What can an ancient Sanskrit text offer us in a world riddled with conflict?
The Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse dialogue between a reluctant warrior and a divine charioteer, is not just a religious scripture. It is a confrontation with conscience. A text that refuses easy answers and, instead, demands a deeper reckoning: what is your duty?
Every generation stands at its own Kurukshetra. Today’s battlefields comprise boardrooms where ethics are bought, campuses where truth is fractured, Parliaments where justice is negotiated, and homes where silence replaces action. Our enemies appear in the form of apathy, misinformation, extremism, and fear.
So when Krishna tells Arjuna, ‘Do not hesitate to strike down even your own kin in the name of dharma,’ it is not an endorsement of war, but a challenge to rise above personal comfort in service of the collective good. That’s why the Gita remains a text of public philosophy. It teaches nishkama karma —action without attachment to results — not as spiritual poetry, but as civic instruction. To serve because it is just. To act because it is necessary.
But public philosophy must reach beyond ivory towers and temples.
A nation may rejoice, and a government may be triumphant, seeing the Bhagavad Gita and the Natyasastra being added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. But the real triumph would be when these texts become part of the everyday discourse — school textbooks, dinner table conversations, classrooms that welcome contradiction and challenge. Tell the next generation the stories of dharma and doubt — not to indoctrinate, but to ignite. Because the true heritage of Hindu thought is not obedience— it is argument — debate, dialogue, and the ceaseless churn of ethical inquiry. The more open the debate, the more honest the interpretation, and the more profound the legacy we leave behind.
In teaching the Bhagavad Gita, many scholars have wrestled with how a single text can mean so many different things to so many different people. Sankara (Adi Shankaracharya), one of the most influential interpreters of the Gita, believed that it does have a singular, true meaning — one that contains the distilled essence of all the Vedas. He acknowledged that common people often understood it in contradictory and diverse ways despite attempts to explain it through logic, grammar, and commentary. This prompted Sankara to attempt a decisive interpretation, one that aligned with his Advaita Vedanta philosophy. For Sankara, the Gita was not just a call to action, but a deeper instruction toward renunciation, self-knowledge, and the recognition of the non-duality of Self (atman) and the Absolute (brahman).
Yet, the history of Gita interpretation shows that Sankara’s reading is one among the many. And this plurality is not a flaw — it is the Gita’s strength.
If even a text as focused as the Gita resists finality, what then of the Mahabharata as a whole? Unlike the Ramayana or the Bhagavata Purana, the Mahabharata has drawn relatively fewer traditional commentaries — perhaps because its ethical complexity defies any singular system. Its episodes of dharma are filled with irony, tension, and contradiction. Strict adherence to dharma sometimes leads to disaster. Failure to follow dharma sometimes yields peace. The text seems aware that its own ethical model is built on shifting sands.
In that light, the Gita, nestled in the heart of the epic, becomes the still voice amid the storm — not because it resolves the contradictions but because it teaches us how to live with them.
So let us return — not to fight, but to listen. Let us carry Krishna’s wisdom — not as dogma, but as dialogue. Let us hand the Gita to the next generation — not as a relic, but as a responsibility.