The Truth about the Gita

A more apt title would have been "The Myth of the Gita". For all that is traditionally said about it is open to serious doubt. Was a great war was really fought on the plain now hollowed as Kurukshetra? In case it was fought, did every principality in the India of the day, and some even beyond India, join one side or the other? What was the date of the war? Was there a Krishna, Vasudeva who elected to be charioteer of Arjuna? Did Arjuna, said to be singlehanded victor of many battles, lose his nerve when he saw the mighty army of Duryodhana arrayed against the smaller one of his own? Granting that he was, in fact shaken by he thought of having to kill his kith and kin to gain a kingdom, could a pot talk by Krishna prepare his mind for the terrible carnage which followed? And did the two vast armies, poised for the battle, stand still while the question and answer session
between Arjuna and Krishna went on for the better part of a day? Another important question that faces is thus: In case the Bhagvad Gita, the song, Celestial, was actually sung by Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, how did it come down to
us? The full text of the Gita, says the Mahabharata was reported at the end of the day by Sanjaya to the old and blind Dhritarashtra sitting miles away in his palace near Hastinapura. Not only did Sanjaya report every word that dropped from the blessed lips of Krishna, but he also described the setting of the divine discourse without missing the slightest gesture by the head or hand or the very Thought lifting of an eye-brow. Unseen by anyone, unhurt by any weapon, he moved freely from one side of the battle front to the other. Day and night made no difference to him. He knew no fatigue and worked round the clock. He read the innermost thoughts of
everyone as though he had an open book before him. Naturally this leads us to another
question. how did Sanjaya manage to do what sounds incredible? How could he put the inventions of the present scientific and technological age, the radio, television, and video to shame? The traditionalists will, of course, retort that even to pose uch question is silly. They will tell you that the sages of that bygone age were only a notch below the gods and they had the poser to grant any boon, and Vyasa was a supreme lord of boons. And so, when Dhritarashtra, the congenitally blind Kuru king keenly waiting to follow fortunes of the war , prayed that Sanjaya his crony, be given the boon seeing and hearing and knowing everything. Vyasa gave it readily.
Obviously, these miraculous powers were given only for the duration of the war. For we do not know of Sanjaya having used them afterwards. Furthermore there was a point when these powers let him down. On the last day of the war, Satyaki spotted him and
might have put him to the sword but for the timely intervention of Vyasa. Brushing aside the traditionalists who put pious gloss over ugly facts, it should be bluntly stated here that Dhritarashtra, thus favoured by Vyasa was Vyasa's illegitimate son. Can a holy man like Vyasa be guilty of lechery? Yes, he was. And he was himself the
natural son of Satyavati, the offspring of her pre-marital sex with Parasara a great sage. And in his turn, the greater sage, Vyasa, was the father of four illegitimate sons in all. Frankly, the age of the Mahabharata was the Permissive Age par excellence. In that age drinking and dicing were customary. Cattle-lifting and the abduction of prospective brides were widely prevalent. Fratricide and genocide were not uncommon. To ensure royal succession and to avoid sure passage to hell, the birth of a son even outside wedlock was actively promoted. Indeed, it was at the
insistance of Satyavati, the queenmother, that Vyasa impregnated her two royal daughter-in-law, Ambika and Ambalika. For their dissolute husband died prematurely without leaving a son to continue the Bharat dynasty. So wide spread was the permissiveness of the age that sexual looseness, bordering on depravity, was not at all confined to the Bharat dynasty. It was very much present in all dynasties as well. To traditionalists all this may be another proof of the miraculous power of sacrifices, but to a modern man with a liberated mind this can only be skullduggery that was being widely practiced by the so called sages. It is quite likely that the illegitimate children of an illegitimate sage were palmed off on a willing Drupada as
gifts from heaven. It looks as though it was also the age of illegitimacy. For, we find, apart from royal princess, the two leading teachers of archery of the age (both of them from the priest caste) were also illegitimate; reference here is Thought to Drona and Kripa. Of course, their questionable origins are hidden, as usual, behind smoke screen of sanctimony. Can any one who cares for naked truth deny that fornication in its grossest form was part of the more important of the Vedic sacrifices? There is ample justification for referring here at some length to what is
frankly putrid stuff. For our traditionalists extol the Mahabharata day in, and day out as the Fifth Veda. They tell us that it is the longest epic in world literature, indeed an encyclopedia of all knowledge, a verifiable treasure, house of history and polity, of sociology and philosophy, of religion and ethics, and of much else. They even tell us that what is not found in its pages is not worth knowing. To counter their balderdash, it needs to be said that the Mahabharata is also Vyasa's Thesaurus of Vice. Are our minds so conditioned by our puerile Puranas that we can be fooled by any fanatic nonsense? Is there something basically wrong with our national psyche? I am pretty sure that most of the contributors to Mahabharata fast during an eclipse and take a bath at its end, feeling joyous that by their piety they saved the sun or the moon from mortal danger. It is clear proof that they were born believers, grew up as believers and one day will die as believers. They are incapable of doubting, of questioning and of putting anything to the acid test of reason. In their view to doubt, any old belief is to be an infidel, to question it is to be guilty of sacrilege, to seek to put it to test of reason is to condemn oneself to a long term in hell. I know that these are strong words, perhaps harsh words, but they are, I submit, not uncalled for in view of the credulity, bordering on imbecility, which is much in evidence in every sphere of our national life today.
