Who Narrated the Bhagavad Gita the Second Time?

 

Who Narrated the Bhagavad Gita the Second Time?

It was definitely not in any of the Vishnu temples.

It was in late 1980s when I struck up a conversation with an Indian Ph.D student and the topic veered off to Bhagavad Gita, the supposedly supreme text that reveals, to those who are willing to listen and accept, the nature of nature (this is my understanding, of the part I had at least a tenuous hold on). He took everything said in it, beyond what Lord Krishna told the despondent warrior Arjuna in the battlefield, but the whole lot of the epic Mahabharata that contains the Bhagavad Gita.

I do not know how long the epic is, but do know it is lo...ng. I am sure my fellow student had not read the whole thing and remembered only bits and pieces that he heard at his grandma’s knees. One thing I should grant him: he must have remembered more than I did. So much so, that he was supremely confident that there were only a few people, less than a dozen in the whole world who did not participate in that war. This, I considered as supremely prejudiced.

But Mahabharata is a strange epic, a compilation, I now have come to believe. There are so many sub-narratives that branch of ever so many times, I would have lost where my grandma left the grand narrative, but she was always sure, back to precisely where she left off.

Whatever may have been the period of the war, ranging over 3,000 years, the earth had a population much more than what a sliver of it could have sustained. That was my logic that sailed right by him.

That was the start I needed to set to answer the question I posed in the heading. Who wrote the epic? The sage Veda Vyasa. No, he did not write it down but narrated it and Lord Ganesha took it down. And, there are sub-stories about this too! But, I will not bore you. How did the sage come to know what Lord Krishna told Arjuna? Divine vision, for the most part. There must have been gaps here and there and these were filled up later, do not ask how.

The above is the story of the first narration of the Bhagavad Gita after Lord Krishna’s direct exposition to Arjuna. The question is who narrated it the second time.       

I introduce another character in the epic, Sanjaya. He was the charioteer as well as the adviser to Dhritarashtra, father of the losing side in the war. Sanjaya did not venture into the battlefield, but stayed back in the palace and narrated the battleground scenes to his king, which, of course include the Bhagavad Gita. Sanjaya was given the boon of Divine Vision and he even saw Lord Krishna in his effulgence when he was teaching Arjuna the Bhagavad Gita−no one else in the battlefield could.

To answer the question, it was Sanjaya who narrated the Bhagavad Gita the second time. If you believed any of the above, I hold some shares in the company that owns the Golden Gate Bridge, and you may buy a few shares from me.

Raghuram Ekambaram