SPECIAL ARTICLE
Ambedkar’s Gita
Meera Nanda
As the Bhagavad Gita becomes an agent of a deeper
sacralisation of the public sphere, it becomes necessary
to read it from Ambedkar’s perspective. Just as Thomas
Jefferson—a deist, a proponent of the Enlightenment
and a signatory to the American Declaration of
Independence—took a pair of scissors to the Bible and
cut out all references to miracles, time has come for us to
ask: What would Ambedkar—an admirer of Buddha
and John Dewey, a tireless advocate for the annihilation
of caste and a signatory to the Indian Constitution—cut
out of the Gita? What would Ambedkar’s Gita look like?
Meera Nanda (nanda.meera@gmail.com) has been teaching and
researching history of science, her most recent work being Science in
Saffron: Skeptical Essays on History of Science (2016).
38
Bhagavad Gita as ‘National Scripture’
O
ne of the first controversies under India’s current
Hindu-Right government involved the Bhagavad Gita
(hereinafter Gita). It all began when the Prime Minister
Narendra Modi made it a habit of gifting the Gita to world
leaders. This was interpreted by many, including his minister
of external affairs, Sushma Swaraj, as a signal that the prime
minister had unofficially elevated the holy book to a national
symbol. It was therefore not entirely unexpected that Swaraj,
accompanied by religious and political leaders, would pro-
pose that the Bhagavad Gita be officially declared India’s
rashtriya grantha, or national scripture.1
The Gita is to the public culture of India almost what the
Bible is to that of the United States (US): while it is not used
for swearing-in ceremonies, public figures go out of their way
to display their reverence for it, some even declaring it above
the Constitution. The process of canonisation began with
anti-British nationalism in the late 19th century, continued full
steam ahead even after freedom and now seems to be poised
for a formal apotheosis. At a popular level, too, the Gita’s mes-
sage of svadharma and Krishna bhakti resonates deeply.
The Modi government’s enthusiasm for the Gita is thus
nothing new or unprecedented. But what is new and un-
precedented—and alarming—is the aspiration to turn an
implicit tradition into explicit official policy that would
align the state even closer with the religion of the majority. So
far, the proposal has failed to gather much legislative momen-
tum, although calls in support keep emanating from public
figures and political allies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP).
Already, demands for making the Gita compulsory for state-
run schools have proliferated; Hindutva ideologues are getting
directly involved in writing school curricula, and a new educa-
tion policy laden with “moral values” and “national ethos”
harking back to India’s Hindu heritage is being drafted. To go
around the “problem” of secularism, Hindutva leaders are pro-
claiming the Gita to be a non-religious text that offers philo-
sophical insights and human values that Muslims, Christians
and non-believers can abide by.2
As the Song Celestial becomes an agent of a deeper sacrali-
sation of the public sphere, it becomes necessary to read the
Gita again, as if for the first time. Is the Bhagavad Gita a suita-
ble text for the moral education of the youth? Does the Gita
pull in the same direction as the liberal democratic Constitu-
tion that India is formally committed to? Can India have two
national holy books—the Constitution and the Gita—without
descending into schizophrenia?
DecEMBER 3, 2016 vol lI no 49 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

Ambedkar and the Gita
There could not be a more able guide to lead us through this
exercise than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.3 As the chair of the
committee that drafted the Constitution and as an “untouch-
able” who renounced Hinduism, Ambedkar offers a unique
perspective on the Gita. Just as Thomas Jefferson—a deist, a
proponent of the Enlightenment and a signatory to the American
Declaration of Independence—took a pair of scissors to the
Bible and cut out all references to miracles, time has come for
us to ask: What would Ambedkar—an admirer of Buddha and
John Dewey, a tireless advocate for the annihilation of caste
and a signatory to the Indian Constitution—cut out of the
Gita? What would Ambedkar’s Gita look like?
Ambedkar’s Gita does not exist. Library shelves groan
under the weight of Gita commentaries—and commentaries
upon commentaries—penned by Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak,
Sri Aurobindo and nearly every other star in the nationalist
firmament. But Ambedkar produced no such treatise. He has
only left behind some hints on what he thought of this text
so revered by his countrymen. These hints, along with his
philosophical reflections on the social power of religious
dogmas and the necessity of subjecting these dogmas to
critical reason, provide a clear enough lens through which to
read this holy book.4
The focal point of Ambedkar’s vision can be summed up in
one word: justice. He believed that in the modern era “all ideal
schemes of divine governance must be put on trial … and
judged on the criterion of justice.” As he elaborated in his
Philosophy of Hinduism (2010), justice was the only suitable
standard against which the moral and ethical values of any
religion must be judged in the modern world, where the indi-
vidual as individual, and not just as a member bound to her
birth-community, matters. For Ambedkar, justice “contained
within itself… [and] was simply another name for liberty,
equality and fraternity” because justice assumes a shared es-
sence that entitles all to same rights and liberties. And because
“what is unjust to the individual cannot be useful to society,”
his criterion of justice could override those (including Gandhi
and a host of others) who defend India’s peculiar institution of
chaturvarna (aka caste)5 on the ground of its usefulness in
maintaining social harmony.
Ambedkar’s criterion will guide me as I read the Gita to un-
derstand its teachings regarding rights and duties of persons,
worship of other gods and the place of reason in human life.
These three equalities—equal citizenship, equal respect for all
religions and equal right (and duty) to exercise one’s reason—
make up the triple helix of the Constitution of India.
