The Bhagavad Gita as a healer for the precarious problem of Colonialism
Raghuramaraju, A
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati
India
raghuramaraju@iittp.ac.in; raghurama9@gmail.com
In this paper, I will examine a national problem that affects individuals both psychologically and physically: colonialism and its impact on Indian society. The problem has two aspects: one, the cause, and the other, a potential solution. Bal Gangadhar Tilak delves into the causes and his ideas regarding solutions in his monumental book, Srimad Bhagavad Gita Rahasya.
In section 1, the paper discusses the interpretations of the Gita by the Acharyas: Sri Sankaracharya, Sri Ramanujacharya, Sri Madhvacharya, Sri Vallabhacharya and Sri Nimbarkacharyya. Despite differences, Tilak contends that these interpretations converge on claiming that the Gita promotes Bhakti and Mukti, devotion and spiritual liberation. This, Tilak claims, led India to focus more on the other-world Bhakti and Mukti, thereby neglecting the physical world. This approach, according to him, made Indians weak and consequently vulnerable to subjugation.
Having identified the cause of the problem of colonialism, Tilak does not reject the Gita. Instead, he distinguishes between the interpretation (Bhasya) and his own, the previously unexplored ‘secret’ (Rahasya). Using Mimamsa’s rule of writing and reading a text, he rejects all the Bhasyas of the Acharyas as interpolative and misleading, as well as dangerous for Indian society. As a solution, he proposes his conceptualization of the message of the Gita as containing a Rahasya that primarily advocates action (Karma). The evidence Tilak gives in support of his claim is that Arjuna, on the advice of Lord Krishna, goes on to fight in the war at Kurukshetra, which involves action, that too violent action. Tilak’s solution is discussed in Section 2 of the paper.
In the next section, the paper discusses how M. K. Gandhi contests Tilak’s claim and asserts that the Gita rejects violence and positively promotes non-violence. As a part of this radical hermeneutics, Gandhi makes three moves: one from the part, which is the Gita, to the whole, which is The Mahabharata; two, from event of the battle to context of narrating the Mahabharata; and three, from contents to context. Alternatively, while Tilak focuses on the beginning and ending of the Gita, Gandhi’s focus is on the consequences of Mahabharata.
The overall thrust of the paper is (a) to identify the problem of colonialism (India’s immediate past) that resulted in what Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya termed as ‘slavery of the self’, and (b) to explore the internal reasons for this predicament and access potential solutions to it in the classical text, The Bhagavad Gita (India’s distant past).
Brief Bio: A. Raghuramaraju teaches philosophy at the Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from IIT Kanpur and taught at Goa University and the University of Hyderabad. His publications include Debates in Indian Philosophy: Classical, Colonial and Contemporary;Debating Gandhi: A Reader, editor; Enduring Colonialism: Classical Presences and Modern Absences in Indian Philosophy; Modernity in Indian Social Theory; Philosophy and India: Ancestors, Outsiders and Predecessors; Debating Vivekananda: A Reader, editor; Desire and Liberation: Biographyof a Text by Vaddera Chandidas, an editor. All published by Oxford University Press. Routledge publishes Modern Frames and Premodern Themes in Indian Philosophy: Border, Self and Other; Calibrating Western Philosophy for India: Rousseau, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari and Vaddera Chandidas. His edited volume is titled Seven Sages: Selected Essays of Ramchandra Gandhi, published by Penguin. He wrote a monthly column from October 2019 to February 2024 for the English daily, The Telegraph, Kolkata.
