The Bhagavadgita Introduction Krishna speaks at the Battleground by Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyayaya

INTRODUCTION The Mahabharata and the Gita The common man is always possessive. He always wants to possess whatever he finds attractive. This leads to conflict between man and man. States, nations and communities are also imbued with the same possessive attitude. That is why, Kashmir, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, to name only a few, are the bones of contention between the neighbouring states. They threaten world peace. The battle lost and won at Kuwait is a reminder of that. It might ignite a full-scale world war. A petty broil in the Balkan peninsula in East Europe led to the First Great War. The fight always begins between two brotherly nations. The Anglo-Saxons belong to the Teutonic race. The two Great Wars raged mainly between the Teutonic countries England and Germany. The Jews and the Arabs are Semitic in origin; they fight each other. Pakistan is merely a cut out portion of India. India and Pakistan fight between themselves over the possession of a trifling area of land.         The same motif of possession of land led to a great war among the brothers of a royal family in the Mahabharata, an Indian epic written in Sanskrit. The poem dwells on how the conflict among brothers over a piece of land led to a global war.         Let us recount in a little more detail the story of the Mahabharata . There were two royal brothers in Dhritarashtra and Pandu in the Kingdom of Hastinapur. Dhritarashtra had hundred sons and one daughter by his first wife Gandhari and one son by his second wife Vaishya. Duryodhana was the chief of them. Pandu had three children in Yudhisthira, Bhima and Arjuna by his first wife Kunti , he had two more children in Nakula and Sahadeva by his second wife Madri. Pandu’s life was cut short in the prime of his youth. His children were therefore brought up in the charge of Dhritarashtra, along with Dhritarashtra ‘s hundred children. Duryodhana who led his brothers was jealous of the strength and character of his cousin brothers. He conspired against them in many ways. Dhritarashtra could not restrain his children from doing harm to his nephews. Because he was a doting father. Besides he was congenitally blind. So, he could not look after the affairs of the state. Growing to manhood, Duryodhana became the de facto king of Hastinapur. He took advantage of his father’s blindness. He made the life of the five cousins, known as Pandavas, unbearable. So, they left their home in cognito and wandered in the forests. They had to undergo many adventures in course of their wide wanderings. By that time they enhanced their personal prowess. They also made friends with numerous royal families. Their one aim was to regain their rightful share of their paternal property. They met Krishna from Dwaraka who became their friend, philosopher and guide. In the meantime negotiations continued between Duryodhana and his brothers, known as Kauravas, on the one side and the Five Brothers or the Pandavas on the other. The negotiations failed and a war between the Five Brothers and the Hundred Brothers lay in the logic of affairs. The allies of both the Hundred and the Five from all over the world assembled. The belligerent enemies met at Kuru kshetra.          Right at this moment, the Srimad Bhagavad Gita begins. It is a long poem consisting of seven hundred verses which is but a part of a vast narrative, the Mahabharata that consists of roughly one lakh verses. The name Srimad Bhagavad Gita literally means a song sung by a god- man. In reality it is the conversation between Arjuna, the greatest warrior in the five Brother camp and his charioteer Krishna, in front of two armies ready to clash with each other at the battlefield. The conversation is reported by Sanjaya a minister to the blind king Dhritarashtra, at a place far off from the site of the war. Whenever Sanjaya refers to Krishna’s speeches, he says “Bhagavana Uvacha”or “The God-incarnate spake”. In other words Krishna is deemed by the narrator Sanjaya as the All-powerful God-incarnate. The speech of Krishna being the main theme of the excerpt from the Mahabharata under study, is known as the Srimad Bhagavad Gita or the Celestial song. This is, however, no Song from the spheres by the unseen God attended by the angels playing upon their citherns and citoles. The Gita is simply the speeches of Krishna a charioteer; he admonishes and exhorts the warrior Arjuna. Arjuna is the greatest warrior among the mortals in the world of Mahabharata. Indeed, it might seem queer how a subordinate of his, Krishna, could rebuke and teach him at a moment when war is presently to take place. But God, it is known all over the world, readily accepts such humble office to stand by his friends and devotees. In Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry when Saint Andreas braves the seas to reach the heathen Myrmidons, Christ himself became his boatman to sail him across the whale’s way and swan’s way. Any speech, when it is too deep for tears, is a song or Gita. And one wonders whether the Song Celestial is a call to battle or not.         The Srimad Bhagavad Gita has eighteen chapters. The first chapter entitled the Arjuna Visad Yoga or the Grief of Arjuna opens with the blind king Dhritarashrta pent up in his palace at Hastinapur anxiously enquiring of the state of affairs at the battle field of Kurukshetra. There the warring brothers and their friends and relatives and allies have gathered for the battle. His minister Sanjaya has television and teleaudition faculties. So he gives the king live reports of what happens in the battle-field. When a character in a fiction himself becomes a narrator, the character becomes real in relation to the narrative told by him. We are all ears and eyes to the narrative. The anxiety of Dhritarashtra, the listener in the narrative, makes the reports convincing