As we shall see, Lord Krishna’s spiritual message is grounded
in a metaphysics that negates these foundational equalities.
The Gita and the Constitution stand in an oppositional rela-
tionship: what is dharma for one would amount to adharma
for the other, and what would be satayuga for one would be
the darkest kaliyuga for the other.
If this exercise of judging a nearly 2000-year-old text
by contemporary standards of justice appears anachronistic,
it is because the very idea of enshrining such a text as
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
national scripture and infusing it in school curricula in the
21st century is itself anachronistic. Besides, reading the
Gita with fresh eyes is necessary to peel away the layers of
apologetics which have found everything from socialism to
managerial capitalism, from non-violence to atomic bombs in
the Lord’s Song. Such an exercise is also needed to answer
those diasporic Hindu groups (the Hindu American Founda-
tion, the Hindu Student Council and their allies in the United
States, for example) that seek to sanitise Indian history in
American textbooks by denying any links between Hinduism
and caste.6
I have chosen to read Robert Zaehner’s translation and com-
mentary published by Oxford University Press in 1969.7 What
attracts me to Zaehner is his minimalist approach of “putting
as little of myself into [the text]..., to consider it as a whole that
should be explained by itself and by the milieu out of which it
grows.” Indeed, by putting too much of their own beliefs and
aspirations into it, modern Indian interpreters have turned the
Gita into a magician’s hat from which anyone can draw out a
rabbit, or a pigeon or whatever else the magician might want
to please the audience with. Zaehner is an antidote to this
interpretive exuberance.
The Noble Lie
In his Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar remarks upon the
“close affinity chaturvarna has with the Platonic ideal” and
goes on to describe this affinity:
To Plato, men fell by nature into three classes. In some individuals, he
believed, mere appetites dominated. He assigned them to the labour-
ing and trading classes. Others … had a courageous disposition. He
classed them as defenders in wars and defenders of internal peace.
Others showed a capacity to grasp the universal—the reason underly-
ing things. He made them the law-givers of the people.
The keyword is “by nature”: Plato and the Gita both justify
social inequalities as built into the stuff we are made of; both
“make nature itself an accomplice in the crime of political in-
equality,” to use Condorcet’s immortal words. There is, how-
ever, a deeper affinity: both Plato and Lord Krishna deploy a
“noble lie” to naturalise inequalities. Plato fabricates a myth
involving metals, while Krishna gives his blessings to the guna–
karma–rebirth philosophy. As the parallels are so striking, it
will be useful to quickly review Plato’s great lie before moving
on to the Gita’s.
The original reference for “noble lie” is the “needful false-
hood” that Socrates fabricates in the Book III of The Republic
written sometime around 380 BCE. The purpose of The Repub-
lic is to define the essence of justice, which Plato finds in so-
cial harmony that results when everyone does what best suits
his or her abilities. The practical problem the chief prota-
gonist, Socrates (Plato’s martyred teacher who he uses as his
mouthpiece) is trying to solve is this: how to ensure that those
allotted to different classes are in fact well-suited for their
jobs. The human soul, Socrates says, has three parts: the
appetitive part driven by lowly desire for food and sex (just
right, presumably, for the producing classes), the spirited part
that wants honour and power (suitable for auxiliaries) and a
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contemplative and rational part that hankers for knowledge
(ideal for the “philosopher–kings”). To ensure that those with
appetitive urges do n0t end up becoming philosopher–kings
and vice versa, Socrates combines education with eugenics
so that people would be “naturally” fit for the class they are
born into.
But how to sell this plan to those who are weeded out
at an early stage, consigned to a life of toil and barred
from higher ranks? How to reconcile people to their station
and secure their compliance with the state-enforced class
endogamy?
This is where Plato’s noble lie comes in: citizens will be told
that while they are brothers, born of the same earth, yet God
has framed them differently. In some of their constitutions, he
has mingled gold, while silver and brass–iron mix in others.
So, it is just and fair that those with the “noble” element—
gold—will have an aptitude for “higher” ends and become
guardians, while those with “base” metals like iron and brass
should be doing base kind of jobs: nobler the “metal,” loftier
the soul, and higher the class. It is thus not the state, but
God-given, inborn substances in the soul that are responsible
for one’s station in life.
The Gita’s Noble Lie
Replace the three metals in Plato’s myth with three gunas
(strands of “subtle” matter with moral qualities, more on
which below), and replace his metal-mixing God with “natural”
processes of karma and rebirth—and you get Gita’s version of
the noble lie. While Plato’s lie is so transparent that he worries
if anyone will believe it, the Gita’s version bears the proud
authorship of Lord Krishna himself. Besides, Plato never did
succeed in putting his lie to work, while the divinely super-
vised guna-karma make up the very stuff of common sense in
India even in the 21st century.
In his unfinished work, Revolution and Counter-Revolution,
Ambedkar wrote, “Gita is not a book of religion, nor a treatise
on philosophy. What [it] does is to defend certain dogmas
of religion on philosophical grounds.” The dogma that
concerned Ambedkar the most was that of chaturvarna, the
hierarchical arrangement of four varnas, and the “philosophi-
cal grounds” that he identified were none other than the
three-guna theory.8
Performance of one’s varna duties is the alpha and omega
of the Gita: it begins with the injunction to do one’s “own
duty, though void of merit, than do another’s well” (3: 35),
and ends with the same teaching, “better to do one’s own
duty, though devoid of merit, than do another’s, however well
performed. Doing the duty prescribed for one’s nature, one
does not incur sin .… Never should a man give up the work
to which he is born, defective though it may be” (18: 47–48).
