Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India

223 Pages·2013·1.48 MB·English

by  Dr Shruti Kapila

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Political Thought in Action
The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India
Edited by
Shruti Kapila
Faisal Devji
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi 110002, India
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107033955
© Cambridge University Press 2013
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed in India at
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Political thought in action : the bhagavad gita and modern india / edited by Shruti Kapila,
Faisal Devji.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “Reflects on the significance of the Bhagavad Gita for political and ethical
thinking in modern India and beyond and contributes new perspectives to historical,
contemporary and global political ideas”--Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-107-03395-5 (hardback)
1.Bhagavadgita--Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Kapila, Shruti. II. Devji, Faisal.

BL1138.66.P65 2012
294.5’924046--dc23
2012029783
ISBN 978-1-107-03395-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Contributors v
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji
1. India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World 1
C. A. Bayly
2. The Transnational Gita 25
Mishka Sinha
3. The Transfiguration of Duty in Aurobindo’s Essays
on the Gita 48
Andrew Sartori
4. Gandhi’s Gita and Politics as Such 66
Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar
5. Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of
Everyday Life 88
Uday S. Mehta
6. Morality in the Shadow of Politics 107
Faisal Devji
7. Ambedkar’s Inheritances 127
Aishwary Kumar
8. Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V. D. Savarkar,
the Bhagavad Gita and Histories of Warfare 155
Vinayak Chaturvedi
9. A History of Violence 177
Shruti Kapila
Index 200

List of Contributors
C. A. Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval
History, Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies and Fellow of
St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. Author of a number
of works on Indian, imperial and global history, his most recent book
is Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire
(2011).
Dipesh Chakrabarty is Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service
Professor at the Departments of History and South Asian Languages
and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Author of a number
of works, his forthcoming books include The Untimely Historian and The
Climate of History: Four Thesis.
Vinayak Chaturvedi is Associate Professor of History at the
University of California, Irvine and the author of Peasant Pasts: History
and Memory in Western India (2007).
Faisal Devji is Reader in Indian History and Fellow of St. Antony’s
College, Oxford University. His most recent book is The Impossible Indian:
Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence (2012).
Shruti Kapila is University Lecturer in History and Fellow of Corpus
Christi College, University of Cambridge. Dr. Kapila works on modern
political thought focussing on violence, revolution and democracy, and
also the history of science, especially psychoanalysis. Widely published,
she is the editor of An Intellectual History for India (2010).
Aishwary Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford
University. Author of a number of articles on intellectual history, he
is completing a book on the political thought of B.R. Ambedkar and
M.K. Gandhi.
vi List of Contributors
Rochona Majumdar is Associate Professor in the Departments of
South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media
Studies at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Marriage
and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009).
Uday S. Mehta is Distinguished Professor in Political Science at
CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Author of a number of books
on political theory, including Liberalism and Empire: Nineteenth Century
British Liberal Thought (1999), he is currently completing a book on
M. K. Gandhi’s political thought.
Andrew Sartori is Associate Professor in History at New York
University and his publications include Bengal in Global-Concept History:
Culturalism in the Age of Capital (2008).
Mishka Sinha received her doctorate from the Faculty of Asian
and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge in 2012. Her
doctoral research was on the history of Sanskrit in Britain and America
from 1832–1939. She currently works on the intellectual history of
Orientalism and translation of ideas across cultures in the colonial
context. In 2012–2013, she will be a Research Associate at the Centre
of South Asian Studies at Cambridge.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the
Trevelyan Fund, the Faculty of History, the Centre for the Research
in Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), the Centre for History
and Economics, the Centre of South Asian Studies and Corpus Christi
College, all at the University of Cambridge. We are also grateful for the
funding and organization provided by the Sister Cities Project of the
journal Public Culture, and the India–China Institute at the New School,
New York. We are indebted to David Armitage, Sunil Khilnani, Arjun
Appadurai and the late Carol Breckenridge.
With a revised introduction here, the essays first appeared as a Forum
in the journal Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press),
7: 2 (2010) and we are grateful to the journal editors for their kind
permission for publication of this book.