or swadharma as the Gita recommended: If we “lose our
dharma, we lose our capacity for good works, lose both this world and
the other.”42
38
CWMG, 37: 11 Nov. 1926–1 Jan. 1927, 131–32.
39
Ibid., 338
40
Ibid., 82.
41
Ibid., 100.
42
Ibid.
The satyagrahi’s ideal dharma was to work ceaselessly towards swaraj.

But Gandhi defined swaraj (literally self-rule)—a word he takes from
the lexicon of his adversaries, the Extremists—as something that was
larger than politics but of which politics remained an integral part.43 He
includes within the ambit of his understanding of swaraj the mystical
ideal of moksha, the liberation of the atman (misleadingly translated as
“soul”) from the body and the cycle of births. The path lies through an
incessant effort at conquering one’s senses. Swaraj was thus, at one level,
literally about power and mastery, for it was, as Gandhi put it in the
1920s, to “live without fear of those who hold us down.” But this power
could be simultaneously mystical and political. The
evil system which the Government represents, and which has endured only
because of the support it receives from good people, cannot survive if that
support is withdrawn. Just as the Government needs the support of good
men in order to exist, so Duryodhona required men like Bhishma and
Drona in order to show that there was justice on his side.44
Yet the striving for swaraj must not be violent as that would contravene
the other principle of the Gita: action with non-attachment. To be
overly attached to even the idea of attaining swaraj would prevent it
from being rightful action.
We should do no work with attachment. Attachment to good work, is that

too wrong? Yes, it is. If we are attached to our goal of winning swaraj, we
shall not hesitate to adopt bad means . . . Hence, we should not be attached
even to a good cause. Only then will [our] means remain pure and our
actions too . . . Anyone who works for reward . . . is a person deserving of
our pity.45
The idea of non-attachment was central to his principle of non-violence

or ahimsa.
43
The history of this word would repay examination. In Maratha historical memory, the word
would have had some resonances with Shivaji’s use in 1645 of the expression Hindavi Swaraj
(“the self-government of the Hindus” is how A. R. Kulkarni translates it). A. R. Kulkarni,
Explorations in Deccan History (Delhi: Pragati, 2006), 60. Indian Sociologist, March 1907, 11,
mentions an Anglo-Gujarati journal called Hind Svarajya in existence at least two years before
Gandhi writes his Hind Swaraj.
44
CWMG, 37: 11 Nov. 1926–1 Jan. 1927, 77.
45
Ibid., 105.
Gandhi exploits to the full the ambiguity of the word swaraj—self-

mastery or self-rule?—to ensure that the striving for swaraj is just that,
a constant and unending striving. For “it is impossible in this body to
follow ahimsa fully.”46 The Gita, according to Gandhi, makes it clear
that “evil is inherent in action . . . Arjuna did not . . . raise the question of
violence and non-violence. He simply raised the question of distinction
between kinsmen and others, much in the same way that a fond mother
would advance arguments favouring her child.”47 It was imperative for
the political missionary or the satyagrahi to struggle ceaselessly to shed
his attachment to the ego. “No matter how well one cultivates vairagya
[non-attachment] or how diligent one is in performing good actions or
what measure of bhakti one practises, one will not shed the sense of ‘I’
and ‘mine’ till one has attained knowledge.”48
This end of “attaining knowledge” actually never came in one’s
lifetime. One could only strive to create the conditions that could make
one into a receptacle for this ultimate knowledge. “Call no man good
till he is dead,” noted Gandhi, for “[w] e may know that a man has
attained moksha only if he died in a brahmi state.”49 Elsewhere he would
put it even more strongly:
It is doing violence to the meaning of words to say that a man has attained
deliverance even while he lives in the body, for the necessity for deliverance
remains so long as connection with the body remains. A little reflection
will show us that, if our egoistic attachment to ourselves has completely
disappeared, the body cannot survive.50
Or, “the cravings of the senses die away only when we cease to exist
in the body. This is a terrible statement to make, but the Gita does not
shrink from stating terrible truths.”51
If the striving was eternal, it called for some techniques, some
routines of personhood by which one would make a beginning towards
being a satyagrahi. Where would one begin? Here it is interesting to
observe that while, like Krishnavarma, Gandhi also valued the practice
46
Ibid., 86.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., 86–87.
49
Ibid., 125.
50
Ibid., 116.
51
Ibid., 117.
of brahmacharya or celibacy and non-attachment to material possessions

as important routines for the political missionary or the satyagrahi, they
were not a sufficient guarantee that the satyagrahi would overcome
attachment. Even the sacrifice of life was not enough. “Quite a few
persons mount the gallows with perhaps a smile on their face. But they
depart from this world and have no future in the other.”52 For “it is the
desires which need to be conquered. Anyone who eats to keep alive his
body may certainly eat, but he should stop eating if he finds that eating
food rouses his appetite.”53 So fasting or celibacy by themselves did
not ensure the attainment of the status of the sthitaprajna. “Something
more is needed,” said Gandhi. A diseased body, too, turned away from
thoughts of food or a good life. The difference between an ailing body
and that of a sthitaprajna turned around the question of the destruction
of the everyday ego:
If a man’s pleasure in the objects of sense has disappeared, if he has become

established in samadhi, or if he is suffering from a disease like jaundice
nothing placed on his tongue will dissolve. Thus, the man who has turned
away from pleasures and the man who is stricken with disease will ultimately
reach the same state, one voluntarily, the other against his will.54
But how would the satyagrahi strive to dissolve his ego? The first
and perhaps the most difficult step was to learn the art of submission,
the submission of man to a higher being. Once again, Gandhi uses
the Krishna–Arjuna relationship to note that only from the slough
of despondency can there arise a true will to know. “When Arjuna
becomes utterly weak, his intellect is awakened. Shri Krishna then tells
him, ‘Your intellect by itself will not serve you. You will need to do yoga,
karmayoga.’ ”55 It is only as a confused and traumatized Arjuna turned
to Krishna for guidance in the battlefield of Kurukshetra that he could
become the recipient of divine wisdom.
This “confusion” or the “trauma” of Gandhi’s reference amounted to
a capacity to let go of the sensibility that marked a satyagrahi’s everyday
phenomenal life. The spinning wheel became Gandhi’s symbol of a
routine of action that, if undertaken in the right spirit, would enable
52
Ibid., 118.
53
Ibid., 111.
54
Ibid., 112.
55
Ibid., 341.
the satyagrahi to become oblivious of his own everyday self. Gandhi

suggested, using no doubt the vocabulary of the bhakti tradition, that the
satyagrahi’s devotion to the spinning wheel should be like that of a slave.
“Your right is to work, and not to expect the fruit,” the slave-owner says
to the slave. “Mind your work, but beware lest you pluck a fruit from
the garden. Yours is to take what I give.”56 God, writes Gandhi, “has
put us under restriction in the same manner. He tells us that we may
work if we wish, but that the reward of the work is entirely for Him
to give.”57 But lest we be misled by the analogy, we should remember
the qualification Gandhi adds. “The relationship between the slave-
owner and his slave is an unhealthy one. It is based on [the owner’s]
self-interest.”58 The satyagrahi was someone who waged an incessant
battle against self-interest. Here is Gandhi again, using the image of
Arjuna’s visvarupdarshan in the Gita: “man is ever rushing into the mouth
of God. A wise man does so consciously and deliberately, and tells God
that he wishes to be His slave, and not the world’s.”59 Swaraj could be
achieved when satyagrahis performed their respective labours without
any consciousness of labouring.60 In that state of unselfconsciousness,
who would be the colonized and who the colonizer? “If . . . we can have
faith in this spinning wheel movement, we can serve the world, be happy
ourselves, can live safe from a great danger, that is, we can live without
fear of those who would hold us down.”61 The satyagrahi also secured,
simultaneously, a means of ensuring human welfare in the other world.62
But the critical thing was to lose the consciousness supported by the
everyday ego. Just as the eyelids protect the eyes by reflex action—that
is, without conscious intention—so too the relationship between the
satyagrahi and his goal should be spontaneous, without the expectation
of any reward.
Spinning also had the advantage of being a technique available to
everybody irrespective of his or her social status. Satyagraha was not an
activity meant for men or the higher varnas alone. Drawing inspiration
from the Gita, Gandhi argued that “women, Vaisyas, and Sudras, all
56
Ibid., 104.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid.
60
Devji in this issue describes this process pithily as “action without a subject.”
61
CWMG, 37: 11 Nov. 1926–1 Jan. 1927, 100.
62
Ibid.
classes of people, can win freedom. In the same way, all of us can do
this.” The critical point was not to “let the senses distract the mind.”
If such a state could be assured, “we can become fit for satyagraha.”63
Gandhi makes it extremely clear that spinning belongs to a set of
activities that protected the satyagrahis from “politics” while living within
the embrace of the political:
At present whether in politics or social reform we leap from one branch to

another. . . The mind of a person who is not satisfied with a lakh which he
has earned and hopes to earn ten lakhs the next day, who is addressed as a
Mahatma this day, hopes to be so addressed ever afterwards—the mind of
such a person is distracted by all manner of thoughts and attractive visions.
His mind will not be plain white, like khadi; he is ever wanting to dress his
mind, as fashionable women do their bodies in many-coloured saris with
borders of various designs. Such a person can never be devoted to God.
Only he who has a spirit of extreme humility, who has the faith of the
Faithful, can be said to have a resolute intellect.64
Satyagraha during and after the 1920s meant, above all, a task of
vigilance. It was a task that taught satyagrahi political workers to be of
the world but not be moulded by its compulsions. This is what Gandhi
took away from Sri Krishna’s message to Arjuna in the Gita:
in conclusion, Shri Krishna gives the mark of a sthitaprajna in one verse. He

is awake when it is night for other human beings, and when other human
beings and all the creatures seem to be awake, it is night for the ascetic who
sees. This should be the ideal for the Satyagraha Ashram. . . The world’s night
is our day and the world’s day our night. There is, thus, non-cooperation
between the two. This should be our attitude if we understand the Gita
rightly. This does not mean that we are superior to others; we are humble
men and women, we are a mere drop while the world is the ocean. But we
should have the faith that, if we succeed in crossing to the other shore, the
world, too, will. Without such faith we cannot claim that the world’s night is
our day. If we can achieve self-realization though fasting and spinning, then
self-realization necessarily implies swaraj.”65
It can thus be seen how, in the Gita, Gandhi sought a series of

routines by which the figure of the satyagrahi, as distinct from the modern
63
Ibid., 121.
64
Ibid., 102.
65
Ibid., 122.
political animal, could be both imagined and practiced. This was called
for, we have proposed, not by Gandhi’s desire to “spiritualize” politics,
but more by his acceptance of the fact that in politics the satyagrahi
would often have to work alongside the political human being, one who
relentlessly and passionately pursued interests, whether of a group or
of the individual. That the Gita became something of a fetish in the
process—almost a talismanic object, an amulet that would protect the
satyagrahi from the venality of politics—is suggested by the little factoid
we have mentioned earlier: that Gandhi’s followers often carried copies
of the Gita with them when involved in nationalist mobilization.
5
Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics

of Everyday Life
Uday S. Mehta
Gandhi had a complicated view of democracy. If we think of democracy

as in some minimal sense it is commonly understood—as an interlinked
set of institutional practices that feature regular elections, broad
representation and a spectrum of individual rights, all of which are
meant to give expression to the idea that individuals are free and equal
and that the ultimate source of legitimate political power is the corporate
body of the people, because it alone is deemed to be sovereign—then
one must conclude that Gandhi was substantially unimpressed by
democracy, though not always opposed to it. His writings are replete
with comments critical of the idea of elections, representation and
individual rights. In Hind Swaraj he famously characterized the British
parliament as a “sterile woman and a prostitute,” and identified it as
the cause of a long litany of British and modern woes. In that context
he was explicit, “I pray that India may never be in that plight.”1
Gandhi similarly was not overly taken with the idea that individuals
were naturally free or that they were naturally equals. In their common
rendering these ideas are not of particular importance to him. Such
claims embodied an abstractness that is antithetical to the basic tenor
of his way of thinking. He certainly did not think that the special value
of freedom lay in giving individuals a sense of their political power as
1
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of Everyday Life 89
citizens. He did occasionally speak of individual rights; nevertheless

it was obligations, and not rights, that he emphasized. Again he did
not always oppose rights, but nor were they the cherished focus of his
considered deliberations on social, political and ethical matters.
Perhaps, most importantly, he did not approve of a conception
of politics in which the quest for individual and collective security
was motivationally and normatively primary because he recognized
that emphasis as alloyed with the sanction of state violence in both
the domestic and international arenas. In this sense he did not share
one of the founding orientations of modern politics, including in its
democratic variants. There is no denying that an important tradition
of modern political thought has been guided by Hobbes’s rendering
of the Latin expression salus populi suprema lex esto, where salus no longer
referred to salvation, but rather to the safety of individuals, and, more
importantly, to the security of the political society as a whole.2 The
primacy of individual and collective security is an emphasis that is
shared by traditions of thought which in other ways are sharply critical
of other aspects of Hobbes’s political ideas. For similar reasons, the
idea of sovereignty, either of individuals or of an established polity, had
little hold on Gandhi. He was not drawn to cognate ideas such as the
territorial integrity of states or the importance of nations having the
power to reaffirm that integrity. On these issues his vision was more
capacious, less particularistic and, most importantly, indifferent to the
precise shape of how political power was organized. His conception of
unity was much more linked with the patterns of social and civilizational
life and less with what is now associated with the imperatives of nation
states. Gandhi’s endorsement of democracy was very much in a lower
key. It was nestled in the everyday and commonplace materials of social
life, which for him supplied the conditions of moral action, and not the
elevated gravity of the political, which as he disparagingly said always
had “larger purposes.”
And yet, on the other hand, ideas of self-rule, transparency, account-
ability and inclusiveness, which are associated with the basic ethos of
democracy, are fundamental to Gandhi’s thought, life and practice. He
did more than any single individual in the twentieth century—more
than even Lenin or Mao—to bring the common man and woman into
2
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), 81.
the fold of public life, on terms that were marked by a singular absence
of hierarchy, prescriptive authority and the condescension of political
parties and traditional elites. It seems fair to say that but for his influ-
ence, the struggle for India’s independence would have been a much
more elite, if not Brahmanical, process. Moreover, the subsequent post
independence political and social norms of the country would have
been more exclusionary, less mindful of the dignity, though perhaps
also less concerned with the material needs, of the most disadvantaged,
and hence at odds with the broad orientation that has characterized,
from the outset, the democratic and legislative thrust of Indian poli-
tics. His deep commitment to openness and truth; his view that in-
dividual self-rule was a function of character and self-discipline and
not predicated on traditional markers of education, gender or prop-
erty ownership; his view that power, including that of the state, had
no presumptive normative priority—are all consonant with a spirit of
democratic governance. His visage, background (middle-class, middle-
caste) and his life, lived among common people with disregard for
sectarian, communal or economic status, are all exemplary of a pro-
foundly democratic person. Like Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi ennobled
what was utterly common and ordinary. His legacy confirms this. Mao-
ists, religious sectarians (Hindu and Muslim) and secular advocates
of a strong state have all equally reviled him and what he stood for.
What explains this complex and ambivalent relationship with
democracy—at once deeply skeptical and yet also profoundly exemplary?
I think the answer to this question centres around two ideas—violence
and politics and the way they affect the ground of everyday action. For
Gandhi, violence and politics, while often mutually reinforcing each
other, also detracted from an attentiveness to the ethical gravity and
context of everyday life. Democracy as a modern political form gives
expression to that connection with violence, along with a diminished or
instrumentalizing view towards everyday actions. Democracy was not
unique in this sense; other forms of organized politics evince the same
connection. Precisely because Gandhi saw an essential link between
violence and politics, non-violence could not be stably affirmed within
any political orientation. It is the underlying link between violence and
politics, and what for Gandhi was a related diminishing of an everyday
ethic, that is evident in Gandhi’s ambivalence to democracy as a political
form. This essay explores that underlying connection.
It is an attention to everyday life that is crucial to understanding

Gandhi’s view of non-violence. In fact one might say that non-violence
is what becomes manifest when there is scrupulous attention to
everyday life. For Gandhi violence and politics are otherworldly. They
are deferrals to another time and another space. That is the warrant
for the idealism that backs up modern politics. Like Max Weber, who
believed that modernity had disenchanted the world and thus had
also made it more ghostly and less attentive to the Calvinist gravity of
everyday life, Gandhi’s focus is worldly. He identifies that concern with
religion generally, and with the central message of Gita in particular.
Gandhi in fact demands of religion that it vindicate itself in the hurly-
burly of everyday life. As he says of the author of the Gita, “he has
shown that religion must rule our worldly pursuits. I have felt that the
Gita teaches us that what cannot be followed out in day-to-day practice
cannot be called religious.”3 This leads Gandhi to so often accept the
terms in which social life is given—for example, the caste, religion or
profession one is born into—without resorting to an idealism that is
constitutionally transformative of those social particularities; and yet
neither does he accept an ethical lassitude that is prepared to excuse the
self on account of some metaphysical or religious fatalism. For Gandhi
the terms of everyday life, often in its most banal form, supply the very
material through which one gives ethical substance to one’s life. But
the vigilance, intensity and energy he brings to this ethical enterprise
should not be confused with a political purposefulness. In summarizing
the doctrine of the Gita as action with a renunciation of the fruits of
actions, Gandhi is attempting to sever action or the everyday from
any essential teleology. In doing so he undermines the grounds for
violence and much of modern politics because it is essentially invested
in a teleology or quite simply in the deferred “larger purposes” of
instantiating justice, material well-being or political equality. As he says,
“When there is no desire for the fruit, there is no temptation for untruth
and himsa [violence]. Take any instance of untruth or violence, and it
will be found that at its back was the desire to attain the cherished end.”4
There is no making sense, at least of modern politics—democratic or
otherwise—without some notion of cherished ends and of a future in
which those ends will be realized.
3
Mahadev Desai, The Gospel of Selfless Action or The Gita According to Gandhi (Ahmedabad: Navjivan
Publishing House, 1956), 132.
4
Ibid.
Gandhi had a deep abhorrence for war and violence, but his
understanding of these phenomena also makes it clear that his
commitment to non-violence cannot in any simple way be meshed
with a modern tradition of thought, which along with its concern with
war, violence and peace, is also deeply committed to notions such as
the public interest, abstract principles of justice, improving the world,
and giving priority to the ontological conditions through which we give
expression to our nature as political animals—namely the idealism of
politics. Gandhi could and did imagine a world in which politics was
not the ground of individual or collective well-being. It is the priority of
politics which Gandhi’s understanding of non-violence sidesteps and
denies. Gandhi was also ambivalent about peace, which he understood
to be another form of political entrenchment. He referred to those
who merely opposed war without seeing its link with the surrounding
international context as advocates of an “armed peace.”5 Even as a
nationalist, a designation so often carelessly applied to him, Gandhi
was, if at all, a reluctant and inconsistent votary. He even demurred
at the idea of India having a constitution. As he so often reiterated,
“My religion has no geographical limits. If I have a living faith in it,
it will transcend my love for India herself.”6 Even his conception of
independence did not for the most part tally with a national or political
vision, “Swaraj [self-rule] has to be experienced by each one for himself.”7
Or as he says elsewhere, man “can be independent as soon as he wills it,”
thus simultaneously refusing the complex temporalities on which both
imperial and national visions relied.8 His opposition to violence did not
draw on nationalist or communal justifications. He thought of peace
in its familiar rendering as no more than a punctuation between the
patterned and instrumental use of violence and force.
I
The terms peace and war have a shared conceptual provenance in
modern understandings of politics. In this part of the essay I try to
make clear that the relationship of these three terms—peace, war and
5
M. K. Gandhi, The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Raghavan Iyer (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 242.
6
M. K. Gandhi, Essential Writings, ed. V. V. Ramana Murti (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation,
1970), 147.
7
Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 73.
8
M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, 11 Jan. 1936 (emphasis added).
politics—is indifferent to the issue of violence. By that I mean that

the three terms neither are fundamentally disposed to violence, nor
are they, more importantly, fundamentally opposed to violence. The
relationship between peace, war and violence is strictly conditional.
The normative status of each of these terms depends on a political
calculation in which the “security” of the political community plays a
decisive role. An implication of this claim that there is no principled
commitment to non-violence or an opposition to war. Put differently,
in the modern conception of peace there is no fundamental reason to
abjure the use of physical force. Regarding this claim, George W. Bush
was concise and to the point: “I just want you to know that, when we
talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.”9 This not simply a
rhetorical or conceptual claim, but rather one that is sadly vindicated
in everyday life in which peace does not signify an absence of violence
and the aspiration for peace does not foreclose the possibility of war. In
contrast, as I argue, Gandhi’s views on non-violence stemmed from an
attitude towards everyday life, which was in important senses neither
part of the language of peace nor part of that of politics.
Let me fill out the claim that our common conceptions of peace
and politics are indifferent to the issue of violence and non-violence. I
will do this by briefly considering the operative logic in the narratives
regarding the origins of political society that one finds in Thomas
Hobbes and John Locke. I go back to these thinkers because I take
their views to be, in the relevant sense, still substantially accurate with
respect to how we conceptualize war, peace and politics in the modern
era. Notwithstanding their considerable normative difference on a vast
range of issues, with regard to the relationship of war and politics,
Hobbes and Locke remain within a broad consensus that includes
thinkers such as Kant, Hegel and J. S. Mill.
In the narratives that Hobbes and Locke offer for explaining and
justifying the origins of politics, human beings are placed in a state
of nature. This is an unregulated state with no supervening power
or authority. Given human nature and the absence of a supervening
power, so the argument goes, this natural state is liable to descend
rapidly into a condition of war in which human life and interests are
9
The entire speech is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/
20020618-1.html. It should be pointed out that President Obama makes precisely this point in
his Nobel Prize speech on 12 Oct. 2009.
inescapably threatened by the imminence of disorder (i.e. the absence

of peace) and, ultimately, violent death. It is the prospect of this
dire predicament which leads individuals, with a primary interest in
avoiding their own death and securing their interests, to contract out
of the natural state, to surrender all or some of their natural powers,
thus forming a political society, which can deploy the power of the state
to regulate the interactions between individuals and between different
states. When such regulation is successful, i.e. when the state does the
job for which it was authorized, individuals can pursue their interests,
and, via various forms of coordination, the interests of the society as a
whole. This is what is designated peace, i.e. where the conditions for the
pursuit of individual and collective interests are stable and hence unlike
the original state of nature.
What is important to note is that in this classic and protean narrative
that encourages and justifies the formation of political society and
authorizes the power of the state there is no argument against killing,
violence or war per se. The rationale for political society does not stem
from a moral disapproval of the fact that human beings in pursuit of
their interests are—or as Rousseau would qualify it, have become—
trigger-happy and murderous. Instead, violence and killing carry no
clear moral opprobrium. There is nothing like the biblical injunction,
however attenuated by other claims, against killing or the sanctity of
life on account of which it is to be preserved. Killing and violence are
merely indicators of a condition of disorder, or, to use Locke’s term
“inconvenience,” which vitiates the pursuit of individual interests,
including crucially an interest in one’s security. Locke does have an
argument, drawn from natural law, that enjoins humans to “preserve
the rest of mankind.”10 But that argument is qualified by the priority
given to “preserve [one] self ”, and as is evident from his chapter on war
the force of that argument does not in any case carry over to proscribe
the use of deadly force.11
The several arguments that both Hobbes and Locke offer regarding
how each of us wishes to avoid painful and violent death have a crucial
10
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, rev. edn (New York: Mentor, 1965),
311.
11
Ibid.: “Everyone as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully; so by
the like reason when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he
can, preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice to an offender, take
away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, liberty, health, limb, or
goods of another.” Also see II, #16.
force in motivating the rationale for political society. But they are
prudential arguments, addressed to individuals with a rational interest
in preserving their own lives and interests. Indeed they make prudence
the ground of politics. War in the state of nature and the absence of
peace are simply conditions in which prudence would be denied and
for which political society offers a purported redress. But the rationality
of that redress need not, and typically among modern political thinkers
is not, part of a general argument against either violence, killing or war
per se. The state, once it is formed, simply regulates violence in light
of the contract that authorizes its power. In an unregulated condition
characterized by human equality and other aspects of the state of
nature, killing and violence are merely imprudent—the idea being that
under conditions where others have much the same resources and the
same intensity for a desire to live, the strategy of deploying violence
to secure one’s interests, sooner or later, is likely to prove to be self-
defeating. This is clearly a conditional argument and not a moral one
in the sense that it is not backed by any broad imperative and certainly
not an imperative against violence, killing or the use of force. It is easy
to imagine a risk-taker not being moved by it, or conditions under
which the rational expectations from violence are better than those
from abjuring violence. Clearly war and violence remain conditionally
rational within this tradition of thought. From the standpoint of the
state, violence is hence again conditionally rational so long as it is
in the service of the public interest and the security of the political
community. In Hobbes quite obviously, but also in Locke, the original
contract does not in any way constrain war, violence and killing in the
face of a threat to the political community. The conditional rationality
of violence that marked the individual in the state of nature, or the
Hobbesian axiom homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man), now merely
conditions the behaviour and rationality of the state. The state, once
it is formed into a cooperative singular entity, must, for the sake of
its own preservation, in principle, retain a strictly conditional and hence
permissive attitude towards war and violence. That is to say, it must
understand the sentences with which Michael Ignatieff begins his
book The Lesser Evil as being prudential, idealistic, perhaps tragically
ironic, but not self-contradictory: “When democracies fight terrorism,
they are defending the proposition that their political life should be
free of violence. But defeating terror requires violence. It may also
require coercion, deception, secrecy, and violation of rights.”12 The

deference for present violence, coercion, deception and the like comes
from deferring to a political ideal in which the absence of violence is
predicated on some sort of ultimate temporal reckoning.
II
Before moving to a consideration of Gandhi, I want to offer a very
schematic and grossly simplified overview of the tradition of modern
politics. There are four aspects of this very general narrative that I
want to single out because they relate to relevant features of Gandhi’s
thought that I will deal with in the final section of this essay.
The first is simply that in this tradition, politics pertains to the
interactions among individuals and states, and not to individuals in solo.
The fact that politics relates only to the interactions between individuals
and states also means that it is largely indifferent to that which is solely
in the individual interest, or what one might think of as his or her being,
i.e. the quality of their integrity.
The second feature of this narrative is that politics necessarily
involves instrumental forms of reasoning and acting. It is only by being
in principle instrumental that politics can concern itself with the various
contingencies that pertain to public life, and only thus can it attend to
advancing the interests of the whole or public interest which undergirds
the normative basis of political society and the state. Moreover, this
instrumentalism fundamentally marks the status of the citizen. He or
she must accept being part of a universe in which the contingencies
that effect the advancement of the whole will necessarily refract his or
her standing as a citizen. The citizen must therefore have a sacrificial
self-understanding. At the limit, citizenship is just a form of soldiering
in which, as they say, one must be prepared to die, so that others
may live. Modern politics, as Weber famously conjectured, may have
triumphed only by disenchanting the world and ridding it of magic.
But in another sense it imbues every moment and every act in the world
with a mysterious quality because it can only be assessed by reference to
some interminable calculus of collective benefit and collective security.
The third aspect of this narrative, which relates to the point about
instrumentalism and to the point that is to follow, pertains directly
12
Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xiii.
to violence. Modern politics cannot foreclose on the use of violence

without also giving up on its constitutive commitment to advance the
public interest. The absolutism of politics, namely a commitment to
securing individual and public interest, requires a commensurate
absolutism of the means, and those, in principle, if not always in fact,
must include the warrant to deploy violent means. Weber’s definition
of the state as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is
largely just a more blunt restatement of the more general claim that if
the public interest must be an overriding priority then the state must
have the means to assert that priority. Violence, put simply, cannot,
given this priority, be proscribed in principle.
The final feature of the narrative of modern politics is what might
be called its inherent idealism. In being concerned with the public
interest and with progress more generally, modern politics expresses an
imperative energy to improve the world. Modern politics in its various
ideological variants has always associated political power with that
capacious imperative for the betterment of life. This is no less true in
Locke than it is in Marx and Mill. As with the other points I have
made, a lot more needs to be said about this issue, including of course
pointing to the various instruments through which liberals in particular
have tried to limit the use of power.
My purpose in very briefly delineating these four aspects of the
tradition of modern politics is to set up a contrast with Gandhi and to
suggest that within this tradition of political thinking, peace can only be
understood as a form of order, and that order itself has no clear relation
with violence or its opposite. That is, violence can be an instrument for
peace and order, and hence for bettering the world and being true to the
idealism that I have said is inherent in modern politics. Alternatively,
violence may be something that undermines order. Precisely because it
can, as it were, go both ways, politics can take no principled view on the
matter of violence. I suppose the simplest way to make this point is to
state the obvious, namely that most modern wars have been authorized
in the name of peace and order.
III
The contrast with Gandhi is stark. In my view it is so stark that one must
consider Gandhi not just as having a very different politics, but rather, in
some crucial sense, as being a deeply anti-political thinker. One should

be open to the thought that despite his having transformed the political
landscape, he may have done so as an anti-political activist. If there is
something puzzling in this claim it is only because we have become so
accustomed and unselfconscious about the idea that politics defines the
domain of all significant collective action, and because for that reason
we assume that all significant transformations must have a political
purpose as their cause. Not surprisingly, the distinctive transformative
energy which Gandhi infused into the public life of India in the first
half of the twentieth century is always designated political—thus at the
level of naming depriving it of much of its originality.
Gandhi at any rate rejects all four of the points I have identified with
the tradition of modern political thought. He firmly abjures the idea
of a secular teleology of progress and the accompanying valorization
of politics and the state. His commitment to non-violence can only be
understood by acknowledging that he did not view the world solely
or even primarily in political terms. Non-violence for Gandhi is not a
cognate of peace. It does not refer, as it does in the tradition of political
thinking I have been referring to, as a condition of public order secured
through the surrounding proximity of fear, punishment and power. As
he said in Hind Swaraj,
When peace was secured and people became simple-minded, its full effect
was toned down. If I ceased stealing for fear of punishment, I would
recommence the operation as soon as the fear is withdrawn from me. This is
almost a universal experience. We have assumed that we can get men to do
things by force and, therefore, we use force.13
Non-violence is different because it does not stem from the world view
in which the avoiding of death, the furthering of the public interests
or the bettering of the world are primary concerns. Gandhi did
not think that corporeal vulnerability was in need of redress. It was
an ineradicable fact of life subject to contingency but also to moral
response. He embraced the contingency and made it the very ground
for crafting a morally meaningful response to it. He did not believe that
the only redress to this predicament of vulnerability was the formation
of political society. Instead he accepted the fear that came with the
13
vulnerability by transmuting it into the demand for courage—courage

