Gita as Casteist and Misogynist? Strawmanning at Its Worst

Last week, I sat through a mock trial of my own making. Three young people played prosecutors and a particularly theatrical bailiff, charging the Bhagavad Gita with crimes against caste and gender in front of a judge. I played the accused. The cuffs were mimed, the gavel borrowed from a prop box, but the charges were not invented for the occasion. They are the same charges that circulate constantly now, in reels and comment threads and the kind of confident paragraph that gets forwarded without anyone checking the verse it claims to summarise. Two accusations dominate that circulation more than any other: that the Gita is a casteist text, and that it is a misogynist one. Both charges, when actually placed next to the verses they claim to be reading, turn out to be built on a method rather than on evidence, the method being to lift a line, strip its grammar, and hand the remainder to an audience that has no reason to check the original.

I want to walk through how each of these charges was built in that room, because the building is more instructive than the verdict. A strawman needs raw material, and the raw material here was always real, a real verse, a real word, sometimes a real silence. What got added to that material, every single time, was an inference the verse itself does not support.

The Silence That Wasn't a Verdict

Arjuna, early in the first chapter, panics at the thought of the coming war and offers Krishna a list of reasons not to fight. Among them is a fear that the killing will cause what he calls varnasankar, the corruption of women leading to mixed, impure offspring. The charge against the Gita builds from there. Krishna spends seventeen more chapters correcting nearly every fear Arjuna raises, yet never specifically refutes this one, and a teacher who corrects everything except a single prejudice has, by that silence, endorsed the prejudice. Put plainly, Krishna's silence is being asked to do the work of an explicit denial, or else stand as agreement.

That standard collapses the moment you apply it consistently. Krishna also never specifically refutes Arjuna's fear about ancestral rites going unperformed, about ancestors falling from heaven for want of ritual offerings. Nobody is building a case that the Gita therefore endorses ancestor worship. What Krishna does instead, across the rest of the text, is dismantle the centre from which every one of Arjuna's fears was generated, the conviction that Arjuna is the one who acts, the one whose hands will carry the stain or the merit. Once that centre is shown to be unreal, the fears stacked on top of it do not need individual rebuttal, they fall together. Arjuna is taught, repeatedly and in increasingly direct language, that he is not the body, not the doer, not the one whose lineage or bloodline defines him. If that teaching lands at all, the question worth asking is whose caste is even left standing by the end of it. A varna belonging to a self that has just been shown not to exist is not a varna anyone needs defending or attacking.

There is a sharper problem hiding inside the charge itself, too. If Krishna's silence on varnasankar really meant agreement, the same silence would have to mean agreement with Arjuna's actual conclusion, which was that he should refuse to fight and walk away. Krishna spends the entire remainder of the Gita arguing for exactly the opposite. The charge, followed through to its own logic, contradicts the one thing about Krishna's response that nobody disputes. When I put this to the prosecution in the room, I asked them, half in jest, whether my own silence on a point should now count as evidence against me. The reply was that silence cannot be recorded as testimony. Quite right, and it cannot be recorded as testimony in a courtroom built on paper either, and the charge had been resting on exactly that kind of testimony all along.

A second charge tried to find caste sitting inside a single word. In the third chapter, Krishna warns that if he himself stopped acting, the worlds would fall into sankara. A slide shown at the trial translated this as varnasankar, caste-mixing, and built an argument on that translation. Sankara on its own means confusion, disorder, nothing more specific than that, a word with no caste content unless someone supplies it. The actual argument in that chapter has nothing to do with caste at all. Krishna is explaining nishkama karma, and the logic runs that those still driven by desire keep acting constantly, and their acting is already wearing down the world; if everyone who has seen through desire's grip also withdrew from action, nothing would be left to counter the damage the desirous keep doing, and disorder, sankara, would simply take over. No caste anywhere in that sentence, until a translation puts one there.

Disposition Mistaken for Birth

The harder charge, and the one that took the most unpacking, was that the Gita makes caste a matter of birth and then commands obedience to it, with the line "death in one's own dharma is preferable to a foreign dharma" read as a divine endorsement of dying in service to whatever varna a person was born into. The eighteenth chapter does list out, fairly mechanically, the work associated with each varna, brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya, shudra, and that list was read as proof. But four chapters earlier, the Gita had already defined how a varna is determined, and it says guna and karma, disposition and chosen action, with no mention anywhere of the household a person is born into. A child can certainly arrive with a fiery temperament already in place, the way a child today might test as more introverted or more extroverted, without anyone supposing the test result was inherited from a parent's surname.

