Positing Krishna against Sankara: An Analysis of Lajpat Rai’s The Message of The Bhagawad Gita and and Yogiraj Srikrishna

Abstract

Studies on the modern and nationalist interpretations of Vedanta and Gita have centred on the likes of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Aurobindo Ghosh, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak and construed Lajpat Rai’s commentaries as mostly irrelevant or a misfit. In this paper, I intend to investigate the reason and veracity of such perceptions. I begin by exploring the subtle variations in the interpreting the karma as political action between Rai and his contemporaries. I critically analyse the anachronism latent in the belief that karma was construed as violent action even before Gandhi’s arrival onto the scene. For Rai, the foremost evil was cowardice which bred loyalty, and the root of this cowardice lay in the mistaken belief in renunciation (sanyasa) as central to Hindu life. It was Sankara, the most absolute proponent of renunciation (and not Buddha or Mahavira as votaries of non-violence) who he conceived as his primary antagonist. I show how Rai freely borrowed his beliefs from the writings of Dayanand Saraswati who up held on to the Vedantic ideal of renunciant brahmacharya but reimagined ‘jiva’ as an actively invested agent of the Dharmic order. Unlike Saraswati, Rai realised that it was not Vedas but Gita which was better suited to articulate Hinduism around the principle of karma. And Krishna was the perfect antinode to twin challenges that faced Hindu society: Western materialism and atheism on the one hand; and Vairagya Vedanta and Sanyasa on the other.