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Essay |
When Krishna Becomes Song
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| Much more than a tenet to live by, the Bhagavad Gita belongs to the playful and paradoxical domain of the poetic. |
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Published : 1 October 2011 |
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HE BHAGAVAD GITA begins at a moment of crisis—not just a crisis of the community and the nation, as it certainly is, but one of a personal and (to use a relatively contemporary term) existential nature. When the influential Kannada novelist UR Ananthamurthy published his first novel, Samskara, about a Brahmin who deliberately chooses to estrange and |
isolate himself from other Brahmin priests, it invited the thought, even from its translator AK Ramanujan, that Ananthamurthy might have made his protagonist more of an existentialist than his Brahminical identity could credibly allow for. But Arjuna in the Gita (of course, he’s a Kshatriya, a warrior, not a Brahmin) reveals that anguished choice-making in relation to the world—the characteristic preoccupation and mood of existentialism—is hardly new to India; that, at least in cultural antecedents, Ananthamurthy’s Praneshacharya is not alone.
What kind of crisis, exactly? The Gita is an episode—a slightly anomalous, somewhat unassimilable episode, but an episode nevertheless—in the epic the Mahabharata. The epic (composed roughly between 400 BCE and 400 CE) is the story of two warring clans of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. The Pandavas, the family to which the great warrior Arjuna and his four brothers belong, are the ‘good guys’. In other words, Vyasa, the author of the epic, means us to see the action through the Pandavas’ eyes, from (to use an ugly piece of creative writing school jargon) their ‘point of view’. The Kauravas are treacherous; they inveigle the Pandavas into a game of dice and rob them of their kingdom, even attempting to disrobe Draupadi, the Pandava brothers’ wife. (How Draupadi came simultaneously to marry five men is another story.)
The Pandavas go into exile for the mandatory mythic period of 13 years, or thereabouts (the Ramayana has Rama banished for 14). The deal at the close of the game of dice was that they would resume their reign once that period was over. Returning, they discover the Kauravas have no intention of letting that happen. The two clans are now formally at war. There’s a crucial scene before the actual conflict begins on the battlefield of Kurukshetra (which, in the course of the rest of the epic, will become a site that, in scale and destruction, out-Guernicas any imaginable Guernica). Both clans have gathered before Krishna, like bidders at a Premier League auction, to petition him for his support and also for his powerful army. Krishna says that each clan can have one or the other; that he will provide advice to the clan that chooses him over his army, but will abstain from fighting himself. The Kauravas decide they want Krishna’s army; Arjuna elects to have Krishna as his charioteer.
Krishna is God incarnate; charming, beautiful, he is in other respects inexplicably volatile, unpredictable and transmogrifying. In other words, being divine, in Krishna’s case, is to be surprising to the point of being alienating: not burdened by a human code of conduct, Krishna can resort, occasionally, to all kinds of duplicity to further his team’s interests. His amorality is quite different from the Kauravas’ tragic treacherousness or the sleights of hand that the Pandavas indulge in; it leads us towards the abyss of meaning, or meaninglessness, from which the Mahabharata’s great power emerges. As a consequence, what’s destroyed in the Mahabharata is not just a great deal of human life, but a stable ‘point of view’ that might give rise to a clear sense of good and bad characters, of virtuous and evil action. The great and perennial casualty of the Mahabharata is the stability of value; its excitement and animation lies in its constant shifting of the centre.
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HE BHAGAVAD GITA is a conversation between Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna which takes place just before the Battle of Kurukshetra is to begin. Both armies are on the battlefield: in the opposing camp, Arjuna can see kinsmen he’s known since childhood, “teachers, fathers and sons; grandsons, grandfathers, wives’ brothers; mothers’ brothers and |
fathers of wives”. On the eve of battle, then, he’s agonised, full of doubt: “These I do not wish to slay, even if I myself am slain.” It’s now up to Krishna to exhort and rouse him to action. This exhortation, briefly, is the gist of the Gita .
