The Bhagavad Gita: The Many Lives of a Text

This course offers students a chance to study the Bhagavad Gita, one of the masterpieces of world religions, treating it as a work of literature, a work of philosophy, and a work of theology. "The many lives of a text" also introduces students to the much less familiar story of the Gita's many centuries of varied receptions across the history of Indian religions. We will look at how traditional Sanskrit commentators, both well known and unduly obscure, have read and responded to the Gita, how it has been told and retold in narrative literature, its interpretation and reimagining in a range of Indian vernaculars (including how the Gita was taught in precolonial India), and the place it has held and continues to hold within colonial, nationalist, postcolonial, and contemporary discourses.