A book that never ceases to ask questions

Rudrangshu Mukherjee

February 20 , 2015

It was quite early in the morning, perhaps a few hours after dawn. Two vast armies, one much larger than the other, were arranged for battle on two sides of a huge rolling field. The warriors in their glittering armour were all ready for battle, to kill their own kinsmen, now made into enemies over a kingdom or even over five villages. The cymbals had clashed when, most unexpectedly, it was the great warrior, arguably the greatest warrior in Kurukshetra, who suffered the pangs of conscience. How could he kill his own relatives, his guru, the person whom he had called his grandfather and the young men he had grown up with? He posed this question to his charioteer, Krishna. The latter's answer, running into seven hundred verses, has become a classic. It is known to the world as the Bhagavad Gita or often more simply as just the Gita.

This exchange between Krishna and Arjuna is tucked away in the sixth book or parva of the Mahabharata, the book named after the grandfather, Bhishma. It is the pause before the bloodshed. Readers of the epic are expected to willingly suspend their disbelief. What did all the generals and soldiers do as Arjuna and Krishna, warrior and charioteer, protégé and mentor, devotee and god, inseparable friends who are also brothers-in-law, went through this expostulation and reply, the dialogue to end all dialogues, as some Hindus would like to believe? The suspension of disbelief would have us yield to the illusion that the rest of the armies just stood by in bewildered silence. Or was this that enchanted moment when time was frozen and not a soul moved as seven hundred verses were gone through? How long did it take? Did the battle begin only in the late afternoon? Such mundane questions are perhaps best not asked of an epic.

There are, however, other features of the epic style that have to be noted. The Mahabharatahas 18 parvas, the Gita18 adhayas. The telling of the Mahabharata is through a framed narrative. So is the Gita. As a prelude to the battle, the writer of the epic, Vyasa, gives to Sanjaya the gift of the divine eye so that he can observe every aspect of the battle and describe it to the blind king, Dhritarashtra. It is through Sanjaya's narration that we learn about Krishna's discourse on life, on duty, on dharma, to Arjuna. It needs to be underscored that the first word of the Bhagavad Gita is ' dharma'. And it closes with Sanjaya telling Dhritarashtra that its supreme secret comes to them by "Vyasa's grace."

In this wonderful book - one of a remarkable series planned and published by Princeton University Press - Richard Davis constructs a biography of the Gita. The book has had a rich life from the time it was first conceived. Krishna's words, his teachings to Arjuna, embody, as Davis shows, some of the principal ideas and disputes regarding dharma in the ancient world. It was probably the summation of Brahmanical Hinduism's riposte to the challenge posed by the teachings of the Buddha, which challenged Brahmanical authority. But it was a text that transcended its own historical and theological context and opened itself up to multiple interpretations. It thus belongs, as Davis says, quoting Bakhtin, in "great time''.

For commentators of the Vedanta like Sankara and Ramanuja, the Gita addressed profound theological issues. Vivekananda read it as a text that advocated karma yoga. For Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, it was the scripture of bhakti, his daily reading. Far away in the desert of New Mexico, as he watched in awe as the first nuclear mushroom burst into the sky, Robert Oppenheimer immediately recalled words from the Gita, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Davis traces the life of the book, but his retelling reminds us that a great book never ceases to question us just as it persuades us to question the text itself again and again. Krishna, by revealing himself to Arjuna on the eve of an apocalyptic battle, persuades the warrior to forget his doubts and to only do his duty. The Gita reminds even those who do not accept its message that for human beings there is only the trying.