[Written as a coda to Sagas and Itihasa: Cultural Cognates.]
A common Western tendency is to approach Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita through categories familiar from the Abrahamic traditions: “God” and “scripture.” The impulse is understandable, but it is also misleading, for it encourages the assumption that they belong chiefly to the domain of religion and therefore have little bearing on contemporary concerns. The misunderstanding is widespread enough to warrant a few observations.
The Bhagavad Gita is not “scripture” in the usual Western sense. It does not lay down commandments or a fixed set of prescriptions. What one encounters is a sustained examination of action, knowledge, and the self, preparing the ground on which decisions must be made. The mind is disciplined, judgment is sharpened, and the burden of decision is returned to the individual.
At the end of the dialogue, Krishna does something extraordinary. He does not assert divinity and demand obedience. He says instead to Arjuna:
“Reflect fully on this; then act as you think fit.”
This is not a decree, nor a law code, nor a prophetic proclamation. It is a dialogue under existential duress, embedded within the Mahabharata’s field of battle. Action is not reduced to formula. Dharma is not specified either, for it is contingent and context-bound.
The text ranges over metaphysics, conduct and consequence, knowledge, discipline, and the nature of the self. The battlefield is the setting, not the limit of its scope.
Part of the difficulty lies in the medium. The Bhagavad Gita is composed in classical Sanskrit, a language capable of an extraordinary density of thought (in tech parlance, one might call it ‘lossless compression’). What appears plain on the surface often carries multiple layers of meaning. A first reading yields very little. With each return, more is disclosed, not because the text changes, but because the reader’s own understanding is being rearranged.
When the preservation of a social order is at stake, the question is not whether one acts, but how one acts without destroying that which one seeks to preserve. This lies at the heart of dharma, the maintenance of order. Within that, ahimsa (minimisation of harm) operates as a constraint, guiding conduct in a field where harm is unavoidable.
In the Mahabharata, Krishna is not presented to most participants as an object of worship. Only a few are aware of his divine nature. For the majority, he is encountered as a man of uncommon ability and an exceptional political intelligence. To read Krishna only as “God” is to miss the operational dimension of his role in the epic. He is a strategist navigating constraints, asymmetries, and moral hazards.
The epic furnishes concrete instances of this, which I set aside here in the interest of brevity.
Each case is uncomfortable if read as moral exempla, but makes sense when understood as statecraft in extremis. The war is the terminal phase of a diseased polity, where action is judged by its place in the larger order rather than by isolated rule compliance. Exceptional measures enter the frame as responsibility shifts from personal purity to civilisational outcome, a difficult doctrine that offers no moral comfort.
The same Krishna who refuses to command Arjuna in the Gita is the one who departs from established norms when adherence would undermine the very ends they are meant to serve. This is not a contradiction but a recognition of hierarchy, of what must sometimes yield if order is to endure.