Scholarly worlds and popular texts: The Bhagavad Gðtå’s vernacular communities in early modern India

Abstract

The Bhagavad Gītā is often thought of as the popular religious text par excellence in modern Hinduism. A substantial amount of scholarship has argued that its modern status as the central text of Hinduism is grounded in its 19^th-century colonial and nationalist receptions. However, recent work on late premodern Indian philosophy has raised the possibility of constructing alternative genealogies for modern religious textual practices, though the methodologies that may allow the characterisation of premodern texts as ‘popular’ canonical works remain uncertain. This article asks how we may further interrogate the idea of the Gītā’s status as a classic or canonical text by looking at the ways in which this status was historically constructed, maintained and mediated in 18^th-century North India. In order to reflect on the conditions that historicise the idea of the Gītā as scholarly, public or popular text in premodern and modern India, this article engages with two different approaches to the question of the Gītā’s social worlds during that period. One, it analyses histories of production and circulation, and two, it examines the genres of some Gītā adaptations. It does so by drawing from manuscripts containing translations and adaptations of the Bhagavad Gītā from Sanskrit into Hindi that were copied and composed between the 16^th and 18^th centuries.

I Introduction

The Bhagavad Gītā could, without too much exaggeration, be described as the popular religious text par excellence in modern Hinduism. While other works, such as 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, moving into intellectual and political spheres.

The editors of a recent influential volume on the Bhagavad Gītā’s modern Indian political life compared it to Thucydides’ interpretation of the Peloponnesian war, for the extent to which it has determined and been productive of political thinking in India (Kapila and Devji 2013: xiv). In the specific context of the Gītā’s 19^th-century receptions, they suggest that the history of such receptions in colonial India allowed it to achieve a ‘kind of territorial transcendence’, which ‘broke with the exegetical tradition within which the text had previously been studied’ (ibid.: xii). Simultaneously, recent work on the Gītā’s contexts of production in 19^th- and early 20^th-century print culture gives us a glimpse into the social and economic conditions that, at least partially, determined the seemingly unprecedented degree to which the text was disseminated, read and studied in modern India (Mukul 2015). In the vast and rich history of scholarship surrounding this text, this appears to be a marked shift from its functions and the extent of its audiences in premodern India.

In the context of the Gītā’s entry into the Sanskrit commentarial tradition following the 8^th century CE, D.D. Kosambi has argued that writers like Kabīr, Tukārām, Jayadeva and other ‘poet-teachers from the common people did very well without the Gītā’ (1961: 201). This particular position, which suggests the idea of a schism between the Gītā’s reading communities in premodern and modern India, permeates the history of writing about the Gītā. Kosambi’s statement above points to how this position additionally implies a firm distinction between the reading practices of ‘the common people’ and those of the scholiasts who were engaged in commentarial and scholarly activities surrounding the Gītā. The notion of the Gītā’s absence in premodern ‘popular’ religious practice and literature is often used to emphasise the extraordinary role that colonial and Indological interventions played in the text’s dissemination and its modern canonisation as a thoroughly transnational, nationalist text. ¹ Indeed, the Bhagavad Gītā in premodern South Asia was, by all accounts, a text whose audiences were significantly more limited and circumscribed than they are today.

While the emergence of print culture and the text’s transnational appeal were central to its popularisation and canonisation in colonial and post-colonial South Asia, conceptions of the text’s premodern audiences are grounded in precisely the rich traditions of commentary that Kosambi was alluding to as distinct from that of the ‘poet-teachers’. These traditions of commentary were being developed in elite, literate (primarily Brahmin) communities, which were sometimes monastic, but almost always scholarly. So far, we have little understanding of how modes of commentary interacted with later textual developments, particularly in early modern South Asia. These early canonical commentarial interventions in Sanskrit have benefitted from scholarship about South Asian religions and their intellectual history and philosophy. Yet, there has been comparatively little enquiry into how these classical, circumscribed methods of reading interacted with other, later textual developments and even less into how these interactions were reflected in the Gītā’s audiences. In particular, early modern North India saw the rise of vernacular literature, both drawing from and emerging independently of Sanskritic genres.

There has been considerable scholarship on the origins and development of Hindi from regional vernaculars or registers since Sheldon Pollock’s conceptualising of the processes of vernacularisation in the ‘vernacular millennium’ (Pollock 2006). Allison Busch notes:

[P]remodern Hindi literature is complex and highly variable in both literary and social register; it has a vast, and vastly confusing, geographical domain in comparison to other Indian vernaculars. Moreover, nobody can particularly agree on what exactly Hindi is, when its literature began, and what its most salient features are. (2011: 8)

Busch acknowledges that the term ‘Brajbhāṣā’ is in some sense an anachronism, not having been used until the 17^th century, and still rarely before the modern period. In contrast to Hindi, it was particularly associated with the Braj region and with registers of the dominant Vaiṣṇava orientation. She, however, notes that when writers in the North Indian, largely literary, vernacular worlds referred to their language use (when they referred to it at all), they preferred the terms ‘Hindavi’ and ‘bhāṣā’ (ibid.: 9–10), meaning, literally, ‘language’, but often used to designate the vernacular. Orsini and Sheikh note ‘a certain lack of grammatical and taxonomic interest in the vernacular’ in North India prior to the 16^th century, at which point it came to be ‘recognized as a named language, a “cosmopolitan vernacular” with a standard poetic language that needed to be learned properly from teachers and through riti-granthas or poetic manuals’ (2014: 16–17).

