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INDIA, THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND THE WORLD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2010

C. A. BAYLY
C. A. BAYLY*
Affiliation:
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge E-mail: cab1002@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This essay considers the relationship between the Bhagavad Gita as a transnational text and its changing role in Indian political thought. Indian liberals used it to mark out the boundaries between the public sphere they desired and a reformed Hinduism. Indian intellectuals also used the image of Krishna to construct an all-wise founder figure for the new India. Meanwhile, in the transnational sphere of debate, the Gita came to represent India itself in the works of theosophists, spiritual relativists and a variety of intellectual radicals, who approved of the text's ambivalent view of the relationship between political action and the World Spirit. After the First World War, Indian liberals, notably Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher and later India's second president, used Krishna's words to urge a new and humane international politics infused with the ideal of “detached action”.

Type
Forum
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 275 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 This point, among several others, was sharpened by Arjun Appadurai's commentary during the conference at the New School, New York. I owe him warm thanks.

2 The literature on the meaning of liberalism is never-ending and descends into semantic niceties. I have tried to define Indian liberalism in several publications. But here I use it as a broadly descriptive term, much along the lines of Majumdar, B. B., History of Political Thought: From Rammohun to Dayananda (1821–84), vol. 1, Bengal (Calcutta, 1934)Google Scholar. See, however, Paul, E., Miller, F. and Paul, J., Liberalism Old and New (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar; and Simhony, A. and Weinstein, D., The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bayly, C. A., ‘Empires and Indian Liberals’, in Hall, Catherine and McLelland, Stuart, eds., Historians on Race, Nation and Empire 1750 to the Present (Manchester, forthcoming, 2010), pp. 74–93Google Scholar. A classic statement of Indian liberalism would be Banerjea, Surendranath, A Nation in Making (Bombay, 1925)Google Scholar; or, in a vernacular idiom, Bharatendu Harish Chandra's speech at Ballia in 1883, when he asked “Bharatvarsh ki unnati kaise ho sakti hai?” (“How can Indian make progress?”), Bhartendu Grantavali, 3, (Varanasi, 1956), 262–7, and stressed the importance of community, communication and sympathy.

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