Just so there are no doubts, the suitable “works” that “inhere
in their nature” are enumerated for each varna: “Calm, self-
restraint, ascetic practice, purity and uprightness, wisdom
in theory and practice, religious faith—these are the works
of Brahmin … Courage, ardour, endurance, skill in battle,
unwillingness to flee, an open hand, a lordly mien—these are
40
the works of Kshatriyas … To till the fields, to protect the kine
and engage in trade, these are the works of Vaishyas … works
whose very soul is service, inhere in the very nature of the Sh-
udras” (18: 41–44).
All of this is familiar. But what is not familiar—or rather,
what have been hidden under a thick deposit of apologetics—
are two aspects of the Gita that Ambedkar reminds us of.
First, its kinship with Manusmriti,9 the ancient law-code that
Ambedkar famously burnt as a symbol of caste oppression
during his campaign to de-segregate drinking water in
the town of Mahad in 1927. Second, the Gita’s noble lie that
simultaneously naturalises and divinises differential duties
through gunas and karma.
In his Philosophy of Hinduism, Ambedkar (2010) reminds
those who think that the Manusmriti is irrelevant as no one
reads it or upholds it any longer, that the Bhagavad Gita—a
book that everyone reads and upholds—is “Manusmriti in a
nutshell” and that the two, along with the Vedas, “are woven
on the same pattern, the same thread runs through them and
are part of the same fabric.” The Gita’s insistence on perfor-
mance of varna duties “even though devoid of merit” is also
found, almost verbatim, in Manu: “One’s own duty even with-
out any good qualities is better than someone else’s duty done
well; for a man who makes a living by someone else’s duty
immediately falls from his caste” (10: 97), while the duties
enumerated in the Gita (18: 41–44) are exactly the same that
Manu prescribes for the pure (“above the navel”) and the im-
pure (“below the navel”) varnas (1: 87–91). The Manusmriti
lives on in the Gita.
Turning to the heart of Gita’s noble lie—the guna–karma
philosophy—Ambedkar asks a pertinent question: Why does
Krishna make performance of varna duty—“though void of
merit”—a necessary condition for salvation? Why isn’t loving
devotion to Krishna enough? After all, had Krishna not prom-
ised that “in all beings the same am I … those who commune
with me in loving devotion abide in Me and I in them” (9: 29)?
Did he not open the door to salvation to all “base born though
they may be, and yes, women too….” (9: 32)? Why then,
Ambedkar asks in his essay, “Krishna and His Gita,” a “shudra
however great he may be as a devotee could not get salvation
if he transgressed his duty to live and die in the service of
higher classes?” Devotees do not lose their varna in Krishna.
Why not?
Devotees cannot lose their varna in Krishna as that would
defy the laws of nature whose author is none other than
Krishna himself. Guna and karma constitute laws of nature, as
the Gita understands them.
The Gita did not invent the concepts of guna and karma: it
inherited the former from Samkhya philosophy, and the latter
from the Upanishadic philosophies extant in early centuries
of the Common Era.10 But the Samkhyan conception of gunas,
as Zaehner points out, is “more clearly, more exhaustively,
more illuminatingly described in the Gita than anywhere
else.” Indeed, so foundational is this metaphysics to Krishna’s
teaching that he finds it necessary to give Arjuna a tutorial
on the constituents of matter in the middle of the war, with
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armies rearing to go on both sides! Let us examine how the
Gita uses this philosophy to defend the dogma of four varnas.
Early on in his battlefield sermon, Lord Krishna takes own-
ership of the four varnas when he tells Arjuna:
the four-varna system did I generate with categories of gunas and
karma, of this I am the doer,—this know—[and yet I am] the Change-
less One who does not act. (4: 13)
He then proceeds to take ownership of the gunas as well:
“Know, too, that all gunas, Goodness, Passion or Darkness pro-
ceed from Me; but I am not in them, they are in Me” (7: 12). He
explains that in Him matter (prakriti) and spirit (purusha) are
unified, as prakriti, is “to Me a womb, in it I plant the seed:
from this derives the origin of all contingent things” (14: 3). If
varnas are created out of categories of gunas, and gunas “pro-
ceed from Him,” how can He suspend their workings even for
those who come to Him with love?
Gita apologists have latched on to the verse cited above—
“the four-varna system did I generate with categories of gunas
and karma…”—and through verbal alchemy, turned it into a
manifesto of meritocracy! They put a tame, secular gloss on
the Sanskrit words “guna” and “karma,” reading them as mere
“abilities” and “action” respectively, as if the Gita does not
make them inseparable from, literally, the womb you are born
from! Set free from their materiality and karmic causality,
the varna order becomes a matter of “temperament and voca-
tion … independent of sex, birth and breeding,” to quote
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the erudite philosopher who
served as the second President of India.11 Moreover, because
castes, or jatis, do not find any mention in the Gita and other
sacred texts—only varnas do—it has allowed the notion to
flourish that, to use Gandhi’s words, “caste has nothing to do
with [Hindu] religion.” Even varna has nothing to do with
caste, according to Gandhi, who equates it rather with a “call-
ing,” a vocation you feel an inner compulsion to follow. And all
such “callings,” in this sanitised account of the Mahatma, are
“good, lawful and absolutely equal in status. The calling of a
Brahmin and a scavenger is equal and their due performance
carries equal merit before God and at one time seems to have
carried identical reward before man.”12 (It is ironic that the
Mahatma wrote these words to the Doctor: Ambedkar, whose
calling as an intellectual was undeniable, was treated as a
pariah for most of his life.)
