Is Gandhiji’s commentary on the Gita ok?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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what is the nature of Gandhi’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita answer many of the Indian leaders who wrote commentaries on the Gita they were very much caught in the national independence struggle and their whole world view was very much shaped by that so Gandhiji was in his own way a very spiritual person he used to follow strict principles of self-control, self and self discipline and he used non-violence as a primary means of combating the British rule now non-violence in one sense for him it was a it was a moral principle another sense also it could be said that it was a it was a pragmatic strategy because Indians did not at that time have the weapons to counter the Britishers and Britishers for whatever whatever be the atrocities they had done in India during the British rule they still had some level of conscience they had been brought up in the Christian ethos which Jesus taught that if somebody slaps you on one cheek, turn the other cheek offer them the other cheek to slap on so basically Gandhiji’s practice of non-violence was something which stirred the Christian soul of the Britishers that this man is actually following Jesus better than what we are following so that same strategy of Gandhiji for non-violence and whenever he would be arrested or whenever he would want to do something he would fast and the Britishers could not really tolerate the idea that a person may die because of us and they would usually arrive at some compromise but later on when Jinnah wanted to partition India Gandhi did not try to fast over there because Jinnah had no such conscience he would have simply let Gandhi die and so the point I am making here is that Gandhiji had a particular way of looking at things he wanted to gain independence for India he had his own idea of spirituality but it was his personal conceptions that shaped his study of the Gita very much and many of the Indian national leaders quite often they say with a little pride also that they did not read any of the traditional commentators of the Gita while writing their commentaries on the Gita many of them when they were imprisoned by the British government in their jail they wrote a commentary on the Gita but they did not have so much access to sources also so now there are many things which Gandhi did get right in the Gita and he appreciated for example the Gita’s emphasis on self-control talked in 2.54 to 72 and he also talked about he himself used to sing songs about God and devotion to God which could be roughly equated to Bhagavata’s Bhakti but the most direct contradiction between his ideas of non-violence and the Bhagavata was the Bhagavata’s setting that it’s a setting of war and this is where the most serious problem comes up in his Gita commentary that he says that he assumes that the Bhagavata’s setting of war is metaphorical and he says that the Kauravas represent our lower desires the Pandavas are higher desires and Kurukshetra is our body and this is the lower desires are far more than the higher desires similarly Kauravas are far more than us and the whole purpose of the Bhagavata is to enable us enable our lower desires to be defeated to enable our higher desires to defeat our lower desires so now this sort of symbolism is okay but it is okay if it is seen in addition to the historicity of the Gita but if it is seen as a substitution for the historicity of the Gita as Gandhiji saw then the whole Gita’s presence and context of the Mahabharata it all becomes redundant it all becomes incoherent over there Gita does clearly talk about fighting a war and there is no indication anywhere in the Gita that Krishna is speaking in metaphorical terms there are some metaphorical verses in the Gita no doubt but the overall message is not metaphorical the literal war to be fought and Krishna is telling Arjuna you should fight the war so now Gandhiji not only said that this whole setting is symbolic he goes further and he says that although Vyasadeva is a great sage sometimes even great sages can commit mistakes and I feel that here Gandhiji is saying that I feel that here Vyasadeva by using the symbolism of war has committed a serious mistake because he has said that this symbolism may encourage people to fight wars to embrace violence and therefore with all humility at my command I say that this is a serious mistake so although he is humble so it is not only that he he considered the Bhagavad Gita to be symbolic but he also considered to be a misleading or dangerous symbol so in that sense his his own version of the truth or his own conception of the truth when it contradicted the Gita’s setting he wanted to change the Gita’s setting itself so that’s why in general in the Bhakti tradition there is a significant amount of reservation about Gandhiji’s take on the Gita