The Gītā’s reception in the early modern period and in vernacular languages tends to be understated in scholarship due to its casting as a part of ‘classical’ Indian religious culture, the underrepresentation in scholarship of scholastic writings in vernacular languages as well as the limited attention paid to early modern philosophical writings in the historiographical accounts of Indian philosophy until relatively recently. ² Here I attempt to unsettle and historicise the idea of the Gītā as a ‘popular’ work on the one hand, and of its status as a widely-read work as a thoroughly modern development on the other. As noted above, while it is certainly true that the spread of the Gītā in the 19^th century was enormously influenced by the advent of widespread print culture, I show that the text, in the previous centuries, was being read in the context of, and thus interacting with, different genres that complicate binaries implicit in our conceptions of scholarly and popular works. This is not to suggest that there were unbroken traditions of reading the Gītā that I am attempting to excavate—indeed, any attempts to posit the Gītā as a canonical work whose status as such was secure throughout Indian history would be destabilised precisely through these instances of mediation.

Hindi iterations of the Gītā in early modern North India have the potential to tell us more about the different ways vernacular registers were being deployed and about the modes of exegesis that were being formulated in vernacular literature at that time. The ‘early modern’ period has been the subject of considerable debate in the field of South Asian history, particularly in the context of arguments around global ‘connectedness’ in the ‘early modern world’, economic and imperial developments, and their relationship to ‘local and contingent relationships’, as Rosalind O’Hanlon (2023: 175) has recently shown. Recent scholarship has, moreover, emphasised the significance of this period in the context of new shifts in scholarly and scribal communities, the circulation of texts and manuscripts and processes of sectarian, caste and religious identity formation, along with their relationship to textual cultures in South Asia. ³ John Cort (2024) has explored the transition from the early modern to the modern as reflected in North Indian Jain practices of vernacular literary production. He asks how attention to audiences, language choices, writing practices and the social locations of authors might nuance our accounts of the ‘straight linear progression’ that a purely temporal periodisation of the early modern period would suggest (ibid.: 52). In my analysis here, I use the idea of ‘early modernity’ to refer to a period in North India which saw the emergence of new exegetical modes in vernacular languages which were linked in significant ways to textual developments that both preceded and followed them.

This article addresses the broad question of whether we may be justified in speaking of the Gītā’s canonisation and popularisation prior to the 19^th century in South Asia, primarily through a set of texts in early Hindi, composed between the 16^th and 18^th centuries. ⁴ I will consider two sets of issues and texts in this regard: First, I briefly consider a 16^th-century exegetical work on the Gītā written in the Gwalior court by an ascetic poet named Theghnāth, composed in early Hindi verse for a royal patron. In particular, I analyse Theghnāth’s statements regarding the genre of his work, suggesting that his presentation of the text re-places the work alongside genres in vernacular writing which were available to him, in his particular time and place. I show, moreover, that his characterisation of the text was shared by later authors who rendered the Gītā into Hindi. Second, I analyse a text whose composition I place in the Bikaner court in the early 18^th century, by a court official named Nājar Ānandrām. The Paramānanda Prabodha (or Prabodha) ⁵ is a work that renders a prior Sanskrit commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā by Śrīdhara Svāmī, written in the 14^th century, into early Hindi (Apte 1901). It was most likely composed in the early 18^th century and, I argue, suggests to us some different modes of thinking of the genealogies of the Gītā’s reading communities as well as its canonical status in the 18^th century and beyond. I reflect on how accounts of the Gītā’s canonicity may be nuanced by accounts of the spread of its instances of mediation—in this case, through interrelated acts of translation and (re)attribution—and concomitant shifts in genre.

The availability and relevance of the Bhagavad Gītā’s vernacular receptions have been addressed, additionally, in some secondary scholarship. Perhaps the best-known instance of its vernacular transmission is the Jñāneśvarī. This, as Christian Novetzke (2016) has shown, addressed itself to wide audiences and elaborated on the text of the Gītā to the extent that it is considered, in many ways, an independent work, and central to the creation of a Marathi vernacular public sphere. Another remarkable instance of reception can be seen in the 17^th-century paintings of Allah Baksh (1680–1698), commissioned by Maharana Jai Singh at the Mewar court, which visually depicted and interpreted the Gītā verse by verse, alongside a Mewari translation in each case (Bhalla and Deval 2020). These works, therefore, suggest that the Gītā was indeed a text that was studied, recited and otherwise transmitted outside of the Sanskritic, commentarial mode. In selecting Theghnāth’s and Ānandrām’s comparatively lesser-known works, I ask how we might identify different modes of textual transmission of the Gītā that participated in and drew from a variety of exegetical and narrative traditions. Composed two centuries apart in sites significant for vernacular production, both texts display a self-awareness and self-presentation that, I argue, allow us to explore the strategies in which vernacular interpretive works engaged with root texts while positioning themselves within specific literary and textual traditions.