in which there was the permanent willingness to surrender or sacrifice
one’s life. In doing so he blunted the principal motive of political
society—fear and the prospect of security.
Courage, while it blunts the motive for political society, also extends
the ambit of moral action to everyday life. One must, for Gandhi, always
be prepared to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of moral action. This is
why for Gandhi the scene of battle, be it the fratricidal war at the heart
of the Mahabharata, the Boer War, the First World War or the Jewish
predicament in the Second World War, all constitute exemplary sites for
moral action. He was drawn to the battlefield, because it exemplified
something commonplace for him. It was the model of everyday life,
not the exceptional predicament against which to construct a political
refuge. As he said, “the opportunity [for non-violence] comes to
everyone almost daily.”14 It could serve as such a model because the fact
of violence was itself a fact of everyday life, not something that could
be quarantined or pacified by the lure of political society. The very
ubiquity of violence in the natural state, which for Hobbes served as
the ground for a political sequestration, for Gandhi serves as the basis
for articulating the universality of ethics, an ethics centred around the
notion of sacrifice and not security.
Nowhere was Gandhi’s call to sacrifice more audacious and
controversial than in what he said he would do were he a Jew in Germany
faced with the genocidal might of Hitler and the Nazis. Writing in
November 1938 in the journal Harijan in response to letters that had
sought his views on what was happening in Germany and Palestine,
Gandhi responded in words that deserve to be quoted at length:
The nobler cause would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever
they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the
same sense that Christians born in France are French. If the Jews have no
home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other
parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home
where they remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable
justification for the German expulsion of Jews. But the German persecution
of Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went
so mad as Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal.
For, he is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism
in the name of which any inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be
14
Gandhi, Essential Writings, ed. Raghavan Iyer, 250.
rewarded here and hereafter. The crime of an obviously mad but intrepid
youth is being visited upon this whole race with unbelievable ferocity. If
there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of humanity, a war against
Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be
completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the
pros and cons of such a war is, therefore, outside my horizon or province
... Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked
when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as
humanitarianism. It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying
it looks in its nakedness. Can the Jews resist this organized and shameless
persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect and not to feel
helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there is. If I were a Jew and were
born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany
as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him
to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to
submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this I should not wait
for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence
that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all
the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be
worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them
an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy
passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France
and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring
no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even
result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the
declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for
voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into
a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the
race even at the hands of the tyrant.15
Not surprisingly, Gandhi’s words provoked shock, controversy and

considerable condemnation.16 But they deserve to be considered carefully.
There are two broad issues that Gandhi refers to in his statement:
first that of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, and second the
German Jews’ response to the barbarity of Hitler. For Gandhi the two
issues are linked, but I will initially consider them separately.
15
M. K. Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War, vol. 2 (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House,
1942), p. 170–72.
16
Among those who responded to Gandhi’s views on Jews in Germany, the Nazis and migration
to Palestine were Hannah Arendt, Joan Bondurant, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes.
Gandhi’s views on these matters have been very thoughtfully considered by Gangeya Mukherji
in “Gandhi: Calling to Non-violence Joined by a strong Pragmatism” (unpublished). Also see
Dennis Dalton, Nonviolence in Action: Gandhi’s Power (New Delhi: Oxford Press, 2007).
Regarding the second issue, Gandhi’s suggestion that were he a Jew

born, bred and earning his livelihood in Germany—that is to say, if he
were a German in the most mundane social sense of the term—he would
defy the discriminatory racial laws, at the risk of being imprisoned and
killed. Gandhi’s suggestion is implicit in the very question he asks. It is
not the question of how German Jews can survive in a corporeal sense,
but rather how can they “preserve their self-respect and not . . . feel
helpless, neglected and forlorn?” He would refuse to be expelled; that
is, he would refuse to be made forcibly into a deserter from the scene
of the battle for self-respect. He would stand up to the “tallest German
gentile”; that is, refuse to concede that race, religion or law should define
a homeland. He would act alone, but with the full confidence that his
example would be followed by other Jews, without his even advocating
such concurrence. He would, that is, refrain from transforming the
singular moral act into a collective and strategic political act. He would
even spurn the support of Britain, France and America, knowing that
such support would at best be for his security and not for the inner joy
and strength that motivates and gives meaning to his action. He would
act with a full measure of self-confidence knowing, as a religious man,
that his God would not forsake him. And finally, he would do all this
without any assurance that his actions would leave the Jews better or
worse off with respect to the violence that might be visited on them.
The act of self-sacrifice or non-violence would thus have been relieved
of the incalculable effects of its external implication. It would represent
what he elsewhere calls a credal commitment and not a mere policy
option. It would literally be an autonomous act—that is to say, self-
legislated, indifferent to the world of appearances—and all this having
relied only on the most mundane of social facts, namely birth and the
conditions of one’s livelihood. Like Arjuna, whose call to moral action,
in Gandhi’s view, stemmed from the mundane concern for the wives
and children of his kinsmen,17 Gandhi, as a German Jew, would find
17
“Let us suppose that Arjuna flees the battlefield. Though his enemies are wicked people, are
sinners, they are his relations and he cannot bring himself to kill them. If he leaves the field,
what would happen to those vast numbers on his side? If Arjuna went away, leaving them
behind, would the Kauravas have mercy on them? If he left the battle, the Pandava army
would be simply annihilated. What, then, would be the plight of their wives and children?.. . If
Arjuna had left the battlefield, the very calamities which he feared would have befallen them.
Their families would have been ruined, and the traditional dharma of these families and the
race would have been destroyed. Arjuna, therefore, had no choice but to fight.” M. K. Gandhi,
The Bhagvadgita (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1980), 20. I thank Faisal Devji for drawing my
attention to this passage.
motivation for the ultimate bodily sacrifice in an inescapable and prosaic

everyday reality. There was, as George Orwell noticed in his review of
Gandhi’s Autobiography, something profoundly democratic in his exacting
moral standards. One can imagine Gandhi being deeply impressed by
stories of knights in shining armour performing acts of great valour,
and thinking that such acts were the template for acts of moral valour
and that they were written for people like himself, who hardly wore any
clothes and came from the most middling of backgrounds.
The other matter Gandhi refers in his statement relates to the issue
of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, but it captures his broader
views on the sort of unity that a political homeland must evince.
Gandhi was of course aware that in seeking a homeland in Palestine,
the Jews were seeking a national state anchored in the exclusive
particularity of their religion. They were like the Muslim League in its
advocacy for Pakistan. In this one might say Gandhi was confirmed by
the frequency with which Jinnah and the Pakistani state, without any
sense of irony, invoked Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish State. But
more relevantly, for Gandhi, this demand made the Jews analogous to
Hitler and the Germans, whose ideology he identified as a form of
exclusive religious nationalism. The demand for a Jewish state thus
vindicated the exclusionary laws that mandated the expulsion of Jews
from Germany or wherever they lived. The claim of exclusivity when
backed by a religious and national form could not be squared with
the idea of Jews being at home in many different places or wherever
they happened to live. Moreover, if the nation state, with its assurance
of security for its exclusive members, was the appropriate mode of
existence for particular religious groups, then at the limit the demand
for a Jewish state vindicated even the Nazi “inhumanity” that professed
to be “an act of humanity.” If the appropriate destiny of human beings
was to be organized into political nation states, then the inhumanity
visited on them to achieve this would, at a minimum, have considerable
normative, or rather political, credence.
That was precisely the form of life that Gandhi wished to challenge.
It is the specifically political sort of unity, the making of one people,
a body politic, which Gandhi viewed with suspicion because he saw
in it a concern with corporeality that could never resolve itself into
fearlessness. It was from the very outset concerned with the preservation
of life and security and not with the conditions of moral actions. To the
extent that such unity valued sacrifice it had to garner that through
a contractual relationship with a group of people specifically chosen
for that purpose, such as those in the army and the police. It is worth
noting that in Gandhi’s statement regarding the formation of a Jewish
state in Palestine he makes no reference to the Palestinians who would
be and were being displaced from their homeland. He knew this; in
other contexts he even wrote of it. It is not from a lack of sympathy
for their plight that he does not mention them, but rather because that
plight is extraneous to the main point he is making. To bring up the
matter of the injustice of Palestinian displacement was itself to raise a
political consideration, which the British in the context of the mandate
were happy to consider in terms of some compromise or negotiated
settlement. This was their preferred way of dealing with such matters,
as the partition of Ireland had proved and as the later partitioning of
India and the island of Cyprus were to confirm.
Gandhi’s point here, as elsewhere, was different. It was to draw
attention to a kind of specifically political unity, which by its emphasis
on the collective security of an exclusive group and the rigidity of
borders and territorial markers that singled out that group evacuated
the everyday conditions of moral action. Those conditions for Gandhi
belonged to the unity and the diversity of the social; to the arbitrary
contingencies that people found themselves in; to the places where they
were born, lived and worshiped, Jews living in France or in Germany,
Muslims who had Hindu neighbours with different dietary taboos,
or Indians who lived in South Africa but, as Gandhi said, “lived as
though they were living in India” and hence in their everyday lives
were indifferent to the vast distance that separated them from their
natal land. He associated the cornucopia of the social, and not the
idealism of the political, with the conditions that made self-knowledge,
and through it moral action, possible. It was under such diverse and
commonplace conditions that non-violence could be a way a living.
Non-violence, Gandhi makes clear in his discourse on the Gita, is
something negative, indeed it has, he says, “no existence of its own.”
Unlike violence, it does not intervene in the world, it is not backed by
a plan, it does not have a product, indeed it achieves nothing external.
Violence, which is ratified by a plan, seeks to intervene and affect the
world in instrumental ways; that is, it intervenes in the chain of cause
and effect. In contrast, non-violence withdraws, not from the world but
rather to the self and its quotidian surroundings. Gandhi’s point is that
non-violence, like spinning, celibacy and silence, represents a mode of
human existence in which there is self-conscious withdrawal from the
instrumental world of political action. Still it is a site of action, for
practices are acts, but not of political action, in part because they refer
only to self. For Gandhi these practices (it is important to see them as
practices) are valourized precisely because the effect they produce is on
the self and not the world. In fact one might say they are not predicated
on the connection or interrelatedness between the self and the world.
They abjure the purposefulness and idealization which I have claimed
mark politics and inform its relationship with violence. In a short essay
devoted mainly to the inherent importance of eating leafy vegetables
and unpolished rice and on “how best to clean latrines,” Gandhi says,
“One must forget the political goal in order to realize it [the natural
life]. To think in terms of the political goal in every matter and at every
step is to raise unnecessary dust. ”18
Celibacy, fasting, spinning and silence give back to everyday activities
a materiality and gravity that is lost to them through their incorporation
in the instrumentality of a politics that always has a “larger purpose.”
They are paradigmatically tactile in the sense that the act subsumes
its effects. They are also instances in which the temporal and effectual
distinction between means and ends is collapsed: “They say ‘means
are after all means’, I would say ‘means are after all everything.’”19 For
an act to have materiality for the self, it must be withdrawn from the
sphere in which its meaning is always constitutionally dependent on
an incorporation into the whole and the attendant chain of uncertain
implications that might stem from it. That is precisely the domain of
politics and especially of a politics wedded to a progressive teleology.
Non-violence, like the practices Gandhi associates with it, is championed
precisely because nothing external follows from it. The practices are
not tied to a future, or dependent on a past. As practices they lack
the requisite abstractness to have implications. They are in a manner
contained by the act itself. There is here a resonance with Kant’s ethics
because only if an act can be separated from its purposeful effects can
it be, for both Gandhi and Kant, autonomous. The resonance also
points to the vexing relationship in both Kant and Gandhi between
their ethical and political writings.
18
M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, 11 Jan. 1936.
19
M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, Feb. 1937.
Gandhi eschews instrumentality to the degree that he denies even

the role of abstract principles as means of coordinating actions.
Akeel Bilgrami has pointed out in an important essay on Gandhi that
exemplary action takes the place of both moral and political principles.
Only by this substitution can the violence that is implicit even in moral
principles themselves be neutralized. As Bilgrami puts it, “if someone
fails to follow your example, you may be disappointed but you would
no longer have the conceptual basis to see them as transgressive and
wrong and subject to criticism.”20 Bilgrami’s identification of the
importance of exemplary action is consonant with what I have earlier
referred to as Gandhi’s anchoring moral acts in the most mundane
aspects of everyday social and individual existence. Unlike the elevated
nomological perch from which Kantian imperatives acquire their moral
credence, in Gandhi the moral is often no more than a firm subjective
commitment whose consequences one is prepared to abide by. For
example, even when Gandhi refers to violence he typically presents his
opposition to it in terms that resist the abstractness of moral principles.
In a letter to Esther Faering in 1917 he wrote, “what is our duty as
individuals. I have come to this workable decision by myself, ‘I will not
kill for any cause whatsoever, but be killed by him if resistance of his
will renders my being killed necessary.’”21 His language, even about an
issue that matters so deeply to him, suggests a private sort of subjective
conviction utterly devoid of larger purposefulness. The self becomes
the governing armature of everything. It leans on neither history nor
the future. And in doing so it repudiates the first point I made with
reference to the narrative of modern politics in which individuals are
relevant only to the extent that they interact with others and not in their
description in solo.
Gandhi’s ideas challenge the modern tradition of political thinking,
including its democratic versions, at a deep level because they question the
value of a form of knowledge and action that underwrites ideas such as
the public interest, political freedom, equality of rights and even justice.
Such ideas must after all be abstract. This is what led Martin Luther
King Jr, following his visit to India in 1959, to qualify the enormous
admiration he had for Gandhi and his ideas on non-violence. King
Akeel Bilgrami, “Gandhi: The Philosopher,” Economic Political Weekly 38/39 (2003), 4163.
20
M. K. Gandhi, Soul Force: Gandhi’s Writings on Peace, ed. V. Geetha (Chennai: Tara Books, 2004),
21
99.
knew that his was a struggle for the civil rights of African Americans
and as such it could not stand apart from the American political creed.
However much that struggle, under King’s guidance, attempted to stay
a course in which violence was eschewed, it was nevertheless a struggle
in which the central demand was for the fulfillment of a political and
constitutional ideal. Non-violence was thus an instrument to realize
a political goal and that too for a group that had been denied that
goal. King understood this, and he understood that it limited the extent
to which the civil rights movement could share the deeper purposes
of Gandhi’s view of non-violence. Ultimately Gandhi’s non-violent
practices were not meant to be redemptive instruments for groups or
for the realization of political ideals.
In contrast, I have been trying to suggest, for Gandhi non-violence
is a form of individual existence that is scrupulously attentive to the
contingent or arbitrarily given features of everyday life—things such as
where one is born, where one earns ones livelihood and who would care
for one’s kinsfolk. For Gandhi actions acquire their ethical substance by
resisting an incorporation into a broader collective calculus of harms
and benefits and freedom and security. Practices such as spinning, fasting
and silence, and non-violence more generally, are ways of being in the
world, which, in some crucial sense, are indifferent to the imperative
to transform the world. They ultimately harbour an indifference to
politics and therefore must have an ambivalence towards it even in its
democratic form.
6
Morality in the Shadow of Politics
Faisal Devji
The story has often been told of Gandhi putting an end to the first
and arguably most successful experiment with civil disobedience across
India in 1922, after some of his followers burnt to death nineteen
policemen trapped in their station at a place called Chauri-Chaura.
Explanations of why the Mahatma should have called off a movement
that was enjoying extraordinary success include, on the one hand, his
fear of losing control over its potentially revolutionary drift, and on
the other his realization that the Indians who took to all manner of
violence during the satyagraha were not quite ready for their freedom.
I am interested neither in the communist theory of Gandhi as an
agent of some bourgeois nationalism desperate to rein in the people’s
revolutionary impetus, nor, for its part, in the liberal theory of a people
too immature for independence. Such explanations cannot account for
awkward details like the fact that no situation could be very revolutionary
that was stopped by a man to whom no police or military force was
available, or the fact that Gandhi had consistently demanded immediate
self-rule and always rejected the claim of India’s being unprepared for
independence.
Non-violent protest was, for the Mahatma, not a means but an end
in itself, one that stood apart from politics conceived as a practice of
conjuring up some future. While such forms of civil disobedience had
political consequences, in other words, their purposes were achieved
in the very moment of expression rather than subsequently. And so
acts of non-violent resistance were already free and did not require
an independent or democratic state for their guarantee. Indeed it was

only this kind of freedom that deserved the name, being immediately
within the reach of anyone who desired it, no matter how powerless or
oppressed. When Gandhi’s would-be followers resorted to violence in
1922, therefore, they had already lost their freedom, not by abandoning
morality so much as by forsaking the immediate virtues of satyagraha
for a politics dedicated to some time other than the present, whether
this was in order to avenge a past or to create a future. In fixing upon
the present as a site of freedom Gandhi refused any politics that would
sacrifice it for the future, and indeed inverted this logic to say that only by
sacrificing the future can we safeguard it. For a future known ahead of
time would no longer be true to itself, while at the same time blinding us
to the possibility of incalculable change, which the Mahatma identified
with the working of God in history. So in his 1924 preface to Satyagraha
in South Africa, Gandhi described moral action in the present as a dharma
yuddha or holy war, because it risked everything to attend upon and
welcome the incalculable:
That is the beauty of Satyagraha, it comes up to oneself; one has not to

go out in search for it. This is a virtue inherent in the principle itself. A
dharma-yuddha, in which there are no secrets to be guarded, no scope for
cunning and no place for untruth, comes unsought; and a man of religion
is ever ready for it. A struggle which has to be previously planned is not a
righteous struggle. In a righteous struggle God Himself plans campaigns
and conducts battles. A dharma-yuddha can be waged only in the name of
God, and it is only when the Satyagrahi feels quite helpless, is apparently
on his last legs and finds utter darkness all around him, that God comes to
the rescue.1
The Mahatma sought to inhabit the present in such a way as to

maintain both its own integrity and that of a moral life possible in no
other time. This accounts for his promises made throughout a lengthy
career that self-rule might be achieved within a year, or his calls for the
British to depart India immediately and let her suffer invasion or civil
war, as in the famous Quit India movement of 1942. The philosopher
Mohammad Iqbal had perhaps the most acute comment to make about
Gandhi’s focus on the present in a speech delivered to the All-India
Muslim Conference in March of 1932. He claimed that the struggle of
imperialism and nationalism in India was based upon a fundamental
1
M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Stanford: Academic Reprints, 1954), xiv–xv.
Morality in the Shadow of Politics 109
misunderstanding. For oriented as they were to the future in which their

ideals lay, the British were unable to recognize themselves as oppressors
in the present, while Gandhi was equally unable to grasp that his inter-
locutors could only be engaged by arguments that invoked this future:
The Western man’s mental texture is chronological in character. He lives and

moves and has his being in time. The Eastern man’s world-consciousness is
non-historical. To the Western man things gradually become; they have a
past, present and future. To the Eastern man they are immediately rounded
off, timeless, purely present. . . The British as a Western people cannot
but conceive political reform in India as a systematic process of gradual
evolution. Mahatma Gandhi as an Eastern man sees in this attitude nothing
more than an ill-conceived unwillingness to part with power and tries all
sorts of destructive negations to achieve immediate attainment. Both
are elementally incapable of understanding each other. The result is the
appearance of a revolt.2
Whether or not Gandhi’s struggles missed their mark, he well

understood that the future was his enemy’s greatest redoubt. Not only
the mental texture of Western man, but modern politics itself was
founded upon predicting and controlling the future, which was why the
Mahatma set out to oppose it in a venture he called a holy war, whose
battles were about setting moral action in the present against a politics of
the future. My task in this essay is to describe the way in which Gandhi
thought this war through after the failure of his first great satyagraha in
1922. Not the explanation of an event, then, but rather the words and
actions of Gandhi as he struggled to come to terms with what he called
“the death of non-violence” are of interest to me, since they provide
us with an exemplary analysis of moral life in the shadow of modern
politics. That the Mahatma took responsibility for the failure of his
non-violent form of civil disobedience indicates that he thought it to be
one of theory rather than of practice. What he learnt from this failure
was to attend to the nature of violence more closely, as something
embodied not simply in crimes like arson or murder, but more generally
as a quality inherent in all action. Violence occupied Gandhi not as a
political, let alone a peculiarly Indian, problem, but as a problem of
everyday life. Yet it was the battlefield that provided him with a site to
2
Mohammad Iqbal, “Presidential Address Delivered at the Annual Session of the All-India
Muslim Conference at Lahore on the 21st of March 1932”, in Speeches and Statements of Iqbal,
ed. Shamloo (Lahore: Al-Manar Academy, 1948), 53.
think about such violence, specifically the battlefield of the Bhagavad

Gita, whose hero, Arjuna, suddenly loses the will to fight in a fratricidal
war, and has to be persuaded to do so by his divine charioteer Krishna.
Gandhi was not alone in seeing this war as the greatest manifestation of
a dharma yuddha, to which he returned frequently for inspiration.
Rather than representing the end or limit of moral action, the
battlefield was for Gandhi its true home. Perhaps because moralists
tend to describe warfare as the instantiation of all vice, thus depending
upon the fear it inspires to justify their arguments, the Mahatma, who
thought fearlessness the essence of virtue, chose to locate morality on
the battlefield instead. In doing so he dismissed the political ideal of a
state at peace as a good example of righteousness, even letting go of
otherwise much-invoked models like Rama the king as a personification
of virtue, or his capital, Ayodhya, as its privileged site. But then the ideal
of ramrajya, or Rama’s rule, with which Gandhi is so often associated,
should not be seen as a political category in either its traditional or
modern senses, since Rama here was not a king so much as a son,
brother, father and husband. More importantly he was the hero of
sacrifice, willing even to have his own wife suffer and die in the name
of duty, and therefore a model for everyday life. Similarly war is not
given over to politics in the Mahatma’s telling of the Gita, and is often
rendered into a spiritual struggle, as if in recognition of the fact that a
state at war no longer represents even its own political ideals, though it
might claim to be defending them. Lying at the heart of politics while at
the same time constituting its outer limits, war has the paradoxical status
of being political and anti-political at the same time, even threatening
the dissolution of politics altogether, and in all these ways it serves as
the most appropriate arena for moral action considered as a far more
protean and universal form of human behaviour. It is this form of action
that Gandhi focused upon when thinking about the place of morality in
the shadow of politics, which he did most powerfully in a commentary
on the Bhagavad Gita delivered at the Satyagraha Ashram in 1926.
The Death of Non-violence

I will return to Gandhi’s commentary on Arjuna’s dilemma in another
section of my essay, and begin instead with a remark made towards
the end of his lengthy interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, which
was made piecemeal during its public reading over several days at
the ashram: “Following the death of non-violence, we discovered the
value of the spinning-wheel, as also of brahmacharya [celibacy]. Beyond
the river (Sabarmati) is bhogabhumi [the site of passivity], while this is
karmabhumi [the site of action].”3 Notable about this comment are the
two distinctions it makes: the first between non-violence and spinning
or celibacy, and the second between these practices of the ashram and
those of the life beyond. How is non-violence different from spinning
or celibacy? Why do these practices make of the ashram a site of action
compared with the world outside as one of passivity? Non-violence,
says Gandhi, was something negative and had no existence of its own.
Unlike violence, which sought to have an effect as instrumental action,
non-violence did not plan, produce or achieve anything, but rather
made change possible by withdrawing from such action. Non-violence,
however, did not flee the world of cause and effect, but made possible
the most spectacular changes in it, and this by a process of negation
instead of affirmation. Non-violence allowed for changes in the world
of cause and effect by setting up ever-newer arenas of withdrawal in a
manner deliberately opposed to the instrumental action so beloved of
politics. Non-violence, indeed, was so little a positive entity, let alone a
political strategy, that Gandhi saw it as a kind of epistemological quality,
one whose detachment he defined as an effect of truth:
Truth is a positive value, while non-violence is a negative value. Truth affirms.

Non-violence forbids something which is real enough. Truth exists, untruth
does not exist. Violence exists, non-violence does not. Even so, the highest
dharma [duty] for us is that nothing but non-violence can be. Truth is its
own proof, and non-violence is its supreme fruit. The latter is necessarily
contained in the former.4
Now the comparisons made in the passage above, between truth and
violence as positive objects and untruth and non-violence as negative
ones, suggest that Gandhi had come to see a series of complicated
entanglements among them which no longer permitted of easy
3
M. K. Gandhi, The Bhagvadgita (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1980), 284. While bhogabhumi
might more literally be translated as a site of enjoyment, the fact that bhoga is a kind of passive
or receptive enjoyment, as well as the fact that it is counterposed here with karmabhumi as a site
of action, seems to me to justify its translation as a site of passivity.
4
Ibid., 11.
distinctions. This becomes clear in an example of violence that Gandhi

gives from the Gita, that of Karna, Bhishma and Drona, all good
men who yet sided with the evil Duryodhana in his battle against the
Pandavas:
Whether out of compassion for Duryodhana, or because he was generous-

hearted, Karna joined the former’s side. Besides Karna, Duryodhana had
good men like Bhishma and Drona also on his side. This suggests that evil
cannot by itself flourish in this world. It can do so only if it is allied with some
good. This was the principle underlying non-cooperation, that the evil system
which the Government represents, and which has endured only because of
the support it receives from good people, cannot survive if that support is
withdrawn. Just as the Government needs the support of good men in order
to exist, so Duryodhana required men like Bhishma and Drona in order to
show that there was justice on his side.5
Gandhi’s use of this example to illustrate non-cooperation as a form

of non-violence is curious, since the good men supporting Duryodhana
did not after all withdraw their support of him, so that the evil of the
Kauravas could only be defeated in a war of extreme violence, which
the Mahatma elsewhere calls a righteous one.6 The problem was not
simply that good men refused to withdraw from evil, but that evil itself,
or rather the violence it gave rise to, was also a product of goodness
and inextricable from it. Here, in the mutual entanglement of truth and
violence, untruth and non-violence, might be found the latter’s cause
of death. This was why it became imperative to think about action and
its inevitable violence in greater detail, because non-violence alone was
capable neither of replacing nor even of comprehending it. In other
words the task Gandhi set himself in his interpretation of the Bhagavad
Gita was not to avoid action, or even its inevitable violence, but to attend
upon its very materiality in a sort of phenomenology.
Spinning and celibacy, we saw earlier, provided the Mahatma with
illustrations of moral action, having been chosen as experiments for his
inquiries into its nature. Experiment, of course, was the English word
Gandhi used to describe the various practices, such as non-cooperation
or non-violence, which he promoted from time to time as ways of being
faithful to the truth. Like the practice of non-violence, spinning and
celibacy were also not instrumental activities, being meant neither to
5
Ibid., 16 original emphasis.
6
Ibid., 36.
produce homespun cloth in the first instance, nor to endow the body
with some unusual power in the second. Indeed Gandhi speaks of
these practices without once mentioning anything they are supposed to
produce, since it is precisely their character as disengaged actions that
he is interested in. This is especially true of celibacy, which most clearly
exits the instrumental logic of purpose and production, cause and
effect, that for Gandhi marks the nature of violence, and of politics in
particular as a practice of violence: “If destruction is violence, creation,
too, is violence. Procreation, therefore, involves violence. The creation
of what is bound to perish certainly involves violence.”7 Unlike practices
of non-violence, however, spinning and celibacy are not negatively
conceived, but important in their own right as experiments in freedom.
What is more, they are the most material and weighty of actions,
because disengaged from the idealizing imperative of instrumental
thought, for which every act has meaning only in terms of some vision
of the future, whether as cause or effect, purpose or product. Indeed
violence might well represent the real outcome of such unreal acts that
take leave of their own materiality to try and control the future. So in his
example from the Gita invoked earlier, it becomes clear that for Gandhi
Duryodhana’s plan to annihilate the Pandavas is violent because unreal,
relying as it does on the support of good men like Karna, Bhishma or
Drona, whose purposes in supporting the Kauravas were very different
from his own. In fact the Mahatma suggests that these men fought under
Duryodhana’s banner for completely non-political reasons, including
compassion and generosity, which gave their actions materiality and so
goodness. The point here is that actions intending to control the future
not only are perfectly ideal in themselves, but are ideal also because
they can never quite control even their own instruments.
By this point a typically Gandhian reversal has been effected, and we
realize that the very peculiarity of his concerns with spinning or celibacy
in fact represents the peculiar materiality of everyday life, which forever
escapes the idealizing violence of instrumental action, itself another
name for politics. Spinning and celibacy are therefore practices in the
materiality of action as a characteristic of everyday life, intended to
restore to all action its gravity or existential weight. But this is by no
means a nostalgic or even desperate effort to retain some old-fashioned
materiality within the abstract politics of modernity. Indeed we might
7
Ibid., 292.
even say the opposite, that the increasing idealization of modern politics
actually makes the materiality of action more disruptive and powerful.
In any case, the Mahatma is adamant about the intractable nature
of such materiality, which he merely brings to political consciousness
by offering it up as a sacrifice to the latter’s idealism. In other words,
everyday action can only protect itself from politics by attending to its own
materiality, just as politics can only protect itself from its own idealism
by recognizing the intractable nature of action’s everyday materiality.
But the act is material in more ways than lacking instrumentality,
which as I have described it thus far may quite rightly be confused with
a lack of motive or intention. What makes an action instrumental is
neither motive nor intention, but the illusion that it might be absolutely
created and absolutely controlled: that it might therefore be a sovereign
act in the peculiarly theological sense this word has for modern politics.
As the fantasy of a creation from out of the void, such action may
characterize monotheistic thought, but is opposed by the notion of
karma, action seen to be completely determined by a chain of cause and
effect which begins before the actor’s birth and continues well after his
death. I shall return to this notion of action as part of a predetermined
universe illustrated by the idea of rebirth, as well as to the role it plays
in Gandhi’s interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita. For the moment it
suffices to note the following irony: that the act can only accede to its
materiality and thus also its autonomy if it is limited, contingent and
determined by the weight of a past rather than by the idealism of a
future. In other words, action enjoys its materiality and autonomy only
if it is separated from the instrumental thought that would idealize it,
and it retains its separateness only insofar as it finds itself in a universe
of determinations and is so unfree. Gandhi’s phenomenology of the act
is about precisely this unfreedom of everyday action, which he reflects
upon in the concept of authority as the one form of determination that
is moral rather than merely brutish in its force.
The Paradox of Authority