Endlessly repeated, such Gandhian doublespeak has
won the day. On this reading of the Gita, no one is born
a Brahmin or a Shudra, only their abilities (“gunas”) and
actions (“karma”) place them in different varnas which,
presumably, used to carry equal value and status in the varna
vyavastha as originally conceived by our Vedic ancestors.
Bhagvan Krishna’s insistence on performing varna duties
without desire for fruit gets reinterpreted as the Hindu ana-
logue of the Protestant ethic that gave birth to the “spirit of
capitalism” in the West, as described famously by Max Weber.
To sum up, the mainstream reading of the Gita goes as
follows: the chaturvarna of the Gita is based upon worth and
not birth, while the caste system as it exists today is a later
corruption caused by assorted outsiders in different historical
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periods, namely, the Buddhists, the Muslims, the British, the
rights-based, individual-centred Western modernity and so
on.13 This story is a massive misreading of the Gita which ties
worth to birth in the clearest possible terms, invoking both
nature and God.
The modern-day apologists can make their story stick by
exploiting the multivalence of the Gita’s two keywords, “guna”
and “karma.” According to Monier Williams’ Sanskrit–English
Dictionary, the Sanskrit word “guna” can mean “string, thread
or strand,” or “virtue, merit, excellence,” or “quality, peculia-
rity, attribute, property.” Those who read gunas as mere
“virtues” and “qualities” untethered from the first meaning
of the word, “strands” of material nature, or prakriti, are man-
gling the Gita beyond recognition. The Gita insists, again and
again, that except for the immaterial soul, everything in the
world, even including the gods are made up of the three
substances/gunas which belong to prakriti (18: 40); that the
gunas (and not the immaterial soul) do all the work (3: 27–29);
that human will is powerless before them (3: 5) and that for
all his fear and trembling, Arjuna’s passionate gunas will
compel him to fight (18: 59).
Remorseless Biological Determinism
Indeed, for Samkhya philosophy which permeates the Gita,
there are no qualities that are not substances. Gunas have
been described as “feeling substances,” or “substance-codes”
in which what we would normally take to be non-substantial
or subjective qualities like moral virtues, knowledge,
thoughts, pleasure, pain are inseparably fused with, or coded
into, appropriate kinds of “subtle” strand of matter.14 The idea
of secondary or emergent qualities, that is, qualities that
are not already contained in the original substance, is foreign
to Samkhya. That is why Lord Krishna goes to great lengths
(the entire 14th chapter) to explain how those with a prepon-
derance of sattvic gunas (that is, strands of intelligence,
purity, light) “bind” the soul to “wisdom and joy” and are
headed for an “upward” birth after death; those with rajasic
gunas (strands of passion, energy and activity) “bind” the
soul to passion and self-interested acts, consigning it to a
middling rebirth; while those in whom tamsic gunas (strands
of darkness and sloth) prevail, end up binding their souls
in darkness and inertia and are headed downward into
“the wombs of deluded fools,” and even animals and inani-
mate objects.
In the Gita—as in the popular Hindu imagination even
to date—the three gunas serve as the conceptual grid for
classifying every possible entity imaginable, including foods,
rituals, knowledge, intellect, pleasures and even the gods.
How could human beings be exempt? Lord Krishna himself
classifies human beings according to their gunas in the Gita’s
concluding 18th chapter: it is the preponderance of sattva
guna that entitles the Brahmins to life of sattvic pursuits of
knowledge, etc; that of rajasic guna in the warrior caste
commits them to their pursuit of power; that of increasing
amounts of tamsic gunas that make the peasants suited to
their meaner pursuits and when tamas overpowers all other
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gunas, we get Shudras whose “very soul is service” of the other
three varnas (18: 42–44). (Recall Plato’s three metals?)
What we have here is a remorseless biological determinism
authorised by the highest god. The essence of biological deter-
minism, to cite Stephen Jay Gould from his classic, The
Mismeasure of Man, is the idea that “the social and economic
differences between different groups … arise from inherited,
inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an
accurate reflection of biology.” Primitive and false though the
Gita’s Samkhya-derived understanding of human biology is, it
clearly grounds varna distinctions, and the differential social
status they carry, in the stuff—the strands of material nature,
the gunas—you are born with. The qualities that make you a
Brahmin or a Shudra are not something you freely choose and
cultivate, but are the inevitable result of the inborn substance
in which they are coded.
In this scheme, not only do you have no choice but to obey
your gunas, which are “in Krishna,” but even your birth to
your biological parents is no accident. You had to be born in
the womb you were born in, with the material constituents
you were born with, thanks to the law of karma which guides
the soul’s journey through the cycles of birth, death, rebirth
and re-death and so forth.
Here again, to interpret karma as any ordinary action is
sheer sophistry. In the Gita, karma stands for its untamed
version in which the immaterial soul produces physical
effects in a new body down the road, in the future.15 Gita ties
this untamed karmic causality to the balance of gunas at the
time of death which the soul carries with it into the next
womb it inhabits. You can try to improve the sattvic content of
your mind–body by “doing the work that is prescribed for
you” (3: 8) and doing it as puja to Krishna, with no expecta-
tion of rewards. But your inborn gunas may only let you go
only so far on the path to self-improvement, and you will have
to wait for the next round of births to continue on the path
towards moksha (salvation) when you break the cycle of
rebirth altogether.