By the time we arrive at this point in the Mahabharata, we already know Arjuna as flamboyant and heroic, possessed of unsurpassed skills in the art of war, and, most importantly, as one of the privileged (despite his travails, and in contrast to his gifted but unfortunate half-brother Karna)—that is, as someone whom both the narrator and the gods smile upon. To see him now changed into an overwrought, Hamlet-like ditherer is intriguing. But Hamlet is no existentialist; he’s disturbed, and part of the source of his disturbance is derived from his new-found disgust at his mother’s sexual availability. Although, vacillating between ‘being’ and ‘not being’, Hamlet asks some of the same questions as Arjuna, Shakespeare allows us to view him from the outside, enmeshed in his own moment of theatre. A small but stubborn question mark hangs over him, both in our minds and inside the play, as to whether he’s making too much of nothing (as TS Eliot accused Shakespeare of doing with the play itself). This distance opens up the character and his agonies to a latent comedy, which spoof-makers have tapped into in various parodies of the tortured prince. No such distance qualifies Arjuna and, as a result, it’s more difficult to parody his anguish. We don’t, here, view Arjuna as a dramatic character with motives and a psychology, although we don’t necessarily think he lacks these things. Nor is he a cipher, a mouthpiece, for a set of questions. In the Gita , Arjuna is inseparable from human language, a language alive with disquiet, prescience and yearning.
Krishna, too, is a different Krishna in the Gita . In the rest of the epic, and even outside it—in songs and in folklore—Krishna is Ovidian. I use the word to hint at Krishna’s self-transforming and metamorphic nature—an errant and greedy child in the Bhagavata Purana and in folklore; a lover of numberless women; in the epic, too, a politician, an inscrutable trickster and strategist; and, all the while, in various manifestations, divine. He is Ovidian because his transformations, or personalities, are, in a sense, material: a dazzling array of registers in the world we experience. Like the metamorphoses that Ovid ebulliently records, Krishna is a reminder that play and creation are synonymous and inexhaustible. Of all the gods, it’s Krishna who’s identified with leela, or the infinitely tantalising play, chicanery, and light and shade of the created universe. This uncontainable Ovidian mood is particularly true of the folksy cowherd Krishna of the Bhagavata Purana, beloved of the devotional Bhakti poets; but we also encounter it in the Mahabharata, where Krishna, at once Machiavellian, merciful and estranging, engages in war as a very serious kind of game, or play.
In the Gita , we encounter a Krishna we can find absolutely nowhere else. This Krishna tells Arjuna that it’s he who is the source of everything; and yet he’s ‘invisible’. This paradox demands a different response, a different order of recognition, a different sort of suspended disbelief, from the Krishna who performs astounding feats and multiplies through stories. What could run through the visible universe, but not be seen itself? We’re not being asked to believe in the sort of astonishing event that epic, myth or fiction often offer us, but in a paradox that’s peculiar to the poetic: “I am not bound by this vast work of creation,” says Krishna. “I am and I watch the drama of works.” What is he, then? Clearly something even more difficult to understand by a concatenation of logical thinking than the Krishna of the Mahabharata or the Bhagavata tradition is. Not only does Krishna at once situate himself in creation and distance himself from it (“I am not bound by this vast work of creation”); he appears to be distancing himself from the epic mode that the Gita and he are presently embedded in: “I watch the drama of works.” On one revolutionary level, then, the Gita is a critique of the epic narrative that it finds itself in, of its outwardly endless range and its momentary way of making meaning: “When one sees Eternity in things that pass away and Infinity in finite things, then one has pure knowledge./ But if one merely sees the diversity of things, with their divisions and limitations, then one has impure knowledge.” Instead, the Gita signals its own radical shift in register by suggesting the power of something that’s contradictory, something that inheres at once in the visible universe and in darkness, in abstraction and in language:
a sense sublime
. . . Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought . . .
