The Gita in School

Roop Kanwar

The Gita is going to be part of school education in India. The goal is to bring “moral, ethical, and value-based education” to children. The Prime Minister’s own state of Gujarat was the first to mandate the holy book in schools. Himachal Pradesh followed soon. Uttarakhand and Haryana have asked all their schools to recite Gita verses during morning assemblies.

I am a little appalled. The first thought that struck me was B R Ambedkar’s verdict on the Gita as a text that entrenched caste-based inequality and undermined the rational, egalitarian values that are essential for a civilised democratic republic. [I wrote about this just last month.]

Imagine a teacher who is a hardcore right-winger teaching the Gita to school children. I wonder whether we will create more Roop Kanwars.

Do you know Roop Kanwar?

She died less than four decades ago, burnt alive on her husband’s funeral pyre, following the dharma of a virtuous widow in Hinduism. She was just 18 and recently married.  

When her husband died unexpectedly of some illness, the husband’s family and village elders decided to follow the sacred custom of Sati. The girl did try to run and hide herself in a barn. The men dragged her out, sedated her with opium, and tied her down on the funeral pyre of her husband. They placed the dead man’s head in her lap, making her look like a devoted wife who was sacrificing her own life for the sake of her husband. They piled up logs all around and set fire. Men stood all around with swords in hand ensuring that she wouldn’t escape. She was a noble and loyal Hindu wife who won’t desert her husband even in his death! [Of course, such sacrifices are not required of men.]

Krishna does not speak of Sati in the Gita. Yet CBSE’s decision to make those 700 shlokas the foundation of Indian children’s morality jolted me. As Ambedkar argued, the very starting point of the Gita is the stifling of the humanity that Arjuna possessed.

Arjuna didn’t want to kill. He would die rather than kill his own brothers and uncles. But Krishna, an incarnation of God, convinces Arjuna that killing is his duty. Go, kill. That’s the starting point of the Gita. And now that will be the starting point of our children’s morality.

I know there’s a lot of philosophy and theology in the Gita. Like any scripture, it can be interpreted in myriad ways. I have read over half a dozen interpretations many of which are sublime material, fit for mystical contemplation.

But schoolteachers are not mystics. Far from that.

I’m sure all the local schoolteachers of Deorala village were the first men to teach Roop Kanwar of her sacred duty as a widow. And they would have quoted the Gita: "Do your duty with devotion, without attachment to…”

I repeat, the Gita has its merits. But it depends who is going to teach it and with what motives.

Why to go back to something written millennia ago for teaching values to our children now? Why not adopt a contemporarily relevant approach? An approach that will make sense to Gen Alpha who views the world through a deeply digital, global, and practical lens. Value education today should not be about ‘what to think’ but about ‘how to navigate’ a complex world. Why does CBSE (or NCERT or RSS or whatever) wish to lead Gen Alpha away from their real problems of cyberbullying, deepfakes, and a whole host of virtual armies (not to forget the real ones in our politics) to a primitive battlefield in a land close to Roop Kanwar’s?