The genius of the Gita—where it leaves Plato and his Repub-
lic in the dust—is that there is no need to create an audacious
fiction that somehow, for no fault of yours, a capricious God
decided to put cheap iron into you while he put gold in some-
one else. You yourself have earned the stuff you are made of
and can only hope for an upgrade in the next life if you do your
duty as worship to Krishna in this life.
This God-backed, karmically-mediated biological deter-
minism continues to be a part of the common sense of average,
every-day Hindus of all castes even today, even though open
scriptural legitimation for the varna order is downplayed and
even denied (as by Gandhi and other modern Hindu inter-
preters of the Gita). It is thanks to the unspoken alliance
between the spiritual seekers in the West who uncritically
embrace all things Eastern and the Hindu apologists that it has
been possible to downplay the sacred and biological legitima-
tion of caste that the Gita teaches. Blithe proclamations, like
the one from the Hindu American Foundation that “caste-
based discrimination is not, and has never been, intrinsic to
42
the essential teachings of Hinduism,” and that “caste-based
discrimination fundamentally contradicts the essential teach-
ing of Hindu sacred texts that divinity is inherent in all be-
ings,”16 belong to the stock of expedient, artful interpretations
that have become the staple of modern Hindus.
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste has some good advice for
those who engage in such sophistry: “It is no use taking refuge
in quibbles. It is no use telling people that the shastras don’t
say what they are believed to say … what matters is how
shastras have been understood by the people … You must not
only discard the shastras, you must deny their authority.” It is
no use, in other words, to proclaim that the Gita teaches re-
spect for “abilities” and “actions” when it has been understood
over the ages by ordinary Hindus as teaching innate distinc-
tions based upon karmic carry-overs from previous existences.
What is needed is to deny the authority of the entire meta-
physics that sanctifies such insidious and cruel distinctions
and hierarchies.
Equal Respect for All Religions
Indians take justified pride in the tolerance and religious plu-
ralism of their country. The credit for it is given to Hinduism
which, as Swami Vivekananda declared in his famous address
to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, “has taught
the world both tolerance and universal acceptance … we accept
all religions as true.” Repeated endlessly, this mahavakya of
modern Hinduism has become the justification of the Indian
brand of secularism which does not separate the state from
religion but promises to exercise neutrality by respecting and
nurturing all religions equally.
Ambedkar, let it be said upfront, was no fan of this maha-
vakya. He was, after all, a man with a criterion for judging the
relative worth of religions. Very much a Durkheimian, he
understood the primary function of religion to be sanctifica-
tion and maintenance of the social order. On that count, he
condemned the religion he was born into as “making lawful
the lawless” and as being “inconsistent with the self-respect
and honour of the Untouchables.” This, indeed, was his strong-
est justification for renouncing Hinduism and converting,
along with 400,000 fellow Untouchables, to a rationally inter-
preted Buddhism. He declared the notion that all religions are
equally true and good “positively and demonstrably false,”
and thought that Hindus were hiding behind this insight of
comparative religions in order to “avoid an examination of
Hinduism on its merits.”17
Ambedkar’s antipathy notwithstanding, the idea that Hindus
respect all religions as equally valid paths to God has only
grown in stature. And more often than not, the Bhagavad Gita
is cited in support of this sentiment, as it was by such lumi-
naries as Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi. In the
aforementioned Chicago address, Vivekananda (2006) cited
from the Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever
form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths that
in the end lead to Me.” And again, he quoted Lord Krishna
as saying “I am in every religion as the thread through a string
of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and
DecEMBER 3, 2016 vol lI no 49 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

extraordinary power raising humanity, know thou that I am
there.”18 His objective was to draw a clear contrast with
Christianity and Islam that hold only one path—their own—
to salvation.
The Gita was composed at the cusp of the Common Era at a
time when many teachers and groups were competing with
each other: orthodox Vedic ritualists, renouncers and ascetics,
Veda-deniers like Buddhists, Jains, Charvakas and worshippers
of new gods were recommending contradictory paths to sal-
vation. The Gita’s lasting claim to fame is how it reconciles
these paths in Krishna’s message of this-worldly asceticism
which only asks for renunciation of the fruits of action, not
action itself.
In order to recommend his own gospel of disinterested
action to Arjuna, Lord Krishna had to necessarily engage with
the alternatives. And therein lays the rest of the story that
those who read tolerance in the Gita simply skip over. There is
tolerance and pluralism in the Gita, but it is hierarchical and
assimilationist.
Gita is nothing if not consistent: the same guna–karma
calculus that explains differential varna duties shows up
again in arranging the gods and the modes of worship along a
scale of merit. We meet our old friends—the three gunas—
again in Chapter 17 in which Lord Krishna answers Arjuna’s
worry about the fate of those who do not follow the scrip-
tures. He explains that what and how people worship springs
from the gunas they are born with (17.2). Those in whom
sattvic gunas prevail worship the gods of light, those with
rajas predominating worship the gods of power and wealth
and those with tamas in their beings worship ghosts and
spirits (17: 4). Similarly, the first type do not expect the
fruit, the second type worship/sacrifice for rewards or to
show off, while the third type of people offer sacrifice without
proper rites, without faith and sacred words and without
“paying the Brahman’s fees” (17: 11–13). All three kinds of
god and modes of worship are permitted—because they are
inevitable, given the gunas—but they are not equally valued
or recommended.