Of course, this is not from the Gita , but from William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’. But the lines (Wordsworth would have known the Gita from Charles Wilkins’s translation, and probably through August Wilhelm Schlegel) gesture towards the oddness of poetic meaning as a special meaning: something simultaneously animate and still, impelling and concealed. This note of eloquent, visionary special pleading for a meaning that contradicts itself constantly in order to generate itself, and which has no discernible justification, rationale, manifestation or cause, comes from the Gita’s Krishna: “That splendour of light that comes from the sun and which illumines the whole universe, the soft light of the moon, the brightness of fire—know that they all come from me.” Again and again, in Krishna’s most famous maxims concerning ‘action’ to Arjuna, it’s the strange, contradictory nature of true meaning that’s being explored and fortified. “Arise and fight!” he exhorts the warrior, but asks him to do so without thought of the ‘fruit of one’s actions’. Meaning comes into being, then, only when there’s no thought of, or desire for, the outcome. This difficult concept is what Arjuna gets, instead of a clear and practical manual of dos and don’ts, or an exhortation to selfless love and compassion, as in the Gospels. Where does that idiosyncratic idea of meaning, and the power of meaning, operate but in poetry itself? In the Gita , Krishna becomes poetic language.
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HIS IS NOT TO SAY that there is a complete discontinuity between the Mahabharata’s analysis of the world as a place of politics, of actions governed by power, and the moment the Gita inhabits. There are instances when Krishna’s role in the Gita is at once historical, admonitory and cathartic: “When righteousness is weak and faints and unrighteousness |
exults in pride, then my Spirit arises on earth.” At such points in the Gita , the world already seems very old, its conventions and pieties tested and turned inside out, as it does often in the rest of the Mahabharata, whose author manages the astonishing feat of being simultaneously disabused and wonderstruck. Certainly, neither the epic nor the song (for that’s what Gita means) has the auspicious, inaugural air of the early Upanishads, or the pastoral freshness of the Bhagavata tradition. Instead they possess (in the case of the epic, almost completely) a quality of lateness and intransigence (“I am time, destroyer of men”) that’s combined, in the epic narrative, with an amazing sense of fecundity. It’s the Gita’s belated, backward look, glancing at the residues of texts and ages it’s emerged from, that prompted J Robert Oppenheimer to quote it when witnessing the first atomic explosion in New Mexico: “I am become Death.”
And although the Gita isn’t, in a strict sense, mythopoeic, its central image—of Arjuna, unable to act in a battlefield full of kinsmen, turning to Krishna—is mythic. It is where, in India, history and myth, reality and the ideal, rulers and the notion of Man, converge repeatedly, in the series of tragic episodes and subsequent attempts at self-renewal of which this civilisation is composed. The emperor Ashoka’s massacre of innocents at Kalinga, and his later passionate turn towards nonviolence and Buddhism; Gandhi and Nehru’s terrible dilemma upon Partition—these, after the fact, set up a surreptitious confluence, in the Indian experience, between history and theatre, civilisation and allegory.
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HE EARLIEST MENTION of the Gita in an extant text occurs in the work of the philosopher Shankaracharya (c 788–820 CE), the first and most important theorist of advaita vedanta, or non-dualism. (For some of the facts in this section, I’m indebted to Professor Sibaji Bandyopadhyay.) Shankaracharya chooses three canonical texts to advance his argument: |
the Brahma Sutra (a work whose centrality has receded entirely), the Upanishads and the Gita . In relation to the first two, the Gita occupies, in Shankaracharya’s argument and scheme, a relatively minor, supplementary position. It isn’t known if prior commentaries on the Gita existed and are now lost. Shankaracharya’s text is structured as a dialogue, where an interlocutor states a position regarding the Gita , and the author answers or refutes him. This could point to earlier positions, earlier commentaries; on the other hand, it might not, for, as Professor Bandyopadhyay tells me, this form of dialogue, at the time, was an accepted convention for presenting an argument.
The Gita’s next significant appearance in the chain of Indian thinking is when the anti-Shankaracharya philosopher, the dualist Ramanuja (traditionally c 1017–1137 CE), uses the same three works to advance his cause. That texts may yield a multiplicity of meaning to readers and commentators of different ages is clear when we glance at the Gita’s history; but the idea of multiple interpretations is a New Critical, literary one, and it’s rarely an advertisement for the Gita , though it embodies it well.
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