Now the paradox of authority is that it commands and forbids choice
at the same moment, in effect demanding that a moral actor dignify his
will by exercising it once only in the decision to obey. The weightiness
of this choice, says the Mahatma, lends it a reality unknown to those
who choose lightly and out of self-indulgence:
The action of a man whose intellect is not fixed on one aim, who is not
single-minded in his devotion, will branch out in many directions. As the
mind leaps, monkey-fashion, from branch to branch, so does the intellect.
A person who clings to his life will seek help from any vaid or saint or witch-
doctor whom he meets. Similarly, a monkey will fly from branch to branch
and ultimately meet an untimely death, the victim of a sling-shot. The mind
of a person of uncertain purpose grows weak day by day and becomes so
unsettled that he can think of nothing except what is in his mind at the
moment.8
Choice, therefore, becomes unreal by repetition and ends up as a

purely mental fixation on self-gratification. Giving it up to authority,
however, allows choice access to reality by freeing its agent from good
as well as evil, seen as objects to which the moral actor is attached, and
in whose name he justifies his action:
We say that we should offer up everything to God, even evil. The two, good
and evil, are inseparable, and so we should offer up both. If we wish to give
up sin, we should give up virtue too. There is possessiveness in clinging even
to virtue.9
Authority, then, in giving the act its materiality and autonomy in the
most everyday manner, by the same token gives it a kind of freedom as
well. And it is the authoritative nature of this freedom that the Mahatma
proceeds to study in his interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita.
It should now be evident why Gandhi, in the statement I first quoted
from him, on the one hand distinguished non-violence from spinning
or celibacy, and on the other described these practices of the ashram as
active ones, compared to the passive practices of the world beyond. His
commentary on the Gita conducts a phenomenological examination of
the act’s materiality, in terms of what he considered to be its necessary
relationship with an authority that alone bestows upon it some measure
of freedom. And while such speculations might seem at times arcane,
it is worth repeating that they insistently take everyday life as their
subject, and deal with it in the most quotidian of ways. Indeed it
was the Mahatma’s frequent self-description as a crank, and his very
obsession with what he often called fads, such as fasting, spinning or
celibacy, that put his concerns squarely at the centre of everyday life.
8
Ibid., 40–41.
9
Ibid., 183.
And this is not even to mention his immense popularity, which to this
day brooks no rival anywhere in the subcontinent. But why think about
action, authority and freedom through a reading of the Bhagavad
Gita? The suitability of its content apart, it was the sacred authority of
the text that drew Gandhi to it: not because the Gita was in fact such
an authority, but because its reading allowed Gandhi to pose authority
itself as a question for all action. It goes without saying that posed as
it was in a reading of the Gita, this question enabled the Mahatma to
address the nature of action in his typically indirect way, as if from
outside the arena of politics.
Of course, the Gita had been an important text for modern Hinduism
since the nineteenth century, especially among nationalists and religious
reformers (The names Vivekananda, Tilak and Aurobindo immediately
come to mind). With these men, very interested in their country’s political
life, the text seems to have functioned as an authority alternative to that
of politics seen in the traditional terms of artha or power. Is it possible
that given their political subjection during this period, the Bhagavad
Gita allowed these men to distinguish authority from power in a way
that refused even to define the former as a legitimate form of the latter?
Whatever the case, such colonial interpretations of the Gita brought to
the fore a thinking of ethics rather than of politics. But the fact that it
is war that provides the arena of moral action, rather than simply its
limits, for the Bhagavad Gita as much as for its colonial interpreters,
suggests that this ethics was not meant to be something inner or spiritual
as juxtaposed with the outer or material world of the state. Indeed we
shall see with Gandhi that morality addressed the politics of the state
precisely by undoing these divisions of inner and outer, spiritual and
material, which were all products of the latter’s modernity.
For Gandhi, then, the Bhagavad Gita was neither history nor scripture,
and certainly not philosophy. To begin with, the Mahatma always made
it clear that far from being a symbol of precolonial authenticity, the
text for him was completely mediated by his first reading of its English
translation while a student in London:
It was at this time that, coming into contact with two Englishmen, I was
induced to read the Gita: I say “induced” because I had no particular desire
to read it. When these two friends asked me to read the Gita with them, I
felt rather ashamed. The consciousness that I knew nothing about our holy
books made me feel miserable. The reason, I think, was my vanity. I did not
know Sanskrit well enough to be able to read the Gita without help. The two
English friends, on their part, did not know Sanskrit at all. They gave me Sir
Edwin Arnold’s excellent translation of the poem. I went through the whole
of it immediately and was fascinated by it.10
In any case, continues Gandhi, the book is not a work of history for
both epistemological and ethical reasons:
The Mahabharata is not a history; it is a dharma-grantha. Who can ever

describe an actual event? A man cannot exactly describe even a drop of
water seen by him. God having created him so weak, how can he describe
an actual event perfectly? In this battle, moreover, the warriors were, on
the one side, the sons of Dharma, Vayu, Indra and Ashvinikumars and,
on the other, a hundred brothers all born at the same instant. Have we
ever heard of such a thing actually happening? Duryodhana rode on the
chariot of adharma, and Arjuna that of dharma. The battle described here
is, therefore, a struggle between dharma and adharma.11
As far as its status as scripture is concerned, Gandhi claims that the Gita
is not a particularly Hindu book but rather a non-sectarian teaching of
ethics: “This is a work which persons belonging to all faiths can read. It
does not favour any sectarian point of view. It teaches nothing but pure
ethics.”12 Far from being a book of revelation in the monotheistic sense,
it is actually a second-order source of authority, important only because
one cannot find true gurus or preceptors in the present age. The text is
important, in other words, not as a source of revelation, since it is not
in fact capable of solving the problems of everyday life, but instead as
an authority for everyday action:
If by Shastra we mean a book, the Bible, the Koran and other books have
been before mankind for so many hundreds of years, but no-one has come
to the end of these problems. The intention of this verse is to tell us not to
look upon ourselves as an authority, that is, not to be guided by our wishes
and feelings.13
What does it mean for the Bhagavad Gita to be an authority? For one
thing, it means that the text is not a work of philosophy but one whose
10
Ibid., 9.
11
Ibid., 15.
12
Ibid., 280.
13
Ibid., 260.
very externality allows individuals to judge their actions in its terms,

and in doing so to form a community of interpreters whose debates
over the text submit the actions of each one of them to examination.
For the Mahatma, therefore, the Gita, like the unavailable guru, is an
authority chosen and even interpreted, though not in a way that sets
specialized learning over the generality of moral action that is available
to all:
Simple like a villager that I am, why should I insist on reading the Gita
myself ? Why should Mahadev refuse to do that? Why did I take this upon
myself ? Because I have the necessary humility. I believe that we are all
imperfect in one way or another. But I know well enough what dharma
means, and have tried to follow it in my life. If I have somewhere deep in
me the spirit of dharma and loving devotion to God, I shall be able to kindle
it in you.14
As an external authority the Bhagavad Gita creates a community of

interpreters by preventing subjects from speaking in their own names.
It also prevents the actions of these subjects from being idealized in
the instrumentality of political life, thus giving them both freedom
and materiality. This is why Gandhi was so insistent upon maintaining
the externality of the Gita, prescribing for its recitation all manner of
ritual attentions, because it was “necessary to create an atmosphere of
holiness round the Gita.”15 Yet at the end of the day he had to confess
that the book alone offered no help:
The conclusion of our study of the Gita is that we should pray and read holy
books, and know our duty and do it. If any book can help, it is this. Really,
however, what help can a book or a commentary on it give?16
The point of authority, therefore, was neither its power nor its truth
but merely its externality. This comes through very clearly in that part
of Gandhi’s commentary on the Gita where he suddenly describes a
Protestant named Wallace, who experimented with Hinduism before
turning Roman Catholic and accepting the authority of the Pope:
If the Pope is immoral, there is bound to be corruption in society, but any

person who has decided that he will do nothing on his own but do only what
14
Ibid., 17.
15
Ibid., 283.
16
Ibid., 283.
the Pope asks him to do, will only benefit himself. A Protestant would say
that one should obey one’s conscience, but this Wallace kept his conscience
out and surrendered himself to the Pope. His giving up concern for his
conscience was a great idea.17
Gandhi was not interested in a book called the Bhagavad Gita or

even in its message, but rather in the kind of moral action that the
external authority they represented made possible, such externality
being a prerequisite for the autonomy and materiality of action. His
reading of the Gita was therefore nothing more than an exploration in
the nature of action.
Virtue Out of Necessity

The setting for Gandhi’s exploration of moral action was Arjuna’s
celebrated dilemma on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Arjuna’s
dilemma, according to the Mahatma, was not whether he should or
should not kill his relatives, but how any choice he might make in the
circumstances would be at all meaningful morally. After all, whether he
killed or did not, a slaughter would in any case ensue, and one in which
he was fully implicated. How, then, could Arjuna either claim or avoid
responsibility by any choice he might make? Or as Gandhi puts it:
Let us suppose that Arjuna flees the battlefield. Though his enemies are
wicked people, are sinners, they are his relations and he cannot bring
himself to kill them. If he leaves the field, what would happen to those vast
numbers on his side? If Arjuna went away, leaving them behind, would
the Kauravas have mercy on them? If he left the battle, the Pandava army
would be simply annihilated. What, then, would be the plight of their wives
and children?.. . If Arjuna had left the battlefield, the very calamities which
he feared would have befallen them. Their families would have been ruined,
and the traditional dharma of these families and the race would have been
destroyed. Arjuna, therefore, had no choice but to fight.18
The question here is therefore the opposite of that normally asked in

discussions of ethics: not how one should exercise choice, but how an
act might retain moral meaning in a situation where choice itself has
become superfluous. And choice becomes superfluous only in a world
17
Ibid., 287.
18
Ibid., 20.
where every act includes what it intends as well as its opposite, thus
giving rise to violence. Such a totality could be addressed neither by a
calculus of means and ends nor by the arbitrariness of conscience, but
instead, Gandhi thought, by action that abandoned choice altogether,
which was after all meaningless if it could not determine the future.
For only action that gave up the myth of control or effect might occur
within a universe of determinations without itself falling prey to the
sublime character of its totality.
Starting with the criticism that moral choice was delusionary and
self-indulgent, Gandhi went on to reject its unacknowledged politics, by
which such choice was held to determine the future and so retrospectively
justify itself, just as ends are said to justify means. But how was choice or
will to be eliminated from moral behaviour? For one thing by rejecting
the quest for self-realization upon which it was so often predicated in
an ostentatious disavowal of crass instrumentality. Though a votary
of self-realization at other times, the Mahatma was deeply suspicious
of its narcissistic potential in his commentary on the Gita, because he
thought that such a concern deprived action of its gravity by turning it
into one among many options in an endless quest for fulfillment. Self-
realization as a spiritual activity should therefore be replaced by self-
purification as a bodily one:
We discussed yesterday that we should speak not of “self-realization” but of

“self-purification”. Self-purification is to be achieved through the body. We
act through the atman [soul] to the degree that we act through the body. In
truth, however, the atman does nothing, nor does it cause anything to be
done.19
In other words self-realization was only possible by way of bodily

action as a form of self-purification, since the self did not exist without
a body that determined it:
All this talk about knowledge is because of the body; otherwise, for an
unembodied one, how can there be any question of knowledge? The highest
knowledge of all in the world is knowledge of the self. Moreover, the idea of
a human being having no body exists only in our imagination. Mortification
of the body, therefore, is the only means of self-realization and the only yajna
[sacrifice] for everyone in the world.20
19
Ibid., 155.
20
Ibid., 84.
Running against the current of moral thought down the ages,

this was an extraordinary attack on the supposedly free subject of
ethics, conceived in terms of a spiritual or mental self that remained
unhampered by the body. It was also an attack on the knowledge that
gave substance to the freedom of such an ethical subject. Both attacks
were prompted at least in part by Gandhi’s recognition that this self
and its knowledge were necessarily confined to a few adepts alone,
serving at most only as ideals for the rest and not therefore the stuff
of everyday morality. But it is important to note that the Mahatma did
not reject this form of ethics because it was difficult for the generality
of people; indeed he thought them capable of far more in the way
of sacrifice than anything prescribed a moral elite by the votaries of
self-realization. What he objected to was the fact that such aristocratic
forms of ethical life depended upon luxuries like time and learning that
were not available to most. But more than this he thought that self-
hood could not exist apart from the body and that knowledge was never
adequate to the choice required of it. And so Gandhi had to eliminate
moral choice altogether by sacrificing its agent and knowledge to action
as a process of forgetting. This involved disciplining oneself to behave
in such a way as to make morality something habitual and spontaneous,
in the same way as the body functioned automatically and was so free:
When a man’s ears, nose, eyes, and so on, go on performing their functions
naturally without conscious willing on his part—the winking of the eyelids
does not need to be willed, there must be some disease if it is otherwise—we
say of such a person that his sense organs, having become free of attachments
and aversions, function spontaneously.21
Having in this marvelous way turned willing into a disease and

revealed the body as a site of freedom, the Mahatma went on to
recommend that the latter’s spontaneity be extended to moral life by a
practice of forgetting that was both familiar and easily available:
When typing on a typewriter has become mechanical work with the typist,
the finger will alight on the right letter even when he is not looking at the
keyboard; he who is able to work in such a spontaneous manner and is
fully alert, like the typist, in everything he does, may be described as the
Buddha.22
21
Ibid., 59.
22
Ibid., 133.
But forgetting has to do with more than spontaneous action, and

involves putting even the objects of one’s morality out of mind, so that
these latter cannot become part of some bargain in which one good
deed is repaid by another. For this orientation of an act to the future
would simply smuggle politics back into ethics by an obscure back
door:
We should not serve anyone with the hope that he, too, will serve us one
day, but we may serve him because the Lord dwells in him and we serve that
Lord. If we hear anyone crying in distress for help, we should immediately
run to him and help him. We should help the Lord crying in distress. After
doing what was needed, we should feel that it was all a dream. Would the
Lord ever cry in distress?23
Though it seems far-fetched, Gandhi’s advice in the passage above

offers us a way of dissociating moral action from the politics of
reciprocal obligation and contract, avoiding which entails forgetting
ethical relations and therefore rejecting any community based upon
them. This was certainly the Mahatma’s way of avoiding all action
motivated by sentimental reasons like pity, horror and even hatred, each
deriving from an imagination exercised by stories of needless suffering.
So while he advocated the display of suffering voluntarily undergone,
Gandhi thought that it could only inspire admiration in the hearts of
observers, and prompt their conversion to the sufferer’s cause, rather
than calling forth passions stoked up by tales of victimization and the
obligations of charity as much as revenge that they implied. Indeed, as
responses to suffering, charity and revenge used the same language and
thus amounted to the same thing, which was perhaps why one could
so easily turn into the other. Quite unsentimental himself, Gandhi
remained level-headed during the most tumultuous of times, refusing
to enter into what he thought of as a political relationship of pity and
gratitude with his interlocutors.
Action Without a Subject

All this meant that the traditional figure of the moral subject, constituted
by will and freed from bodily dependency, had to be replaced by
someone quite different. Gandhi chose as his moral exemplars the
23
Ibid., 148.
figures of the child and the slave, who had in the past, a few religious
ideals apart, served as the very emblems of moral lack. While criticizing
the unhealthy effect that slavery had upon the master, who was after all
tied to his slave by self-interest, the Mahatma saw in the latter someone
who could forget himself because he was unable to exercise choice:
The slave can never conceive of his existence without his master. A person
who has the name of another on his lips all the twenty-four hours will forget
himself in the latter. The atman [individual soul] becomes the paramatman
[universal soul] in the same manner.24
The slave, then, becomes for Gandhi the model of a moral subject,
as indeed he was for a number of religious traditions in India and
beyond. Similarly, children were examples of virtue because they alone
could be counted as truly free, their physical, and even intellectual or
spiritual, needs all being taken care of by adults, so that they could live
non-politically in the immediate present:
If children have faith, they can live as a sthitaprajna [one who is single-minded
or self-possessed] does. They have their parents and teachers to look after
their needs. They have, therefore, no need to take thought for themselves.
They should always be guided by their elders. A child who lives in this
manner is a brahmachari [celibate], a muni [saint], a sthitaprajna. He is so in the
sense that he does what he is asked to and carries out every instruction.25
By locating traditional virtues like freedom and faith, to say nothing

of celibacy and asceticism, in the unexpected figures of children and
slaves, Gandhi was doing more than pointing out the superficiality
and contradictions of older ethical models. He was also attempting
to universalize moral ideals in non-hierarchical ways and see them at
work in every aspect of social life. This did not, of course, mean that
the Mahatma glorified slavery and advised obedience to all authority.
Indeed his own life was dedicated precisely to contesting such authority,
whether in the form of politics or religion, and however imperfectly
he might be seen to have done so. Obedience was important because
it was a necessary and inevitable part of social life in general. And
if anything it was more important for moral life in particular, since
even an ethics founded upon conscience requires obedience to the call
24
Ibid., 49.
25
Ibid., 49.
of one’s better self if it is to function. Instead of seeing in obedience

merely a limit to moral action, in other words, Gandhi recognized it as
an irreducible element of ethics, one whose virtue needed to be fostered
in its own right, much as religions of various kinds had always done,
though perhaps not for the same reasons. And in doing so he showed
up the poverty of ethical principles, as they are commonly understood,
confined as these are to a moral aristocracy while prevaricating about
crucial features of social life, obedience being only the most obvious
instance of these.
While children and slaves might have provided models of virtue for
the Mahatma, he did not think that moral subjects were all the same,
and possessed no generic idea about them. On the contrary, he defined
their obligations in the most multifarious ways by citing the old notion
of swadharma (individual duty), according which people belonging to
different castes, genders and generations each had their own particular
role to play, also therefore owing obedience to particular authorities.26
Opposed to the standardized subject of modern law, and therefore
of politics as well, swadharma could not be determined by others but
only decided by oneself. And its task was not simply to differentiate
one’s own duty from that of others, but also to distinguish among the
recipients of one’s action. This ostensibly unequal treatment, both of
oneself and of others, produces real equality in an almost communist
sense, as in the famous shibboleth “from each according to his ability, to
each according to his needs”. And it does so by turning the subject who
distinguishes and differentiates into someone who by that very token is
samadarshi, able to see everything equally:
When can we say of a person that he is samadarshi? Can we say so of that

man who would give equal quantities to an elephant and an ant? Indeed no.
We can say it of him who gives to each according to his or her need.27
The test of equal regard, however, as of moral action in general, was

undoubtedly sacrifice, which Gandhi prized above knowledge, freedom
and the like because it was the only moral form available to everyone
without distinction. Indeed the bulk of his commentary on the Gita is
taken up with a discussion of sacrifice, whether it is called spinning,
celibacy, fasting or dying. For the Bhagavad Gita, of course, it is not
26
Ibid., 301.
27
Ibid., 157.
dying but killing that is seen as the ultimate sacrifice, in its own way
much more arduous than dying when it involves killing one’s relatives.
Though in principle opposed to killing, the Mahatma did see it as
being unavoidable on certain occasions, for instance when it came to
protecting the weak.28 But his approbation of the act went much further
when describing Arjuna’s dilemma:
The Gita permits no distinction between one’s relatives and others. If one
must kill, one should kill one’s people first. Shri Krishna asks Arjuna: “What
is this you are saying about people being your relations?” The Gita wants to
free him from this ignorant distinction of some people being his relations
and others not. He has resolved to kill. It was not right, then, that he should
shrink from killing particular individuals.29
The duty enunciated by swadharma required that one’s own relatives

be killed before anybody else, this proof of detachment and equal
regard being the truest way in which killing could partake of morality.
Such forms of killing even represented the most sublime of moral acts,
because they entailed greater sacrifices than merely dying for others.
And so Gandhi repeatedly praised the sacrificial killings, whether only
intended or actually carried out, that were ascribed to heroic or saintly
figures like Arjuna, Harischandra and Prahlad, though he did not,
of course, recommend the practice among his contemporaries. How
did the apostle of non-violence come to see killing as the highest form
of sacrifice, and therefore as the supreme moral act? The process of
reasoning that led him to this conclusion was driven by a desire for
universality: ethics was either possible everywhere and available to
everyone or it had no meaning at all. We have already seen how this
desire informed the Mahatma’s rejection of choice, knowledge and self-
realization for authority, obedience and self-purification. It is because
he did not think any morality worthwhile that abdicated responsibility
in situations of extreme violence, or had to be confined to a moral
aristocracy, that Gandhi ended up investing traditional moral categories
like authority and sacrifice with a universality they had not previously
possessed. For his idea of ethical universality was fundamentally
egalitarian in nature, and thus tied to the politics of anti-colonialism,
though without partaking of its instrumentality, which bartered the
virtues of the present for ideals of freedom and equality in the future.
28
Ibid., 25.
29
Ibid., 25.
This is the sense in which Gandhi’s morality can be said to exist in

the shadow of politics, with whose practices it had perforce to engage,
if with the gravest of doubts. Rather than simply an inheritance from
some Indian past, therefore, his deployment of traditional moral
categories, all transformed in the process, might be recognized as an
effort to avoid those, like legal freedom and equality, that provide the
currency of modern politics. And this was important not because
politics was altogether evil, but because it was founded upon an
instrumentality that sacrificed the present for the future, thus denying
the former its existential weight while robbing all action of reality. The
Mahatma’s alternative, then, was to sacrifice the future for the present,
in the faith that the former would be better secured by attending to the
latter’s virtue. Controlling the present, after all, was more feasible than
predicting the future, which was one reason why self-purification and
sacrifice were so crucial for Gandhi, and part of the same logic as his
otherwise inexplicable rejection of locomotives and fast cars, which he
thought deprived their passengers precisely of a lived present.
Indeed the Mahatma can be said to have inhabited the present more
fully than anybody in the last century, and to have invested it with more
significance than it had ever possessed, if only by replacing the fleeting
and illusory character of this category with a gravity appropriate to
modern times. And so to become arenas for moral action, war and
killing had also to be diverted from their orientation to the future and
made fully present. For Gandhi saw in the battlefield not an exception
to ethics but the very stuff of its reality, if only because it provided
a site for moral action that politics could not occupy without risking
self-destruction. Instead of withdrawing from such violence, then,
moral action had to prove its mettle by domesticating and even going
beyond it, to occupy an arena such as Arjuna did on the battlefield
of Kurukshetra, where politics might not venture because choice had
been rendered superfluous there. Only by exceeding its future-making
violence in this way would politics finally be cast in morality’s shadow:
In this world which baffles our reason, violence there will then always be.
The Gita shows us the way which will lead us out of it, but it also says that we
cannot escape it simply by running away from it like cowards. Anyone who
prepares to run away would do better, instead, to kill and be killed.30
30
Ibid., 14.
7
Ambedkar’s Inheritances
Aishwary Kumar
Widely perceived as the most radical thinker and critic of caste in

twentieth-century India, B. R. Ambedkar also remains the most
enduring symbol of that country’s emancipatory democracy.
Relentlessly insurgent in thought and resolutely legislative in ambition,
flirtatious with Marx but powerfully tied to the vicissitudes of his own
revolutionary commitments, Ambedkar was not merely the foremost
constitutionalist of free India but also the remorseless elaborator of the
hollowness of the nation’s freedom that had remained untouched by
equality. Strikingly original in the way he conceptualized the varieties
of power at the intersection of state and religion, Ambedkar was at
once given to legislative reason and scriptural enchantments. He was
born an untouchable within the Hindu fold, an identity he disclaimed
on moral, political and religious grounds; and he died a Buddhist,
to which he publicly converted in a spectacular dalit disavowal of
free India’s tolerance of untouchability. His prolific itinerary and his
rigorously cosmopolitan cognition of suffering, one which allowed
him to apprehend the negro, the Jew and the dalit within the narrative
of universal dehumanization, secures Ambedkar rather decisively in
the deformed constellation of twentieth-century humanistic thought.
Such, clearly, are the legitimate broad strokes, if more than slightly
homogenizing contours, of the didactic, secularist, and sometimes
grudging nationalist appropriations of Ambedkar as the thinker of the
Indian political.
These are no doubt powerful hegemonic readings of Ambedkar’s
politics. But what is Ambedkar’s “politics of reading”? By which I
mean in this essay not so much the overdetermined political interest

and pragmatic conception of rights that supposedly underlay all his
intellectual labour, a viewpoint curiously endorsed by his nationalist
critics, liberal advocates and dalit hagiographers alike, tied historically
as they all have been to the impasse and imperative of numbers, first
under the constraints of imperial expansion of franchise and then of
parliamentary democracy. Rather, by referring to Ambedkar’s politics
of reading, this essay points towards his insurgent and heterogeneous
response to the unitary power of tradition to frame meaning, and the
aesthetics of his resistance against that power. His responsibility, that is,
to rigorously, doggedly and politically read that scripture which bars the
untouchable from its very “economy of reading”, yet also constitutes,
by the sheer reproducibility of its own authority and permissiveness, the
untouchable’s fraught inheritance. Ambedkar’s politics of responsibility,
his method of “excessive reading”, constitutes his desire at once to
violate this inheritance and to recuperate its plural touchable histories.
In that world of touchability that Ambedkar had conjured in his
dream, authenticity of origins was clearly less important than the
destination of history. Origins were dubious and secretive, their claim
to authenticity dodgy and their textuality suspect. Repeatedly invaded,
settled, interpreted and translated, as Ambedkar loved to repeat, the
Brahmanic authenticity of India itself buckled under the pressure of
a revolutionary counterhistory. For someone whose acute awareness of
the problem of violence came not always by way of modernity but
fundamentally by way of his difficult relationship with antiquity and
the medieval, the Gita opened up for Ambedkar a radical and slippery
economy of reading. It was a passage both attractive because of its
promiscuous interpretive world and its perversely alluring “economy
of violence”, and repelling because of its contaminating mythological
power. As a text within scripture, the Gita became in fact a striking
allegory for Ambedkar’s history of a disrupted India. In its patchwork of
interpretive maneuvers; its meticulously cultivated aura; its concealment
of those cultic practices which gave it form and content; its suppression
of plebian orality; its fratricidal remorselessness; its unacknowledged
textual neighbourhoods and arbitrary political boundaries that cut
deep across a long history of degrading Indic violence and subjugation;
and its construction of a timeless theological imaginary in order to hide
its depressing, willful modernity, the Gita re-enacted just as it concealed
Ambedkar’s Inheritances 129
the foreignness of the idea of India to itself and to Brahmanic Hindu

thought. It is this secretive concealment of the modernity of the text,
a secrecy that is foundational to antiquity by its very name, which
Ambedkar sought to unlock.
Would the dissolution of this secrecy, this drive to force open the
spurious antiquity of the Gita, enable him to write a wholly different
history of touchability? Is a heretical history possible without that
inheritance which, by its very name, is always in excess of one’s capacity
to respond? Could Ambedkar stand untouched by the excessiveness of
this inheritance and its claim to universality and institute a new and
ideal politics of responsibility? Is there an ideality, a touchable history
which could be purely political, untouched by the repressive morality
of the canon and its foundational secrecy? On what kind of ideality
would that touchable history be founded if not on another universality,
equally violent, excessive and purist?
Legislations of Fratricide
The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history.
Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence
In his meticulous attention to both form and content, to the
hermeneutics and politics of texts, in other words, Ambedkar comes
remarkably close to that other distraught figure in twentieth-century
thought, Walter Benjamin. I will leave aside the checkered relationship
with historicism and humanism that both these figures share in the
constellation of twentieth-century revolutionary thought, and focus
here instead on their strikingly similar responses to the question of fate
and the law.1 At the common core of both Benjamin’s and Ambedkar’s
political thought, which makes this contrapuntality possible, is a
painstaking rethinking of the mythic, numbing and pacifying force that
sustains and reproduces the most oppressive forms of power in their
1
The mobilization of legal and legislative metaphors in Walter Benjamin’s early essay on the
“Critique of Violence” and Ambedkar’s on the Gita is suggestively similar. Where Benjamin
invokes the police, the military and the state, Ambedkar deploys the metaphors of the
courtroom, “trial for murder”, and Krishna as a defending lawyer and “dictator”. See Dr
Babasaheb Ambedkar, “Philosophic Defense of Counter-Revolution: Krishna and His Gita”
in idem, Writings and Speeches (henceforth BAWS), ed. Vasant Moon (Education Department,
Govt. of Maharashtra, 1987), vol. 3, 365.
respective traditions. Where Benjamin’s work invokes the divinity of

the revolutionary general strike, Ambedkar’s reading of the Gita reveals
exactly the opposite: the counterrevolutionary propensity inherent in
fratricide that masquerades as holy, divinely sanctioned war. If, for
Benjamin, responsibility resides in the ethical violence of the strike,
Ambedkar’s responsibility hinges on the non-ethical. It heretically
breaches Hindu mythology and its Brahmanic secrets to force open
a recalcitrant tactile space for the untouchable. Not for him the “pure
means” of Benjamin’s non-programmatic, utopian, divine violence,2
which as Werner Hamacher has observed can easily lapse into an
abstention from politics itself.3 Ambedkar’s critical space is animated by
a stubborn intensity, a political responsibility not merely to dismantle the
myth of the canon but also to situate that canon within the contingent
histories of scriptural interpretation and popular religious practice.
Yet what is common to both these political thinkers is the idea of
contamination and decay of divinity by myth.4 At the core of both
Benjamin’s and Ambedkar’s thought, in other words, is the attempt to
lay bare the powerful aura of tradition and modernity whose legitimacy
is enforced not by divine sanction but by the myth that goes in its name.
Ambedkar’s Gita, by which I mean his readings of that text, is first
and foremost a political discourse which must be placed, according
to him, within the larger juridical problematic of sovereignty. It is a
discourse, before anything else, on the law. For the Mahabharata is
fundamentally a lyrical exposition of fratricide and war.5 Placed within
this problematic, the Gita captures that moment when the juridical
imperative of war interrupts the ethical demands of brotherhood.
Sovereignty calls for exceptional action, even if such an action entails
the supreme sacrifice of all things familial and affective. It is by elevating
this decisive moment of war to the state of ethical exception and by
raising fratricide to the status of singular responsibility that Krishna
successfully “provokes” Arjun to pick up his arms again.6 This moment
2
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, in idem, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed., Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA,: Harvard University Press, 1996), 252.
3
Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence”, in Andrew
Benjamin and Peter Osborne, eds., Destruction and Experience: Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy
(Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 113–14.
4
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 251.
5
Ambedkar, “The Literature of Brahminism”, BAWS, 3: 261–2.
6
Ibid., 262.
of provocation, which is merely a singular instance of calling to war,

assumes within the Gita a lawmaking force; in other words, it assumes
the form of myth that posits and henceforth preserves the law of all war
and all duty. Ambedkar’s staging of this moment of decision resonates
strikingly with Benjamin’s attempt to liberate divine law, which is the
law of justice, from the stupefying inertia generated by mythic forces.7
Not for Ambedkar, the fear and trembling that is Arjun’s condition
when Krishna reveals to him his infinite, universal and celestial form,
“with countless mouths and eyes” and “raising divine weapons beyond
count”.8 The trembling of the subject, after all, is precisely what gives
the Gita its auratic capacity to posit the law of war as the law of action.
Stripped of this cultivated aura that clouds its mythic and bloody origin,
then, Ambedkar’s Gita reveals its true form: a reactionary “dogma of
counterrevolution”.
This conceptual move, which entails the rehabilitation of Gita in the
world of representation—a very political world of representation—is
crucial to Ambedkar’s critique of violence. It is here, after all, in its
founding at the moment of war, that the Gita finds its most violent
form, expansive in its call to fratricidal duty, but measured in its
political ambition, which is the legislative articulation of sovereignty.
It defends war, according to Ambedkar, on two grounds. The first
ground is that because the world is perishable and “man is mortal”, he
is “bound to die”. What difference does it make for the wise whether
“man dies a natural death or whether he is done to death as a result of
violence”?9 The violence of Ambedkar’s prose and the interpretation
itself is suggestive here. “Life is unreal”, he continues, “why shed tears
because it has ceased to be? Death is inevitable, why bother how it has
resulted?”10 It is worthwhile to quote at some length the second defence
of violence that Ambedkar’s Gita mounts:
It is a mistake to think that the body and the soul are one. They are separate.
Not only are the two quite distinct but they differ in-as-much as the body is
perishable while the soul is eternal and imperishable. When death occurs it
7
“Justice is the principle of all divine endmaking”, writes Benjamin, “power the principle of all
mythic lawmaking’. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 248.
8
The Bhagavad-Gita in the Mahabharata: A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. J. A. B. Van Buitenen
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 113. Henceforth The Bhagavad-Gita.
9
Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 360.
10
Ibid., 360.
is the body that dies. The soul never dies. Not only does it never die but air
cannot dry it, fire cannot burn it, and a weapon cannot cut it. It is therefore
wrong to say that when a man is killed his soul is killed. . . His soul discards
the dead body as a person discards his old clothes—wears a new ones [sic]
and carries on. As the soul is never killed, killing a person can never be a
matter of any movement. War and killing need therefore give no ground to
remorse or to shame, so argues the Bhagvat Gita.11
To Ambedkar, this would actually seem to be an “unheard of

defense of murder”.12 Despite his irony here, this critique of the Gita’s
representation of life as deathless abstraction is singularly important for
Ambedkar’s displacement of the ethical commandments that constitute
the text. Ambedkar, of course, goes farther than merely displacing its
ethics from politics. He attempts in fact to entirely empty the realm of
the political of moral constraints. No etiquette of critique, no hospitality
to tradition, no patience for abstraction even when few things are as
abstract and imperative for him as rights, no concession to sovereign
violence even when he must give up neither the idea of the state nor of
representation, and clearly a great deal of principled attention but no
cognitive sympathy towards the ethics of form: Ambedkar is a thinker
of pure politics, where political consequences of critique are much
more important than the merit of moral outcomes.
It is in this purity of means and meticulous unraveling of form that
Ambedkar’s corpus comes closest to Walter Benjamin’s. What both of
them emphasize is the importance of rescuing the body for itself, rather
than in the name of the soul or the “impure sacred”. Rescuing, that is,
the idea of the body’s vulnerability to injury and violence. For no matter
how sacred man is,13 Benjamin argues, his bodily life is always open to
suffering, always vulnerable to the painful experience of corporeality.
Now to suffer as a result of fate and because of conditions outside of
one’s control, Benjamin writes elsewhere, is one thing. This would be a
suffering free of guilt. But to suffer one’s corporeality with guilt, to blame
oneself for one’s suffering, is a telling sign that fate, or rather what goes
in the name of that fate, has managed to install the law of suffering in
its place. In other words, fate has transformed into the law—fate after
11
Ibid., 360.
12
Ibid., 364.
13
By which he means “that life in man that is identically present in earthly life, death and
afterlife”. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 251.
all is the law—when it naturalizes itself by making suffering look like

it is the problem of the sufferer. As Benjamin puts it, “Law condemns
not to punishment but to guilt”.14 It is precisely this law masquerading
as fate that Ambedkar too confronts: the law that puts the responsibility
and the guilt of being an untouchable on that which is untouchable. A
responsibility which is then legitimized as natural, for being born an
untouchable is indeed one’s fate and also one’s guilt.
This violation of life in the name of the law—that is, violation of
life in its most embodied form by being forbidden to touch—is enabled
by what Benjamin would call “lawmaking” violence. The moment of
lawmaking violence is the moment of instituting godly myths. In other
words, mythic violence stages itself as a lawmaking force in the name
of the gods or as gods’ manifestation and posits the law.15 This mythic
moment of law-positing or lawmaking does not remain merely a
moment. Instead, it expands and reproduces itself continuously outside
of its originary time, so that what started as momentary violence is
transformed into a general rule, a repeatable example and a universal
ethics. This infinite expansion of the mythic moment into the law enables
not just the making of law but also its preservation.16 What originates
at the exceptional moment as merely mythic violence, then, through
expansion and repetition goes on to found the general law. Put differently,
the law that exists is always already contaminated and ruined by the
myth which gives it the mystifying stability, a “sacrosanct” attribute, a
word Ambedkar uses for the Gita with a strikingly Benjaminian irony.
The critical node of thought that joins Benjamin’s lawmaking myth
with Ambedkar’s law of untouchability here is again that masquerade
which enables the sacrosanct, auratic reproduction of violence: fate. It
is from the “uncertain, ambiguous sphere of fate”, after all, that mythic
violence bursts upon the subject: Arjun in Ambedkar’s case, Niobe in
Benjamin’s.17 It stops short of killing the subject, but leaves in its trail a
profound guilt, respectively, either of not having answered the call of
14
And just before that: “Fate shows itself, therefore, in the view of life, as condemned, as having
essentially first been condemned and then become guilty”. Benjamin, “Fate and Character”,
204.
15
16
“All mythic, lawmaking violence, which we may call ‘executive’”, Benjamin writes, “is
pernicious”. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 252. Also see Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike”,
109.
17
duty or of having mistakenly underestimated the power of the gods.

