The Essence of the Śāstras: The Bhagavad Gita Māhātmya in Vernacular North India

Abstract

The Bhagavad Gītā’s publics in premodern India were very likely more diverse than merely a study of its Sanskrit commentarial traditions would suggest. Closer analysis of the range of interpretive works surrounding this text is central to understanding how religious and scholarly perspectives on the Gītā changed the work’s status, particularly in early modern India, in the centuries before colonialism. Richard Davis (2020) has argued that the Sanskrit Gītā Māhātmya has the potential to help us understand the devotional impact of the Gītā in premodern religious circles, and its status as a popular or public work seen to be productive of religious merit. This paper takes this line of enquiry forward by exploring the Gītā Māhātmya in Sanskrit and in early Hindi through an analysis of an eighteenth-century adaptation of the Māhātmya by a Rajasthani author named Nājar Ānandrām, a eunuch official in the Rajput court in Bikaner, and a prolific commentator who also produced an exegetical work based on an Advaita reading of the Bhagavad Gita. Drawing on, and modifying, V. Raghavan’s conception of the ‘Greater Gītā’ genre (1938), this paper aims to explore two central aspects of māhātmya literature as it manifests in this text: first, how did vernacular authors employ the māhātmya genre for their particular exegetical purposes; and second, what role did the Gītā Māhātmya play in the Bhagavad Gītā’s canonisation as a popular religious text in vernacular North India?