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Ambedkars 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 Ambedkars perspective. Just as Thomas
Jeffersona deist, a proponent of the Enlightenment
and a signatory to the American Declaration of
Independencetook a pair of scissors to the Bible and
cut out all references to miracles, time has come for us to
ask: What would Ambedkaran admirer of Buddha
and John Dewey, a tireless advocate for the annihilation
of caste and a signatory to the Indian Constitutioncut
out of the Gita? What would Ambedkars 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).

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Bhagavad Gita as National Scripture

ne of the first controversies under Indias 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 propose that the Bhagavad Gita be officially declared Indias
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 Gitas message of svadharma and Krishna bhakti resonates deeply.
The Modi governments enthusiasm for the Gita is thus
nothing new or unprecedented. But what is new and unprecedentedand alarmingis 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 momentum, 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 staterun schools have proliferated; Hindutva ideologues are getting
directly involved in writing school curricula, and a new education policy laden with moral values and national ethos
harking back to Indias Hindu heritage is being drafted. To go
around the problem of secularism, Hindutva leaders are proclaiming the Gita to be a non-religious text that offers philosophical insights and human values that Muslims, Christians
and non-believers can abide by.2
As the Song Celestial becomes an agent of a deeper sacralisation of the public sphere, it becomes necessary to read the
Gita again, as if for the first time. Is the Bhagavad Gita a suitable text for the moral education of the youth? Does the Gita
pull in the same direction as the liberal democratic Constitution that India is formally committed to? Can India have two
national holy booksthe Constitution and the Gitawithout
descending into schizophrenia?
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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 untouchable who renounced Hinduism, Ambedkar offers a unique
perspective on the Gita. Just as Thomas Jeffersona deist, a
proponent of the Enlightenment and a signatory to the American
Declaration of Independencetook a pair of scissors to the
Bible and cut out all references to miracles, time has come for
us to ask: What would Ambedkaran admirer of Buddha and
John Dewey, a tireless advocate for the annihilation of caste
and a signatory to the Indian Constitutioncut out of the
Gita? What would Ambedkars Gita look like?
Ambedkars Gita does not exist. Library shelves groan
under the weight of Gita commentariesand commentaries
upon commentariespenned 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 Ambedkars 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 individual 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 essence 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 Indias peculiar institution of
chaturvarna (aka caste)5 on the ground of its usefulness in
maintaining social harmony.
Ambedkars criterion will guide me as I read the Gita to understand its teachings regarding rights and duties of persons,
worship of other gods and the place of reason in human life.
These three equalitiesequal citizenship, equal respect for all
religions and equal right (and duty) to exercise ones reason
make up the triple helix of the Constitution of India.
As we shall see, Lord Krishnas spiritual message is grounded
in a metaphysics that negates these foundational equalities.
The Gita and the Constitution stand in an oppositional relationship: 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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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 Lords Song. Such an exercise is also needed to answer
those diasporic Hindu groups (the Hindu American Foundation, 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 Zaehners translation and commentary 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 magicians 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 labouring 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 universalthe reason underlying 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 inequality, to use Condorcets immortal words. There is, however, 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
karmarebirth philosophy. As the parallels are so striking, it
will be useful to quickly review Platos great lie before moving
on to the Gitas.
The original reference for noble lie is the needful falsehood that Socrates fabricates in the Book III of The Republic
written sometime around 380 BCE. The purpose of The Republic is to define the essence of justice, which Plato finds in social harmony that results when everyone does what best suits
his or her abilities. The practical problem the chief protagonist, Socrates (Platos 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 philosopherkings). To ensure that those with
appetitive urges do n0t end up becoming philosopherkings
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 Platos 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 brassiron mix in others.
So, it is just and fair that those with the noble element
goldwill 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 ones station in life.
The Gitas Noble Lie

