In a recent essay the agent provocateur and philosopher Slavoj Žižek remarked that the Bhagavad Gita represented the perfect philosophy for post-capitalist society. By no means the first reaction to this text, this is only the most recent 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 the text 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.
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, to 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 two hundred years, the Bhagavad Gita, “Song of the Lord”, forms the central drama of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. This special issue of Modern Intellectual History brings together a group of intellectual and social historians to discuss modern interpretations of 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 pre-eminence until very recently. Its resurgence and reinterpretation, in short, are coterminous with the formation of modern life and politics.
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 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 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, 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 onwards, 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 company with 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 in this special issue of Modern Intellectual History 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 its model. In this sense the text plays the kind of role in Indian political thinking that Machiavelli's Prince or Hobbes's Leviathan do for its European equivalents, 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, what is 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 anticolonial 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 referents. Thus while the questions of ethics, war and action remained stable, 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.
An instructive point of comparison in this case would be the underlying implications of violence and transformation in Thucydides’ 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 Lord 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 (dharma). 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. 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 need and ethical injunction. The foreshadowing of these deeply modern concerns was precisely the reason why, and the context in which, the Gita acquired a new life from the late nineteenth century within the global arena. 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 humanity nor God's providence being at stake. Instead of a turn towards nihilism, however, these commentaries on the Gita aimed to equip human action with appropriate meaning. 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 from a form of duty through that of sacrifice, all highlighting the issues of violence and non-violence.
The essays in this issue encompass the range of ideological formations from liberalism to revolution as these intersected with and interrupted the dominance of nationalism. Ranging from Bayly's discussion of the Gita's problematic relationship with liberalism through Kumar's discussion of law as a form of violence, they examine the institutionalized but secret histories of the state. Devji and Kapila's interventions focus on the radical reformulation of the political in relation to the ethical. These essays chart anew the power of ideas, text and place in the making of the modern world. While Mehta and Chakrabarty-Majumdar extract the iconic Gandhi from the ethical prison in which he has languished for so long, Chaturvedi centres historicism as a form of violence. Sinha and Sartori, by contrast, trace the conversion of the Gita into a travelling-text of ‘spiritualism’ both within and beyond the confines of India.
The following essays thus seek to intervene in current debates within political theory and intellectual history and to offer new perspectives. 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 on the Gita, and nor is it the aim of this collection to reinscribe the concern with dialogue, dissent or difference as the primary way of treating colonial, national and civilizational encounters. Rather, this collection aims to revise perspectives on violence, war and sacrifice, the political and the ethical, that continue to inform the world we inhabit.
