The Song in the Middle

Two armies stand drawn up for battle, and the battle does not begin. In the gap between them, by his own request, a single chariot has been driven out into the no-man’s-land, and its warrior, the greatest archer of the age, has lost his nerve. Looking across at the other side, Arjuna sees his family where an enemy should be: his cousins, his teachers, the grandfather who raised him, the men he is about to try to kill. His bow slips from his hand. He sits down in the chariot and says he will not fight.

What follows, in that suspended moment with two armies waiting, is a conversation. The warrior’s charioteer, who is also Krishna, who is also, the tradition holds, God, answers his despair. The conversation runs to eighteen chapters and seven hundred verses, and the war waits the whole time. That conversation is the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, and this chapter is about a strange fact: that the most famous Hindu scripture in the world began as an episode in the sixth book of a war epic, and had to be lifted out before it could become what it now is.

This volume’s companion guide, What is the Bhagavad Gita?, takes up what the song teaches. This chapter asks a different question. How did a song in the middle of the Mahabharata become the book a Hindu hands a stranger?

A song with an address

First, where it sits, because the placement is the point. The Gita is not a free-standing book in its origin. It is a passage of the Mahabharata, lodged in the Bhishma Parva, the sixth of the epic’s eighteen books, the book named for the grandfather whose fall it leads toward. In the modern critical edition it runs from the twenty-third to the fortieth chapter of that book; older printed editions number it a little differently, beginning around the twenty-fifth, and the difference is simply an artefact of which recension one is reading.

It even shares the epic’s habit of telling rather than simply showing. The Gita is not narrated to us directly. It is narrated to the blind old king Dhritarashtra, far from the field, by his minister Sanjaya, who has been granted a divine sight by the sage Vyasa so that he can see and hear everything happening at Kurukshetra. So the most intimate spiritual dialogue in the tradition reaches us at one remove, reported by a man describing a battlefield to a blind king who cannot bear to watch his sons march to their deaths. The opening words are Dhritarashtra’s, asking what happened on the field of dharma, the field of the Kurus. In Telang’s public-domain translation: “What did my people and the Pandavas do, O Sanjaya, when they assembled together on the holy field of Kurukshetra, desirous to do battle?”

The image the Gita gives of itself is precise and recurs like a refrain: senayor ubhayor madhye, in the middle of the two armies. The teaching happens in the gap. Not before the war and not after it, but in the held breath between the marshalling and the killing, which is exactly the place a human being is most likely to ask what any of it is for.

The despair that opens it

The first of the eighteen chapters is given a title that tells you how unlike a sermon this scripture is. It is called the vishada yoga, the yoga of despondency. The book of God’s song opens with a breakdown.

Arjuna’s collapse is described with unsparing physical detail. In Ganguli’s rendering: “my limbs become languid, and my mouth becomes dry. My body trembles, and my hair stands on end. Gandiva,” his great bow, “slips from my hand, and my skin burns. I am unable to stand.” He would rather be killed unresisting, he says, than win a kingdom over the bodies of his teachers and kin. The chapter ends with him sitting down in the chariot, casting aside his bow and arrows, his mind overwhelmed with grief. Only then, into that emptied and desperate man, does Krishna begin to speak.

It is worth pausing on how the scripture chooses to begin, because it shapes everything the tradition has done with it since. The Gita does not open from authority or serenity. It opens from a good man’s refusal to act, in the worst situation he can imagine, and treats that refusal seriously enough to answer it at length. That is much of why it has travelled as it has. The despair is the door.

The song is lifted out

For a long time the Gita lived where it was born, as part of the epic, recited within it, commented on within it. Its journey to standalone supremacy happened in stages, and the stages can be named.

The first is philosophical. When the great systematizers of Vedanta sought the textual ground for their schools, they fixed on three sources, the prasthanatrayi, the three points of departure: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita. To found a school, you wrote a commentary on all three. Shankara, in roughly the eighth century, wrote the first major commentary on the Gita that survives, and by placing a passage of the epic beside the revealed Upanishads as a foundation of Vedanta, he began the work of lifting it out of the narrative and onto the highest shelf. After him, Ramanuja and Madhva and many others wrote their own Gita commentaries. A chapter of a war story had become a philosophical scripture in its own right.

The second stage is the one that made it global, and it is bound up with the colonial encounter. In 1785 an East India Company official named Charles Wilkins published The Bhagvat-Geeta, the first translation of the Gita into English, and indeed the first translation of any Sanskrit work into any European language. It carried a preface by the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, and it astonished European readers; within two years it had been turned into French and soon into German, and it fed the Romantic imagination of India. A century later, in 1885, Edwin Arnold rendered the whole song into flowing English verse as The Song Celestial, and it was in Arnold’s version, handed to him by Theosophists in London, that a young law student named Mohandas Gandhi first read the Gita properly.

The third stage is national. For Gandhi the Gita became a daily companion and, in his 1929 reading he called Anasaktiyoga, the yoga of non-attachment, a charter for selfless action and inner struggle rather than literal war. For Bal Gangadhar Tilak, writing his Gita-Rahasya in a colonial prison, it was a gospel of action and duty for a people seeking their freedom. As the scholar Richard Davis has shown, the Gita’s modern career as the representative Hindu scripture was made, in significant part, by translation and by the freedom movement, by print and by the needs of a nation finding itself. Its supremacy is not a simple inheritance from antiquity. It was also achieved, recently, in the open.

Why the middle

There is a fittingness, in the end, to where the Gita sits. The tradition could have placed its most beloved teaching in a quiet hermitage, in the mouth of a serene sage to a willing pupil, as the Upanishads so often do. Instead it placed it on a battlefield, in a broken man, in the last moment before catastrophe, and made the teaching an answer to the question of whether to act at all when every action is terrible. The previous chapter was about the epics making trouble out of dharma. The Gita is the Mahabharata’s longest single attempt to answer the trouble, offered from inside the human predicament rather than from above it, in the gap between the armies.

The war was about to begin.

In the space between the two sides, the tradition put its song.