Arjun’s trembling and the death of Niobe’s children both stage this
moment of violent law-positing, when not only is the God manifested
and revealed, but also his law is transformed into a call of obligation to
the infinite.
Looked at through this Benjaminian lens, Ambedkar’s critique
of the Gita begins to assume a radically impatient form, where his
condemnation of the canon is enabled not by evasion but precisely by
his exaggeration of its hermeneutic power; its capacity, in other words,
to legislate and conceal at once. For within the text, at the moment
of its enunciation, what is actually a call to fratricide is in due course
transformed (outside of it and through recursive practice) into the
law of action. If the Gita stages that mythic moment of exceptional
encounter between Krishna and Arjun—that is, the moment of
impending fratricide—it also has the capacity to expand the doctrine
of that moment into the law. In other words, the negation of the body
that inheres in the originary moment of the Gita, the refusal of the
body as a site of any experience, any tragedy, any remorse, and, above
all, any politics, does not merely remain a momentary doctrine. Nor
is the trivializing of the destructible body meant merely to stage the
exemplary “manifestation” of Krishna as an indestructible God. What
the negation means, instead, is the coming together of a reproducible,
recursive myth that legitimizes violence towards the body, towards
thinking of the body itself, as it begins to masquerade as divine
“sovereign” law.18 This violence towards human finitude, towards the
dark possibility of the destruction of man, is what Ambedkar, in the
manner of Fanon, polemically calls “murder”.19
Murder can, however, take dangerously banal and mundane forms.
Beneath the polemical effect for which Ambedkar deploys that word is a
simmering critique of the negation of the body in Krishna’s mythic law.
When thinking of violation from the untouchable space that Ambedkar
inhabits, after all, murder could come to mean much more than
destruction of “mere” life. For untouchability corrupts the untouchable
18
As Benjamin writes, while distinguishing mythic or “executive” violence from divine violence:
“Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be
called ‘sovereign violence’”. See Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 252.
19
Like when Fanon revolts on an equally angry humanist register, “I see constant denial of man,
an avalanche of murders.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, new trans. Richard Philcox
(New York: Grove Press, 2004), 236.
even without spilling blood.20 It demands the untouchable’s sacrifice

and secures his suffering, like all mythic violence, within the law. As
Benjamin puts it, “mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for
its own sake” which constantly “demands sacrifice”.21 Untouchability
is precisely that: the reduction of life to “mere existence” and the
mystification of the law as divine will. It is of critical importance to
Ambedkar and the source of considerable anger, then, that it is precisely
the body, reduced to mere existence, which is instituted as dispensable
in the law of the Gita. As an encounter between the infinite God and
the finite subject which occurs at the moment of a fratricidal war, the
Gita institutes a specific kind of lawmaking moment, violent in origin,
apparently disinterested in its politics, yet reproducible in its aura.22 A
moment, in other words, which can then be mobilized in nationalist
political theology toward a “law-preserving” end, where bodily suffering
can be permanently habilitated—or “bastardized”, as Benjamin calls
it23—as a source of ethics, but never apprehended, touched and treated
as a mark of juridical and historical injury.
While suffering of the self can now be given the name of absolute
obligation to God, and in more public moments to the nation or swaraj,
there would be no language to express the suffering of that which is
suffered not as ethics but under force. There would be no language to
conceptualize intimate bodily injury that is not practiced by the self
but inflicted by fellow men and legitimized by the sheer everydayness
of the law. Except that it is the sufferer’s fate. It is instructive to read
the word harijan as this lawmaking myth that institutes the untouchable
as the “manifestation of the gods”. The naming draws its legitimizing
force from the corporeal tragedy of the untouchable—of being born
untouchable—and reinscribes him in his own mythic fate as “God’s
child”. Reiterating, reminding, rehearsing, and even respecting the
untouchable’s tragedy by invoking the divine, the ethical act of naming
20
Blood anyway, writes Benjamin, is a symbol of “mere life”. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”,
250.
21
22
On the Gita’s “manipulation of the question of history” and its interest in the “apparent
disclosure of the law” see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 58. As Krishna
says, in Spivak’s astute rendering of the Gita’s legislative and semitic registers: “I make myself
whenever the Law is in decline”. Ibid., 53.
23
can then defer a fundamentally political imperative: touching the moral

law of untouchability itself.
Negative Sacred
Something is out of joint in the way the Gita acquires its legislative power
in the name of divinity. For Ambedkar, the divinity of Krishna and of
the Gita itself obfuscates the historicity of its beginnings, substituting
the text’s contingent temporal sedimentation with a timeless, mythic
origin. To him Krishna is in essence a fallible warrior, and only a dense
network of Brahmanic interpretation accumulated over time has lent
to his name a divine aura. Throughout the Mahabharata, for instance,
Krishna remains a subject of abuse because of his “low origins” and
“loose morals”.24 He is the classic Machiavellian figure whose name
attaches to “intrigue” and violation of “rules of war” a dubious and
pragmatic legitimacy. Such is Krishna’s wretched fallibility that even
Duryodhan, the Kaurava prince whose imperial ambitions are at the
centre of this epic fratricide, can accuse and abuse him and still be
endorsed by the “gods in heaven”. Ambedkar’s suspicion of the Gita
is here both hermeneutic and theological. For if the Gita had always
been a part of the Mahabharata at large, why does the “personality”
of this God sway so violently between these two textual moments? In
other words, how and why is a wretched human intriguer in the master
text strategically elevated to divinity within the decisive event of the
encounter that is the Gita?25
In itself and despite Ambedkar’s resistance, this elevation of
Krishna is not a dubious manoeuvre when viewed from inside the
dense web of events that constitute the epic. The cultural force of
the Mahabharata as epic resides precisely in its humanity and in its
often perverse highlighting of the fallibility of gods and men alike. Its
enduring political charm for the nationalist imaginary is a function of
its complex narrative network that links several generations of betrayal,
friendship and war together, eventually culminating in the delivering
of justice. In fact, Ambedkar was himself situated in that hermeneutic
field of infinite interpretive possibilities that the epic’s, and within it the
Gita’s, mythological complexity opened up. It is his own worldliness, his
24
Ambedkar, ‘‘Krishna and His Gita’’, 375.
25
Ibid., 376.
corporeal awareness of being untouchable and the worldly tragedy that

attaches to it, that opens up for him the space of radical displacement
inside the Mahabharata; an immanent displacement enabled by the
transparent humanness and the moral lapses intrinsic to the epic. His
countermemory, after all, is given no more to historicist fidelity and no
less to radical mythology than that of the epic’s other modern readers.26
In that sometimes unwilling and sometimes willful intimacy of method
and neighbourhood, he thus inherits an impossible fraternity, difficult
to disavow and painful to inhabit.
Ambedkar’s singular tragedy is marked by this aporetic passage
through Indian antiquity. The history he attempts to rewrite is not one
he can simply conjure out of the remains of Brahmanic history, which
he sees as absolutely antagonistic and therefore worthy of destruction.
The history of touchability he wants to conjure would be necessarily
intimate, by its very name, to the other’s history even as it negates
the latter.27 There is, in other words, no material, no hermeneutics,
no narrative of sovereignty, statemaking, legislation, cruelty and
disenchantment open to conjuring and rewriting that is not already
marked and marred by the ghost of Brahmanic labour hovering over
the conjoined archives of Indian antiquity. Ambedkar’s painstaking
and exasperated readings of both the Mahabharata and the Gita were
constituted by and located within the textual matrices activated and
disabled by the sheer heterogeneity of that canonical tradition. Neither
this canon nor his resistance to it were available to him entirely outside
this neighbourhood of antiquity and the numerous modern imaginaries
that this antiquity had generated, including his own Buddhist imaginary.
The prolific matrix of Brahmanic and liberal–nationalist canonizing
labour that Ambedkar is so righteously repelled by at once circumscribes
and lends form and power to his displacement of the Indic tradition.
In finding himself perversely attracted to the permissive economy of
texts such as the Gita, then, Ambedkar is no exception. The twentieth-
century political life of the Gita and the several political theologies that
26
Ambedkar’s difficult relationship with the method of modern historiography and his radical
“mythography” has been attentively explored, with great originality, in Debjani Ganguly’s
Caste, Colonialism and Counter-modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (New York:
Routledge, 2005).
27
For a theoretically sophisticated engagement with Ambedkar’s genealogy of the dalit as
political subject and his conceptual struggle to frame a counterhistory for the “minority” see
Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2009).
were derived from it flourished precisely because its deftly constructed

metasubject, from which all worldly subjects could derive their archetypal
being and form, and its capacity to soothsay, could be mobilized for all
sorts of ethical and political imaginaries. The Gita became the “God’s
law”,28 the law, in other words, of the nation’s ethical and semitized
God.29 It offered all worldly subjects something prophetic, something
which promised transcendence from the drudgeries of colonial life and,
problematically for Ambedkar, all life. The problem of Krishna’s fallible
and amoral humanity and his sudden transformation into divine form
actually adds to the humane unpredictability and fickle intimacy of the
canon. The problem, then, is not of the narrative kind. It is certainly
not a problem of inconsistency that inheres in the text, as Ambedkar
contends.30 On the contrary, Krishna’s magical transformations
fundamentally constitute the productive vicissitudes of the epic form
that lend and sustain its powerful universality.31
The problem is with what is silently enabled by the malleability of this
epic, where the aesthetics of delivery shrewdly obscure the morbidity of
its ethics and where its political consequences are concealed, through a
strange reversal of Enlightenment disenchantment, by the cunning of
magic and rebirth of God.32 The problem is with the erasure of that
textual history that makes the Gita what it is, which is a text outside and
later than the Mahabharata, a text with heterogeneous beginnings and
careers. As a text, Ambedkar argues, the Gita is a non-text, by which
he means that unlike the Bible, it is unworthy of making any claim to
universality on which a given text’s status as scripture must hinge. Clearly
interested more in its spuriously modern authority than in its scriptural
antiquity, he is relentless in his emphasis of the obscurity of the Gita’s
dodgy authorship. It is not, according to him, “a single book written
by a single author”.33 It is a patchwork of contingent improvisations.
It is hetero-temporal in its beginnings and multiple in its authorship.34
28
This term surfaces throughout Gandhi’s corpus. But see Gandhi, The Bhagavad-Gita According to
Gandhi (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books, 2000), 81.
29
See Ambedkar, “The Literature of Brahminism”, 263.
30
31
On the openness of the Gita as text and its permissive hermeneutic world which enables its
prolific use in nationalist allegory, see Simona Sawhney’s probing work The Modernity of Sanskrit
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
32
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002).
33
34
Ibid., 372–76.
Not only is it not part of the canon of tradition, its textuality itself is
also deeply suspect. For the very “transmissibility” of the Gita, to use
another Benjaminian term, is enabled by its oral rather than scriptural
provenance. Its genealogy is clannish rather than religious. The original
Gita, according to Ambedkar, was merely a “ballad” recited by the
bards about Arjun’s unwillingness to “fight” the war and Krishna’s use
of “coercion” to compel Arjun to fight.35 This “historical saga” is a
“beginning” of the Gita. Like all beginnings, this beginning mutates
over time: first, by the addition of the verses of Bhakti Yoga where
Krishna is given divine form as “the God of the Bhagavat religion”;
second, by stitching onto the original ballad a “patch” which introduces
the Sankhya and Vedanta philosophy as “defense to the doctrines of
Purva Mimansa which they did not have before”;36 and third, by finally
elevating Krishna to the position of the transcendental, celestial,
supreme God. “From the position of Ishwara”, he was elevated “to
that of Parmeshwara”.37
The terrifying yet affective revelation of Krishna’s vishva-rupa or
celestial form was indeed part of the original folktale, but that early
folktale was not a moment of enunciation of any ethics. An oral and
popular cult of Krishna in due course came to be “interwoven” with
a folktale on war to give the text its religious history. The terror which
marks the trembling encounter between Arjun and Krishna was merely
a “different way” of alluding to and legitimizing the use of “brute
force”.38 It is the singular concern with moral law that must undergird
the emergent form of sovereignty and legitimize the duty and right to
kill in the interest of the state that formed the core of the text in its early
iterations. So what changed with the addition of the patches? What
does the counterhistory of the beginnings of Ambedkar’s Gita tell us?
In the early forms of the Gita, Ambedkar’s reading suggests, terror
was foundational. The moment of divine revelation and the obligation
to war were hinged on it. Trembling, provocation and fear were crucial,
in other words, to the political and sacrificial structure of the early text.
In the subsequent forms, Ambedkar argues, terror becomes secondary.
35
Ibid., 376.
36
Ibid., 377.
37
Ibid., 377.
38
Ibid., 376. An entire chapter in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj goes by that term “brute force”. Is
Ambedkar as unaware of that other critique of violence as his secretive evasion of Gandhi in
his essay suggests? Or is it Ambedkar’s attempt to recuperate the history of non-violence itself,
untouched by the spirit of the Mahatma?
Instead, it is revelation which is mobilized and habilitated at the centre

of the politics and ethics of the Gita. In these subsequent forms the
“mundane problems of war” are replaced by a discourse on religious
practice, non-violence and renunciation. In fact, in the later text one
can easily discern a “drop in the tone” of the dialogue whenever
Arjun’s questions veer towards the worldly futility of killing. The
narrative takes a new turn, in contrast, every time Krishna mobilizes
his own metaphysical, “philosophic defense of war”. This philosophic
defence, more importantly, often has nothing to do with Arjun’s worldly,
“natural” questions, nor has it anything to do with war as such as a
worldly and stately act of killing.39 Instead, what is offered by Krishna
is a combination of strands of later Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies.
The philosophical emptiness of the early Gita is stuffed, post facto, by
questions and answers on discipline, death and the transmigration
of the soul. In fact, in both form and content the extended dialogic
structure of the Gita resembles so strikingly the “dialogues” of the
Buddhist suttas that it is preposterous to claim, as Tilak does, that the
former borrowed nothing from Buddhism and that it is a self-standing
text within the Mahabharata.40
For Ambedkar, with the occult histories of Buddha lurking in his
imaginary, the ethical veneer of the Gita merely conceals its rootedness
in the moment of fratricide and its originary theorization of clannish
duty. This veneer is given its form not in textual isolation but through
active exchange with other religious traditions, especially Buddhism. In
fact, the ethics of the Gita is not only produced through this exchange,
it is produced precisely as a response to the Buddhist doctrine of non-
violence.41 Neither is Ambedkar’s Gita, then, a text of antiquity within
the Mahabharata, for parts of the Mahabharata were themselves
composed as late as the early medieval period, nor are its morality
and politics part of its originary form. Its mobilization of friendship,
compassion and disinterest as ethics, unless seen to have been derived
straight out of the Mahapadana Sutta, sit uncomfortably on its founding
moment of fratricide.42 The Gita, in other words, was as foreign to
39
40
Ibid., 371.
41
Ibid., 369–71. On Ambedkar’s comparative reading and literal matching of words of the
Bhagavad Gita and Buddha’s doctrine in Majjhina Nikaya I see 370. On dates and authorship
see 371–4.
42
Maitri, Karuna, Mudita and Upeksha are the words in Ambedkar’s text.
the Brahmanic canon and to the politics of Hindu India as radical

Buddhism was. Its secretive politics was a considerably modern politics,
given form through recursive interpretive practice.
The Gift of Death

It is in the Terror that the State is realized.
Alexander Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
What is, then, according to Ambedkar, the politics of the Gita? What
is it that dies at the very moment when a fratricidal politics is substituted,
ironically, by an ethics of fraternity and care? Not only is Krishna,
by deliberate mutation, made a god amongst other gods, a godliness
which is inconsistent with his status as a fallible man throughout
the Mahabharata, he is also suddenly made a “representative” par
excellence, within the event of the Gita, of all other forms of gods.43
The enormous power of this Brahmanic mutation of Krishna, first as
the transcendental God who contains the multiplicity of gods inside
him, and second as the “incarnation” of that God who is wholly
incorporeal and infinite, paradoxically accrues from and enables the
Gita’s suspension of the finitude of worldly being. For according to
Ambedkar, Krishna’s doctrine of sacrifice and death necessarily hinges
on the infinity of the atman or soul: man is never killed because the
“atman is eternal” and even grief is unjustified because “things are
imperishable”.44 That which is finite, worldly and destructible trembles
at the sight of divine, infinite aura, and is revealed the universal spirit in
that very moment of terror. The law of war, the subject’s obligation to
the infinite, the invocation of the masculine, the politics of sovereignty,
the ephemerality of the corpus, the indifference to death, the dictum of
disinterested action—all politics, in other words—come to the subject
as divine revelation at that dramatic moment of trembling.45 This
political theology, where politics comes as revelation of the aura and as
transcendental terror, marks the triumph of the infinite over the finite.
Terror and revelation are out of joint, then, only inasmuch as one
is lawmaking and the other law-preserving. They are disjointed, yet
conjoined. For lawmaking terror originates at the moment of war and
43
Ambedkar, “The Literature of Brahminism”, 263.
44
45
Ambedkar, “The Literature of Brahminism”, 263.
posits the law of killing precisely through the frightening revelation.

Then, once the law has been posited, revelation quickly sequesters itself
of its own origin in terror, becomes law-preserving and opens itself
as a site for peaceful (or liberal) ethics, lending in the process a stable
continuum to its legislative powers. What makes such a continuum
work? Benjamin’s argument is acutely dialectical on this point: the law-
preserving force is no less violent than the lawmaking one. In fact, it
functions precisely by weakening the lawmaking violence that founded
it, and then by “suppressing hostile counterviolence”.46 Ambedkar’s
interpretation of Krishna’s ethics strikes a radically similar tone when
he discusses the Gita’s reinforcement of Chaturvarnya, or the Law of
Four Varnas.
Krishna says: that a wise man should not by counter propaganda create a
doubt in the mind of an ignorant person who is a follower of Karma Kand
which of course includes the observance of the rules of Chaturvarnya. In
other words, you must not agitate or excite people to rise in rebellion against
the theory of Karma Kand and all that it includes. The second injunctionc
. . . tells that every one do the duty prescribed for his Varna and no other and
warns those who worship him . . . that they will not obtain salvation by mere
devotion but by devotion accompanied by observance of duty laid down for
his Varna. In short, a Shudra however great he may be as a devotee will not
get salvation if he has transgressed the duty of the Shudra—namely to live
and die in the service of the higher classes.47
Now this commandment of duty and obligation to God does not

merely institute the ethics of the Gita. It also stabilizes that which is
crucial to all law-preserving violence: fate. For a shudra is born a shudra
by his fate, and must aspire to salvation only as a shudra.48 He must live
within the lines of his fate, serve those he is born to serve, and, only in so
doing, open his person to divine light. That is to say, the shudra’s sacrifice
of politics for moral duty or dharma must be secured in advance by his
fate. In Chaturvarnya, fate circumscribes not merely the boundaries of
the shudra’s action but also his “life” and “death”. Nothing escapes, in
other words, the mythic force of fate. This is how the potential of any
revolutionary “counterviolence”, according to Ambedkar, is suppressed
in the Gita.
46
47
48
On Varna founded as “innate, inborn qualities” see ibid., 361–62.
The initial suppression of counterviolence is further stabilized through

a second legislative moment. This is the moment when Krishna’s law-
preserving revelation hides its violent origin by creating an ethics of
non-violence. Not only is the shudra barred from insurgency against fate
in the name of devotion; those who provoke him are barred too with the
threat of retribution. The Gita’s enunciation of ahimsa, then, operates
by outlawing all counterviolence, all insurgency, and all revolutionary
action, precisely in the name of an unconditional gesture towards
the divine. The dialectic at work here is, again, very Benjaminian:
Krishna’s law-positing occurs at the violent moment of terror, and
then turns against its own nature—that is, against violence itself—to
enunciate a sovereign law-preserving ethics of ahimsa. Law is preserved,
in other words, by suppressing all “counterviolence” and by smothering
any rebellion that might posit a new law.49 It is this suppression which
Ambedkar argues is the “soul” of the Gita that goes by the name of
fate; that is, a suppression of worldly finitude and an injunction to live
out this life in the form in which one is born, so that justice is delivered
in the other life. Any transgression from this mythic law (which appears,
of course, as “sovereign” divine law), in a classic Benjaminian moment,
invites divine retribution. Such deferral of legislative justice and the
foregrounding of the infinite, Ambedkar would argue, is what go in the
Gita by the trope of “salvation”.
The death of finitude has implications both hermeneutic (hence
historical) and political (hence ethical) for Ambedkar’s Gita. For the
finitude of the Gita as a text situated in time, the history of its textuality
and its readership, the worldliness of its beginnings, the juridical moment
of its enunciation, its will to sovereignty, its elevation of war to the level of
unconditional duty,50 its call to sacrifice the fraternal, its tactful deferral
of the corpus in order to foreground the soul, could all be masked and
legitimized only by violating the immutable corporeality of worldly
life and lending to human soul the abstract myth of a deathless spirit.
49
Thus Ambedkar’s insistence of the Bhagavad Gita being a text of “counterrevolution”, which
in turn reinforces Jamini’s Purva Mimansa, “the Bible of Counter-revolution”, at the very
moment when “revolutionary” Buddhism was articulating the himsa inherent in Chaturvarnya.
Ambedkar’s juridical metaphors and his allusions to that intractable relationship between
violence, revolution and the law are remarkably persistent. Ambedkar, “Krishna and His
Gita”, 362–66.
50
See especially The Bhagavad-Gita, 85; and Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 377.
Fidelity and Fraternity

Respect commands us to keep our distance, to touch and tamper neither with the
law, which is respectable, nor—therefore—with the untouchable.
Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy
Thus it is that the Gita, even its “counterrevolutionary” defenders
have to accept, never goes as far as to “root out caste”, for its interest
lies not in worldly finitude and touchability but in their suspension
into an infinite world of sacrosanct untouchable spirit.51 To an extent,
Telang concedes that the Gita’s “author” (note the nationalist singular)
undermines the authority of the Vedic scripture and puts caste “on a
less tenable basis”. The Gita, in other words, does not “absolutely reject
the Vedas, but it shelves them”. Shelving is an important metaphor
here. It enables Brahmanic nationalist thought to cite and archive
without ever confronting the endurance of its degrading tradition. It
allows a patronizing auto-critique without in anyway compromising
the moralistic claim to universality on which Vedic antiquity is hinged.
Ambedkar’s war is waged precisely against this Brahmanic claim over
the universality of the Indic tradition.
Yet here is also the aporia of Ambedkar’s politics of responsibility.
Here is that moment where he comes up against his own readings. For
the Gita, both as text and as epistemology, is inaccessible to Ambedkar,
inaccessible to anyone, without the dense layers of interpretation and
legislation, ancient and modern, by which it has been both generated
and transformed. There are no originary moments of this theology,
only obscure beginnings. What can be rewritten is the Gita’s worldly
career, its secular historicity, its contingent beginnings, the unfolding of
its patchwork. Once Ambedkar has done that, however, he is faced by
the enormity of the consequence of his own historicism. The enormity
follows from the fact that the Gita has been shown, even by Telang, to have
actually emerged as the product of the same milieu of “spiritual upheaval”
of which ancient Buddhism is also a part.52 The corrupt scaffolding
of Brahmanic religion begins to shake, and this shaking generates two
distinct but curiously conjoined responses: Buddhism and the Gita.
Telang, cited at length in Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 368.