Accounts of a work’s popularisation and transmission must ask in what form it was transmitted and, in the case of a text like the Gītā—whose history of reception is one of seemingly endless instances of mediation—how these modes of transmission themselves constituted instances of canonisation. I suggest that attention to developments in commentarial and interpretive traditions in the early modern period allows for a greater understanding of the transmission of the Gītā among new, non-specialist audiences. Both Theghnāth and Ānandrām were authors writing within courtly environments in North India, in courts where the patronage of vernacular literature had been underway during the period of their respective careers, as we shall see. This raises the question of gauging the extent to which categories like the ‘scholarly’ and the ‘popular’ when referring to works of reception surrounding the Gītā, comprise a spectrum in the early modern period, and into the modern period.

II The Bhagavad Gītā in Sanskrit

In its context of composition, the Gītā was a part of the Mahābhārata, a sprawling and foundational epic whose central narrative deals with a dispute between two warring sides of the Kuru clan, culminating in the Kurukṣetra war. The framing narrative of the Gītā depicts the Pāṇḍava warrior Arjuna, in dialogue with his charioteer, the god Kṛṣṇa, just before the battle is to commence. The text begins with Arjuna’s refusal to fight and his fear of the sin that would be a consequence of the bloody battle to come. He frames his concerns as a dilemma regarding whether he ought to fight in the battle, thus fulfilling his duty as a member of the kṣatriya varṇa or the warrior class, or to renounce his claims entirely. Kṛṣṇa responds to Arjuna’s initial articulation of his dilemma at length, convincing him to fight and, in fighting, perform his individual dharma, the code of conduct specific to his class and life stage. In so doing, Kṛṣṇa provides a novel re-articulation of how one ought to perform acts, offering a path to absolution through the rejection of desire as a motive for action. The Gītā’s philosophical arguments are dense, often contradictory and rarely straightforward, touching as they do on debates and tensions around ritual and asceticism, the immortality of the soul and questions of agency, action and its consequences, among many other issues both central to its epic context and extending beyond it.

Much of the Gītā’s own interpretive history, however, hinges on its having been read in relative independence from the Mahābhārata. The earliest extant instance we have of the Gītā’s being read and interpreted as a whole and as a stand-alone text comes to us from the 8^th century ce, with Śaṅkara’s Gītābhāṣya. ⁶ Indeed, we have little, if any, access to the existence of prior commentarial or other interpretive interventions, save for Śaṅkara’s own representations of his opponents (Pansikar 1936). The Gītā went on to become a significant site of interpretation for adherents of the various Vedānta schools and a text through which commentators could argue for radically differing interpretations, based on their own philosophical and sectarian commitments. Traditions of interpretation around the Gītā continued to emerge in Sanskrit, with scholars writing commentaries and sub-commentaries on the text, often defending the interpretations of their own sectarian and philosophical lineages, while adding newer layers to these interpretations based on their own commitments. As Richard Davis has noted, the points of debate in these commentarial works tended to be both theological and soteriological, while also remaining practical, emphasising divergences of positions on the means to liberation and freedom from bondage and transmigration (2015: 58).

While we have little idea of what kinds of interpretive activity surrounded this particular work prior to the composition of Śaṅkara’s Gītābhāṣya, some scholars have suggested the existence of a lost commentarial tradition (Davis 2015: 62; van Buitenen 1968: 6). Certainly there is evidence, from citations of the Gītā in earlier texts, that it was generally considered separately from the epic in scholarly writings (Uskokov 2019). The existence of prior readings is presupposed in Śaṅkara’s own commentary, in which he refers to the Gītā as difficult to understand and as a text which is understood in worldly convention as having multiple, extremely contradictory meanings. ⁷

Commentarial literatures comprise a startling majority of works produced in Sanskrit. As Tubb and Boose note at the very outset of their study of the genre of commentary: ‘Of all the expository works available in Sanskrit most are, at least in external form, commentaries’ (2007: 1). Texts tended to presuppose oral exegetical or commentarial intervention and scholastic commentarial protocols had a range of functions, from the glossing of terms and the analysis of grammatical complexes to mediating the positions and ideas contained within the text by presenting and answering possible objections (ibid.: 1–3). Different types of commentaries performed different functions or introduced different hermeneutical strategies into a text; these functions often overlapped. Commentarial literature frequently presents and re-presents root texts in the context of novel ideas and systems, often stacking the deck in favour of the author’s position. The commentary-mediated canon creation is characterised by its circumscribed, pedagogical function, its centrality to philosophical debate and its extensive systems of citation. Commentators often cited at length from other texts to explicate a given root text and placed that root text into conversation with other genres and canons. ⁸

