Ambedkar's Gita

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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 ([email protected]) 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’

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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 propose 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 message 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 unprecedented—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 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 India’s 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 books—the Constitution and the Gita—without descending into schizophrenia? DecEMBER 3, 2016

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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 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 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 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 understand 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 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 Economic & Political Weekly

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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 Lord’s 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 Zaehner’s 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 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 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 universal—the 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 Condorcet’s 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– 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 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 (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 39

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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 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 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, selfrestraint, 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 Shudras” (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 performance of varna duties “even though devoid of merit” is also found, almost verbatim, in Manu: “One’s own duty even without 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 impure (“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 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 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 DecEMBER 3, 2016

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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 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 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 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 “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 Krishna’s 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 Economic & Political Weekly

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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, 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: 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 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 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 41

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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 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 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 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 Gita—where it leaves Plato and his Republic 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 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. 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 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 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 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 DecEMBER 3, 2016

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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 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 salvation. 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 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 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

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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 “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 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: 7–18)—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, 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-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). 43

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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 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 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 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 “philosophical 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 (lovingkindness)—that can be found in Krishna’s 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. 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 challenge that Ambedkar’s 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 who’s 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 (1891–1956), 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 Dewey’s philosophy), and another from the London School of Economics. Back in India, he led India’s 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 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 embraced Buddhism, along with nearly 4,00,000 of his followers. Babasaheb (“respected father”) 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 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, Economic & Political Weekly

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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 Mascaró, first published in 1962 and reprinted many times as a Penguin Classic. Although he misunderstood that three gunas— depending upon their proportions—can 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 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 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 strands—“gunas” in Sanskrit—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 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.

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11 Quoted here from Robert Minor (1986: 166). 12 This comes from Gandhi’s response to Ambedkar’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-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. Mascaró, 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 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 [email protected]. 45