51
Telang’s argument is inconclusive: “either Buddhism having already begun to tell on

52
Brahmanism, the Gita was an attempt to bolster it up”, or more conclusively: “the Gita [was]
an earlier and less thorough going form of it”. Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 368.
What does Ambedkar do with this skewed, disjoint, textual

brotherhood? What does he do once he has already, in the preceding
pages, committed an act of hermeneutic fratricide? In this act of
unacknowledged fratricide, in this act of exemplary and fratricidal
fidelity to what he has claimed to be the core of his Gita, does not
Ambedkar himself become, inescapably and aporetically, the most
thorough modern reader and practitioner of the text? Through the
exemplary act of this hermeneutic fratricide, committed resolutely but
secretively, does Ambedkar not move increasingly into the secretive—
or as Max Müller would put it, “esoteric”—world of Hinduism rather
than the spiritual openness that went by the name of Buddhism?
In a world of general critique and idealist politics Ambedkar would
perhaps concede, given his own plea for consistency in acts of historical
interpretation, that he is faced not merely by the temporal obscurity of
the Gita, which he has painstakingly demonstrated. He is faced also by
the historical possibility of mutual borrowing between Buddhism and
the Gita, a memory of fraught and fraternal neighbourhood. Although
his emphasis on the Buddhist inspiration of the Gita is relentless, just
as relentless as Tilak’s or Telang’s emphasis is on the anteriority of
the Gita, it may have also been evident to him that textual similarities
both in “ideas” and in “language”53 point to a checkered history of
cross-influences. Just as the Gita was many texts in one, so too were
the Buddhist suttas and their authors. This limited concession to the
probable and partial originality of the Gita and a more circumspect
attitude toward his own dating of the texts would have marked the
generality of Ambedkar’s ethical responsibility. It would have marked
his commitment to an interrupted yet conjoined history and memory
of religious heterodoxies that punctuates Indic classicism.
Yet Ambedkar’s responsibility towards antiquity and its violent
secrecy is no general responsibility. Nor is his ideality any less grounded
in the economy of fratricidal violence than is the Gita. His refusal to
offer any hospitality to the canon marks the singularity of his response,
one where moral outcomes and truth play a part only inasmuch as they
must be reversed. His is a transgressive and unethical responsibility,
not only violent toward scriptural authority but also irresponsible and
willfully inconsistent toward rules of critique. Ambedkar is mindful of
the contingency of all canons, Hindu and Buddhist. But this memory
53
of contingent beginnings is a very heretical memory, in the sense that

its use in his thought is radically amoral. His oppositional memory
is meant neither to dismantle one tradition in order to replace it by
another (which would be normatively predictable and desirable),
nor to modernize religiosity (which is not required anyway, since this
religion, by its very name, is modern). The heretical memory in his
thought is mobilized to breach, refuse and interrupt that canon which
rests comfortably in the knowledge of its calculative legislations and its
measured morality. It is meant to establish the exceptionally fratricidal
career of the Gita rather than to devise a general theory of textual
fraternity in the history of Indian antiquity. It is meant to establish the
foreignness of the canon to itself; it is to reinstitute that memory of
foreignness in order to trouble the Gita’s ethical stability. It is to argue,
in other words, for an absent centre of Brahmanic political theology.
The foregrounding of this absence is striking. For as if to compensate
for this absent canon, Ambedkar radically reproduces an absence in his
own readings of the text. As if to heretically mock the authority and
completeness of the Gita, he makes a reciprocal gesture towards the
canon. He conjures a counter-absence, as it were. For how else could
one understand the absence of Gandhi in this particular essay, when
Ambedkar would so relentlessly and angrily confront the Mahatma
almost unfailingly all over his corpus? Why is Gandhi absent from
this particular text on the Gita? Why does Ambedkar evade critiquing
Gandhi’s audacious reading of the Gita as a text of non-violence? Is
this secrecy and silent disavowal of Gandhi, this refusal of intimacy
at precisely that moment when the Mahatma is his most proximate,
provocative and fraternal other, yet another moment of Ambedkar’s
exemplary fidelity to the Gita? Does the exceptional denial of Gandhi
not uncannily mirror that other state of exception, that call to dutifully
deny brothers their lives, which Ambedkar encounters in the Gita? Or
perhaps it is an act of an exemplary and secretive annihilation, for it is
only by dismissing the Mahatma’s reading as absolutely unworthy of any
political– rational attention that Ambedkar could underline and respond
to the enormity of blasphemous labour that counterhistory demands.
Either way, Ambedkar’s secrecy and silencing of this fraternal figure,
this other radical critic of violence, makes him a strikingly committed
practitioner of that politics which according to him undergirds the Gita
itself.54 This, of course, is the Gita of his political thought; it is the text,
like so many other versions ancient and modern freed from the burden
of consistency, which is born and which dies through his interpretation,
his readings, his fidelity, and his annihilation.
The exception of this creative and annihilative political thought is
that unlike other political thoughts, it responds not by engaging the
other but by doing exactly the opposite: by disengaging. The heresy
that marks Ambedkar’s responsibility is an evasion, and therefore
exaggeration, of that which would always haunt his corpus. Evasion of
the Mahatma is crucial not only to Ambedkar’s heresy, it is critical also to
his project of writing a touchable history. This desire for counterhistory
makes it singularly imperative that he rescue the practice of history,
and, more centrally, the practice of non-violence, from the Mahatma’s
Indic universality and rehabilitate it within the counteruniversality of
another antiquity, an antiquity which would nevertheless have to be
located in the same neighbourhood. It is essential that this universality
of non-violence be recuperated secretively and violently, by keeping
its most powerful practitioner in secret. It is important, so as to drive
home his point about the finitude of life deeper, that he play upon and
reiterate the Mahatma’s mortality and dispensability. It is imperative,
above all, that his corpus have that exceptional moment, that rare
corner, where it remains untouched by the Mahatma and where it can
summarily dismiss him as an untouchable, so that this corpus can reveal
the tragic tactility of untouchable existence, as opposed to the abstract
divinity that the latter thought flowed from such a life. Gandhi would
often suggest that he would have been happy to be born a harijan, and
here at this exceptional moment Ambedkar, the conjurer of touchable
history, heretically and dutifully renders the Mahatma exactly that:
an untouchable. Such are the fraternal and fratricidal demands that
the Gita makes on its modern readers; such is the reversibility of the
touchable and the untouchable within its economy; such is the power
of its hermeneutic openness to recognition and misrecognition; such,
above all, is the contingency of its distinction between violence and
non-violence that secures its universality.
Ambedkar’s phenomenal awareness of muteness, the inhumanity that underlay the gesture
54
of“silencing”, and, by the same token, the enormously retributive potential of that gesture over
which he lays claim here, is evocatively arrested in the name he chose for his earliest weekly,
Mooknayak, literally “The Mute Hero”.
Ambedkar struggles with this universality like few others who inhabit
the tenuous, and for him reeking, corpus of modern Indian thought. For
his critique of the Gita emerges from that untouchable space where to
avoid touching and to avoid being touched had come to be legitimized
in the general law of suffering, death and disinterest, a very Brahmanic
disinterest that could have been enabled and sustained only by that
moral and legislative power which flowed from tradition. To breach this
disinterest requires an exceptional politics. It requires an understanding
of the body as body itself, finite, servile and banned from entry into the
world of gods and men. The Mahatma’s Gita redistributes this servility
and ban into an economy of degraded labour that masquerades as
the moral legislation of Varna. Gandhi’s edification of the shudra for
whom seva or “service” must be not only a worldly duty but also an
obligation to the transcendental55 reveals precisely that reproduction of
the law which is enabled by the secrecy of Indian antiquity. Gandhian
ahimsa, in other words, violates the untouchable at the very moment
when, imbuing it with divinity as harijan, it opens an ethical economy
of respect and sacrifice and lays politics and history to ruin. It is this
residual cruelty, the conceptual turning of inequality into a distancing,
if ethical, non-relation, inherent in the Mahatma’s Hindu dharma, that
Ambedkar annihilates when he responds to tradition.
Annihiliation as Negative Universality

Thus the task is both to construct and deny universal history.
Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom
What kind of action, which must be political by its very name,
does the Gita institute? To Ambedkar, the political economy of the
Gita suspends the particularity of work precisely in order to empty the
touchability and reproducibility of labour from the realm of action.
Action, in other words, is articulated merely as a dharmic site for
sacrifice rather than as a site for legislating upon the distinctly historical
problem of shudra labour. Such a sacrificial economy, measured in its
demand and self-centred in its legislation of moral law, can then not
55
See Gandhi, The Bhagavad-Gita According to Gandhi, 85. Ajay Skaria’s important essay “Gandhi’s
Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram”, South Atlantic Quarterly 101/4 (Fall 2002)
offers an illuminating reading of Gandhi’s conceptual paractice that underlay his naming of
the harijan.
only defer touching the untouchable but also expropriate him from a
distance by naming him. This name itself, which bears the mark of a
deliberately distancing kinship of the harijan in the world of touchables,
will have deferred that which is the most tactile corner of his being, his
labour history, and imbue his degrading work with an abstract universal
dharma and scriptural religiosity.
The Gita’s elevation of suffering to an ethics of sacrifice is even more
problematic. For that which is suffered every day not as ethics but as
estrangement, not as renunciation but as worldly indignity, is somehow
forbidden from its prolific legislative economy. It has no responsibility
towards the ban and the effacement that is enforced by law. The
obligation of sacrifice and the gift of revelation—the bond of interest,
in other words, that joins the subject and the universal spirit—hinges
on a generalized exchange of devotion and blessing. Like all economies
of generalized exchange, this interest moves in a space of legislated,
contractual goodness. The legislation dictates the foregoing of the
local, the banned, and the situated; it banishes the corporeal and its
recalcitrant particulars; it demands a focus on the absoluteness of spirit
as it takes flight from history; it generates, above all, a kinship between
the shudra and the Brahman and his God framed and secured by the
scriptural universality of moral duty.
Ambedkar’s engagements with the Gita are measured to annihilate
this foundational claim that the Gita makes over universality as scripture
and its interested legislation of duty as contract. As two moral sentiments
that undergird liberalism, universalism and interest make Ambedkar’s
Gita a quintessentially modern text. It is the Indic liberalism of the
text with which he grapples, then, unwilling to accept its morality but
unable to give up its universality. His exceptional dilemma is that the
Gita articulates a universalism which is foundational to his legislative
politics: an Indian imaginary of the sovereign state. It articulates this
universalism, more problematically, in the same neighbourhood of
antiquity where a similar ethics of sovereignty, kingship and justice
also produces the elaborate Buddhist imperial edicts by Asoka.56 This
56
State-making in antiquity, in that nascent form upon which the Mahabharata elaborates, is
foundationally constituted by the move towards legislative and moral sanction for the sacrifice
of blood kin. In its more mature forms, not less but more extractive and violent, it is again
the state that also enables the economy of monastic renunciation. On the political and moral
matrices of empire in Indian antiquity see Romila Thapar, From Lineage to State: Social Formations
in the Mid-first Millennium B.C. in the Ganga Valley (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984).
is the legislative tradition, the conjoined history of statemaking and

renunciation, each of its parts equally violent, tributary, sacrificial and
redemptive in its own right, fraternal yet dissonant, Brahmanic and
Buddhist, heterodox in antiquity yet seamless in modernity, where
Asoka’s ethics of duty and Krishna’s call to war would be guiltlessly
braided in liberal–nationalist appropriations of satya and dharma, that
as an untouchable Ambedkar is not only not born into but must also
ironically inherit. What does he do with this fraternal antiquity, this
Indic inheritance at once degrading and worth recuperating?
Untouched by the canon and forbidden by it, the untouchable is forced
to respond to this inheritance which has already marked his presence
as corrupting. Ambedkar must respond to this inherited tradition not
merely by dismantling and disavowing it, but by doing precisely that
which is feared: corrupting it. A responsibility worth its name, after all,
must be excessive and singular; it must be annihilative of the tradition
even as it recuperates the semblance of its antiquity. It must invoke the
painful particularities of shudra labour yet it must never surrender the
idea that suffering is universal. It must counter the universality of the
scripture, so as to annihilate its mythic authority and moral foundations
in war. Yet it must neither give up the universality of human experience
nor the imperative and violent universality of the political that enables
the re-legislations of history. What is called upon here from the
untouchable, then, is an absolute responsibility, a Benjaminian strike
on authority, an ideality at once destructive and universal. Ambedkar’s
annihilation would have to rescue the universality of touchable history
even while it negates the universality of scripture. His history would
have to be, as it were, a “negative universal history”.
In his “Analytical Notes” on the Mahabharata, for example,
Ambedkar opens up what I call an “economy of pure defacement”, a
struggle to reconstitute the universality of suffering by inflicting pain
on the scripture itself. Strewn throughout his “Notes” are words that
destabilize the nationalist imaginary of the Mahabharata as an archive
of virtuous conduct and masculine righteousness. For if a new history
has to be founded on the ruins of Brahmanic antiquity it must hinge on
the destruction of all fraternal neighbourhoods that antiquity marks out
as its own. Foundational acts, after all, must be acts of separation and
desecration, and, if need be, of fratricide. If Ambedkar ever produced
a translation of the Mahabharata—and given his labourious attention
to the corpus of Brahmanic texts, he certainly might have—the title

of his epic would have been War. There is an entire vocabulary in his
interpretation which invokes the morbid, the base and the inhuman in the
Mahabharata, everything, in other words, which goes in the name of just
war. There is the “brag and boast” of Karna, the tragic anti-hero of the
epic; there is “slander” by Karna of Drona; there are apologetics; there
is ridiculing, arrogance, surrender and anger; there are taunts, refusals
and illegitimate origins;57 there is “abuse” (note the condemnation by
exaggeration here, as it is not rebuke or reprimand) of Duryodhan the
ambitious prince by his mother; there is destruction and flight; there
is the fainting of an entire army; and there is, strikingly, a corpse.58
For Ambedkar, the heretical responsibility of corrupting the legislative
powers of the Gita demands an exception to the ethical practices of
reading, recognition and respect. In fact, it is counter-abuse, misreading,
and misrecognition that become Ambedkar’s potent and legitimate
strategies. Thus, in his Gita, Krishna makes a “fool” of himself by
defending the dogma of Chaturvarnya (Law of Four Varnas) on the basis
of the Guna theory of the Sankhya. Then there are those angry words
that form his vocabulary of pure defacement and are deployed in his
interpretation of both Krishna and the Gita: “absurdity”, “stupidity”,
“transgression”, “abhorrent”, “murder”, “foul”, “effeminate”,59
“puerile”, “fool’s errand”, “childish”, “flung in the face” and “lunatic
asylum”.60
It is clear from this vocabulary of excess that Ambedkar goes well
beyond the merely corporeal and cognitive registers in his readings
of the Gita. It is also apparent from his language that Ambedkar can
disinherit himself neither from the masculine and sexist impulses of
nationalist thought nor from the strain of that pastoral lexicon on which
his own counterhistory of antiquity is hinged. Yet he does open up at
such times and through such words a moment of absolute transgression
and complete defacement of divinity. After all, Krishna’s infinite divinity
hinges critically on his face: his devouring of monsters, his eating up of
the sun and his revelation of numerous mouths, his horrifying tusks,
57
Ambedkar, “Analytical Notes on the Virat Parva and Udyog Parva”, 390.
58
Ibid., 381–7.
59
The pastoral and sexual registers on which Ambedkar’s thought operates, and which so
powerfully regulates his idea of the “woman”, is itself worthy of an attentive reading.
60
and his bristling fangs.61 Ambedkar’s defacement of this aura starts

with the face and violently passes through it, first ravaging it in order to
humanize it, and then finally dehumanizing it. In Ambedkar’s hands,
the talkative Krishna becomes a figure of buccality: a figure with a
mouth but not a face.62 For when someone as base as Duryodhan has
the legitimacy to fling Krishna’s foul deeds in his face, the godliness
and the aura of the god become genuinely suspect. The corporeality
of his tone, the dehumanizing reduction and inflation of characters
of the epic into figures,63 the power of excessive prose which accrues
from cursing, and at moments the buccality of Ambedkar’s own anti-
humanist vocabulary are part of his attempt to radically reverse the
human trembling that constitutes the force of divine terror.
Yet such attempts must also be read as defacement of divinity
itself, as sacrificial gestures deeply universalist in their ambition and
politics. Such defacement is singular and exceptional in that it is neither
humanist, which expects the god to be made human, touchable and
be seen as face; nor religious, in that it never desires the god who
would be accessible to the untouchable. Nor, finally, is this defacement
wholly anti-scriptural, its priority merely the corruption, by touching,
of the dharmic text. Ambedkar’s fidgety relationship with scripture,
which leaves in its wake Buddha and His Dhamma atop his corpus, is too
tenuous to be resolved and settled into an anti-scriptural politics. The
Benjaminian singularity that underlies his defacement, rather, is that
of a violent ideality, an anti-liberal pure means: defacement of God’s
aura without any desire of replacing that god by another, or of opening
an access to that god-as-human. Ambedkar’s responsibility constitutes
an unlimited responsibility, a “pure defacement”, precisely because it
breaches the ethical frontier of all religiosity by defacing God’s divinity
and humanity alike.64 As if at once to mock and obediently to respond
to the god’s call to war, Ambedkar sacrifices the god himself.
61
The Bhagavad-Gita, 113.
62
Sara Guyer, “Buccality”, in Gabriele Schwab, ed., Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007).
63
On the distinction between “character” and “figure” and the cognitive implications of that
distinction see Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
64
This denial of humanity and historicity to Krishna is what makes Ambedkar’s anthropology
different in its performance from the semitic impulses of the Gita’s other modern readers
such as Bankim. On the latter’s reclamation of Krishna as a Christ-like historical ideality see
Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of
Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
This “economy of pure defacement”, with its mockery, dutifulness,

violence and responsibility, is pure not because of the integrity which
underlies that gesture. No defacement worth its name, after all, can
be anything but a failed sublimation, a lapse of integrity, a tactile
expression of desire for intimacy and possession which culminates
instead in angry defilement and contamination.65 Ambedkar’s sacrifice
of god and his enduring proximity to that canon is, then, at once
defiling and promiscuous. Yet the economy of this defacement is pure
because of its absolute ideality; that is, not because of his complete
fidelity to the act itself, but rather because of his faithfulness to the
receiving subject of his act, the god to whom he meticulously listens and
then sacrifices. Singular in its fidelity and heretical excess, Ambedkar’s
responsibility here blurs the lines between the divine, the human and
the buccal. It destabilitizes that very mouth which institutes through
its enchanting utterance the degrading dharma of shudra labour. In
so doing, it gestures towards a universalist politics that wages war on
that secretive and mythic morality which goes in the name of the
untouchable’s fate. A war, one might add, in which Ambedkar willfully
and inescapably participates, never sacrificing his own idealist impulse to
sacrifice, remaining at once dutiful and oblivious to the war’s fratricidal
matrices. This idealism of Ambedkar’s fratricide, this passionate and
violent recuperation of ideality from the cruelty that inheres for him
in the Gandhian naming of the harijan, is what makes his politics
accessible to the vocabularies at once of emancipatory democracy and
didactic hagiography, vocabularies deemed incongruous otherwise but
enamoured in equal measure by the purity of ideals. For how else can
Ambedkar’s politics be accounted for if not through a certain ideality
and desire for purity, where what he seeks to recuperate in the manner of
the Benjaminian dialectic is not only the shudra’s right to revolutionary
counterviolence but also an untouched history of non-violence?66 This
ideality, stubborn, worldly, intractable in its coupling of antithetical
desires, and resolutely rooted in the “economy of violence”, grounded
at once in the purist practice and sincere renunciation of war, is what
constitutes Ambedkar’s annihilative “politics of reading”.
65
Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1959).
66
I draw here from Etien ne Balibar’s insightful elaboration of these relationships in “Violence,
Ideality and Cruelty”, in idem, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002).
Conclusion
Such politics would tragically, if so productively, bear the mark of
Ambedkar’s inheritance of the very canon he seeks to dismantle. His
universality, in other words, would have to be negatively constituted.
For in his resolute commitment to the annihilation of a violent text on
war and myth, Ambedkar himself becomes the most intimate and ideal
modern practitioner of its law. The Gita, because of its prolific openness
to interpretation that secures its universality, thus also becomes his Gita,
the Gita he creates and destroys. Ambedkar’s counterhistory, committed
neither any more to interpretive consistency nor any less to idealistic
violence than the Gita itself, comes to be staged in the universal idiom
of destruction and counterlegislation even and especially as it assaults
the universality of Hindu dharma.
In his dramatic coupling of scriptural authority with legislative
power; in his remorseless decoupling of ethics from any concept of the
political; in his simultaneous evasion and exaggeration of the fraternal
other; in his conjoining of fratricidal apathy with fraternal duty; in his
intense warlike infliction of pain on the scripture; in his ironic struggle to
recuperate non-violence from the ruins of his own violent counterhistory;
in the masculine and pastoral impulses of his hermeneutics; in his
impossible disinheritance of the sovereign imaginary of the state no
matter how violent; and, above all, in his exemplary fidelity to his Gita
performed through the act of several fratricides, Ambedkar inherits
and inhabits Indian antiquity intimate and distraught. His ideality, that
world of touchability he dreams of, that conjuration of a dalit history
which would have been born ironically untouched by the Brahmanic
spirit, remains an impossible dream, an intractable prolific negative.
Nor does the fate of the Hindu nation, as it now turns out, hinge any
less critically on its fraternity with the dalit.
8
Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V. D.

Savarkar, the Bhagavad Gita and Histories of
Warfare*
Vinayak Chaturvedi
Why. . . mourn for the past? My power and intelligence would have been as nought,
if I had feared and trembled in the hour of my trial, like Arjuna on the battlefield
of Kurekshetra. I did not fail in my duty—in my Dharma.
V. D. Savarkar, My Transportation for Life (1927)
Introduction
On 7 July 1937, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar delivered a speech entitled

“Ek hi dharm-pustak nahin, yeh achcha hai!” (“There Is No One
*
An earlier version of this article was presented at the workshop on The Bhagavad Gita in
Modern Times, held at the New School University, New York. I owe special thanks to Faisal
Devji and Shruti Kapila for encouraging me to write this article and for their suggestions for
improvement. I appreciate the critiques of the participants of the seminar, especially Sunil
Khilnani, who provided very thorough and helpful comments. I am extremely grateful to Robert
Moeller and Bina Parekh for reading earlier drafts of the article. A National Endowment of
the Humanities Summer Stipend, a British Academy Visiting Fellowship and a Shorenstein
Fellowship at the Asia–Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, generously funded a part
of the research for this article.
Religious Book: This Is Good!”).1 Savarkar’s central argument was that

the Bhagavad Gita should not be considered the singular or monolithic
text for the creation of the Hindu nation. He explained that the Gita was
a seminal work, but that it needed to be read alongside other books that
constituted the diverse literary traditions within Hinduism. Savarkar’s
claim for textual pluralism was a direct response to contemporary
arguments that Hindus needed to elevate the Gita to the status of the
Bible in Christianity or the Koran in Islam as a way to strengthen the
foundation of Hinduism in the making of modern India. In the short
speech, Savarkar simply presents his argument about the Gita, rather
than providing a commentary on the text. To what extent the speech
had an influence on the interpretation of and debates around the Gita
remains unclear. Nor is it known if the speech had an impact on the
direction of Hindu nationalism, especially since Savarkar was elected
president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha on 30 December 1937.2
Savarkar does not appear to have returned to the theme of the Gita
in his later speeches.3 Nor did Savarkar produce a systematic critique
of the Gita, like his contemporaries in the first half of the twentieth
century, such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak,
Lajpat Rai or Aurobindo Ghose. The historiography of the reception
of the Gita in modern India has generally neglected to even consider
Savarkar and his writings. In fact, it may appear that Savarkar really
did not have much to contribute to scholarship and debates on the Gita.
There are, of course, important factors that help to explain the nature
of the scholarship. Perhaps the main reason Savarkar is overlooked
in this context is that he did not adopt the existing hermeneutical
traditions to establish a critique of the Gita. Tilak, for example, points
out in his Srimad Bhagavadgita Rahasya that the interpretations of the Gita
took on two distinct forms that date back at least one thousand years:
1
V. D. Savarkar, “Ek hi dharm-pustak nahin, yeh achcha hai!” Savarkar Samagra, vol. 7 (New
Delhi: Prabhat Prakashan, 2003), 313–14 (please note that the location of the speech is not
given in the text).
2
A. S. Bhide, ed., Veer Savarkar’s “Whirl-Wind Propaganda”: Statements, Messages & Extracts from the
President’s Diary of His Propagandistic tours, Interviews from December1937 to October1941 (Bombay:
A.S. Bhide, 1941), v.
3
This is not to say that Savarkar did not produce other essays and speeches on the Gita. For
example, the thousands of pages that make up Savarkar’s unpublished papers have not been
thoroughly examined by scholars on this theme. The Savarkar Papers are housed at the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi (hereafter NMML).
Rethinking Knowledge with Action 157
bhasya or commentary, and tika or criticism.4 He explains that authors

of bhasya and tika followed specific guidelines that were required within
each literary form. This not only helped to distinguish between formal
commentary and criticism, but it also established links with earlier
authors and their writings on the Gita.
In addition, Savarkar promoted the idea of reading widely in several
languages. He was particularly interested in encouraging individuals
to study history, economics and politics. As the president of the All-
India Hindu Mahasabha, he even compiled a list of essential readings
for his supporters.5 The Gita is not included on the list, nor does it
appear that Savarkar prescribed its reading elsewhere. Further, in his
well-known publications, Savarkar only makes minor references to the
Gita, without providing any direct interpretation of the text or its ideas.
In general, Savarkar was not explicit about the influence of any text—
the Gita or otherwise—in his writings. In some books he provides the
names of authors and the titles of texts he had read, but these lists
are usually incomplete: for example, authors’ names are included, but
not the specific titles of their books. In other places Savarkar assumes
the reader had familiarity with an idea or set of ideas, and therefore
he does not provide a context or explanation for the references. To
complicate matters further, citations are inconsistently used throughout
his writings, and bibliographies only appear in select publications. He
explains that he often wrote without having regular access to books.
Savarkar also states that his purpose was never to produce academic
scholarship or to follow specific disciplinary conventions in his work. In
addition, the fact that Savarkar spent over three decades (c.1905–37)
writing while being subjected to police surveillance or the prison censor
also explains the sometimes inconsistent, incomplete, and fragmentary
nature of his work.
While there is no systematic analysis of or engagement with
Savarkar’s interpretation of the Gita, some scholars have briefly
mentioned the impact of the text on Savarkar. Robert Minor in his
writing on modern interpreters of the Gita asserts that Savarkar was
4
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Srimad Bhagavadgita Rahasya or Karma-Yoga-S astra, vol. 1, trans. Bhalchandra
Sitaram Sukthankar (Delhi: L. P. Publications, 2007), 15–16.
5
NMML, Savarkar Papers, Microfilm Reel No.10, Letter from A. S. Bhide, Personal Secretary
of V. D. Savarkar, President of Hindu Mahasabha, to P. N. Setha, Secretary, Hindu League
(date not given).
an individual “who took the Gita’s battle literally”.6 Dhananjay Keer,

Savarkar’s main biographer, writes that Savarkar stated the following
to a police officer after being arrested in London in 1910: “We are
Hindus. We have read the Geeta.”7 Keer also claims that in the 1950s
Savarkar turned to the Gita as a way to argue that Christians in their
attempts to convert Hindus were being “intolerant” and “unjust”.8
Chetan Bhatt in a recent work on Hindu nationalism states that the
Gita helped Savarkar to establish an argument about an “ethical
premise” of violence against non-Hindus in India.9 I provide these
select comments here as a way to begin considering the significance of
the Gita on Savarkar’s thought on religion, nationalism and the idea of
Hindu India. Why is this important? As one of the intellectual founders
of Hindu nationalism, Savarkar has emerged as the most controversial
Indian political thinker of the last century, gaining notoriety for his
program to “Hinduize Politics and Militarize Hindudom”, for his anti-
Muslim and anti-Christian politics, and for his advocacy of violence
in everyday life. Yet his writings still remain largely unexplored bodies
of political thought in twentieth-century India.10 By bringing together
key selections from Savarkar’s writings in this paper, I will show how
Savarkar developed concepts from the Gita for his political purposes of
contesting colonial power and creating a Hindu nation. I will also show
that while Savarkar departed from the traditions of both bhasya and tika
in interpreting the Gita, he adopted history writing as the main literary
6
Robert Minor, ed., Modern Interpreters of the Bhagavad Gita (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1991),
223.
7
Dhananjay Keer, Veer Savarkar (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1988), 78.
8
Ibid., 458.
9
Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 104.
10
Nearly every work on Hindu nationalism in the twentieth century includes a discussion of
Savarkar’s seminal role in the development of Hindutva. To be clear, my point is that in
comparison to every other major intellectual of the twentieth century in India, the large body of
Savarkar’s writings—published and unpublished—has generally received little attention. Select
recent scholarship on Savarkar includes Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in
India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); A. G. Noorani, Savarkar and Hindutva: The
Godse Connection (New Delhi: Leftword Books, 2002); Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames:
Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002); Amalendu
Misra, Identity and Religion: Foundations of Anti-Islamism in India (New Delhi: Sage, 2004); Erin
O’Brien, “Active Awakening: Swaraj in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and in Savarkar’s The Indian War
of Independence” (University of Calgary, unpublished MA thesis, 2006); John Pincince, “On the
Verge of Hindutva: V. D. Savarkar, revolutionary, convict, ideologue, c.1905–1924” (University
of Hawaii, unpublished PhD thesis, 2007).
form for his engagement with the text and its principles. For Savarkar,
the creation of historical knowledge that embodied key ideas from the
Gita was necessary for transforming the individual and the nation. He
claimed that it ultimately motivated individuals to adopt violence for
the creation of Hindu India.
Reflections of the Gita in Prison Life

On 13 March 1910, Savarkar was arrested in London on five separate
charges, ranging from “delivering seditious speeches” and “procuring
and distributing arms” to “waging war against the King Emperor of
India”.11 He was extradited to India and convicted of sedition and
sentenced to “transportation for life” in the Cellular Prison, located in the
Andaman Islands. In 1922, Savarkar was initially transferred to a prison
in Ratnagiri, and then to another prison in Yeravda. He was later put
under house arrest for nearly five years and finally released in 1937. After
leaving the Andaman Islands, Savarkar completed a memoir of his time
in the Cellular Prison entitled My Transportation for Life. It is here, perhaps
more than in any other work, that he provides small clues about the place
of the Gita in his everyday life, while also including brief discussions
of the text that are necessary for understanding Savarkar’s histories.
Savarkar begins his memoir in the days before he was to depart for
the Cellular Prison. He writes that he began a daily pattern of reciting
religious texts in the morning, followed by composing verses of an epic
poem that he was writing. Savarkar first makes reference to the Gita
while discussing a visit to the jail from his wife and her brother. He
explains that during the meeting he discussed the prospect that the
British authorities would allow his wife to move to the Andaman Islands
after a few years, following a policy of reuniting and resettling prisoners
with their families. However, as the prison superintendent abruptly
ended the meeting, the brother-in-law turned to Savarkar and urged
him to repeat a mantra from the Gita every morning while in prison.
Savarkar states, “Looking at him wistfully, I promised to carry out his
behest”.
Later in My Transportation for Life, Savarkar explains that prior to
boarding the ship that took him to the island prison in the Andamans,
11
Keer, Veer Savarkar, 73.
his last personal possessions were confiscated by the authorities: a pair

of eyeglasses and a copy of the Gita. He writes,
I was a conspirator; the rule was that a convict of that type lost all his
property to the State. My trunks, clothing and books had already been
taken in possession and sold by public auction. That my ... [G] ita and my
spectacles, the last things I had with me, should also be taken away from me,
grieved even my fellow prisoners.12
In select passages, Savarkar includes references to the Gita’s central

themes of swadharma and dharma. At one point, Savarkar even
encourages the readers of his book to examine a chapter of the Gita. He
states, “Look at the eleventh chapter of the Bhagwat Gita, and remark
the manifestation in it of the Divine Spirit as cosmic force, embracing
in its sweep both the One and the Manifold”.13 Savarkar notes that
prison officials eventually returned his copy of the Gita to him. Once
in the Andamans, he describes the existence of a sizable prison library,
with two thousand books in English, Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali. He
lists the texts he read during his years in prison, including works of
fiction, history, philosophy, politics, and religion.14 Based on Savarkar’s
discussion, the Gita was only one of the many texts that he read in
prison; however, he notes that the Gita played an important role for him
personally, and he relied on it to educate fellow prisoners about politics
and religion. However, Savarkar also says that he turned to the writings
of Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, Giuseppe Mazzini and Herbert Spencer
to teach about the nature of the state and society while in prison.
The fragmentary nature of Savarkar’s discussion of the Gita in
My Transportation for Life is consistent with his other works; that is, his
discussions are brief and randomly appear in the text usually without
explanation.15 Perhaps Savarkar assumes that the reader will have
familiarity with the key ideas in the text, and consequently he does not
12
V. D. Savarkar, My Transportation for Life, Selected Works of Veer Savarkar, vol. 2 (Chandigarh:
Abhishek Publications, 2007), 38.
13
Ibid., 261. Chapter 11 is perhaps one of the most prominent and recognized parts of the Gita.
It includes a dialogue in which Krishna reveals to Arjuna that he is the Supreme Deity, or the
Lord.
14
For example, Savarkar lists the following religious texts that he read in prison: the Upanishads,
the Rig Veda, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Brahma Sutras, Sankhya texts, Yoga Vashishta, and
Imitation of Christ. See Savarkar, My Transportation.
15
For the purposes of this essay, my focus is on examining Savarkar’s engagement with the Gita,
but a similar critique can also be made of Savarkar’s work that engages with other texts.
have to provide clarification. I have included the main examples from

his memoir as a way to illustrate both the possibilities and the limitations
in trying to examine Savarkar’s interpretation of the Gita, personally,
politically, intellectually or otherwise. However, there are two additional
passages in the text that provide clues about the Gita, which go beyond
Savarkar’s usual discussions even in his major writings. He states,
Every one who presumes to think of his own country, to dabble in politics,
and to aspire to political leadership, must. . . possess full and deep knowledge
of subjects like politics, economics and constitutional history. To be wanting
in such knowledge is to spell yourself inefficient and unfit for responsible self-
government, or for high administrative offices in it. As in religion so in politics,
action with knowledge is the key to salvation. . . When you have plenty of time
before you [in prison], a number of years to be passed in enforced idleness,
you must add knowledge to service and vision to self-sacrifice. Heroism, to
do or die, is not enough. It must be illuminated by deep learning[,] ripening
into wisdom. I exhorted them [political prisoners] finally to cast off gloom
and despondency, and apply themselves to knowledge[,] which was their
proper work... 16
He later continues:
We know how in their exile, the Pandavas used to be down-pressed, how they
would pity and condemn themselves. They were tortured by their minds for
what they had brought upon themselves; despair and melancholy overcast
their souls, and they forgot their own valour and greatness. Then Dhaumya
and other sages narrated to them stories of Nala and Rama to put courage
in their hearts and teach them to defy misfortune and cruelties of fate. And
these stories from the past put a new hope in their hearts. Similarly, stirring
acts of former heroes in history. . . or discourses on the immortality of the
soul from the Upanishads and the Bhagawat gita would provide a tonic to
the shattered hearts of our political prisoners. That would imbue them with
the spirit of defiance.17
In the first passage, Savarkar evokes the central principles of karma yoga,
or the discipline of action, found in the Gita, without actually referencing
it for the reader. It is important to note that this is characteristic not
only of his silence on the Gita explicitly, but in general, of his silence on
16
Savarkar, My Transportation, added emphasis.
17
Ibid., 152–53.
sources of influence in his work. So what can be interpreted from this

passage? Savarkar is building upon the dialogue between Krishna and
Arjuna in the Gita, in which Krishna states that Arjuna, and indeed all
men, should follow their own duty, or swadharma, without being attached
to desires, pleasures or accomplishments. An individual’s actions should
not be for personal fulfillment of anytype, but rather in the service of
God (Krishna). It is through everyday actions, in consonance with
swadharma, that an individual acquires true knowledge of Krishna.
However, Savarkar reconsiders the general message of the Gita for
political purposes. Most important, he urges on fellow prisoners in the
Andamans the need to expand the religious context of karma yoga into
the realm of politics. Savarkar notes that despite the strict limitations
imposed on individuals, prisoners need to reconsider the meaning of
karma yoga for everyday life. He declared that it is the duty of every
prisoner who was ready to make a personal sacrifice for the sake of the
nation to acquire knowledge of history, politics and economics, as well
as of Krishna. It is only then that self-government, independence, or
swaraj can be achieved in India. In other words, for Savarkar, the idea
of “action with knowledge” is necessary not only for personal salvation,
but also for national salvation.
The example of the Pandavas in the second passage continues with
the theme of uplifting and motivating fellow prisoners in the Andamans.
Savarkar uses the example of the forced exile of the Pandavas as a
way to establish a comparison with the tortured, daily lives of political
prisoners. In other parts of the memoir, Savarkar writes about
individuals who had committed suicide because they found prison life
to be unbearable. He points out that these deaths motivated him to
take up a role as a teacher and leader in the Cellular Prison, because
the prevalence of suicides and the cases of depression were evidence
that many prisoners had forgotten the lessons of individuals who had
overcome their suffering through perseverance and strength. It was
necessary to encourage prisoners to learn from the examples of others
as a way to provide hope for a better future. For Savarkar, knowledge of
the past would provide a “spirit of defiance”.
The passages from the memoir further help to illustrate the types
of theme Savarkar thinks are necessary from the Gita in his writing.
Like other nationalists, he urged his followers to think of their duties to
others as being for the betterment of India. To what extent Savarkar is
building upon the arguments of others writing about the Gita in the late
nineteenth and the early-twentieth centuries remains unclear. However,
as early as 1902 it is likely that Savarkar was familiar with Tilak’s
interpretations of the Gita, which were initially delivered as speeches
in Nagpur before being published in regional newspapers in western
India.18 By the time Savarkar wrote his memoir, Tilak had already
completed his Bhagavadgita Rahasya, arguing that the Gita encourages the
discipline of action, or karma yoga (the subtitle of Tilak’s book), rather
than simply advocating renunciation or devotion as suggested by other
contemporary interpreters of the text. Further, Tilak claimed that it was
the dharma or duty of individuals to take up forms of political action to
defend the nation from oppression, exploitation and injustice.19
Many individuals, especially revolutionaries and extremists, were
influenced by Tilak’s interpretation and considered that Krishna’s
instructions to Arjuna to take up arms and fulfill his dharma as a
kshatriya (warrior) was an ethical justification for advocating violence
against the British empire. However, Savarkar notes that as a political
prisoner he had limited options in pursuing disciplined action. He
immersed himself in reading, writing and functioning as a “sage” in
order to educate fellow prisoners. As Savarkar points out, studying the
actions of “heroes” and “heroism” in history serves as inspiration for
new forms of political action necessary for the religious and political
future of India. The prison memoir provides an important context that
explains the embodiment of what Savarkar has taken from the Gita in
the writing of history.
Creating Historical Knowledge

In 1906, Savarkar travelled to London for the purpose of studying
law. Upon his arrival he immediately began collaborating with his
patron Shyamaji Krishnavarma and other Indian revolutionaries in
underground activities against British rule in an organization called
the Abinav Bharat Society (Young India Society). While in London,
Savarkar read widely on the global histories of imperialism and
nationalism. Based on his studies, he started delivering political speeches
Tilak, Bhagavadgita Rahasya, xliv.