Replace the three metals in Platos 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 rebirthand you get Gitas version of
the noble lie. While Platos lie is so transparent that he worries
if anyone will believe it, the Gitas version bears the proud
authorship of Lord Krishna himself. Besides, Plato never did
succeed in putting his lie to work, while the divinely supervised 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 philosophical grounds that he identified were none other than the
three-guna theory.8
Performance of ones varna duties is the alpha and omega
of the Gita: it begins with the injunction to do ones own
duty, though void of merit, than do anothers well (3: 35),
and ends with the same teaching, better to do ones own
duty, though devoid of merit, than do anothers, however well
performed. Doing the duty prescribed for ones 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: 4748).
Just so there are no doubts, the suitable works that inhere
in their nature are enumerated for each varna: Calm, selfrestraint, ascetic practice, purity and uprightness, wisdom
in theory and practice, religious faiththese are the works
of Brahmin Courage, ardour, endurance, skill in battle,
unwillingness to flee, an open hand, a lordly mienthese 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 Shudras (18: 4144).
All of this is familiar. But what is not familiaror 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 Gitas 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 Gitaa
book that everyone reads and upholdsis 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 Gitas insistence on performance of varna duties even though devoid of merit is also
found, almost verbatim, in Manu: Ones own duty even without any good qualities is better than someone elses duty done
well; for a man who makes a living by someone elses duty
immediately falls from his caste (10: 97), while the duties
enumerated in the Gita (18: 4144) are exactly the same that
Manu prescribes for the pure (above the navel) and the impure (below the navel) varnas (1: 8791). The Manusmriti
lives on in the Gita.
Turning to the heart of Gitas noble liethe gunakarma
philosophyAmbedkar asks a pertinent question: Why does
Krishna make performance of varna dutythough void of
merita necessary condition for salvation? Why isnt loving
devotion to Krishna enough? After all, had Krishna not promised 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 Krishnas
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 ownership 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 Changeless 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 proceed 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 proceed 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 karmaand 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 vocation 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 textsonly varnas doit has allowed the notion to
flourish that, to use Gandhis 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 calling, 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 Krishnas insistence on performing varna duties
without desire for fruit gets reinterpreted as the Hindu analogue 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 Gitas two keywords, guna
and karma. According to Monier Williams SanskritEnglish
Dictionary, the Sanskrit word guna can mean string, thread
or strand, or virtue, merit, excellence, or quality, peculiarity, 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 mangling 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: 2729);
that human will is powerless before them (3: 5) and that for
all his fear and trembling, Arjunas 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 preponderance 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 inanimate objects.
In the Gitaas in the popular Hindu imagination even
to datethe 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 Gitas
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: 4244). (Recall Platos three metals?)
What we have here is a remorseless biological determinism
authorised by the highest god. The essence of biological determinism, 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
Gitas Samkhya-derived understanding of human biology is, it
clearly grounds varna distinctions, and the differential social
status they carry, in the stuffthe strands of material nature,
the gunasyou 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 souls 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 mindbody by doing the work that is prescribed for
you (3: 8) and doing it as puja to Krishna, with no expectation 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 Gitawhere it leaves Plato and his Republic in the dustis 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 someone 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 determinism 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 interpreters 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 legitimation of caste that the Gita teaches. Blithe proclamations, like
the one from the Hindu American Foundation that castebased discrimination is not, and has never been, intrinsic to
42

the essential teachings of Hinduism, and that caste-based

discrimination fundamentally contradicts the essential teaching of Hindu sacred texts that divinity is inherent in all beings,16 belong to the stock of expedient, artful interpretations
that have become the staple of modern Hindus.
Ambedkars 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 dont
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 respect for abilities and actions when it has been understood
over the ages by ordinary Hindus as teaching innate distinctions based upon karmic carry-overs from previous existences.
What is needed is to deny the authority of the entire metaphysics that sanctifies such insidious and cruel distinctions
and hierarchies.
Equal Respect for All Religions

Indians take justified pride in the tolerance and religious pluralism 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 mahavakya. 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 sanctification 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 strongest justification for renouncing Hinduism and converting,
along with 400,000 fellow Untouchables, to a rationally interpreted 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
Ambedkars 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 luminaries 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
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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 paththeir 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 salvation. The Gitas lasting claim to fame is how it reconciles
these paths in Krishnas 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 gunakarma
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 friendsthe three gunas
again in Chapter 17 in which Lord Krishna answers Arjunas
worry about the fate of those who do not follow the scriptures. 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 Brahmans fees (17: 1113). All three kinds of
god and modes of worship are permittedbecause they are
inevitable, given the gunasbut 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 Gitas approach to other gods
and their worshippers has come to serve as the paradigm of
pluralism and tolerance in contemporary India. To Indias
credit, no one is hauled up for blasphemy and no one is
denied his/her conception of the divine. And yet, a high-Hindu
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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 contrary 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 excommunicable crime. The Manusmriti, he reminds us in Annihilation 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 hetuvadisthe sceptics who use logic and dialectics
to question these sources of traditionare deemed atheists
who must be excommunicated.
The Gita follows Manus script and consigns the doubters to
devilish wombsproving yet again that Ambedkar was correct 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, lusting after material things, self-conceited and basically good for
nothing (16: 718)all the qualities that the orthodox attributed to Lokayatas, the ancient Indian materialists. People like
these have no hope for salvation for they are headed for devilish 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, Krishnas 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 powerbe it Javali in
the Ramayana or Charvaka in the Mahabharataare cast as
villains who have to be shunned and even killed.
There is another teaching of Lord Krishna and Manu-thelawgiver 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).
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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 counterpropaganda, 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 indictment 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
liberaldemocratic Constitution would be nothing more than
a palace built on a dung-heap. Ambedkar, the admirer of
John Dewey, saw reflective thoughtin the sense of active,
persistent and careful consideration of any belief in the
light of the grounds that support itas the primary force
that would bring about such a social revolution. Ambedkar,
the Buddhist, saw reason as the basis for a religion of principles over a religion of mechanical, handed-down rules which
in his opinion, Hinduism had become. The Indian Constitution,