While a broader review of the commentarial traditions of the Gītā remains outside the scope of the present article, we may note for the moment that the Gītā’s inclusion into the commentarial genre, beginning at least with Śaṅkara’s attentions, was a precursor to its canonical status as part of the prasthānatrayī, or the ‘three points of departure’, in the Vedānta corpus—making it a work that could, and perhaps had to be, an object of commentary for serious scholars of Vedānta—and as, in Śaṅkara’s words, a text containing the essence of the Vedas (Pansikar 1936: 5). The Gītā’s importance as a stand-alone work in commentarial traditions and in the canons of Vedānta likely did not preclude its having been a widely read, public text in premodern South Asia, as the example of the Jñāneśvarī, its best-known vernacular rendition, would also suggest. However, we have little sense of what the intellectual worlds of the Gītā actually looked like in North India outside these scholastic traditions.

In the following sections, I consider two separate instances of the Gītā’s receptions through its movement into the North Indian vernaculars in the early modern period, in order to ask how we might, one, read the popularisation of the Gītā during this time and, two, rethink conceptions of its canonisation and textual communities in view of its movements beyond the commentarial and Vedāntic prasthānatrayī. I show, through brief analyses of two courtly vernacular works that the question of the Gītā as a ‘popular’ text in premodern South Asia must account for a variety of processes of transmission that were possible in vernacular registers in North India during this time. I examine genre and authorship as issues that I suggest should be of primary importance to our historical analysis of the Gītā’s textual communities in early modern North India.

III Theghnāth’s Gītā Bhāṣā and the Kathā genre

One of the earliest available Hindi renditions of the Gītā is Theghnāth’s Gītā Bhāṣā, composed in the 16^th century at the Gwalior court, during the reign of Mānsiṃha Tomar. A manuscript of this text, which has not been studied in much detail, can be found at the Nāgarī Pracārinī Sabhā in Banaras. ⁹ Gwalior, at the beginning of the 16^th century, was already an important literary centre, with Mānsiṃha’s predecessor, Ḍuṅgar or Ḍuṅgarendrasiṃha, having established a tradition of patronage for the production of religious and literary texts, particularly those in the newly emergent North Indian vernaculars (Pauwels 2020). Indeed, in Mānsimḥa’s time, the Tomar court patronised multiple poets and singers, many of whom eventually left Gwalior for the Mughal court—Tānsen being the most well-known such figure (Kumar 2012). In his introduction, Theghnāth dedicates several verses to the praise of Mānsiṃha—who would have been at the height of his reign—comparing him to the god Indra presiding over Amarāvatī, his celestial kingdom. ¹⁰ He then extends his praise to a more direct patron of the particular work—the older prince Bhānu, Mānsiṃha’s uncle. Bhānu is described as knowledgeable but conflicted between the realms of worldliness and detachment. ¹¹

Theghnāth’s debts to contemporary genres of epic poetry become abundantly clear through the course of his lengthy preamble to the Bhagavad Gītā. In his Introduction, Theghnāth lays out in some detail his reasons for writing about the Bhagavad Gītā for his particular audience and refers to his text as kabitu, or poetry. ¹² He goes on to add that his work is kathā, a story or a tale, for the sants. ¹³ This is nowhere more explicit than when he ties this characterisation to his task of speaking directly to his patron: ‘“Tell me that tale (kathā)”, said Prince Bhānu, “through which the essence and the non-essence are understood”’. ¹⁴ Theghnāth’s larger intellectual context and his Introduction raise a number of significant questions regarding whether the Gītā is seen here as a part of an epic literary tradition, a religious text or a scholastic work. Were these distinctions relevant at all for an author like Theghnāth? His references to the genre of his composition, furthermore, allow us to understand how he envisaged his composition.

What does it mean for Theghnāth to talk about the Gītā as kathā? This particular phrase seems to locate the text primarily within a narrative, performative genre, similar to Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇdavcarit, written in the Gwalior court in the 15^th century (Bangha 2014). Through Bangha’s work on Viṣṇudās, we see that the shift to the genre of kathā was significant in the writing of vernacular epics. Bangha mentions several features of this genre: They ‘embed Sanskritic themes into a local milieu’. While the texts are often ‘concerned with martial themes’, there are many variations to be found indicating oral circulation and tropes from Sanskrit literature, including a maṅgalācaraṇa (invocation) and mention of phalaśruti (the result of hearing the text). It is reasonable to note, as Bangha does, that Viṣṇudās likely inspired later kathā writers in the vernacular (2014: 400).