Lord Krishna is not a jealous god, but an all-encompassing
god. Krishna is gracious enough to grant that those who
worship other gods can attain what they desire. But He thinks
of them as “men of little wit,” “deluded by desire” who
deserve a proportionally “finite” reward (7: 23). In any case,
“even those who lovingly devote themselves to other gods
and sacrifice to them ... do really worship Me” (9: 23) and
“whatever good happens to [them] actually comes from Me
(7: 22).” In other words, there is no getting away from Krishna:
worship whomever you want, but all prayers, all sacrifices, all
devotion ultimately come to Him, and He dispenses all that is
due to the worshippers.
Is this tolerance? Or is it a hostile takeover of other gods?
Call it what you may, the Gita’s approach to other gods
and their worshippers has come to serve as the paradigm of
pluralism and tolerance in contemporary India. To India’s
credit, no one is hauled up for blasphemy and no one is
denied his/her conception of the divine. And yet, a high-Hindu
Economic & Political Weekly EPW DecEMBER 3, 2016 vol lI no 49
SPECIAL ARTICLE
conception of featureless, undivided One has come to stand as
the ne plus ultra of all religious strivings.
Reason
“Reason and morality,” Ambedkar wrote in his Annihilation of
Caste, “are the two most powerful weapons in the armoury of
a reformer. To deprive him of the use of these weapons is to
disable him from action.” An embattled reformer who spent his
life urging people to examine their beliefs that lead them to accept
the legitimacy of caste and “discard their authority and act con-
trary to those beliefs,” Ambedkar felt disabled by the strictures
on rational questioning that abound in Hindu sacred books.
He painstakingly catalogued how authoritative sacred
books discourage scepticism to the point of making it an ex-
communicable crime. The Manusmriti, he reminds us in Anni-
hilation of Caste, allows only three authorities for judging the
validity of a belief or the correctness of a practice: the Vedic
revelation (“shruti”), the remembered tradition (“smriti”) and
examples of good conduct as handed down from tradition.
Those “hetuvadis”—the sceptics who use logic and dialectics
to question these sources of tradition—are deemed atheists
who must be excommunicated.
The Gita follows Manu’s script and consigns the doubters to
“devilish wombs”—proving yet again that Ambedkar was cor-
rect to call the Gita “Manusmriti in a nutshell.” Consider the
16th chapter of the Gita where Krishna explains the difference
between the daivas and the asuras, the godly and the devilish
types of people, respectively.
Who are the asuras? It is clear from the start that Krishna is
referring to non-believers, who are supposed to be people
without any morals, people who are hypocrites, greedy, lust-
ing after material things, self-conceited and basically good for
nothing (16: 7–18)—all the qualities that the orthodox attrib-
uted to Lokayatas, the ancient Indian materialists. People like
these have no hope for salvation for they are headed for “devil-
ish wombs” which will lead them to the “lowest way,” which is
the opposite of nirvana. The only way to escape this fate,
Krishna advises Arjuna in the concluding verse of this chapter,
is to “let the Scripture [shastras] be your norm, determining
what is right and wrong. Once you know what the ordinance of
the Scripture bids you to do, you should perform down here
[in this life] the works [therein prescribed]” (16: 24).
Indeed, Krishna’s condemnation of materialists gives us “in
a nutshell” not just Manu, but also the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, both of which are replete with condemnation of
materialists and rationalists as “nastikas” (atheists and nihilists),
“pashandis” (heretics) and “rakshasas”/“daityas” (demons).
All those who dare to speak truth to power—be it Javali in
the Ramayana or Charvaka in the Mahabharata—are cast as
villains who have to be shunned and even killed.
There is another teaching of Lord Krishna and Manu-the-
lawgiver that Ambedkar thought was perverse in the extreme:
Both insist that wisdom and enlightenment are not to be shared.
After Krishna teaches Arjuna the virtue of disinterested
karma, He admonishes him not to share this knowledge with
the unwise who work selfishly for fruit of their actions (3: 26).
43
SPECIAL ARTICLE
And again: “let the knower of the whole not upset the knower
of the part” (3: 29). Manu is far more insistent on this matter
and expressly and repeatedly prohibits those entitled to know
the Vedas from revealing them to the servants.
Why this injunction? Clearly, to prevent any “counter-
propaganda,” as Ambedkar puts it in his Krishna and His Gita,
that might lead to a rebellion against observances of rituals
and rules. But what leaves Ambedkar aghast is the stinginess
of spirit, “the unwillingness to spread the light,” that has made
“illiteracy integral to Hinduism.” He is searing in his indict-
ment of the Hindu social order: “Never has any society been
guilty of closing to the generality of its people, the study of books
of religion. Never has society been guilty of prohibiting the mass
of its people from acquiring knowledge. Never has a society …
declared attempts by the common man to acquire knowledge to
be punishable as a crime…” (Emphasis in the original).
Ambedkar, the Constitution-maker, was aware that without
a prior revolution in the hearts and minds of the people, the
liberal–democratic Constitution would be nothing more than
a “palace built on a dung-heap.” Ambedkar, the admirer of
John Dewey, saw “reflective thought—in the sense of active,
persistent and careful consideration of any belief … in the
light of the grounds that support it…”—as the primary force
that would bring about such a social revolution. Ambedkar,
the Buddhist, saw reason as the basis for “a religion of princi-
ples” over a religion of mechanical, handed-down rules which
in his opinion, Hinduism had become. The Indian Constitution,
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44
too, gives pre-eminence to reason: It has made it a duty of all
citizens to cultivate “scientific temper, humanism and the spir-
it of inquiry and reform.” Clearly, the Gita would not approve
of such asuric ideas!