18
D. Mackenzie Brown, “The Philosophy of Bal Gangadhar Tilak: Karma vs. Jnana in the Gita
19
Rahasya”, Journal of Asian Studies 17/2 (1958), 198.

and publishing essays as forms of public protest against colonial power

in India. By early 1907, he had completed his first book on the Italian
intellectual Giuseppe Mazzini, which was later published in India, and
immediately banned by the government.20 Savarkar finished writing
his influential book The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (IWI) in
1907. However, the government proscribed the book even before it
was completed, and as a result it was difficult for Savarkar to find a
publisher for two years; IWI eventually appeared in 1909. Later during
Savarkar’s stay in Britain, he wrote a history of the Sikhs, which was
apparently confiscated and destroyed by government authorities, with
the result that the book was never published.21 Savarkar was arrested
in 1910, and only released in 1937; however, he continued to write
despite the fact that he was a political prisoner. His major treatise on
Hindu nationalism, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, was published in 1923.
In addition, he completed two major works of history in his lifetime:
Hindu-Pad-Padshahi, Or a Review of the Hindu Empire of Maharashtra (HPP)
in 1925, and Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History (SGE) in 1963.
At the centre of each work of history is an analysis of warfare in
India. An explicit discussion of the centrality of the Gita only appears
in SGE. However, the general concepts and themes from the text—
especially the ethics of violent action and warfare—are incorporated
into all his major writings. While my primary focus in this essay is to
examine Savarkar’s engagement with the Gita in his histories, it is worth
mentioning that Savarkar was also influenced by the writings of thinkers
across the political spectrum—in India, Europe and beyond—who were
concerned with the importance of understanding warfare and violence
in world history. In IWI, for example, Savarkar explains that he was
influenced by Mazzini’s work on the history of wars and revolutions in
Europe. The larger significance of these writings is further elaborated
in Savarkar’s book on Mazzini. However, aside from these exceptions,
Savarkar is generally silent on the impact of other authors or texts in
his work.22 Yet an analysis of the embodiment of the Gita and its ideas
20
V. D. Savarkar, Josephà Mejhini: Atmacaritra ni Rajakarana (Pune, 1946).
21
V. D. Savarkar, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, trans. S. T. Godbole (New Delhi: Bal
Savarkar and Rajdhani Granthagar, 1971), 458.
22
What future studies will need to consider, for example, is how Savarkar’s writings were
influenced by a rich tradition of historical narratives of wars and battles found in Maharashtra
in western India. Here I am thinking not only of how Savarkar located his writings within an
emergent historiography of wars in western India, but also of his engagement with a genre of
in Savarkar’s histories provides a necessary context for the intellectual

and political development of religion and nationalism in colonial and
postcolonial India.
Savarkar attributes great power to historical texts, claiming that they
allow readers access to knowledge that is ontologically transformative.
Savarkar engages with key concepts from the Gita in his histories, but
his interpretation of “knowledge” does not centre on knowing Krishna.
I raise this point in order to question whether Savarkar saw himself
departing from the ultimate form of knowledge as prescribed in the
Gita, namely Krishna, or if he considered his approach a modification
the message of the Gita. Savarkar, however, does not clarify this point
directly. After all, the purpose of Krishna’s dialogue with Arjuna in
the Gita is not to reveal the importance of historical knowledge per se,
but rather that Krishna embodies all knowledge. For example, Krishna
states,
Hear how you, fixing your mind on me and finding shelter in me, shall
find me entirely beyond doubt. . . I shall propound to you more fully that
insight and knowledge, after acquiring which nothing more remains to be
known in this world. Among thousands of people there is perhaps one who
strives toward success, and even among those who have striven successfully,
perhaps only one really knows me.23
It may be argued that Savarkar had accepted the idea that seeking
knowledge as discussed by Krishna was difficult, if not impossible, for
anyone other than Arjuna. Or that Savarkar believed that historical
knowledge was in fact a component of “true” knowledge prescribed in
the Gita. The problem, once again, is that Savarkar did not elaborate
on these ideas in his writings, and consequently he left large gaps in his
interpretations. Instead, Savarkar provides a claim that the Gita was
a “tonic” for political prisoners. He situates his interpretation of the
texts called bhakars that date back to the early modern period. Jawant D. Joglekar, for example,
states that Savarkar studied both the Chatrapatichi Bakhar and Peshavyanchi Bhakar in Veer
Savarkar: Father of Hindu Nationalism (n.p., [2006]), 25. For a discussion of bakhars see Prachi
Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007); and Sumit Guha, “Speaking Historically: The Changing
Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400–1900”, American Historical Review 109/4
(2004), 1084–1103.
23
J. A. B. van Buitenen, trans., The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 99. The reference is from Chapter VII, lines 1–4, of the Gita.
Gita’s central concepts within the debates on karma yoga. And, rather
than writing a commentary or criticism of the text, Savarkar produces
histories that he believes will transform each individual and the nation.
When writing his histories of warfare, Savarkar was also aware of
contemporary public debates on the Gita and its central concepts.
There was general disagreement whether the Gita’s message of
disciplined action was to be taken allegorically or literally.24 This
debate also raised the question of whether the Gita was promoting
non-violence or advocating new forms of violence within a colonial
context. As mentioned above, Tilak in his Bhagavadgita Rahasya had
explained that it was the duty of individuals to take up arms and fight
against exploitation and oppression based on the principle of karma
yoga. Gandhi, on the other hand, was the main proponent of ahimsa
(non-violence) and stated that it was incorrect to interpret the Gita as
inciting violence in India. Gandhi’s assertion was that the discussion
of “fighting” or warfare described in the Gita was an allegory. For
example, he states,
the physical battle [in the Gita] is only an occasion for describing the battle-
field of the human body. In this view the names mentioned [e.g., Krishna
and Arjuna] are not of persons but of qualities which they represent. What
is described is the conflict within the human body between opposing moral
tendencies imagined as distinct figures.25
Gandhi’s initial contention about the interpretation of the Gita was

with Savarkar and other revolutionaries he had met in London at the
start of the twentieth century. He helps to illustrate this point in his text
“Discourses on the Gita”:
When I was in London, I had talks with many revolutionaries. Shayamji

Krishnavarma, Savarkar, and others used to tell me that the Gita and the
Ramayana taught quite the opposite of what I said they did. I felt then
how much better it would have been if the sage Vyasa had not taken this
illustration of fighting for inculcating spiritual knowledge. For when even
highly learned and thoughtful men read this meaning into the Gita, what
can we expect of ordinary people?26
24
See Simona Sawhney, The Modernity of Sanskrit (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2009), 86–124.
25
M. K. Gandhi, ‘Discourses on the Gita’, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (hereafter CWMG),
vol. 37 (New Delhi: The Publication Division of the Government of India, 2000), 76.
26
Ibid., 82.
Immediately following his trip to London in 1909, Gandhi wrote Hind

Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, in which he presents arguments against an
unnamed revolutionary. Dhananjay Keer, on this point, argues that
Gandhi’s text is a direct reply to Savarkar.27 Anthony Parel states that
Keer’s assertion is an “exaggeration”, but he believes that “there is some
truth in it”.28 Parel suggests that the revolutionary is a composite of at
least three individuals: Pranjivan Mehta, Krishnavarma and Savarkar.29
While Gandhi never identifies the individual or individuals who inspired
the figure in Hind Swaraj, he is clear that he had a very specific purpose
in writing Hind Swaraj: “[it] was written in answer to the revolutionary’s
arguments and methods”.30 Gandhi continues, “It was an attempt to
offer something infinitely superior to what [the revolutionary] had.
. . because he does not even appear to me to understand the art of
warfare.”31 He provides alternatives to the revolutionary’s claims by
discussing the principles of non-violence, passive resistance, satyagraha
and Indian civilization.32 However, he also includes critiques of the
revolutionary’s celebration of violence (“brute force”), interest in
militarization, appeal to modern civilization and interest in writing
histories of wars in India.
By not identifying Savarkar, or any other individual, Hind Swaraj may
be considered Gandhi’s response to emergent revolutionary thought
that was inspired, in part, by the Gita. However, by the time Gandhi
had met Savarkar in 1909, he was well aware of Savarkar’s arguments
in IWI. Gandhi did not want to cede the interpretations of swaraj,
swadharma, or any other concept central to understanding India’s past to
Savarkar or any other revolutionary. Nor was Gandhi willing to accept
an interpretation of the Gita that argued for violence and warfare as
part of a political strategy. For Gandhi, Hind Swaraj was his intervention
in the public debate on both these themes. Parel has even pointed out
that Gandhi elevated the status of Hind Swaraj to the Gita and the
Ramayana—a major Hindu epic. He points out that it is in Hind Swaraj
27
Keer, Veer Savarkar.
28
Anthony Parel, ‘Introduction’, in M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxvii.
29
Ibid., 6 n. 3.
30
M. K. Gandhi, “At It Again”, in CWMG, vol. 31 (New Delhi: The Publication Division of the
Government of India, 2000), 286.
31
Ibid.
32
See Gandhi, Hind Swaraj.
that Gandhi “actualizes the potential” of the Gita in contemporary

society.33 Gandhi even states that “We may read the Gita or the Ramayana
or Hind Swaraj. But what we have to learn from them is desire for the
welfare of others”.34 Savarkar does not explicitly respond to Gandhi in
his historical writings, but he is certainly aware of the nature of public
debates on the Gita and their impact on the direction of the nationalist
movement in twentieth-century India. The impact of Gandhi’s
critique of revolutionary thought is not immediately apparent in IWI.
In IWI, Savarkar claims that histories of revolutionary wars need to
be written as part of a nation’s strategy.35 However, he also notes that
not all histories were the same, noting the existence of fundamental
differences in the interpretations of histories written by British officials,
Indian collaborators and Indian nationalists.36 (These are categories that
Savarkar develops in his own work.) Savarkar explains that his purpose
for writing IWI was to provide an important corrective to historical
analyses that only considered the events of 1857 as a military mutiny. He
states that he was inspired by “the brilliance of a War of Independence
shining in the mutiny of 1857”.37 He discusses the necessity of writing
histories in both Indian and European languages, and he comments
on the issues of translating histories from one language to another.
He notes that many historians have simply adopted methodological
approaches that neglect “native” sources and the voices of Indians, who
either witnessed or participated in wars. He explains that within the
context of imperial rule, these histories have the potential to be ignored,
forgotten or silenced. Savarkar claims that without an intervention by
a nationalist like himself, histories of Indian wars, and accounts of the
actions of revolutionaries and heroes—from Chitore and Pratapaditya
to Guru Gobind Singh—would eventually be “erased from the pages
of our history.”38
33
Parel, ‘Introduction,’ Hind Swaraj, xvii.
34
M. K. Gandhi, CWMG, vol. 32 (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Press, 1969), 496. Also cited in Parel,
‘Introduction,’ Hind Swaraj, xvii.
35
“An Indian Nationalist”, The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (London: [np], 1909), vii. Please
note that Savarkar’s name was not included in the original edition of the book. Also, later
editions of the book have a slightly modified title: The Indian War of Independence, 1857. The
discussion of IWI is further developed in Vinayak Chaturvedi, “V. D. Savarkar and the Uses of
History”, in Crispin Bates, ed., Perception, Narration and Reinvention: The Pedagogy and Historiography
of the Indian Uprising (New Delhi: Sage, forthcoming).
36
Savarkar, Indian War of Independence, 5–6.
37
Ibid., vii.
38
Ibid., 8.
Savarkar further argues that all nations need to “develop a capacity”

for claiming the past, while at the same time adopting a strategy of
knowing how to use these claims for the nation’s future.39 Writing a
national history about the themes of “revolution”, “revolutionary
wars” and “wars of independence” was necessary for overthrowing
colonial rule. For Savarkar, once the past was revealed, every individual
would understand his personal duty (swadharma) for working towards
the cause of self-government or self-rule (swaraj) and the greater good
of the nation. It is worth noting that the concept of swaraj is not
central to the message of the Gita, but it is central to the emergent
debates on nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in
India.40 Savarkar, like many of his contemporaries, also engages with
the concept of swaraj in his writings, while also linking it directly with
swadharma. Further, for Savarkar, the coupling of swaraj and swadharma
was necessary for interpreting histories of independence or swatantrya
in India.41
What is interesting to note is that Savarkar includes Muslims as heroes
in IWI— a theme that is omitted from his later writings. For example,
an individual like Ahmad Shah Moulvie is celebrated by Savarkar as a
“national hero” who fought on “the battlefield in 1857 for the freedom
of the country and the protection of Dharma”.42 The last Mughal
emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar is also recognized as promoting the dual
principles of swadharma and swaraj in IWI. Savarkar further states,
[The English] have got now the wicked desire to destroy our holy religion!
. . . God does not wish that you should remain [idle]; for he has inspired in
the hearts of Hindus and Mahomedans the desire to turn the English out
of our country.43
Savarkar does not elaborate on what he means by the idea of a

shared country or religion between Hindus and Muslims in IWI. It is
a theme that appears to be assumed in parts of Savarkar’s writings at
this point. I emphasize this in order to underscore the fact that there
was in important shift in Savarkar’s histories of warfare in HPP and
39
Ibid., vii.
40
See Shruti Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism,
1890–1920’, Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 109–27.
41
Savarkar, Indian War of Independence, 3–12.
42
Ibid., 328.
43
Ibid., 9 (my emphasis).
SGE. While Savarkar argued for Indian independence from British

rule in IWI, his later work focused on wars of Hindu independence
from Christians and Muslims in India. The publication of Hindutva
had formally signalled this shift in Savarkar’s work, but it was in HPP
that he made it clear that his purpose was to write a Hindu national
history, rather than an Indian history, as he had done in IWI. Savarkar
states, “I decided that I myself should write a discursive book. . . which
would interpret and explain the unrivalled valour of the post-Shivaji
Maharashtra and the freedom of the Hindu nation that it effected by
destroying Muslim domination”.44
Discussions of swadharma and swaraj are present in the texts, and as
in IWI they are integral to the larger analyses of warfare. The methods
of writing history developed in IWI are also carried through in the later
works on Hindu independence and the ideology of Hindutva. The
primary focus is once again on studying the acts of former “heroes”
in history, although now he centre his claims on Hindu heroes, not
Muslim ones. He even began to push his arguments back in time;
whereas IWI provided an analysis of warfare the nineteenth century,
HPP focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and SGE
covered the histories from the ancient to the modern world. Savarkar,
of course, continued to believe that by writing histories he would create
knowledge that would demand a transformation of society through
direct action. Yet, for Savarkar, the fact that a war—Indian or Hindu—
did not occur during his lifetime did not mean that he was incorrect in
his analyses—a revolutionary war or a war of independence was an
ongoing, multigenerational process.45 He argued that every nationalist
needed to learn from all wars, even ones that failed, for the purpose
of working towards future wars. Rather than proposing arguments for
a shared religion or nation between Hindus and Muslims, Savarkar’s
emphasis was on Hindu India.
In SGE Savarkar argues that the Gita helps to explain the nature
of violence in India’s history. While Savarkar provides fragmentary
references to the Gita in IWI and HPP, his discussion in SGE is more
extensive, but by no means comprehensive, in comparison to the
writings of his contemporaries on the Gita. For example, the Gita is
Savarkar, Six Glorious Epochs, 409.

44
See Vinayak Chaturvedi, ‘Vinayak & Me: Hindutva and the Politics of Naming’, Social History
45
28/2 (2003), 155–73.

explicitly mentioned only twice in IWI. In HPP, Savarkar includes

several scattered references to the Gita and its battle, all of which would
have been well known to any reader in India. However, what is evident
in SGE is that there is a continuity of themes and methods in Savarkar’s
analyses of warfare in India in all his history writing.
Before continuing with Savarkar’s discussion of the Gita, it is worth
considering a recent interpretation of SGE. David Hardiman has
suggested that Savarkar’s historical arguments and interpretations in
SGE can be read as a direct response to Gandhi’s writings on non-
violence.46 Hardiman gives the example of Savarkar’s discussion of
the emperor Ashoka, who adopted Buddhism and non-violence in
his empire in the third century BCE.47 Savarkar claims that Ashoka’s
turn to non-violence not only was “anti-national”, but also weakened
India’s independence at the time and made India susceptible to foreign
invasions. According to Savarkar, Ashoka’s descendent Brihadrath
Maurya had failed to protect India’s empire due to the new policies.
As a result, an individual named Pushyamitra took it upon himself to
assassinate Brihadrath and assume the position of the new emperor.
Pushyamitra later fought against the Greek invaders of India and
restored pride to the Indian nation by abandoning the policy of non-
violence. Hardiman explains that this episode reflects Savarkar’s idea
that it was a “national duty” to assassinate proponents of non-violence
for the cause of the nation.48 He further notes that the assassination
of Brihadrath discussed in SGE is an analogy for Gandhi’s murder by
Nathuram Godse—one of Savarkar’s key disciples.
Not surprisingly, Savarkar does not state that SGE is an engagement
with Gandhi or his ideas. Whether Savarkar’s discussion of the
assassination of Brihadrath was intended as an analogy to Gandhi’s
murder, or whether the purpose of the example is to inspire future
assassinations for national pride, remains unclear. However, by providing
examples of heroes of ancient India, Savarkar also had another
objective in mind. He was able to show that historically India had been
in a permanent state of war, in which Hindus had always turned to
warfare against all foreigners. Gandhi’s arguments against warfare
46
David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004), 175.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid.
were based on the fact that individuals like Savarkar were influenced by
the ideas of modern civilization that promoted violence.49 At another
level, Gandhi claimed that these same individuals misunderstood the
Gita by taking its message of advocating violence literally. I would
like to push Hardiman’s insights even further here. In SGE—and by
extension, in IWI and HPP—Savarkar provides key interpretations of
India’s past by presenting violence and warfare as necessary ethical
responses by Hindus against aggressors in India, in which the Gita
provides justification not only for understanding the past, but also for
advocating politics in the future.
Savarkar points out that not all wars were the same, despite the fact
that India had been in a permanent state of war. He explains that
the early wars were fought against invaders who had aspirations for
“political ascendancy” rather than “religious enmity”, such as Persians,
Ionians, Greeks, Sakas, Kushanas and Huns.50 He says that religion was
not an issue in the early wars because the invaders practiced religions
that were “more or less like the offshoots of Hinduism itself ”.51 In
fact, Savarkar argues that millions of individuals who had come as
invaders decided to settle in India and assimilated into Hindu society.
This was only possible because the conflicts in early India were about
politics, not religion. However, a major shift occurred in India with the
emergence and spread of religious sects like the Jains and Buddhists,
who promoted “extreme non-violence, kindness, love, [and] truth”.52
Savarkar explains that as a result the Hindu polity became susceptible
to new invasions. Yet Hindus were to blame for the shift within India.
For Savarkar, the destruction and annihilation of the Hindu polity only
became apparent when “Islam invaded Hinduism”, and Hindus now
lacked a “war-strategy”. The new wars were fundamentally different
from the early ones, because the invaders had aspirations for both
religious and political dominance in India.
For Savarkar, Hindus who had promoted “extreme non-violence”
had established a “perverted conception of virtue”, which resulted
in the abandonment of the principles of the Gita. He states, “But at
this time of the Hindu–Muslim war the Hindu nation forgot even the
49
See Gandhi, Hind Swaraj.
50
Savarkar, Six Glorious Epochs, 256.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 256–57.
Bhagawat Geeta. . . Why [Hindus] even twisted the message of the

Geeta itself.”53 Savarkar refers to Chapter VII of the Gita as a way to
discuss the importance of the three characteristics—satvik, rajas, and
tamas—necessary for all Hindus to fight Muslims (and later Christians)
in India.54 He explains that the combination of these characteristics
provided a “three-edged weapon” necessary for all warriors to win
victory over injustice on the battlefield. What this meant for Savarkar
was that Muslims and Christians wanted to “destroy” and “eradicate”
the Hindu religion; the only hope for resisting invasions was found in
the Gita. Savarkar acknowledges the general collective amnesia of the
Gita’s principles by most Hindus, but he also states that a handful of
individuals did not forget the “true” message of karma yoga. In other
words, researching and writing history had the power to reveal when
the Gita was forgotten in periods of India’s past, but it also showed
when individuals turned to the Gita to challenge the power of invaders
to create a “social revolution”.55
Savarkar went on to argue that Hindus maintained an ethical
code in their wars with all invaders into India. Battles were fought
between enemies based on agreed guidelines derived from Hindu texts.
Dharmayudda—literally, righteous or legitimate warfare—was a principle
that was adopted by the warring clans in the Gita, but it was also a
principle found in religious texts to discuss the battles between gods.56
Savarkar explains the nature of warfare in India:
No single charioteer was to be attacked by many charioteers; the submissive

or surrendering warrior was to be given his life. Such considerations for
justice and injustice were to be actually shown on the battle-field. This
ethics of war was preached because it was honoured by both the contending
parties.57
He claims that even after the arrival of Muslims into India, Hindus
either promoted “extreme non-violence” or maintained the principles
of dharmayudda. As a consequence, over time Muslims were able
53
Ibid., 168.
54
Ibid., 167–68.
55
Ibid., 168.
56
See K. N. Upadhyaya, “The Bhagavad Gita on War and Peace”, Philosophy East and West 19/2
(1969), 159–69; Surya P. Subedi, “The Concept in Hinduism of ‘Just War’”, Journal of Conflict
& Security Law 8/2 (2003), 339–61.
57
Savarkar, Six Glorious Epochs, 255–56.
dominate India. Savarkar’s main concern was that once it was known
that Muslims were not willing to accept dharmayudda or any other Hindu
principle, Hindus should have resorted to an alternative war strategy
found in the Gita. For Savarkar, this posed an important turning point
in India’s history. The act of killing is at the centre of the dialogue
between Krishna and Arjuna; however, not all forms of violence—and
by extension killing—are considered legitimate. In other words, not all
is fair in war. However, there are exceptions to dharmayudda. Savarkar
asserts that even Krishna argues that it is necessary to abandon a code
of ethics with an enemy that is unjust or unethical. Yet what Savarkar
does not discuss is that the principles of dharmayudda were violated in
the Gita itself. Instead, he cites Muslim interest in establishing religious
and political dominance in India as evidence of the violations of all
Hindu principles. The arrival of the British in later centuries was also
interpreted in this context.
No longer could wars be fought with a common understanding of
the rules of engagement or based on dharmayudda. Hindus had to adopt
alternative forms of warfare in order to defeat the enemy, with the
result that wars fought against invaders were necessarily going to be
unjust. Savarkar writes, “Were a serpent (an inveterate national enemy)
to come with a view to bite the motherland, he should be smashed into
pieces with a surprise attack, deceit or cunning or in any other way
possible.”58 Savarkar’s argument in SGE helps to explain his interest in
writing about individuals who adopted the tactics of guerrilla warfare.
These were Savarkar’s true heroes: individuals who turned to the Gita
when others had forgotten its message, individuals who understood
karma yoga, individuals who were ethical and knew when to adopt the
principles of dharmayudda, and individuals who knew when to turn to
alternative war strategies to fight an unethical enemy. Savarkar claimed
that by writing about heroes of wars he would create a transformation
in any reader of his text. But he adds that writing history is “secondary”
to the main objective of making history. The knowledge that is gained
from studying the past must be connected to taking action in everyday
life to create change for the cause of the nation.
58
Ibid.
Conclusion
Savarkar establishes the importance of the Gita in his writings, but he
also argues that the Gita should not be the only text for the creation of
the Hindu nation in his speech “Ek hi dharm-pustak nahin, yeh achcha
hai!” I do not raise this point to suggest that there was an inherent
contradiction in his thought. Savarkar was not systematic in his
interpretation of the Gita (or perhaps of any other text in his work). But
what is more revealing is that he engaged with a large body of writings
throughout his lifetime and argued for the necessity of individuals to
read widely in a number of disciplines. As a result, Savarkar was also
attracted to political thought that argued for principles that converged
with his own understanding of the need for warfare. Here I am thinking
not only of his engagements with the writings of Mazzini, but also of
his reading of figures like Herbert Spencer, G. S. Sardesai and Johann
Kaspar Bluntschli, and his political associations with Sinn Fein, the
Irish Republican Army, Russian and Scottish anarchists, and other
revolutionaries.59 Savarkar also became interested in considering histories
of Nazism, Fascism, and Zionism as a way to think about the future of
Hindu India. However, for Savarkar, the method for the circulation and
reproduction of his ideas was in the form of writing histories. Historical
knowledge was meant to transform both the individual and the nation.
Because embedded within Savarkar’s histories were the principles
developed out of the Gita, it was no longer necessary to read only the
Gita. (In fact, this is also a claim made by Gandhi, who elevates Hind
Swaraj to the level of the Gita and Ramayana.) This helps to explain why
Savarkar primarily recommended his historical writings to individuals
who were interested in creating a Hindu nation.60
Yet there are significant gaps in Savarkar’s writings that make it
difficult to provide a thorough analysis of his thought. The context in
which Savarkar composed much of his seminal work helps to explain,
in part, the fragmentary nature of the writings. However, Savarkar may
59
Savarkar’s engagements with these thinkers and ideas also need to be considered, in association
with the Gita, for a fuller interpretation of an intellectual history of Savarkar’s political thought.
On similar themes see Michael Silvestri, “The Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita, and Dan Breen:
Terrorism in Bengal and Its Relation to the European Experience’, Terrorism and Political Violence
21/1 (2009), 1–27.
60
NMML, Savarkar Papers, Microfilm Reel No. 10, Letter from V. D. Savarkar, President of
All-India Hindu Mahasabha, to Manager, Sindh Bookstall, 7 July1941.
have also adopted a strategy for writing that was elusive. For example,
Savarkar does not explain why individuals who had acquired knowledge
of past heroic acts would necessarily accept his interpretation of
swadharma and swaraj. Nor does he explain why an understanding
of past acts of violence would lead to new acts of violence. There is
little to explain the shift from writing about histories of Indian wars
to histories of Hindu wars. Perhaps these issues, and many others like
them, were beyond the scope of Savarkar’s arguments, because he never
intended to write academic, analytical works. Rather he was interested
in producing affective histories to inspire and motivate individuals to
take up arms for the cause of the nation.
By bringing together key selections from Savarkar’s writings in this
essay, it is possible to show how Savarkar developed concepts from
the Gita for his political purposes. While Savarkar declared victory
against the British Empire in SGE, the idea of a permanent war has not
ended, especially among a later generation of Savarkar’s disciples and
followers, who argue that violence against Muslims and Christians is
the new form of ethical warfare in postcolonial India. Savarkar realized
that his vision of a Hindu India that was free from wars might not
occur in his lifetime, but by setting out strategies for history writing
and inspiring future wars, he provided an intervention for Hindu
nationalists to rethink the principle of knowledge with action for the
twentieth century and beyond.
9
A History of Violence*
Shruti Kapila
Life is the Life of Life

