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THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND MODERN THOUGHT: INTRODUCTION*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2010

SHRUTI KAPILA  and
FAISAL DEVJI
SHRUTI KAPILA
Affiliation:
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge E-mail: sk555@cam.ac.uk
FAISAL DEVJI
Affiliation:
Faculty of History, University of Oxford E-mail: faisal.devji@history.ox.ac.uk
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Extract

In a recent essay the agent provocateur and philosopher Slavoj Žižek remarked that the Bhagavad Gita represented the perfect philosophy for post-capitalist society. By no means the first reaction to this text, this is only the most recent and arguably most controversial understanding of the philosophical content of the Gita, whose previous commentators have ranged from Nietzsche to Hitler. Less controversially, the modern composer Phillip Glass opened his opera Satyagraha with a dramatization of the discourse between Krishna and Arjuna that forms the Gita's content as a plea for a humanist politics. Though the text does not offer limitless possibilities for interpretation, what is certain is that the Gita has acquired an iconic status in modern times as a set of reflections on ethics, war, justice, freedom and action.

Type
Forum
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 269 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

* 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 (King's College), 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, above all, to the late Carol Breckenridge.