To the Test of Justice and Reason
What Would Ambedkar’s Gita Look Like? One thing we can
be sure of: it will not add much extra weight, if any at all, to
the library shelves groaning under the weight of countless
Gita exegeses!
The simple truth is that once you put the Gita to Ambedkar’s
test of justice and reason, nothing much is left of it. The “soul”
of the Gita—chaturvarna—fails the test of justice; its “philo-
sophical grounds”—the metaphysics of guna and karma—fail
the test of reason. Ambedkar the Buddhist would have tried to
retrieve the Buddhist elements—nirvana and maitri (loving-
kindness)—that can be found in Krishna’s sermon. But he
would have again run them through the test of justice and rea-
son, exactly as he did with the entire Buddhist corpus in his
last testament, the Buddha and His Dhamma.
Ambedkar saw the Gita as consolidating the counter-
revolution that set in after the rise of Buddhism challenged the
dominance of Brahmin rule. Today’s calls for enshrining the
Gita as a national scripture are but another chapter in the
same counter-revolution, this time brought on by the chal-
lenge that Ambedkar’s own justice-promising, reason-seeking
Constitution poses to the upper-caste Hindu hegemony.
Features
Presents All-India
and state-wise
annual data from
1980 onwards.
Structured in six
major sections :
• Demography
• Health Status
• Infrastructure
• Human Resources
• Health Education
• Health Finance
DecEMBER 3, 2016 vol lI no 49 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

NOTES
1 Sushma Swaraj made this proposal at the Gita
Prerna Mahotsav that celebrated the purported
“5151st anniversary” of the Gita at the Red Fort
Maidan on 7 December 2014. Organised by
GIEO-Gita (Global Inspiration and Enlighten-
ment Organisation) the gathering was attended
by the who’s who of the Sangh Parivar, includ-
ing Manohar Lal Khattar, the Chief Minister of
Haryana, Mahesh Sharma, Minister of State for
Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, Ashok
Singhal, President of Vishwa Hindu Parishad,
Baba Ramdev, Shankaracharya Swami Divy-
anand Tirth, Rameshbhai Oza and many other
spiritual leaders. For details, see Times of India,
8 December 2014.
2 Starting this academic year, moral education
would be compulsory for state-run schools in
Haryana and will include the Gita. The state of
Madhya Pradesh already includes the Gita in
state-run schools, while other states including
Karnataka and Maharashtra have contemplated
such a move. Lessons and recitations from the
Gita and other sacred texts are a part of daily
routine of over 3 million students enrolled in
Vidya Bharati schools run by the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). A partisan review
of where things stand can be found at http://
www.firstpost.com/india/imparting-core-val-
ues-through-gita-mahabharata-is-no-saffroni-
sation-of-education-2806438.html. On the Gita
as a book of philosophy, not religion, see
http://www.thoughtnaction.co.in/srimad-
bhagwat-gita-not-a-religious-book/.
3 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), was
born to an untouchable family in military ser-
vice under the British. He was among the first
Dalits to receive a university education. He
went on to earn two doctorates, first from Co-
lumbia University (where he was deeply influ-
enced by John Dewey’s philosophy), and an-
other from the London School of Economics.
Back in India, he led India’s untouchables
through a thicket of struggles ranging from ac-
cess to public wells, entry into temples, labour
rights to electoral representation. Initially an
admirer of Gandhi, he emerged as the Mahatma’s
most formidable critic. After the transfer of
power in 1947, Ambedkar was appointed the
law minister and led the drafting committee
for India’s Constitution. In 1956, shortly before
his death, he renounced Hinduism and em-
braced Buddhism, along with nearly 4,00,000
of his followers. Babasaheb (“respected fa-
ther”) Ambedkar remains an icon for India’s
Dalits and an inspiration for all fighting for a
better world.
4 While Ambedkar’s collected writings and
speeches run into some 16 volumes, the writ-
ings cited in this essay can be found in his classic,
Annihilation of Caste (2014), Philosophy of
Hinduism (2010), and essays collected as Essen-
tial Writings (2003) by Valerian Rodrigues.
5 Chaturvarna is the Sanskrit term for the order
of four varnas: Brahmins (the priests), Kshatriya
(warriors), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (the
working classes). The “untouchables,” who
were assigned all unclean tasks involving de-
cay and death were considered avarna, with-
out varna, as they were considered outsiders
(non-Aryan dasyus) or the progeny of non-
sanctioned unions across varnas.
The Indian word for “caste” is jati. Jatis are hi-
erarchically arranged endogamous groups
within varnas. Jati membership is decided by
birth. Social contact between jatis, especially
when it comes to marriages and sharing food,
is regulated by rules of purity. While there are
only four varnas, there are thousands of jatis,
Economic & Political Weekly EPW DecEMBER 3, 2016
with enormous variety of rules and customs
which are fluid enough to adapt to changing
circumstances and provide for some degree of
mobility within varnas.
Jatis derive their relative status by their place-
ment in the varna order: in a rough analogy,
varna is the genus and jatis are the species.