B. G. Tilak1
The history of India, and specifically of its nationalism and indepen-
dence, has been portrayed primarily as a triumphal history of non-
violence. The iconic figure of Gandhi has become a proper name,
a name that stands for this concept, history and practice. European
proper names, Kant, for instance, have long come to stand for and an-
nounce epochal change. To that extent Gandhi has seized ownership of
non-violence and the annunciation of Indian freedom in the twentieth
century.
In her reflections on the question of violence, Hannah Arendt argues
that Gandhi and non-violence were possible in India because they had
a “different enemy” than either Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany or
even pre-war Japan. Had any of these been the enemy, she conjectures
that the “outcome would not have been decolonization but massacre
and submission”.2 Even if massacre there was in decolonization, Arendt
*
For the pleasure of conversation and constructive comments I am grateful to Akeel Bilgrami,
Chris Bayly, Faisal Devji, Kriti Kapila, Marc Michael and Sam Moyn; I remain, however,
solely responsible for the arguments here. An earlier version was presented at a workshop on
Gandhi at the Heyman Center, Columbia University, April 2009, and I am indebted to its
participants.
1
B. G. Tilak, Srimad Bhagavadgita Rahasya or Karma Yoga Shastra (1915), trans. B. S. Suthankar
(Bombay, 1935), 44; hereafter Gita-Rahasya.
2
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1969), 53.
raises the important question of the relationship between violence and

power.3 Her suggestion is that the British were simply too powerful to
mount systemic violence of the kind that Stalin and Hitler had pursued.
The rule of and by violence, she claims, becomes possible only where
“power is being lost”. Moreover, the available choice for the British
Empire between decolonization of India and a massacre for submission
exposed but the fragility of imperial power. Cromer, the Viceroy of
Egypt in the opening years of the twentieth century, had feared the
“boomerang effect” of the “government of subject races”, but also
mainly that the violence in these distant lands would come home and
affect government in England and thus had the potential to make the
“English the last subject race”. For Arendt, Cromer’s fears were not
meaningless colonial paranoia but instead articulated an important
historical problem, namely that violence without the restraint of power
is the short road to destruction.4 In this scenario, the British choice in
India for “restraint” was in the end a choice for self-preservation.
Arendt’s reflection on violence and power—profound as it remains
forty years after it was written—nevertheless assumes that the state is
the legitimate, all-powerful author of violence and indeed holds
the monopoly on it. So while Arendt rightly puts massacre and
decolonization together, she fundamentally mistakes it is as a historical
choice and that too for one actor alone, namely the weakened imperial
state. As such, the choice of killing and violence is seen to be the
prerogative of the state either for action or for restraint. Or, more to
the point, Arendt only restates one of the central concerns of the
modern state and its theorization, namely its relationship with violence
itself, understood either as its rightful monopoly or as the guarantee of
its legitimization. From Hobbes to Schmitt this has been a persistent
concern.
Yet Indians killed each other in an unprecedented fashion at the same
time as they went into the unprecedented business of making a nation
state. Violence and power and its role in historical change have been
central to the understanding of political modernity, at least since the
3
Estimates of numbers killed vary from several hundreds of thousands to a million, while those
displaced vary from seven to ten million. For a comparative perspective see Mark Mazower,
‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century,’ American Historical Review 107/4 (2002),
1158–78.
4
Arendt, On Violence, 54.
A History of Violence 179
French Revolution. However, rather than approaching the problem of

violence as perennial to an imagined or concrete foundational moment
of modernity, this essay will situate violence strictly in the context and
character of the twentieth century itself.
Tilak, the key nationalist figure prior to the arrival of Gandhi,
was, this essay will argue, the central thinker of the political in India.
The same year as Gandhi wrote his seminal text Hind Swaraj aboard
ship from London to South Africa, Tilak produced a comprehensive
translation of and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita from a prison
cell in Rangoon.5 The year was 1908. These two seminal texts mark
the two critical strands of modern political thought in India. This
article will focus exclusively on Tilak’s commentary on the Gita while
on occasion reflecting on Hind Swaraj. This will sharpen the distinction
between Gandhi as a pre-eminent ethical thinker and Tilak the arch-
theorist of the political in India.6
There are three main claims and points of elaboration in this essay.
First, violence has been central to the transformation of the meaning
and practices of the political in India. Second, the capacities of
violence, whether conceptual or real, were not directed towards the
“outsider” but instead violence was framed as a matter of sacrifice and
kinship. Unlike the distinction between friend and foe that has been
taken as central to the understanding of the political in the twentieth
century, it was instead the fraternal that equipped the political in India.
At its most basic and its most excessive, relations between Hindus and
Muslims in India are framed in terms of kinship and are referred to
in terms of brotherhood. Finally, the question of fraternal violence is
neither perpetual nor spectral. Instead, the article argues, the issue of
the “event”, understood here as rupture, has been salient for fraternal
enmity and for its significance for the political.
The Self/Other dichotomy, both in India’s past and in more recent
writings that have framed the Hindu/Muslim distinction, is owed to
liberal, colonial and Hindutva traditions. On the contrary, the vision
of the relationship of Hindu to Muslim as fraternal is what mattered
5
First published in Marathi in 1915, other vernacular editions in Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali,Telugu
and Tamil soon followed. By 1925, Hindi and Marathi editions were in their sixth print runs,
in the tens of thousands.
6
Implicit here is an engagement primarily with Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1932),
trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996); and Derrida’s critique of
Schmitt.
to Gandhi as much as to Tilak. As Gandhi wrote, “Any two Indians are

one as no two Englishmen are.”7 Significantly and precisely, the fact that
Hindus and Muslims were not merely relational, but were essentially the
same, posed the most potent conceptual and political problem regarding
violence and sacrifice. Gandhi transformed this fraternal relationship
into one of “neighbourliness”, whereby Hindus and Muslims could
coexist with their differences held intact.8 Nevertheless, even as it broke
with liberal ideas of public neutrality towards religion, neighbourliness
offered walls as a means of protecting differences. Tilak, on the other
hand, focused on the fraternal itself and therefore the nature of the
political for him was premised in terms of brothers within a house.
Thus, the spectre of fratricide that the Gita addressed was central,
since it overtly posed the problem of the conversion of kinsmen into
enemies.
Balgangadhar Tilak, or Tilak for short, is received in commentaries
and historiography as “extremist” nationalist, litigious agitator, nativist–
chauvinist, and so on. Tilak is set in contrast to the opposing tradition
of “moderate” nationalists, constitutional men and polite petitioners
who until then had led the story of the Indian National Congress.9 This
contradiction between the agitators and the petitioners that led to the
split of the Congress in the opening decade of the twentieth century
is resolved in crass Hegelian fashion with the arrival of Gandhi in the
national arena. This teleological triptych has formed the common sense
of the history and politics of modern India. Far from transcending and
superseding Tilak, however, Gandhi’s ethical politics were forced to
subsist with their alternative and, if anything, were superseded by it.
If there is a teleological pole to consider here then it would have
to be the year 1947. The violence of partition in particular showed
that Gandhi did not sublimate Tilak but that the latter outlasted any
synthesis. To be sure, Tilak’s thought did not in any simple manner
cause partition and therefore the two states of India and Pakistan. But it
did make violence possible, plausible and conceivable. Significantly, this
violence was ingested or sutured remarkably quickly in the twentieth
7
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (1909), ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 49.
8
On neighbourliness as a Gandhian idea see Ajay Skaria, ‘Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the
Question of the Ashram’, South Atlantic Quarterly101/4 (2002), 955–86.
9
Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1962).
century. It is a striking historical fact that there have to date been neither
commissions about nor memorials to the violence of partition. Rather
than inciting victims of violence to confession, we need to ask instead
how this violence not only appeared but was absorbed. There was
no call for a “reckoning with the past” in the style of the Nuremberg
trials, and even recently the very Gandhian invocations of “truth and
reconciliation” elsewhere have remained absent in India. Neither the
Holocaust nor postwar genocides offer adequate interpretive rubrics
for the violence of the political in India. For the former and for other
“totalitarian” practices, violence was the instrument of the state, and the
latter have primarily been “sub-national” struggles. They were bids to
change a given equation among the established entitlements of groups,
however erroneously fabricated, as separate blood communities.10
Gandhi’s figure and ideals are not forgotten but commemorated in
postcolonial India. As a non-violent father of the nation, Gandhi is
particularly invoked after the event of bloody riots or a pogrom. As
an anti-capitalist thinker, it is his face that adorns the Indian rupee.
Gandhi serves as an ethical reminder of and a necessary corrective to
the violence of the political. If, on the other hand, Tilak is identified
as the political unconscious of twentieth-century India (as he will be
here), then it is in his conceptual prison house that the Indian political
has been held hostage. Needless to say, this is not to write in the vein of
“India-the-siege-within”.11 On the contrary, the aim is to uncover and
explain how such a significant ideological innovator as Tilak addressed
the foundational question of violence and the political.
Thus this essay does not take the genealogical approach in viewing
Gandhi as a revolutionary legatee of an earlier extremist nationalist
violent world view. In other words, it is not through genealogy or even
the law of subtraction that Gandhi becomes the philosopher that he is.
It is certainly plausible that Gandhi usurps the earlier tradition at the
same time as he subtracts violence out of it. However, my own inclination
is to view Gandhi as a philosopher strictly in the way Gilles Deleuze
10
On genocide see especially Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism,
Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001).
11
The sociologically robust but theoretically under-explained accounts in various now standard
texts in the disciplines of history, anthropology and politics are more sure-footed on causes
of violence and memory rather than on the conditions of the possibility and the subsequent
absorption and acceptance of violence.
identifies a philosopher: that is, he announces new concepts.12 Tilak, on

the other hand, was instrumental in creating a new normative language
of the political. For Gandhi, as I have argued elsewhere, truth rather
than non-violence per se was the oppositional arm to the violence of the
political, and that has defied institutionalization.13 Tilak, on the other
hand, foregrounded a dehistoricized political subject, whose existence
was entirely dependent upon the event of violence, and this view of the
political has proven to be potent in postcolonial India. As such, being
formative of a political norm, Tilak has no single legatee. Further,
fixing the triumvirate of Hindutva ideologues—Vinayak Savarkar, K.
B. Hedgewar and M. S. Golwalkar—as genealogical successors to Tilak
misconstrues both Tilak and Hindutva ideology. Hindutva is forged on
the premise of the Hindu as a separate and “pure” blood/religious
community and is deeply enmeshed in evolutionist ideas of race as
nation. But it was fraternity—as opposed to blood community—that
forged the political and its violence in twentieth-century India.
Freedom and the End of the Nineteenth Century

The question of violence and the political has a specific historical
trajectory in the Indian context. Sheldon Pollock has argued that
sometime in the seventeenth century political thought died in India,
signalling a divergence from Europe. Pollock explains this death in
a number of provocative ways, notably including that of the death
of the language of the learned, Sanskrit. The most challenging and
productive dimension of Pollock’s claim is that India had arrived at
a “civilizational equilibrium” consisting in the comparative absence
of religious wars and the “control of conflict”—unlike the situation
in contemporary Europe, marked as it was by the “peculiarly violent
wreckage of premodernity that produced its modernity”.14 The control
of conflict in premodern India was “total” and significantly this
control curtailed reflection on ideas of freedom. This was not because
repression was total, but rather, as Pollock suggests, because the polity
was marked by a remarkable degree of freedom. Therefore, the lack
12
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Verso, 1996).
13
Shruti Kapila, “Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth”, Public Culture,
23: 2 (2011), 431–48.
14
Sheldon Pollock, The Ends of Man at the End of Premodernity, Gonda Lecture (Amsterdam: Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005).
of political theory and the absence of a vocabulary of freedom are the

civilizational hallmarks of precolonial and premodern India. Pointing
to the connections between moral theory and political thought, Pollock
points to the significant loss of centrality of the pre-eminent text of
politics (rajniti), Kautilya’s Artha Shastra (Science of Power), which fell
into obscurity after the twelfth century.
While this view of precolonial South Asia may be open to debate,
it is nevertheless striking that the departures of the nineteenth century
reflect precisely the mirror images of the absences that Pollock has
delineated, in the specific philosophical concepts and practices of the
modern subject or self. To be brief, conflict and freedom are the two
fundamental concepts that inform selfhood in the Indian context from
the nineteenth century onwards. There is, then, a deep recognition and
confrontation with the lack of freedom in colonial modernity. While
moral thought may have been narrow in its scope and highlighted the
actions of the individual, the ethical domain was seen to be broad in its
scope, outlining the collective conditions necessary for the freedom of
the self and individual action. Though the Artha Shastra would remain
obscure, it is striking that the Bhagavad Gita became the pre-eminent
text in late colonial Indian ideologies, thus allowing for the ethical and
political under colonial rule to be conceptualized.
For some decades prior to the opening of the twentieth century, Indian
ideologues of various hues, both high-minded and popular, thematized
the relationship between the subject, self or human agent and the
necessity for ethical and political change. This imperative of renewal in
the face of necessity can be called the problem of the Indian national
subject. The Indian problem as understood in the late nineteenth
century was not that human agency and subjectivity were imprisoned
by the structures of industrialized society, or more specifically that they
were alienated through the hierarchy of caste, class or rank. Rather,
the imperative for renewal turned on the perception that agency had
dissolved into deep passivity, for which the insidious but pervasive power
of colonialism was blamed. The purposive logic of the renovation and
equipment of selfhood was directed towards freedom.
The sourcing of the freedom of the self took two distinct and
oppositional directions: in one, the aspect of self-freedom was
articulated as a common sensibility in which Vedanta became the
primary source of inspiration. Vedanta was set out as a vision and
norm in which the self was a historicized agent of action and change.
We can associate this with Vivekananda and much of the Indian liberal
tradition. A second stream of thinkers overtly reclaimed the vocabulary
of abandonment, rejection and renunciation. This form of thinking
took the material world and circumstance as an inadequate context for
freedom and selfhood. This is the trajectory that Gandhi, Aurobindo,
Tagore and the revolutionary terrorists would pursue. Underlying both
these trajectories was the nature of human agency that was perceived
in terms of a lack, or as underdetermined and thus focused on a will-
to-power as a will-to-self hood.15
As several commentators and historians have noted, Indian modernity
has been first and foremost political in nature and only then economic.
The invention of the political subject or the constitution of the modern
and national subject was the key concern of fin de siècle colonial India.
The main issue related to the question of freedom: that of the self and
of the nation. It is striking that the nationalist term for self-rule and the
term for the mastery and freedom of the self are one and the same,
namely swaraj. To be sure, though, the modern and national subject
were by no means synonymous.16
Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, historicist and
dialectical understandings of the relations between the subject and
collective conditions, with the firm goal of freedom, despite variations
on this theme, held sway. Whether it was the materialists or the idealists
or an Aurobindo or a Bankim, there was recognition that nation, society
and religion had set off in different and incompatible directions. The
Swadeshi movement (1905–8) put the idea of a renewed subject to
the test and its related politics and techniques set out to reconcile and
connect these incommensurable domains. Swadeshi politics gave rise
to sporadic violence in the face of the proposed partition of Bengal
in 1905, which they opposed. Yet, less than fifty years later, the violent
acceptance of partition would define the birth of the nation states on
the Indian subcontinent.
15
Shruti Kapila, Governments of the Mind: The Self and Its Sciences in Modern India (Cambridge
University Press, MS under review).
16
Shruti Kapila, “Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism,
1890–1920”, Modern Intellectual History 4:1 (2007), 109–27.
Event and the Subject of Action

B. G. Tilak (1856–1920) was a key public figure and propagandist
through the latter half of the nineteenth century who was associated
with radical and controversial positions on issues ranging from religion
and education to Sanskrit scholarship and law. Tilak emerged as one
the central ideologues of the Swadeshi movement and was given the
sobriquet “Lokmanya” or “will of the people”. Beyond India and in the
opening years of the twentieth century, Vladimir Lenin declared Tilak
the revolutionary figurehead of Asia.17 Lenin was not off the mark
in apprehending that, although no communist, Tilak was a thinker
of the revolution. The failure of the Swadeshi and its consequences
made visible the limits of possibility and the inadequacy of existing
technologies of the political. Swadeshi then not merely marked a closure
in the public lives of many of its leaders (whether Aurobindo or Tagore)
but rather its failure made the colonial state and its repressive capacities
all too evident. It was within this context that the political had to be
imperatively thought anew. Far from being exiled from public life, the
failure of the Swadeshi movement and his own internment in Rangoon
forced Tilak to reconfigure the relations between agent and action.
Swadeshi failure pointed to the limits of the idea of transformation
as a dialectical outcome of preparation and confrontation, commonly
associated with Hegelian approaches. In historicist approaches an
event—whether revolutionary or liberationist—is primarily expressive
of all that was understood as suppressed, as opposed to the event as an
opening of a new historical sequence. In other words, confrontation
was an outcome of antinomies that were intended to be conclusive of
a historical sequence. For example, events or protests surrounding the
Swadeshi movement were a confrontation in search of a conclusion
between the antithetical politics of empire and nation. Swadeshi
politics, or the “dress rehearsal” for the Bolshevik Revolution, like the
1905 Revolution in Russia, emanated from this expressive–historicist
perspective on the nature of agent, action and event.
Swadeshi politics, especially those of the “extremist” or of Tilak’s
brand, had made anti-statism its main doctrinal plank. More recent
rethinking on the political, notably by Alain Badiou, has persuasively
argued that the event by definition lies, and happens, beyond the
17
V. I. Lenin, The National Liberation Movement in the East, trans. M. Levin (Moscow, 1962), 14–15.
boundaries of the state. This is because through law, policing and

the army, the modern state categorically defines the limits of political
ruptures. Equally, the modern state, while claiming a monopoly on
violence, pushes violence to the boundaries of the state, quite literally
through the deployment of armies at its frontiers.18 Recent perspectives
on the political have turned attention to the issue of the rupture as
an event. In the light of these perspectives, it is striking that Tilak’s
commentary on the Gita set out to rethink precisely this task of the
political. Tilak’s commentary, while engaging with nineteenth-century
preoccupations, including that of historicism, was ultimately a break
with those forms of thinking. Instead, the theme of the subject as
contingent on the event became the focus of his project.
For Tilak, and as his commentary on the Gita asserted, the
fundamental problem in the Indian context was with the available
understandings of the subject and freedom itself. Categorically, he
claimed, renunciation was mistaken for, and overlapped with, freedom.
Equally, detachment was upheld as a virtue and a matter of disposition.
As such, the agent or subject seeking freedom, whether individually or
collectively, was idealized because it stood apart from the worldly. Tilak
intervened within these existing precepts by specifying detachment not
as an ideal disposition but as one that was parochial to action. This
form of detached action then was neither endless nor everyday but was
to be marshalled as sacrifice, and that was what marked out the event
from the normal unfolding of time.19
Alain Badiou’s recent interpretation in The Century strikingly
recaptures the situation Tilak faced. According to Badiou, this
fundamental delineation of the event as neither historical nor
quotidian resonates with the twentieth century more generally in that
the century itself is seen to be in a confrontation with history. The
twentieth century was, indeed, the Nietzschean century, in which the
past had to be confronted and annihilated for a new beginning. The
radical commencement of the future by necessity had to be taken to
be discontinuous with the inherited past. The subject in the twentieth
century has been constituted through a confrontation between necessity
and will, predicated on the event thus causing a rupture in the nature
of historical time itself. This has further been explained in terms of the
18
Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
19
Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, especially Chap. 12 on worldly and timely action.
salience and significance of war for the century.20 In this view, rather
than providing a historical conclusion, the event is the opening up of
new possibilities. It is this perspective on the event that will be borne
in mind in my subsequent discussion of Tilak’s Gita and the radical
nature of violence that was premised upon a de-historicist subject. It is
this that marks Tilak out as a thinker of a (conservative) revolution.
Stringently and stridently, Tilak was opposed to all existing
understandings of the Gita that had privileged knowledge (gyan) or
devotion (bhakti) as paths to self-realization and freedom. As part of a
conceptual clearing exercise, Tilak argued that both knowledge and
devotion were ultimately similar since both these rival and dominant
schools privileged of the idea of renunciation as the final goal of self-
realization. Shankracharya’s method of knowledge and Ramanjua’s
devotional practices took the idea of desireless action (nishphal-karma) as
a technique towards freedom (moksha) , rather than an end in itself. To
be sure, Tilak took issue with every given doctrinal interpretation and
philosophical argument, from monists to qualified monists, dualists,
Vedantists and Mimansa philosophers on the Gita.21 At the outset, he
accepted that there was a fundamental difficulty given the multiplicity
of interpretations, but he cautions that the “Gita is not such a pot of
jugglery, that any one can extract any meaning he likes out of it.” 22 And
his critique of both gyan and bhakti and of the elevation of karma (duty/
action) became a critical intervention via the Gita on the question of
the political in the twentieth century.
Following the rules of argumentation laid down in the Mimansa
tradition, Tilak departed from other commentaries by focusing on
the event. Making explicit that all commentators had neglected the
beginning (upkrama) and conclusion (phala) of the Gita, Tilak argued
that this neglect had allowed for the multiplicity of interpretations and
had therefore led to their “cultic” and doctrinal effects and readings.
Existing commentaries had then focused on the question of love for the
union with God as a form of detachment from material and conjugal
attachment. Equally, the pursuit of knowledge/gyan had focused on the
rigours of discipline as a form of self-emancipation. This focus on the
20
Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
21
Tilak also discusses seriously the canonical political theorists from Hobbes to Kant to British
liberals and idealists and on to Nietzsche, and endorses only Nietzsche.
22
Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 28.
technologies of love and knowledge in the pursuit of ultimate freedom

in the form of detachment from the material realm of the world had
made “desireless action” or nishphal-karma a didactic but an unexplained
injunction. In short, pursuing desireless action as an ethical end would
amount to, as he put it, “treating the owner [self] of the house as a
guest.” 23
According to Tilak, then, the earnest pursuit of love/devotion and
discipline/yoga, while worthwhile on its own terms, had left the central
dilemma of the Gita intact, and unexplained.24 This dilemma or the
event or the beginning referred, then, to Arjun’s dilemma in the middle
of the battlefield: to kill or not to kill one’s kinsmen. It is striking that the
commentary of thousand-odd pages was focused on this event alone
and the dilemma that it posed.
By focusing on action, Tilak construed the self as neither natural
nor historical but requiring a decision to become a subject through
an event. To put it in terms of the Gita, as Krishna exhorts Arjun to
war, he foretells the event and outcome of war. Yet the conundrum
was not whether the war would take place but rather whether Arjun
(the warrior) would remain Arjun (the subject) if he did not go to
war. In short, the subject (Arjun) was cohered by the event itself. By
making the event central, Tilak’s comprehensive commentary took
the epistemological and metaphysical approaches in both Western and
Indic traditions together. The foundational aim and intervention was in
the end a critique of the ethical and its subordination to the political.
Ahimsa/Satya or Killing/Life
But life in this world, which is full of villains, is difficult.

Tilak25
At the outset, Tilak accepted that all religious and ethical ideas were
about the categorical imperative of ahimsa or non-violence. Citing
the epic Mahabharata that had occasioned the Gita in the context of
war, the epic had nevertheless enshrined the doctrine of ahimsa paramo
23
Ibid., 37.
24
This position is in direct contrast to that analogously theorized by Foucault which posits labour
(oekesis) and love (eros) as techniques for the will-to-selfhood. Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of
the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005).
25
dharma (Ahimsa is the highest religion) as much as the foundational

Jewish and Christian commandment had privileged “thou shalt not
kill”. Non-violence was further recognized as the condition of truth. In
other words, truth and non-violence were the universal pillars of ethics
and religion. Tilak aimed to interrupt the foundational issue of truth’s
relationship with non-violence by focusing on exceptions to this rule.
For Tilak, the law of truth was not an act of speech. Let us remind
ourselves here of the truth-dilemma that beset Arjun’s older brother,
that embodiment of truth, Yudhishther. Yudhishther had killed his
preceptor on the battlefield by uttering a half-truth or through the
suspension of truth. For Tilak this issue posed little problem in the sense
of an ethical dilemma on the question of the utterance of truth or lies,
whether in combat or in ordinary life. For Tilak, Truth instead was
predicated on promises and vows. That is to say, truth was a matter
of “performing one’s vows”.26 As such, promises made or vows taken
even in dream states had a higher import than the speech act of truth
or non-truth per se.
Truth or satya was neither the obstacle nor the imperative. Both
law and ethics for Tilak had dealt with this problem, thus allowing for
exceptions and subtle distinctions between truth and falsehood.27 Having
accepted the virtue of truth, he constantly reminds the reader that the
central actor of the Gita is Arjun, the ace warrior, rather than Yudhisther
the ideal and truth-seeking king. Further, Tilak was less interested in
the Gandhian—or what one might term the Foucauldian—theme of
techniques and their constitution of the subject. In a move typical of
the systematic thinker/philosopher, such issues of techniques of truth,
for instance, were relegated and bracketed with aspects of conduct. In
short, conduct, for Tilak, was a subset or a detail of ethics.28
More to the point, Tilak understood truth as part of nature: even
if it was relegated to conduct, truth was not a matter of cultivation.
For Tilak, commandments and moral injunctions, whether about non-
violence/harmlessness or about truth, were problematic in that they
were merely injunctions which then demanded only a non-reflexive
obedience. Thus ethical commandments could only be a question of
fidelity to a certain precept. In other words, such commandments did
26
27
Here he takes the example of the truth-seeking Harischandra and the figure of St Paul.
28
Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 15–39.
not possess any reflexive importance in terms of discrimination or

judgement.29 Tilak writes, “the root meaning of the word satya is ‘which
exists’, that is, ‘which never ceases to exist’, or which is not touched
by the past, present or the future”.30 All religions, including Vedic
literature, had thus extolled truth. What is striking is that truth was not
a virtue, but a passive value that “dignified” not humanity, but, as he
put it, “the Earth”.
Tilak did not relate the structural salience of truth for non-violence
that he acknowledged but instead jeopardized this relationship by
introducing the fundamental metaphor of theft and the figure of the
thief. The issue was not the opposition of truth versus non-truth for
Tilak; rather he endeavours to show that non-truth was a dimension of
truth itself. Gandhi, too, often had recourse to the figure of the thief.
Theft had been a common metaphor for colonialism. As Gandhi asks in
Hind Swaraj, “what if the thief is your father?” Truth and the kin or the
fraternal were directly related to each other and mutually constitutive
for Gandhi, and as such non-violence created the context for truth.
Tilak, on the other hand, argues that “If there is so much difference
of opinion with reference to Harmlessness (ahimsa) and veracity (satya)
[in law and ethics] then why should one be surprised if the same line of
reasoning is applied to the third common law, namely of not-stealing
(asteya)?” The question of truth was evacuated from the ethical compass
through an epistemological clearing-house exercise. Theft was the
exception that for Tilak made truth if not redundant, then a concept
that opened the space or the conditions for the possibility of violence. In
this vein, Tilak gave various examples that pitched marauders against
innocent men or posed dilemmas about the possibility of speaking
the truth to thieves or simply put investigated the state of truth under
conditions of violence.
Just the way theft created the conditions of exception for the law
of truth, fraternity or the figure of the brother was foundational to
the question of violence. In short, for Tilak the law of non-violence/
ahimsa was disrupted through the law of fraternity. Tilak thus broke
the salience of truth for non-violence by positing theft as a condition
29
This is why this interpretation is an act of political theory/philosophy despite being steeped
in a theological exegesis, and why no pundit in Benares or even Poona recognized it as part
of a shastric interpretation or textual tradition. All the contemporary reviews point to this.
Conversely, this is one of the most popular texts of twentieth-century India and indeed now is
received as the dominant reading of the message of the Gita.
30
of exception for truth. Equally and more potently he disrupted the

injunction of non-violence through the figure of the brother.
Killing the Brother or the Political Contra the Ethical

No: no life, no natural power, can be beyond Good and Evil. We should say, rather,
that every life, including that of the human animal is beneath Good and Evil.
Alain Badiou31
The problem of the law of truth lay in its specific relationship with
the law of fraternity. If for Schmitt the friend and the enemy and the
possible but existential death of the enemy are central to the political,
then Tilak’s argument is strikingly premised on Gandhian and ethical
concepts of truth/satya and non-violence/ahimsa. If for Gandhi the
fraternal was the friend—or rather, the conjoined fraternal friend was
what constituted the relationship with the “other”—it only follows
that for Gandhi the “other” is both outside the self and categorically
relational in character.32
Yet for Tilak the fraternal was a given relationship. The choice of
friendship could not claim the fraternal, nor could the conjugation of
blood make brotherhood an absolute relationship. Though inherently
natural, the fraternal (unlike truth) matters, but not because it is
permanent. Instead, for Tilak the fraternal was the only relationship
open to the real possibility of conversion and mutation into enmity.
The spectre of “O friends, no friend - to - O enemies, and no enemy”
haunts the Schmittian political.33 For Tilak, then, the political referred
strictly to the conversion of kinsmen into enemies and the existential
destruction of the brother. Neither the “stranger” nor “friend”, the
central categories that have informed writings on political ethics in the
twentieth century, are prefigured in his commentary. Equally, enmity
did not inhere in difference; instead it acquired the dimension of enmity
in an event of brothers in conflict. This was because relationships such
as those with preceptors, parents and kinsmen marked the paradigm of
ordinary circumstance—the ordinary according to Tilak was seen to be
31
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso,
2001), 59. Original emphasis.
32
On Gandhi and friendship see Faisal Devji, “A Practice of Prejudice: Gandhi’s Politics of
Friendship”, in Subaltern Studies XXII (Delhi, 2005), 78–98.
33
Derrida exposes that underlying the desperately concrete idea of friend–enemy in Schmitt is
indeed the figure of the brother. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins
(London: Verso, 1997), 138–70.
an ethical state (dharma). It was only the mutation of kinship on the eve
of war that had the capacity to disrupt the ethical and the ordinary.
Thus for Tilak the indeterminacy of the fraternal—at once natural
but not permanent—is what demands ethical clarity. But it was only
in the state of exception or in the context of the extraordinary that
these relations were strained to their very limits, open to mutation, and
that put the ethical to test and potential jeopardy. A comparison with
Gandhi makes the radicalism of this conception plain.
For Gandhi, arguably, evil was self-evident in as much as it was
purely civilizational that included the extractive principle of capitalism.
Gandhi’s humanity was not much lodged in the inhuman (contra
Nietzsche) but instead lay in the dissolution of the human for the life of
the brother.34 A thin and vanishing notion of life for Gandhi nourished
the abundant potential of human-ness. Fraternity/enmity for Gandhi,
then, was not so much a relationship of virtue, whether of equality
or of love, but only of self-sacrifice. In a passage on his views on cow
protection he says,
A man is just as useful as a cow, no matter whether he be a Mahomedan

or a Hindu. Am I, then, to fight with or kill a Mahomedan in order to save
a cow? In doing so I will become an enemy as well as of the cow as of the
Mahomedan. . . If I were overfull of pity for the cow, I should sacrifice my
life to save her, but not take my brother’s.35
In comparison to Gandhi, Tilak writes only through the concreteness

of metaphors as opposed to the concreteness of naming. In the instance
of the fraternal, Gandhi undertakes the candid naming of Hindus–
Muslims and the totemic cow.36 This naming, to my mind, sharpens the
distinction between Gandhi the ethical philosopher and Tilak the political
philosopher. If we accept that to “force the naming of the un-nameable
[particularly a collective/community] is the principle of disaster”, the
question arises as to why Tilak chooses not to name his politics or indeed
identify Hindus, Muslims, or others.37 This was, after all, the stuff with
34
Though at its limits Hind Swaraj can be read as anti-human.
35
36
It does indeed make more sense to read Gandhi via Levinas (cf. Ajay Skaria) since naming/
other/difference/ethics are the conceptual repertoire. As opposed to action/event/ subject/
namelessness/political that cohere Tilak and are more open to the anti-ethical writings of
Alain Badiou. Tilak is no communist in the making.
37
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso,
2001), 80–87.
which his ordinary political life was replete.38 His insistence on the event
explains his preference for deploying metaphors rather than names.
If the perspective from the event that Tilak so assiduously follows is
the foundational lesson of the Gita, does it not follow, then, that this
deliberate namelessness was simply fidelity to it?39 If fidelity for Tilak
could not be an act of (ethical) obedience, it demanded discrimination.
Even so, the killing of the fraternal was, Tilak decreed, to be undertaken
for the protection of life. This killing or sacrifice, according to Tilak,
was in consonance with the restoration of dharma (moral order), even if
it was hostility that could confer meaning on this principle of protection
of life, which was understood as duty.
Duty and Discrimination or the Event as Exception