Descriptions of the Gītā as kathā appear in a range of vernacular works, allowing us further insight into what this term may have meant to vernacular writers transmitting the text. A much later text titled the Pāṇḍav Gītā Bhāṣya, attributed to one Gopāl Ratan, lists the individual efficacies or phalaśruti of the kathā of each Pāṇḍava: Yudhiṣṭhira’s kathā leads to the growth or maturation of dharma (righteousness); Bhīma’s to the destruction of sin; Arjuna’s to the destruction of one’s enemies; and Nakula and Sahadeva’s to the healing of illnesses. ¹⁵ Another text, which presents an explicitly non-dualist reading of the work, states that one who possesses the knowledge of the Gītā, which is the knowledge of the [Mahā]Bhārata put all in one place by Vyāsa, is characterised as being devoid of all duality. ¹⁶

The idea of a kathā has a complex and somewhat underdetermined history of usage in Sanskrit literary theory (Raghavan 1958); however, in the context of these vernacular works, we see the term being used repeatedly to refer to Kṛṣṇa’s discourse in the Gītā, while also framing the text as a work capable of producing religious merit. Titled simply Gītā Bhāṣā, a manuscript found at the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute (RORI) in Jodhpur attributed to a Śivānanda Brāhmaṇa, is dated 1756 ce, and contains the Gītā rewritten in vernacular prose. At the end of the 18^th chapter, the author repeatedly refers to the text as kathā, first when Kṛṣṇa asks Arjuna to narrate this kathā only to those who are truthful, and not to the wicked, in what is a rendition of verses 18.67–70 of the root text. The text is also then described as the kathā transmitted from Kṛṣṇa to Arjuna, and then from Sañjaya to Dhṛtarāṣṭra. ¹⁷ In verse 18.75 of the root text, Sañjaya tells Dhṛtarāṣṭra that he has heard the Gītā from Kṛṣṇa, through the favour of Vyāsa (vyāsaprasādāt). ¹⁸ The phrase used here to describe the text is guhyaṃ param yogaṃ, or ‘the secret and highest yoga’ narrated (kathayataḥ) by Kṛṣṇa. In this vernacular rendition, Sañjaya describes the Gītā as a kathā, from which he obtains sudhī or purity. He credits Vyāsa for this, who he says narrated the kathā to his celā, or disciple. The Gītā here is altered subtly from an esoteric text whose secrets have just been revealed to a discerning few to a moral teaching or religious discourse to be passed on through a pedagogical lineage. Well after the root text ends, the rendition concludes with a note extolling the virtues of dāna or charity towards those on the uttam gati or the highest path. ¹⁹

What did it mean for these authors to frame the text in this way? Francesca Orsini (2014) has written extensively about the history of the kathā genre in Hindi, primarily with respect to the Awadh region, and the ways in which the kathā often straddled narrative, performative and religious functions. Referring to kathās as a ‘meritorious pastime’ (ibid.: 202), she speaks of the intertextuality intrinsic to Awadhi kathā traditions in the context of Sufism and Kṛṣṇa devotion and of kathās being ‘particularly liable to becoming narrative sites of interchange and inflection’ (ibid.: 229). While Orsini here is specifically referring to the shared social worlds of kathās in the context of Sufi and Bhakti traditions, many of her observations on the Harikathā tradition are instructive for our purposes. She says, ‘Harikathas were part of a much larger body of stories, which at this time were generally touted as a ritual that could substitute for other, more expensive and cumbersome duties, and was just as good as listening to the “Vedas and Puranas”’ (ibid.: 202). This equivalence, as well as talk of the puṇya or merit that could be obtained from listening to these narrative kathas were, in Orsini’s words, ‘a strategy to legitimize the katha as a genre which could and did actualize a religious/spiritual experience’ (ibid.). Orsini’s comparison between Lalach’s Haricarit and Nanddas’s Dasam Skandha, both written around the late 16^th century, is similarly useful in trying to understand the different ways in which these kathās addressed and actively negotiated their narrative and religious concerns. Nanddas, in his introduction, explicitly references the scholastic tradition around the Bhāgavata Purāṇa by deferentially citing Śrīdhara Svāmī’s Sanskrit commentary and suggesting that he, despite not being able to understand Sanskrit, could write his rendition of the text because of his guru’s grace. Here, Orsini suggests that Nanddas, in framing his text at the outset with reference to a prior commentarial tradition, is self-consciously producing a ‘doctrinal text’ (ibid.: 206). She argues that Lalach, however, in his Haricarit, presents his work as a narrative, devotional text, sidestepping theological detail and not displaying a clear sectarian bent.

Understanding these aspects of the kathā tradition in Northern Indian vernacular literature during this time, then, perhaps allows us to further contextualise what Theghnāth may have been doing in his own work. Theghnāth’s writing must be seen as self-consciously engaging different modes of reading a text like the Gītā. The fact of Prince Bhānu asking to ‘hear that kathā’, which allows one to distinguish the essence from non-essence, implies, for one, that the text of the Gītā was understood to be a soteriological text aimed at vairāgya or detachment and additionally aimed at those who desired the ability to discriminate, since Bhānu’s concern appears focused on how to manage the demands of worldliness and detachment. ²⁰ We can assume, then, that Bhānu, as the ideal reader, points outwards to the larger audience that may have been interested in hearing the text of the Gītā. Furthermore, the use of the word kathā similarly gestures towards an audience for the Gītā that went beyond a circumscribed scholastic circle that may nevertheless have desired to read the text for its religious or soteriological rewards. Orsini’s (2014) characterisation of the kathā as a religious or meritorious pastime, then, may be an appropriate lens through which to understand the Gītā’s movement out of the circumscribed space it can be said to have occupied in the Sanskritic tradition.