Even though the varna duties enumerated in
the Gita and dharma texts do not provide blue-
prints for every-day life of different jatis, they
serve as the matrix in which jatis rationalise
their status and self-image.
6 For an overview of the current round of
California textbook controversy, see http://
www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/us/debate-
erupts-over-californias-india-history-curricu-
lum.html. That caste should be presented as a
regional custom with no links to Hinduism was
one of the major demands of the Hindu lobby in
this controversy.
7 In few places where I found Zaehner (1969)
somewhat obscure, I have used the more poetic
translation by Juan Mascaró, first published in
1962 and reprinted many times as a Penguin
Classic.
8 Although he misunderstood that three gunas—
depending upon their proportions—can be
used to justify four varnas.
9 Manusmriti, or the Laws of Manu, has been de-
scribed by its translators, Wendy Doniger and
Brian K Smith (1991) as “a work of encyclopedic
scope… consisting of 2,685 verses on social ob-
ligations and duties of various castes and indi-
viduals in different stages of life; the proper
way for a righteous king to rule; the appropri-
ate relations between men and women of
different castes and of husbands and wives;
birth, death and taxes; cosmogony, karma and
rebirth; ritual practices;... and such details of
everyday life as settling traffic accidents, adju-
dicating disputes with boatmen, and penance
for sexual improprieties with one’s teacher’s
wife.” It was probably composed around the
beginning of the Common Era, or slightly
earlier. It was one of the most cited and com-
mented upon code of law up until the time
when the administration of the law was taken
over by the British.
10 Samkhya is one of the six schools of classical
Indian philosophy and is generally paired with
another school, namely, Yoga: the former is
concerned with the true nature of reality,
while the latter with the means of realising it.
Samkhya posits two orders of reality: spirit, or
purusha, which is non-material, immutable
and beyond time, space and causation and
masculine; and material nature, or prakriti,
which is in perpetual state of flux, bound by
space and time and feminine. Prakriti is made
up of three kinds of strands—“gunas” in San-
skrit—called sattva, rajas and tamas. Sattva is
the quality of purity and tranquillity, rajas is
the active principle which initiates action or
karma, while tamas is the quality of dullness,
lethargy and apathy. The goal of Yoga is to real-
ise that the spiritual element, the purusha,
which has become entrapped in the strands of
prakriti, is in fact free of the body and of all
other material constraints.
Karma originally referred to ritual acts, but
gradually came to include secular acts in
general, including acts appropriate to different
varnas. Karma, whether ritual or secular,
invariably produces their own good and evil
“fruits” in this or the next birth was the secret
teaching of the early Upanishads. This retribu-
tive understanding of karma, along with trans-
migration of the soul, has served as a founda-
tional presupposition of Hindu dharma from
times immemorial.
vol lI no 49
SPECIAL ARTICLE
11 Quoted here from Robert Minor (1986: 166).
12 This comes from Gandhi’s response to Ambed-
kar’s Annihilation of Caste.
13 For a sample of how this purported corruption
was blamed on the Muslim conquest in the
anti-colonial nationalist discourse, see Vijay
Prashad (1996).
14 The eminent exponent of Hindu philosophical
systems, S N Dasgupta (1922) describes gunas
as “feeling substances.” The term “substance
code” comes from McKim Marriott (1990).
15 The distinction between “tame” and “untame”
karmic causality is borrowed from Owen
Flanagan (2007).
16 See Hinduism: Not Cast in Caste by Hindu
American Foundation available at http://www.
hafsite.org/media/pr/not-cast-caste-big-pic-
ture-and-executive-summary.
17 All quotations appear in his essay “Away with
Hindus” written in 1936, available in his
Essential Writings (2003).
18 The first quote is clearly the 11th verse from
the 4th chapter of the Gita. I have failed to
locate the second quote anywhere in the Gita.
Emphases in the original.
References
Ambedkar, B R (2003): The Essential Writings of
B R Ambedkar, edited by Valerian Rodrigues,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
— (2010): Philosophy of Hinduism, New Delhi:
Critical Quest.
— (2014): Annihilation of Caste: the Annotated
Critical Edition, annotated and edited by
S Anand, New Delhi: Navayana.
Dasgupta S N (1922): History of Indian Philosophy,
Volume 1, New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass.
Doniger, Wedny and Brian K Smith (1991): The
Laws of Manu, New York: Penguin Classics.
Flanagan, Owen (2007): The Really Hard Problem,
Boston: MIT Press.
Marriott, McKim (1990): India through Hindu
Categories, New Delhi: Sage.
Mascaró, Juan (1962): The Bhagavad-Gita, New
Delhi: Penguin Classic.
Minor, Robert (ed) (1986): Modern Indian Inter-
preters of the Bhagavad Gita, Albany: SUNY-
Albany Press.
Prashad, Vijay (1996): “The Untouchable Question”,
Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 31, 2 March,
pp 551–59.
Vivekananda, Swami (2006): The Complete Works
of Swami Vivekananda, Volume I, Mayawati
Edition, Advaita Ashram, Kolkata, 11th printing.
Zaehner, Robert (1969): The Bhagavad-Gita, with a
Commentary based on the Original Sources,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Obituaries
The EPW has started a section, “Obituaries”,
which will note the passing of teachers
and researchers in the social sciences and
humanities, as also in other areas of work.
The announcements will be in the nature of
short notices about the work and careers of
those who have passed away.
Readers could send brief obituaries to
edit@epw.in.
45