From among the sacrifices, I am the sacrifice in the shape of a prayer.
Forgiveness in all cases or war-likeness in all cases is not the proper thing.
Tilak40
If Arjun is the central character of the Gita, then Tilak expended
significant effort on the negative example—not, as one would expect
on the brother-to be-killed, Duroyodhan, but instead on Prahladh. A
virtuous figure in the epic tradition, Prahladh was also a follower of
desireless action, who had conquered all spheres and had been involved
in patricide. As in the story of Abraham, sacrifice of kin was central
as proof of loyalty to the gods, as well as for the preservation of the
kingdom. For Tilak, though, the example of Prahladh highlighted the
central dilemma of discrimination or the ability to recognize the moment
of sacrifice. While Prahladh had been dutiful and had sacrificed kin, he
had misrecognized the moment or the event of sacrifice since (as the
story goes) the sacrifice had been demanded in a dream. In the case
of Prahladh, patricide resulted in dejection and the renunciation of
the worldly. And though abundant in virtue, but not discrimination,
Prahladh could only renounce.
Thus discrimination was essential to the question of sacrifice. As such,
on the few occasions that Tilak mentions the anti-hero Duroyodhan, it
38
The not-naming is specific to the translation and the commentary of the Gita.
39
All the more striking, in that after the Swadeshi era and through the long-winded trial against
the imperial state when the Gita-Rahasaya was written Tilak stubbornly refused any naming
of his politics. When pushed, he did say that the only politics he had been involved with were
“Indian”.
40
Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 407 and 45.
is to signify his abject failure to sacrifice his self-interest which had then
made war possible. In fact, sacrifice and duty were central to Tilak’s
conceptual repertoire. Singling out the key distinction between Western
political theory and Indian thought that desirelessness rather than
happiness sustained the possibility of life in the collective, sacrifice rather
than self-interest was paramount. As Tilak argued, “For protecting a
family, one person may be abandoned; for protecting a town, a family
may be abandoned, and for the protection of the Atman [soul], even
the earth may be abandoned.”41
Theorists in the West, Tilak contended, had erroneously focused on
happiness rather than on duty as the principle of life (collective and
individual). As such, their insights into the political could only refer to
the role of interest and reason to the exclusion of will. Yet Tilak did
recognize that sacrifice had indeed been central to Western political
thought. The problem for Tilak was that the sacrifice was conceptualized
according to a calculus of interest, and, just as significantly, in Western
political thought sacrifice was premised on the notion of historical time.
Thus Tilak criticized Hobbes, arguing that for the English philosopher
sacrifice for the sake of another person’s interest was merely a “long-
sighted variety of selfishness”.42
Yet as he saw it, Indian traditions offered the alternative of
renunciation as the creation of a subject prone to inaction, as the highest
form of virtue. It was most of all this connection he aimed to disrupt.43
For example, killing in anger would not constitute a discriminate act of
war, and would therefore automatically preclude the possibility of an
opening or event. Disassociating action from its “fruits” or detached
action (nishphal-karma) therefore became the central aspect of Tilak’s
project. We should keep in mind, however, that this new subjectivity
would not be predicated on utilitarianism, vitalism or intentionalism.
Instead, Tilak’s politics and his concept of the subject were based on a
system of discrimination of action, namely action as sacrifice (yagya), as
duty (kartavya) and as desireless (karma).44 Within this system, desireless
41
42
Ibid., 113.
43
Shruti Kapila, “Self, Spencer and Swaraj”.
44
Tilak’s system hints at a pragmatic paradigm inasmuch as it hinges on the categories of self-
knowledge and recognition/discrimination of the doable and the non-doable, or the possible
and the impossible, which in turn are related not to historical time but to the ordinary/everyday
(nitya) and the purposive (kamya). Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 70–85.
action was suborned to action as sacrifice. Discrimination was in fact the

only duty. The subject—in his influential terms, stithiprajna—would be
constituted as it is via desireless action, a type of action isolated from its
own consequences and therefore immutable through historical motion.
Stithiprajna, as a detached subject or an identity that is immutable
thanks to its immunity to attachment, thus comes to the fore in Tilak’s
reading. If desirelessness constitutes action, this subjectivity derived its
immutability from emotionlessness; that is, an unwillingness to “move
out” (literally ex-movere) of oneself. Yet the stithiprajna was not the celibate
monk but rather the householder who was surrounded by pleasures.
Detachment here has to be understood as a category of the world, a
form of engagement with it.
Discrimination, for Tilak, was about knowing what is doable and
what is not, being able to tell apart the normal time of ethics from the
moment of the exception. While the former called for a submission to
the prevalent ethics—the normative framework—of everyday life, the
latter entailed the suspension of these norms in the context of macro-
disruptive events, such as famine or war. The ethical in everyday life
consists in the perpetuation of life; during crises, such as famine, duty
becomes the protection of the good life (bios or valuable life), for the sake
of which action that violates quotidian and ethical principles is justified
by its feasibility. His repeated example in this context is the breaking of
taboos and of the Brahman eating rotting flesh during times of famine.
Tilak makes a related claim about the taking of life. We know that
for Gandhi the “true warrior” befriends or domesticates death rather
than taking possession or control of the killing of the Other. For Tilak,
however, the stithiprajna is exhorted, through the example of Arjun, to
kill in order to restore the moral order; that is, in order to protect the
perpetuation of good life from the irruption of evil. To be sure, the
question remained how to understand the exact nature of evil. One
answer that is suggested by Tilak is that nature itself is unnatural
inasmuch it is sustained by killing. Evil for Tilak was naturalized, and
lies beyond the boundaries of the human. From that we can deduce that
evil is not imperatively linked to morality. The other answer that Tilak
gives is that the modern epoch we inhabit is itself immoral (Kaliyug).
This means that non-violence (ahimsa)—recognized as the highest form
of religion—is suspended. Does this imply that Kaliyug is the perpetual
state of exception?
Either way, however, not all killing partakes in the realm of the political,
in Tilak’s view. Instead, Tilak constantly locates killing in its connection
to the event and especially to war. Yudh (war), as the exception within the
exception of Kaliyug, becomes the focus of attention. This is precisely
why Tilak’s Gita is an exhortation to recognize and declare a state of
exception.45 Tilak’s subject, in that light, has to be equipped with the
will to act on his discriminatory knowledge, which entails, essentially,
the lucidity to identify one’s brother as the enemy, the quintessential
political act.
Tilak’s proposed insight is the inadequacy and insufficiency of the
ethical. Where the ethical could only issue injunctions to obedience
(“keep going” is all it could ask), an eternal principle such as truth
required discrimination in as much as ethics had to be rendered
complete by the idea of duty. “Life is the life of life”: killing and life
were considered as co-constitutive. It followed that duty was an act of
discrimination and protection of this principle.46 Harmlessness (ahimsa)
was suborned by the “necessity of discrimination of duty and non-
duty”. “The antithesis of the political”, as Derrida reminds us, “dwells
within and politicizes the political”.47 For Tilak, the antithesis of the
political was indeed the ethical, or, in other words, the political was to
be found at the margins of the ethical. And the reinterpretation of the
Gita by Tilak was intended to invert this relationship completely.
The transformation of kinsman into enemy was a matter of judgement
and existed only in and during the event, and was categorically not a
perpetual–spectral enemy of the Schmittan variety. To exemplify briefly
here, Tilak’s commentary at the end of the Gita, on the Shantiparv or
the time of peace, discusses the salience of closure, when precisely those
who had killed their kinsmen had to then perform the death duties of
their elders, brothers and preceptors. This, then, was the declaration of
the end of the event, the resumption of the ordinary course of dharma
or the moral order, as enemies were reconverted back into kinsmen.
The political, which dwells in the event, was therefore neither the
culmination nor the expression of suppressed desires. Instead, since the
45
The “state of exception” here is not the same as Giorgio Agamben’s in a literal sense because
Tilak is not interested in the sovereign power of distinction between bare life (zoe) and the good
life (bios). It is simply apdharm, or the suspension of quotidian norms.
46
Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 41–49.
47
Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 138.
event is by definition exogenous, no preparation was possible in facing

it. Thus, for Tilak the political was mainly about the opening up of
the possibility of war. In short, Tilak’s Gita was concerned with the
awakening or recognition of the political, rather than with the naming
of it.
Conclusion: 1947, Event and History

The political, for Tilak, in the ordinary, the quotidian or normal times,
was understood to be a passive state. For Tilak and his times, the quotidian
belonged to the British. The mundane world of employment, education,
food, clothing—all latterly came to be identified as colonialism—were in
effect deeply British conditions in India. Rejection, which had become
the hallmark of Tilak’s political actions, was thus not really a boycott
of the state. Instead it was a suspension, rejection and boycott of the
quotidian.
Unlike Savarkar, Tilak cut no deal with the British despite several offers
of a self-imposed exile. In Savarkar’s case, this compromise produced a
secret though potent politics, and ultimately a conspiratorial one. The
heirs of this conspiratorial politics have since been anxious to write
and recast history in terms of the purity of blood and as entitlement
to sole ownership of land. It is striking, however, that for Tilak the one
intervention he makes on the “origins” of Hindus places these origins
far away from the land known as India, and instead locates them at
the outer peripheries of the Arctic.48 Arguably, Savarkar and Hindutva
ideology belong to the nineteenth century’s liberal–evolutionist view,
with the twentieth-century element of racial purity added on as a true
claim to the state of the nation.
In this instance, it is precisely because the twentieth century’s
political life has been constituted through rupture that it has held
several historical projects within itself, including historicist projects of
the nineteenth century. As such, Hindutva and Gandhian non-violence
became each other’s twins with the potential of conversion from one
to the other. In an analagous move, imperial liberalism and Nehru’s
liberal socialism were mutually constitutive and around the moment of
independence the former was transformed into the latter.
48
B. G. Tilak, Arctic Home of the Vedas (Poona: Kesari, 1903).
The casting out of Two (or One plus One), or the problem of
mutually defining pairs—Hindus and Muslims, men and women,
British and Indian—is potent but not because of inherent and
categorical difference. For, on closer inspection of each of the pairs,
their apparently opposed terms are fundamentally the same or related.
The twentieth century’s answer to the appearance of difference has
been to cast it in the frame of war (be it in India or elsewhere) as the
existential destruction of the enemy allows the overcoming of division.
Tilak deserves reconsideration precisely as a cautionary reminder of
this foundational issue of violence as a condition of the political.
Gandhi’s politics were premised on the fundamental idea of self-
sacrifice for the sake of the “other”. Tilak, on the other hand, made
central a subject premised on action and event whereby sacrifice
was a matter of kinship and fraternity and not otherness. Inspite of
Lenin’s appropriative reference, Tilak was not a communist in any
way. But Tilak’s philosophy shares one foundational element with the
contemporary rethinking of communism, for it views the political
in a purely singular fashion.49 This is to say that it seeks the political
perspective from that of the subject itself.
We are accustomed to viewing the story of India’s independent
moment from the perspective of the nineteenth century, seeking originary
points either further back, or further forward from the Archimedean
point of 1857. Yet the nineteenth century, as Tilak apprehended, had a
view of the subject that had to be historicized, prepared, indoctrinated
and equipped with adequate techniques. The purpose of such a subject
was that, when ready, it could be sacrificed for a greater historical
cause, whether revolution, war or freedom. Swadeshi-era politics had
suggested as much—an excessive expression of such a subject—no
matter whether examples ranging from radical terrorists to the humanist
Tagore are considered. The failure of Swadeshi, then, pointed to the
failure of such a subject itself. The nineteenth-century subject was one
that was created out of a combination of historical necessity and will.
Swadeshi marked out its limitations.
In response, Tilak broke away by positing the immutable and non-
historical subject (sthithiprajna) that exists only through the event, and
which then both founds and concludes the political. For beyond and
49
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2005).
outside the event such a detached subject can only be an ideal—but

a necessary one that then creates the conditions for the acceptance of
the event. It is in this sense that the figure of Arjun becomes an ideal.
If the unprecedented violence around partition is viewed as a fratricide
and as an event, instead of the expression of millennial or primordial
hatred, it could be sutured rather than memorialized. The radical but
non-revolutionary potential of violence needs to be appended and
understood within this context that has imbued and informed the
political anew in the twentieth century.50 It is precisely in this context
that violence—towards one’s own—alone provided the conditions of
freedom.
Tilak’s silence on the naming of a collective Hindu or Muslim
betrayed an imperative quality of truth, the quality that truth is invisible.
The event, then, is an opening that points to new possibilities as much
as it produces consequences. The year 1947 as the event produced the
nation state as a consequence and as a pure fact. Truth can only appear
as visible, or rather be apprehended, managed and retold, through the
state. In this sense the state constitutes history. Since partition violence
and fratricide lay beyond the state, as opposed to freedom that the state
annexed, this violence remains unmemorialized.
On midnight of 15 August 1947 we know that Nehru declared India’s
independence as a matter of a “tryst with its destiny”. This misspells
or misnames the moment. In one sense Nehru betrays his unflinching
fidelity to the liberal historicism in which 1947 marked out the rightful
but inevitable placing of India into a free state. According to this logic,
it was fated (though fought for) for India to be a free nation state. Nehru
misrecognized it, first as a sequential moment in historical time and
second as a matter of destiny. In fact, it was a rupture, an opening and
an event that inaugurated history itself.
50
On Hindutva and sacrifice see P. Ghassem-Fachandi’s forthcoming work.
Index
Abinav Bharat Society, 163 Bhaktivedanta, A. C., 46

action in spirit of detachment, 6 Bhandarkar, R. G., 9, 34
advocates of armed peace, 92 Bhatt, Chetan, 158
ahimsa, 82, 83, 143, 148, 166, 188–90 Bible, 9, 10, 19, 24, 138, 156
Alfassa, Mirra, 49–50 Bilgrami, Akeel, 105
All-India Hindu Mahasabha, 156, 157 Blake, William, 31–32
Ambedkar, B. R., 3, 23, 127–29, 143–53 Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar, 160
and Benjamin’s political thought, 129–36 Bosanquet, Bernard, 8
and politics of the Gita, 141–43 Brahman, 6
Amorphous Unity, 8 Brown, Judith, 68
Anquetil Duperron, Abraham-Hyacinthe, Buddhism, 144
31 Buddhi Yoga, 17
Anusilan Samiti, 17 Burnouf, Emile, 31
Arendt, Hannah, 177 Burnouf, Eugène, 31
on relationship between violence and
power, 178 Carpenter, Edward, 5
Arnold, Edwin, 35, 36 celibacy, 75, 84, 104, 111–13, 115, 123,
Artha Shastra, 183 124
Arya, 49, 50 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 14, 60
Arya Samaj, 7, 13–14 Chatterji, Mohini, 42
Ashoka, emperor, 171 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, 54
Chaturvarnya, 142
Atlantic Charter, 22
children, as model of moral subject, 123
atman, 141
Chrishnaet Christna (Jacolliot), 10
Aurobindo Ashram, 50 Christian Fulfilment Theology, 11
Christ, Jesus, 13
Badiou, Alain, 185, 186 citizen, 96
bad karma, 12 Civil Disobedience Movement, 18
Bannerjea, Surendranath, 15 civilizational equilibrium, 182
barbarism of modernity, 7 Clough, Bradley S., 68
Bengal in Global Concept History, 52 colonial state, 4
Bengal partitioning, 48 commandments, ethical, 189
Benjamin, Walter, 129 concept of dharma, 1
Bergson, Henri, 8 control of conflict, in premodern India,
Bernard, Bosanquet, 20 182–83
Besant, Annie, 1, 12–13, 41, 42 corporeal vulnerability, 98
Bhagavad Gita, ix, x, 1, 5–7, 20, 23, 31, counterviolence, suppression of, 142–43
47, 51, 110, 112, 114–16, 118, 124, courage, 99
156, 179, 183 Critique of Violence (Walter Benjamin),
Bhagavadgita Rahasya, 163, 166 129
Bhagavat Geeta (Wilkins), 28–29 Cromer, 178
Index 201
Das, Bhagawan, 15
Dayananda, 7, 13 Gandhi, 4, 17, 18
death of non-violence, 109, 110–14 Gandhi, M. K., 166, 177, 179, 180–81,
Deleuze, Gilles, 181 184, 190, 191, 192
democracy, 88 on avoidance of actions motivated by
Dennett, Daniel, 21 sentiments, 122
Derrida, 196 concept of dharma, 81–82
desireless action, Tilak on, 188 exploration of nature of action, 114–19
dharma, 54–55 idea of ethical universality, 125
Dharma of distraction, 5 on issues related to Jews in Germany and
Dharmatattva: Anushilan Palestine, 99–103
(Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay), on link between violence and politics, 90
54 on parliamentary democracy, 77, 88–90
Dharmatattwa, 60 on politics and religion, 68–69
dharmayudda, 173, 174 and practice of spinning and celibacy,
dharmayuddha, 108 112–14
Discourses, 79 response to revolutionary thought,
discrimination of action, 193–95 167–68
dispassionate action, concept of, 3 and The Song Celestial, 39–41
divine law, 63 and Tilak conception of politics, 66–68
doctrine of karma, 12 and tradition of modern politics, 97–106
dogma of counterrevolution”, 131 on truth and non-violence, 111–12
Durkheim, 20 understanding of swaraj, 82–83
Dutt, R. C., 23 use of the Gita and politics, 68–71,
duty, in Gita, 63 76–79, 81–87, 91
view of non-violence, 91–92, 98,
East India Company, 28, 31 103–06, 111
“economy of pure defacement”, 150–53 Ghose, Aurobindo, 7, 16, 48–65, 72–73,
Eliot, T. S., 44–45 184
enmity, 191–92 Ghosh, Barindrakumar, 73
Essays on the Gita (AurobindoGhose), 14, Gill, M. H., 36
49–65 Gita, xi–xv
Esther, Faering, 105 eclipse of, 22–23
Eternal Self, 59 Edwin Arnold’s translation of, 35,
event, 185–88 36–39, 43
extreme non-violence, 172, 173 metamorphoses of, 32
philosophy of action in, 18
fate, 142 publication of, in Sacred Books, 33–36
First World War, 16 Theosophical representation of, 41–43
Forster, E. M., 5 Tilak interpretation of, 181–97
fraternal relationship, 179–80 as transnational public text, 8–13
fraternity, 182 in twentieth century, 43–47
fratricide, 129–36 Wilkins’s translation of, 28–29
freedom, 183–84, 187 Gita Rahasya (Tilak), 72
Fulfilment Theology, 5 Gladstone, William, 33
fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmel- Glass, Phillip, x
zung), 26 “God’s child”, 135
“God’s law”, 138 International Society for Krishna Con-

Golwalkar, M. S., 182 sciousness, 46
Green, T. H., 8, 20 Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Al-
Grierson, George, 9 exander Kojève), 141
Growse, F. W., 9 Iqbal, Mohammad, 108
Isherwood, Christopher, 5, 46
Halbfass, Wilhelm, 22
Hamacher, Werner, 130 Jacolliot, Louis, 10
Hardiman, David, 76, 171 James, William, 16
Hare, R. M., 20 Joad, C. E. M., 16
harijan, 135 Jones, William, 30
Hart, J., 20 Jordens, J. T. F., 70
Hastings, Warren, 29 Judge, William Quan, 42
Hedgewar, B. K., 182
Hegel, 20 Kant, 17, 20, 104, 177
hermeneutic fratricide, 145 karma yoga, 162
Hind Swaraj (Gandhi), 76–78, 88, 98, 167, karmayoga, 61
179, 190 karma-yoga, Extremists view of, 73
Hindu-Pad-Padshahi, Or a Review of the Karmayogin, 73
Hindu Empire of Maharashtra (V. Keer, Dhananjay, 67–68, 158, 167
D. Savarkar), 164, 170, 171 Kesari, 71
Hindutva, 182 Koran, 9, 19, 24, 156, x
Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (V. D. Sa- Krishnacarit, 60
varkar), 164 Krishnacharitra (Bankim Chandra Chat-
Hints on the Study of the Gita (Annie terjee), 14, 54
Besant), 42 Krishna, Lord, ix, x, 2, 7, 13–16, 54, 67,
historical consciousness, in interpretation 73, 75, 84, 136, 138–40, 162, 165,
of text, 26 174
histories of revolutionary wars, 168 Krishnavarma, Shyamaji, 74, 163
History and Freedom (Theodor Adorno), Krsna in History and Legend (Majumdar),
148 16
Hitler, x, 99, 100, 177, 178
Hobbes, Thomas, 93–95 Las Casas Paradox, 4
holy war, 108, 109 lawmaking violence, 133
Huxley, Aldous, 46, 47 League of Nations, 22
Leeds Public Library, 38
“ideal of renunciation”, 75 Lenin, Vladimir, 185, 191
idea of sovereignty, 89 Le spritismedans le monde (Jacolliot), 10
Ignatieff, Michael, 95 Leviathan (Hobbes), xiii
India House group, in London, 74, 76 liberal public sphere, 3
Indian Home Rule, 167 liberal tradition, 2
Indian Sociologist, 75, 76 Lincoln, Abraham, 90
inhuman slaughter, 4 Locke, John, 93–95
interest-based idea of politics, 69 Lorinser, 13
Luther, Martin, 105
Index 203
Madame Blavatsky, 41 Phule, Jotirao, 7

Mahabharata, x, 10, 25, 42, 71, 74, 130, Pinch, William, 9
136–138, 140, 150, 188 political action, Extremists definition of,
Majumdar, Bimanbehari, 7 69, 73
Marx, 20 political assassinations, 74
Maurya, Brihadrath, 171 political missionary, 70, 74–76, 83
Max-Muller, Friedrich, 1, 11 political ruptures, 186
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 15, 160, 164 political society, formation of, 94
Michelet, Jules, 10 political struggle, Gita and, 16
Mill, James, 30 political thought, death of, 182
Minor, Robert, 157 Pollock, Sheldon, 182–83
Mitter, Dwarkanath, 10 Prabhavananda, Swami, 46
modern politics, tradition of, 97 Prakriti, 58–60
Moore, Thomas Sturge, 44 Prince (Machiavelli), xii
moral choice, 119–21 “purifying politics”, 68, 70
moral injunctions, 189 Pushyamitra, 171
moral subject, 122–23
Moulvie, Ahmad Shah, 169 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 7, 17, 19–23
Müller, Max, 33–35, 145 Rai, Lajpat, 14
murder, 134 Ramakrishna, 7
mythic violence, 133–35 Ramayana, x, 10, 23, 167, 168, 175
My Transportation for Life (V. D. ramrajya, 110
Savarkar), 155, 159, 160 Religion and Society (Radhakrishnan), 20
Renan, Ernst, 10
Needham, Joseph, 16–17 renouncer, 6
neighbourliness, 180 Richard, Paul, 49
Nietzsche, Friedrich, x, 10, 20 romantic counter-Christianity, 10–11
nishkama karma, 40, 54, 61 Row, T. Subba, 42
non-cooperation as form of non-violence, Runciman, David, 3
112 Russell, Bertrand, 16
non-violent protest, 107
Sacontalá, 30, 31
obedience, 123 Sacred Books of East, 33–36
On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Jacques sacrifice, 124–25, 193–94
Derrida), 144 Sadhu, Tilak and Gandhi on, 67–68
Orwell, George, 102 samadarshi, 124
sanatan dharma, 73
Pal, Bipan Chandra, 14, 16 Sarkar, Sumit, 50
Parel, Anthony, 77, 167 Satyagraha in South Africa, 108
passive spirituality, 2 satyagrahi, 68, 69, 71, 75–79, 81–87
peace, war and violence, relationship Savarkar, V. D., 24, 74, 155–59, 182
between, 92–97 on coupling of swaraj and swadharma,
perennial philosophy, 46 169
personality of the state, 3, 4 on creating historical knowledge, 163–74
phenomenal realm, 17 Gandhi response to revolutionary
philosophy of action, Gita and, 18 thought and, 167–68
reflections of the Gita in prison life, Telang, K. T., 9, 13, 23

159–63 terror, 141–42
Schlegel, August von, 31 The Century (Alain Badiou), 186
self-freedom, 183–84 The Duties of Man, 15
Self/Other dichotomy, 179 theft, 190
self-purification, 120 The Idealist View of Life (Radhakrishnan),
self-realization, 120 20
Sen, KeshubChunder, 1 The Indian War of Independence of 1857
Shantiparv, 196 (V. D. Savarkar), 164, 168–71
Sharpe, 72, 73 The Lesser Evil (Michael Ignatieff), 95
Sharpe, Eric, 71 The Light of Asia (Edwin Arnold), 36
shelving of Vedas, 144 The Religion We Need (Radhakrishnan), 20
Shivaji’s killing of Afzal Khan, 71, 74 The Sacred Anthology: A Book of Ethical
Shri Bhagavad Gita( R. J. K. Shastri), Scriptures, 33
18–19 The Song Celestial (Edwin Arnold), 35,
shudra, 142, 143 36–39
Six Glorious Epochs of Indian Gandhi and, 39–41
History(SGE) (V. D. Savarkar), 164, The Song of God (D. G. Mukerji), 18, 46
170, 171, 174 Thomson, J. Cockburn, 32
slave, as model of moral subject, 123 Tilak, 71, 156–57, 163, 166, 179–81, 185
social and ritual hierarchy, 3 on duty and discrimination, 193–97
sociological imagination, 9–10 on event and subject of action, 185–88
Spencer, Herbert, 8, 160 killing of fraternal and, 191–93
spinning, 85, 86, 104, 106, 111–13, 115, on truth and non-violence, 189–91
124 on violence and political in India,
181–97
spiritual realization, 64
Tilak, B. G., 18–19
Srimad Bhagavadgita Rahasya (Tilak),
Tilak, Lokamanya, 66–68
156 Transcendentalists, 8
Stanley, H. M., 36 Trübner, Nicholas, 33
state, and use of violence, 95 truth, 189–191
stithiprajna, 195 Truth and Method (Hans-Georg Gadamer),
suffering under force, 135 26
Supreme Self, 59, 60
Swadeshi discourse, 56 Vaishnavism, 9
Swadeshi movement, 49, 72, 184, 185 Van der Veer, Peter, 41
swadharma, 81, 124, 125, 162, 169 violence
mythic, 133–35
Swami, Guru Achutya, 19
of partition, 180–81, 184
Swami, Purohit, 44–45
rightful, 74
swaraj, 82, 162, 169, 184 and state, relationship between, 177–78
Vivekananda, Swami, 1, 7, 184
Tamil kinsmen, 4
Telang, KashinathTrimbak, 33–35 Wadia, Madame Sophia, 17
Index 205
warrior, 6 yoga, 58
Weber, Max, 91, 96, 97 Yogi of Pondicherry, 49
Wilkins, Charles, 28, 29, 32 Young India, 39
Williams, Monier, 9
Wilson, H. H., 32
Zafar, Bahadur Shah, 169
“zealous nationalists”, 75
Yeats, W. B., 5, 44–45

Political Thought in Action - The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India PDF

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Political Thought in Action - The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India PDF

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Political Thought

Cambridge University Press

© Cambridge University Press 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2013

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

C. A. Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval

Dipesh Chakrabarty is Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service

Vinayak Chaturvedi is Associate Professor of History at the

Faisal Devji is Reader in Indian History and Fellow of St. Antony’s

Shruti Kapila is University Lecturer in History and Fellow of Corpus

Aishwary Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford

Rochona Majumdar is Associate Professor in the Departments of

Uday S. Mehta is Distinguished Professor in Political Science at

Andrew Sartori is Associate Professor in History at New York

Mishka Sinha received her doctorate from the Faculty of Asian

The editors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the

Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji

By turns a child and killer, trickster and philosopher, Krishna’s appeal

way of thinking about their present and future more generally. So in

colonial period, when it was praised and condemned by European

Leviathan do for its European equivalent, being like them a thoroughly

questions of ethics, war and action remained constant, there was a

these commentaries on the Gita aimed to equip human action with

India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World

In this essay, I take a broad, transnational view of the political and

within an oriental sphere of passive spirituality in contrast to the active

The Context in Indian Intellectual and Social History

This text, however, could be made particularly serviceable for Indian

The Global Context

The Gita and The Tensions of Indian Modernity

the various ancient Brahminical traditions.10 The “traditionalists” who

Secondly, the revival of the tradition of Vedanta, notably through the

aggression of new empires”.16 Christianity, striving against the brutality

The Gita as a Transnational Public Text

Ibid., 56; see also Andrew Sartori in this issue.

in the transnational public arena to acquire a degree of significance

basic religious instinct even if it developed at different speeds in different

translation and commentaries on the Manusmriti and the somewhat

Religion, vol. 3 (London, 1992, repr. London, 1997), vi.

Lord Krishna as Hero

In the prevailing nationalist and historicist mood, it was important

The attempt by Westerners and then by Indian historians to annex the

The Gita and The New India

Needham—biochemist, historian of science, idealist, Anglican Christian

and “inward” within the subcontinent. The first was D. G. Mukerji’s

Kathiawar, India: Rasashala Aushadhashram, 1937).

Radhakrishnan: The Ends of Indian Liberalism

Indian classics. His commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita (1948), the

unprecedented pace of revolutionary change.47 There was a “lag between

New York, 1988), 253.

to retreat to the newspaper, the television screen, the lecture room

compromise, between the spiritual and practical modes of life, between

Khare, 1949), Introduction, ii.

The Transnational Gita*

The Gita lends itself easily to interpretation.1 The tractability of the

further possesses a certain ambiguity of status: despite being of smarta3

by new readers and interpreters as a historicized presence of a defining

The Early History of Translation

Charles Wilkins and Warren Hastings, Governor General of Bengal

of the eighteenth century the majority of this readership was primarily

“mother-tongue”, with Sanskrit as the favoured contender, shaped the

Anquetil-Duperron’s version was based on the Persian translation written or commissioned