Theghnāth’s own work of exegesis reveals a complex relationship between the genres of epic narrative production in vernacular languages, the language of the kathā as a didactic, popular, performative genre and the status of the Gītā itself as a didactic, soteriological text. In the next section, I examine a rather different, and much later, instance of the Gītā’s presence in courtly interpretive communities, in order to ask how a text’s interpretive instances are transmitted and may speak to accounts of its popularisation and canonisation.

IV The Paramānanda Prabodha as a work of commentary

The Paramānanda Prabodha, composed most likely in 1704 ce and attributed most commonly to an author named Nājar Ānandrām, is a commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā based on an earlier commentarial text from the 14^th century—the Subodhinī by Śrīdhara Svāmī. ²¹ A lithograph of the text, published by the Jñānsāgar Press in 1880 ce, is housed in the British Library and attributed in Blumhart’s catalogue to a Paṇḍit Śrīdhara Śivalāla, who was likely the editor and publisher of the work (Śivalālā 1880). That the Prabodha was published at a time when manuscript and print culture were dovetailing in significant ways is an important part of its story, as is the fact that manuscripts of the text continue to be widely available in North Indian archives. Tyler Williams (2019) has argued for recognising the importance of paratextual materials and the possibility of thinking of manuscript production, particularly in the North Indian vernaculars, as a form of ‘publishing’ in the premodern period, before print culture made texts widely available. Going by its considerable archival record, the Prabodha seems to have been well-known and widely circulated by the time of its lithograph’s publication in the late 19^th century. ²²

The introduction to the Paramānanda Prabodha gives us some valuable information as to Ānandrām’s identity, location and time, as well as how he viewed the text. He describes the text as a ṭīkā or commentary, drawn from Śrīdhara’s work, thus placing his act of composition within the context of the commentarial tradition in Sanskrit where scholars indicate their indebtedness to their forbears in the introductions to their texts. ²³ The text, as it is most often circulated, contains a prose section, which renders the prior Sanskrit commentary into vernacular prose, and a rendition of the Gītā’s Sanskrit verses into vernacular verse. There are further ambiguities surrounding Ānandrām’s precise identity and position. There were several individuals by this name who were present in Rajasthani courts during this time and there exists a strong possibility, based on the title ‘Nājara’, that he may have belonged to one of the communities of eunuchs who were responsible for guarding the zenānas in the royal courts of Mewar and Marwar (Vyas 2023). Ānandrām was likely also known to Jain scholars and monks in the region, based on correspondences and extant works that refer and are addressed to him. ²⁴

Ānandrām’s introductory verses locate him firmly in a courtly context. We learn that he worked during the reign of Anūpsiṁha who ruled in the late 17^th century and whose patronage of vernacular literature has been widely noted. ²⁵ Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha counts Ānandrām among the many illustrious personalities patronised by Anūpsiṃha, who translated Sanskrit texts into the vernacular (1927: 254). John Cort (2015) has pointed to the ubiquity of what we might consider translation practices in early modern North India, particularly in Jain communities. Indeed, Cort argues that for Jain writers the relationships between commentary and translation were complex and interwoven, and that the act of translation, though less theorised in premodern texts than commentary, implicated a range of practices like the bālāvabodh—simple renditions of texts likely used for pedagogical purposes for young monks—as well as practices and terms representing different modes of glossing and rendering texts into target languages (2015; forthcoming). Ānandrām’s work here is framed firmly as a ṭīkā but a closer reading additionally suggests that the Prabodha is a remarkably faithful rendition of the Subodhinī commentary, whose debts he acknowledges in his introduction. ²⁶ Ānandrām’s writings, therefore, represent a clear example of precisely this interwoven nature of practices of translation and commentary.

The other part of this story, then, concerns Śrīdhara Svāmī, the author of the Subodhinī. There is reason to believe that Śrīdhara’s commentary on the Gītā was considered an important intervention, relevant to interpretations that came after him. However, while there has been some degree of attention in secondary scholarship given to Śrīdhara’s oeuvre and his work on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (for example, see Gupta 2020; Shukla 2010; Venkatkrishnan 2024), hardly any scholarship focuses specifically on his commentary on the Gītā. That Śrīdhara’s work on the Gītā was important during this period appears not to have been in doubt. Indeed, Charles Wilkins, writing in the late 18^th century, translating the Bhagavad Gītā to English with the help of his Brahmin interlocutors, makes marked reference to him as one of the great commentators of the premodern era, without whom, he argued, the text was unintelligible (Wilkins 1785: 115). While Śrīdhara provides extensive glosses on the text, and the Subodhinī probably had the distinct advantage of brevity and clarity, he was still drawing from the non-dualist tradition of reading the text that began with Śaṅkara. Śrīdhara, additionally, was seen as opening up the text to more explicitly devotional commitments (see, Venkatkrishnan 2024). Śrīdhara’s work may, therefore, have been legible to Ānandrām’s courtly and other audiences as a significant intervention and likely lent authority to Ānandrām’s own exegetical endeavours in addition to being a comprehensible guide to the root text.

