Bhagavad Gita - A Biography by R. H. Davis

Author:R. H. Davis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Hinduism, Religion, History, General
ISBN: 9780691139968
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Varieties of Karma Yoga

In 1907, Lajpat Rai was arrested for leading widespread agrarian agitations in the Punjab region and deported without trial to Mandalay Fort in Burma. While in prison, he wrote a lengthy article on the “Message of the Bhagwad Gita,” published in the Modern Review.10 In his interpretive essay, Lajpat Rai stresses that Krishna’s primary purpose in the Gita is to persuade Arjuna to fight. All else is secondary to the activist message. Past commentators on the Gita, Lajpat Rai observes, have often neglected this central agenda in Krishna’s discourse, and instead emphasized the paths of knowledge, devotion, or some other philosophical doctrine. Dharma or duty should be the supreme law of one’s life, and once one recognizes that duty, no consideration of self-interest, love, or mercy should distract one from it. As such, Krishna above all advocates the path of karma yoga. This has clear present-day political implications, according to Lajpat Rai. Quoting Sanjaya’s concluding statement about the beneficial presence of Krishna and Arjuna, he continues, “A nation’s prosperity and success depend upon wisdom like that of Krishna and bravery like that of Arjuna.” As in the Mahabharata, a crisis looms in early twentieth-century India. “If ever any nation stood in need of a message like that of Krishna, it is the India of today.”11 Despite his own incarceration in Burma, Lajpat Rai ends on a hopeful note. If his fellow Indians are able to heed this message from the Gita, India’s future is just as assured as the victory of Arjuna over the Kaurava forces at Kurukshetra.

Lajpat Rai was not the only one to enlist the Bhagavad Gita in the cause of Indian independence. The Gita was particularly significant for those who, like Lajpat Rai, sought a more active, confrontational, “masculine” response to British colonial rule. They too valued Krishna’s emphasis on selfless duty-based worldly action and viewed the path of karma yoga as his most important teaching. Yet among these activist interpreters of the Gita there were profound differences. They range from the young revolutionaries of the Anushilan Samiti and Yugantar, through the so-called Extremists like Aurobindo and Tilak active in the Indian National Congress, to Hindu nationalists like Shraddhananda and K. S. Hedgewar, founder of the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

To gain entry to the inner circle of the Anushilan Samiti (Self-Culture Association), a police surveillance report of 1909 stated, an initiation was required. Lying flat on a human skeleton, holding a revolver in one hand and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in the other, the initiate had to recite the group’s oath.12 The Anushilan Samiti formed a cadre-based revolutionary network centered in Bengal in the early part of the twentieth century. Other similar groups operated largely underground in Maharashtra, Punjab, and other parts of India. Samiti members were convinced that insurrectionary violence against the British was the best path for gaining independence for India, and sought to catalyze this uprising through propaganda and terrorist actions. They trained themselves in the use of lathi,

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