The Bhagavad Gītā could, without exaggeration, be described as the popular religious text par excellence in modern Hinduism. While other literary or religious works like the Rāmcaritmānas and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa have occupied a fairly major place in devotional practice, the Gītā’s realms of influence have extended past the purely devotional, into intellectual and political spheres. This talk treats the Bhagavad Gītā as a site through which to ask: what are the different ways in which we read canonical, religious works? Relatedly, how were canonical works read by different actors, for different purposes, in Indian intellectual history?

To read a text like the Bhagavad Gītā in the contemporary moment is to read through—and participate in—multiple histories of interpretation. In this talk, Akshara will address three specific aspects of the Gītā’s reception histories from early modern North India, in the centuries before its emergence as a nationalist, transnational text. First, the Sanskrit commentary as an act of reading, linked with practices of pedagogy, reveals the extent to which interpretive processes constituted and reconstituted the text through its premodern life. Second, the early modern period in North India saw the emergence of vernacular modes of engaging with classical texts, both literary and scholarly, and these vernacular writers and readers enabled the Gītā to be read in new forms and within new intellectual spaces. Finally, she will address some aspects of her own ongoing work on the Gītā’s manuscript cultures, in order to ask how the material and social histories of this text might help us understand canon-creation in premodern North India.

 The talk is mandatory for students of Lit 201: Introduction to Literary Studies