too, gives pre-eminence to reason: It has made it a duty of all

citizens to cultivate scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. Clearly, the Gita would not approve
of such asuric ideas!
To the Test of Justice and Reason
What Would Ambedkars 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 Ambedkars
test of justice and reason, nothing much is left of it. The soul
of the Gitachaturvarnafails the test of justice; its philosophical groundsthe metaphysics of guna and karmafail
the test of reason. Ambedkar the Buddhist would have tried to
retrieve the Buddhist elementsnirvana and maitri (lovingkindness)that can be found in Krishnas sermon. But he
would have again run them through the test of justice and reason, 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 counterrevolution that set in after the rise of Buddhism challenged the
dominance of Brahmin rule. Todays calls for enshrining the
Gita as a national scripture are but another chapter in the
same counter-revolution, this time brought on by the challenge that Ambedkars own justice-promising, reason-seeking
Constitution poses to the upper-caste Hindu hegemony.

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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 Enlightenment Organisation) the gathering was attended
by the whos who of the Sangh Parivar, including 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 Divyanand 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-values-through-gita-mahabharata-is-no-saffronisation-of-education-2806438.html. On the Gita
as a book of philosophy, not religion, see
http://www.thoughtnaction.co.in/srimadbhagwat-gita-not-a-religious-book/.
3 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (18911956), was
born to an untouchable family in military service under the British. He was among the first
Dalits to receive a university education. He
went on to earn two doctorates, first from Columbia University (where he was deeply influenced by John Deweys philosophy), and another from the London School of Economics.
Back in India, he led Indias untouchables
through a thicket of struggles ranging from access to public wells, entry into temples, labour
rights to electoral representation. Initially an
admirer of Gandhi, he emerged as the Mahatmas
most formidable critic. After the transfer of
power in 1947, Ambedkar was appointed the
law minister and led the drafting committee
for Indias Constitution. In 1956, shortly before
his death, he renounced Hinduism and embraced Buddhism, along with nearly 4,00,000
of his followers. Babasaheb (respected father) Ambedkar remains an icon for Indias
Dalits and an inspiration for all fighting for a
better world.
4 While Ambedkars collected writings and
speeches run into some 16 volumes, the writings cited in this essay can be found in his classic,
Annihilation of Caste (2014), Philosophy of
Hinduism (2010), and essays collected as Essential 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 decay and death were considered avarna, without varna, as they were considered outsiders
(non-Aryan dasyus) or the progeny of nonsanctioned unions across varnas.
The Indian word for caste is jati. Jatis are hierarchically 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,
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DecEMBER 3, 2016

10

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 placement 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 blueprints for every-day life of different jatis, they
serve as the matrix in which jatis rationalise
their status and self-image.
For an overview of the current round of
California textbook controversy, see http://
www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/us/debateerupts-over-californias-india-history-curriculum.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.
In few places where I found Zaehner (1969)
somewhat obscure, I have used the more poetic
translation by Juan Mascar, first published in
1962 and reprinted many times as a Penguin
Classic.
Although he misunderstood that three gunas
depending upon their proportionscan be
used to justify four varnas.
Manusmriti, or the Laws of Manu, has been described by its translators, Wendy Doniger and
Brian K Smith (1991) as a work of encyclopedic
scope consisting of 2,685 verses on social obligations and duties of various castes and individuals in different stages of life; the proper
way for a righteous king to rule; the appropriate 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, adjudicating disputes with boatmen, and penance
for sexual improprieties with ones teachers
wife. It was probably composed around the
beginning of the Common Era, or slightly
earlier. It was one of the most cited and commented upon code of law up until the time
when the administration of the law was taken
over by the British.
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 strandsgunas in Sanskritcalled 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 realise 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 retributive understanding of karma, along with transmigration of the soul, has served as a foundational presupposition of Hindu dharma from
times immemorial.

vol lI no 49

11 Quoted here from Robert Minor (1986: 166).

12 This comes from Gandhis response to Ambedkars 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-picture-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.
Mascar, Juan (1962): The Bhagavad-Gita, New
Delhi: Penguin Classic.
Minor, Robert (ed) (1986): Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavad Gita, Albany: SUNYAlbany Press.
Prashad, Vijay (1996): The Untouchable Question,
Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 31, 2 March,
pp 55159.
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.

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