Yet, Ānandrām’s own authority over the Prabodha is not unambiguous—the prose text, its verse section and its lengthy authorial colophon were attributed at various times to different authors, many of whose identities came with their own specific claims to different forms of textual authority. I suggest, therefore, that these interrelated issues of attribution, authority and origin might nuance our approaches to the question of the Gītā’s communities and canonicity, even as the question of the Prabodha’s ultimate provenance remains an open one. What does this mode of circulation, with multiple claims to authorship, tell us about what it means to think of the Bhagavad Gītā as a canonical text in 18^th-century North India? What are the pieces, so to speak, of this claim to canonicity, and what forms of interpretation and circulation does it presuppose and entail?

One of the primary contenders for authorship was a figure named Harivallabh. There are several instances in the bibliographical and manuscript record in which sections of the text are attributed to Harivallabh. There has been some speculation in secondary literature regarding the authorship of this text. ²⁷ A manuscript at the Nāgarī Pracārinī Sabhā which attributes a Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣā to a Harivallabh Miśra, composed in 1714 ce, contains a detailed set of verses in the author’s own voice. ²⁸ Perhaps more significantly, he identifies himself as belonging to Mathura and offers obeisance to Hitaharivaṃśa, the 16^th-century founder of the Rādhāvallabh sect, who was born in Mathura but moved to Vrindavan, where he established his sect (Beck 2005: 66). It is noteworthy that the Rādhāvallabh sect was firmly rooted in traditions of reading the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and the 12^th-century Gītagovinda. It arose in a context where Vaiṣṇava philosophical lineages emerged which were firmly in opposition to the non-dualist positions that Śaṅkara’s lineages represented. Yet, the Rādhāvallabhīs had a self-conscious tendency to remain at the margins of the philosophical debates that these sectarian developments wrought, resisting formal affiliations with the orthodox Vaiṣṇava lineages that were solidifying in 18^th-century North India (ibid.).

The status of Harivallabh’s claim of authorship over this text and what parts of it he wrote, if any, are less significant, I contend, than the fact of its cross-sectarian transmission and the ambiguity of its authorship. Indeed, uncertainty over authorship is hardly unusual, and bhāṣā texts circulated widely across North India. The Paramānanda Prabodha, both in its prose and verse forms, was circulated in multiple manuscript copies, many of them with no claim at all to authorship. These issues become starker, however, when we consider two other attributions of the text, both to central figures in vernacular intellectual history in North India.

The first is an attribution to Tulsidas (1511–1623), which I have found in one manuscript dated to the late 18^th century, housed in the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, Maharashtra. ²⁹ The manuscript in question is catalogued as the Bhagavadgītā with a commentary by Mukteśvar in Marathi, possibly referring to the Marathi ‘paṇḍit-poet’ and son of the Marathi saint Eknāth (Keune 2015: 74). Yet, it also intersperses the Marathi verses with the same verses in early Hindi that are to be found in manuscripts containing the Prabodha as attributed to Nājar Ānandrām and Harivallabh, adding a final, formulaic verse which asserts Tulsīdās’ authorship of a vernacular Gītā for the welfare of the world. ³⁰

Finally, a version of the Prabodha, both in its prose and verse forms, is attributed to Jasvant Siṃha of Marwar (1626–1678), whose posited authorship would, as in the case of Tulsīdās, place the text significantly in advance of the 18^th-century date of composition we have thus far considered. Jasvant Siṃha lived and reigned in Jodhpur during the 17^th century, and a volume of his purported works—the Jasvantsiṃha Granthāvalī—contains three texts related to the Bhagavad Gītā: a Bhagavadgītā Ṭīkā Bhāṣā, Bhagavadgītā Bhāṣā Dohā, and a Gītā Māhātmya (Miśra 1972). ³¹ While, again, an adjudication on the truth of these claims is beyond the scope of this article, the text as found in the Granthāvalī is constructed from fairly scanty and incomplete manuscript evidence (ibid.: 4–5). Whether or not Jasvant Siṃha wrote all or part of these works, their attribution to him is particularly noteworthy here, given his status as both patron and author of a wide range of Advaita Vedānta works. Jasvant Siṃha’s work is, therefore, an important example of how Vedānta had moved into scholarly writing in vernacular idioms, specifically in the early modern Rajasthani courts (Williams 2014: 248–49).

The Paramānanda Prabodha, in its different forms and iterations, can therefore be understood through Michael Allen’s framework of ‘Greater Advaita’, which accounts for a wider range of materials and texts than a traditional historiography of Indian philosophical thought allows, including works of vernacular philosophy, works of translation, synthetic works and so on (Allen 2017: 24–26). The Prabodha’s transmission of a prior commentary, itself considered part of an Advaita lineage of reading the Gītā, is particularly significant in the context of emergent vernacular articulations of Advaita Vedānta. However, when we consider questions of authorship and attribution, it becomes quickly clear that the re-placing of the text within other lineages within the North Indian, vernacular, sectarian and religious landscape is an equally important aspect of its history of transmission.

