3. - The Bhagavadgita and the Gandhian Hermeneutic of Non-Violence: Globalizing Selfless Action

Summary

Thus the author of the Gita, by extending meanings of words, has taught us to imitate him … after forty years’ unremitting endeavor fully to enforce the teaching of the Gita in my own life, I have in all humility felt that perfect renunciation is impossible without perfect observance of ahimsa in every shape and form.

—M. K. Gandhi, Anasaktiyoga

Introduction

The Bhagavadgita is an 18-chapter philosophical dialogue between Arjuna, the despondent warrior hero reluctant to raise arms against his kin, and his divine charioteer, Krishna, who exhorts him to wage war with detachment as an instrument of divine will. It is set on the battlefield in the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, moments before the beginning of a war. The Bhagavadgita (henceforth Gita), as Richard H. Davis elucidates in his ‘short biography’ of the text, intrigued scholars with its ‘doubleness’ – ‘its historical specificity and its continuing, even eternal, life’. Its ambiguities and accommodation of multiple theological currents made it possible (and continues to do so) for the text to appeal to diverse groups of readers and commentators in medieval, pre-colonial, and colonial India and beyond. It gained a transnational community of readers in Europe and America, as colonial commentators, Christian missionaries, Romantic philosophers, and Indologists popularized it as a Hindu philosophical text at par with the Quran and the Bible. By the early twentieth century, it came to provide a wide range of Indian political thinkers, from Aurobindo Ghose to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who were occupied in anti-colonial struggle with an opportunity to ‘rethink politics in a novel language of action without consequence’. Among such engagements, M. K. Gandhi's approach to the Gita as a guide to moral action in the realm of politics has attracted maximum scholarly attention. Such works have accorded due focus to the genealogies of (mostly Western) political and religious thought that informed his readings and the innovative agency of Gandhi himself.

This chapter, however, shifts the optic from Gandhi to the Gandhian(s) to draw attention to the hermeneutics of reading the Gita through the prism of non-violence (ahimsa) that Gandhi introduces in Indian sociopolitical thought and constructs an intellectual history of such hermeneutical exercises. Through this, I wish to move beyond the individual centricity that has characterized the global intellectual history of Gandhian thought.