Without any apology for drifting too far from Kurukshetra and the chariot of Arjuna stationed on no man's land to serve for the time being as a pulpit for Krishna, let us now return to the sermon he delivered in the form of the Gita. When Sanjaya, the war correspondent of yore, was giving graphic oral report to Dhritarashtra that evening was anyone recording it on electronic tape for the use of posterity? No, but was not Vyasa there to work wonders? He had a prodigious brain unmatched even by the latest computer. With its help, he edited four Vedas, composed the Mahabharata, authored eighteen major Puranas, wrote Brahma Sutra and did a lot more. To him reproducing the text of the Gita which is after all a tiny fragment of the mighty and weighty Mahabharata was child's play. And he did that many years after the Kurukshetra War. Along with the rest of that epic, he taught the Gita to four of his disciples, besides his son. One of the four was Vaisampayana, and like his Guru, he also had a computer brain. When Janamejaya the grete grand-son of Arjuna, performed a great sacrifice to extirpate the Naga clan, Vaisampayana recited for the
edification of the great assembly at the sacrifice the whole of Mahabharata, including the Gita. On that occasion Souti Ugrasravas was present and he, in his turn, recited it from first to last for the benefit of Sounaka and a host of Thought other sages who performed a twelveyear sacrifice in the Naimisa Forest. It is not on record as to who took up the role of recital from Souti. However that may be, the point is that between the original teaching of the Gita by Krishna and its recital by
Souti at least a century must have elapsed. For after the Kurukshera War, Yudhishtira rules for thirty-six years; Parikshit, his successor, ruled for sixty
years. It is not known when exactly Janamejaya launced genocide of the Nagas as a measure of revenge for their assassination of his father Parikshit. Nor is known definitely how many years later Sounaka initiated his sacrifice at Naimisa Forest. But of one thing there can be no doubt. The time-lag between Krishna's teachingof the Gita and its recital by Souti cannot be taken as less than a century. Not one but several centuries must have elapsed from the time Souti to the time of the final
reduction of the Gita in writing. If we have to give credence to traditionalists,
that gap is to be reckoned not in centuries but in millennia. Over such a wide gap in time did the text of the Gita as taught by Krishna retain is original size or shape or the scope of its message? It can, of course, be argued by the traditionalists that the Vedas were reduced to writing after a much longer gap than the Gita and yet even nuances of its pronunciation retain their original purity. But the Gita is no Veda and even now its scriptural authority is not universally accepted. In fact, none seems to have taken the Gita very seriously before Adi Sankaracharya who lived in A.D. eighth century, and wrote a commentary on it as a part of campaign to destroy Buddhism. Not to speak of others, neither the Arya
Samajists nor Brahmo Samajists attach much value to the Gita. And so, any analogy sought to be drawn between the purity of the text of he Vedas and of the Gita can hardly be relevant. The improbable setting in which the Gita is said to have been taught and the dubious way in which it is supposed to have been handed down to us are
good enough reasons to convince a rational mind that it is a myth. Having first read the Gita when I was a fresher at college and having given very many years to the study of innumerable commentaries on it, I am convinced that all that is said about the Gita, including its authorship, its time and place of composition, its transmission from generation to generation, its importance as compendium of a unified and profound system of philosophy with relevance for all people and all times, in a word, everything that is sedulously propagated about it is a myth.
V R Narla
(From Introduction to Book
The Truth about the Gita,
published in 1988)

The Telugu translation of V R Narla`s critical book in English entitled: Truth about the Gita