The question of the authorship of this text or its different parts, may ultimately remain open, and the history of its circulation awaits further analysis. We can, at the very least, entertain the possibilities that one, the verse and prose sections of the text had two different authors, and two, that the verse version may have been in circulation prior to the composition date we have determined for Nājar Ānandram’s text. It seems likely that the verse rendition of the Gītā was one important way in which multiple audiences received this work, perhaps in some cases as an added gloss to the somewhat denser discussions arising out of the Paramananda Prabodha’s adaptation of the Subodhinī commentary. The erasure, forgetting or complications around the authorship of this work, coupled with what is evidently a remarkable manuscript footprint, points to the ways in which canon formation is often the result of these multiple, alternative genealogies.

V Conclusion

I have attempted to show, through a few glimpses into the Gītā’s life in the new vernacular communities in early modern North India, how our models of its role in scholarly and popular realms of intellectual activity may be fruitfully nuanced by an understanding of the twofold aspect of the text’s histories and the communities of its reception. First, I have argued that an analysis of the genres within which the Gītā was placed by its interpreters, from its earliest extant instances of interpretation in vernacular languages, reveals moves that complicate fixed understandings of genre and show that the Gītā could, and did, move between commentarial, narrative and poetic genres. Second, I have shown, in the case of the Paramānanda Prabodha’s transmissions, how lineages and networks of interpretive communities often involved ambiguities, erasures and additions in its perceived histories of authorship and transmission, enabling a text like the Prabodha, and through it a text as canonical and constantly mediated as the Gītā, to enter new spaces.

Roger Chartier (1982) has fruitfully problematised the distinction between scholarly or high culture on the one hand, and popular culture on the other. Asserting that this question of the distinction between popular and elite culture falls firmly within the ambit of intellectual history, he emphasises the problems involved in making this distinction. Elite culture, then, is co-constituted by oral or so-called popular or folkloric culture, which in turn ‘has been profoundly “worked over” in each epoch by the norms or the interdictions of the ecclesiastical institution’ (ibid.: 34). He goes on to say:

These intersections must not be understood as relations of exteriority between two juxtaposed but autonomous worlds (one scholarly, the other popular), but rather as producers of cultural or intellectual ‘alloys’ whose elements are as solidly incorporated in each other as metal alloys. (ibid.: 35)

The courtly spaces within which both Theghnāth and Nājar Ānandrām’s texts appear to have been composed resist characterisation strictly as either elite or popular/folkloric. Further, as we have seen, the mere existence of vernacularity does not necessarily mark a text or space as being either elite or its opposite, even as the real differences between genres like commentary, narrative and performance and their intended audiences, remain relevant. How, then, may we understand these very different acts of interpretation through the communities they both presupposed and produced and through the lens of processes of popularisation and canonisation? As in the case of the Prabodha, and given the indeterminacy and ambiguities surrounding historical details around authorship in premodern India, how do we take seriously the multiplicity of authorial voices through which audiences may have accessed the Gītā and the Prabodha?

In the preface to his volume on commentaries, Glenn Most (1999) emphasises an approach to commentary that ‘would involve focusing upon the cultural institutions involved in their production and consumption and inquiring into just what social and psychological aims they serve and what functions they fill’ (1999: vii). Two of his observations on the ‘aims and dynamics’ of commentary are particularly germane to us here. First is the idea of authority as underlying the root text chosen for an interpreter’s commentarial attentions—writing a commentary on a text can be at once an acknowledgement of its authority and an indication that this authority is ‘not self-explanatory’, that is, it needs mediation to be understood. Second, commentaries tend to be produced in centres of cultural authority, by those interpreters who are members of privileged textual communities, regulating access to authoritative texts (ibid.: vii–viii).

Both criteria may legitimately give us pause, in the context of the Bhagavad Gītā’s early modern vernacular worlds. In the case of the Prabodha, as we have seen, authority is placed, and re-placed in the root text of the Sanskrit Gītā, in the canonical Śrīdhara commentary and in the various figures to whom the text was attributed, or misattributed. Similarly, in early modern North India, from at least the 15^th century onwards, we see the emergence of regional centres in which the patronage of vernacular and Sanskrit literature flourished. ³² These cultural networks were newly emerging centres of power and authority, particularly in the intellectual, philosophical, religious and literary realms. Yet, they continue to be relatively marginal in narratives of philosophical and commentarial writing, more generally, and certainly in narratives of the Bhagavad Gītā and its canonisation, in particular. As I have suggested in this article, accounts of the scholarly worlds of the Bhagavad Gītā and its status as a popular work in the premodern period must also account for processes and genealogies at these various scales: of the text, the court, the pedagogue, the specific instance of transmission and the many interpretive communities that existed in early modern India. The Bhagavad Gītā’s contemporary status as a ‘national’ text of modern, popular Hinduism, therefore, belies its histories of reception as a work whose authority and meaning were being continually negotiated and re-established in the centuries before colonialism.