Several Nationalists used the Gita to argue for a more confrontational, masculine response to British colonial rule. In 1925, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a Brahmin who trained as a doctor but became a revolutionary, established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh : RSS, or National Volunteer Organization, whose purpose was to build strength and character among Hindu males and to circle the wagons around the caste system. Hedgewars reading of the Gita was crucial to this: each person has his own god-given set of duties (sva-dharma) inherited through his caste birth; acting contrary to that dharma disrupts the social order. Hedgewar also used Krishnas teaching of karma yoga and nishkama karma to train young boys both physically and morally. Other Nationalists, too, made good use of the martial Gita. Swami Shraddhananda, an educator and reformer, argued in 1926 that, just as the Muslims had a single holy text, the Koran, all Hindus should have a shared sacred Bible, and so he proposed to hold mass recitations of the Gita. Lajpat Rai, a writer, politician, and freedom fighter, wrote, while in prison, an essay on the martial Gita, in which he took the argument that a warrior should take up arms and risk his life to defend dharma to mean that Indian youths should risk their lives, if necessary, to oppose British colonial rule. Aurobindo Ghosh (Shri Aurobindo), a nationalist, yogi, poet, and religious leader, also regarded nishkama karma as the means by which India could gain independence, citing Krishna in arguing that violence was an acceptable means. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a nationalist, social reformer, and lawyer, acknowledged that action might include violence, provided it was carried out without any desire to reap the fruit of the violent deeds. But since Krishna had validated violence only for the warrior class (of Kshatriyas), this meant that one had to extend the caste-based code of violence of the warrior castes to all the other castes in India ... There is an irony in this exclusion of Muslims, whose monotheism, later compounded by British monotheism (and British preference for monotheistic Muslims over Hindus), contributed greatly to the Hindus desire to elevate the monotheistic Gita (as a counter to the Koran) over polytheistic Hinduism.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 06:30:09 +0000
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