About The Bhagavad Gita

By Vyasa, translated by Edwin Arnold · first published in 1885 · Non-fiction

The Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of the Lord”, is a dialogue of seven hundred verses inside the Mahabharata, India’s great epic. Two armies drawn from one family face each other on the field of Kurukshetra. Prince Arjuna, seeing his teachers and cousins in the enemy lines, puts down his bow and refuses to fight, and Krishna, who is serving as his charioteer, answers him. Their conversation, in eighteen chapters, ranges over duty, action without attachment to its results, devotion and the nature of the self.

Tradition attributes the Gita to the sage Vyasa, who is also named as the author of the Mahabharata. Scholars place its composition in the centuries around the start of the common era, and it has been recited, memorised and commented on in India for well over a thousand years, by thinkers from Shankara to Tilak, Aurobindo and Gandhi.

Sir Edwin Arnold, an English poet and journalist who had spent several years in Pune as principal of the Deccan College, published this translation in 1885 as The Song Celestial, turning the Sanskrit into English blank verse. Mohandas Gandhi first read the Gita in this version as a law student in London, and it remains one of the most widely read English translations. The preview opens with Chapter One, as the armies gather and Arjuna’s doubt begins.