One objection at the trial tried to fold this disposition back into heredity anyway, on the ground that temperament itself is genetic, passed down in the blood the same way a surname is passed down on paper. The premise is not wrong so much as incomplete: genes are inherited, but a life built on top of them is not, in anything like the same mechanical way. Two children born of the same parents, carrying much of the same genetic material, go on to live two entirely different lives, make entirely different choices, become two different people by the time either of them is old enough to be asked what they have made of themselves. Whatever a gene hands a person at birth, it does not hand them the rest of their life along with it. Disposition is only half the Gita's definition, in any case. The other half, karma, is choice, and choice can run against disposition as easily as with it. What actually fixes the varna, by the Gita's own stated definition, is the choice, not the womb it was made from, and not the chromosome either. Read the fourth chapter's definition first, then the eighteenth chapter's later description of typical work falls into its proper place underneath that definition, not above it.

This also means the category the Gita is describing was never meant to sit still. A varna defined by choice can be re-chosen. Someone who arrives gentle and slight of build can still decide, when a moment demands it, to take up arms and stand as a kshatriya stands, the way history is full of people whose conduct in a crisis had nothing to do with the body they were born into. The Gita's varna, on its own definition, is volitional and it is fluid, neither of which describes the caste system that calcified later in its name. Somewhere between the text and the centuries that followed it, this fluid, chosen category hardened into a fixed, inherited one, and walls went up where the text had only described a choice. That hardening is a charge against the society that built the walls, not against the verses it built them on top of.

A related objection picked at a different verse entirely, the line about the learned seeing a brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and an outcaste with the same eye. The argument was that this equal seeing is meaningless unless it produces identical conduct toward all five, since nobody actually drinks the dog's milk the way they drink the cow's, so some distinction clearly survives, caste by a gentler name. This mistakes equal seeing for identical conduct, two things the verse never claims are the same. A parent holds no favouritism between two children and still, properly, treats a toddler differently from a teenager. The absence of bias in the eye does not erase the real differences in what each situation in front of that eye calls for.

What follows from an unbiased eye is not identical conduct but what the tradition itself calls samyak vyavahar, conduct that fits what is actually in front of it. The eye carries no partiality; the hand still has to respond to a toddler and a teenager differently, to a cow and a dog differently, because the situations are different even when the regard behind them is not. Treating every object the same regardless of its actual nature is not equality, it is carelessness dressed up as virtue. What the verse is asking of its reader is a gaze without prejudice; what follows from that gaze is conduct suited to whatever is actually there, not a flattening of every distinction into sameness for its own sake. No reader across two thousand years of this verse's circulation concluded that it was an instruction to treat a dog as a cow. That conclusion had to be manufactured for the occasion, and manufacturing an objection of that kind says more about the need for an objection than about the verse.

A Single Word Doing the Work of an Insult

The misogyny charge sat almost entirely on one verse from the ninth chapter, the line about women, vaishyas, and shudras attaining the highest goal even though born of papa-yoni, a sinful womb. Read fast and stripped of its grammar, this sounds like Krishna is calling womanhood itself a sin. The actual sentence has two parts joined by the word api, which means even, and the joints matter here more than anywhere else in this list. The first part is complete on its own: even those of sinful birth who take refuge in Krishna cross over and find liberation. Only then does the second part add, even women, vaishyas, and shudras attain the highest goal this way. The list of who is included is not the definition of the sinful womb; it is the next example in an expanding circle of people the verse insists are not excluded from the highest end, regardless of where the sinful-womb clause has already landed in the sentence before them.

Papa-yoni itself is being misread as a slur when it is closer to a diagnosis. Yoni means origin, source, the conditions a person is handed before they have had any say in the matter, the household, the beliefs, the prejudices a child absorbs before being old enough to question any of it. A child raised inside cruelty and superstition has, in this sense, been born into papa-yoni, regardless of the household's caste and regardless of the child's sex. What the verse is actually doing is declaring that not even the worst possible start disqualifies a person from the highest end, and that the people society had already pushed to its margins, women very much among them, were being told, in the plainest language the text has, that no door was closed to them. The verse its accusers needed does not exist in the chapter they were quoting from.

Read in full, that verse looks less like an accommodation a hierarchy makes for its own convenience and more like a refusal to let the hierarchy decide anything at all about who reaches the highest end. Womanhood is not the sin being named here; the verse never says that, and a society's treatment of women has no bearing on the reach those women are promised toward liberation. Nor is the offer a modest upgrade within the existing order, a slightly better seat for those already seated lowest. The goal on offer is the same highest goal available to anyone who turns toward it, full stop, regardless of where a society has chosen to place them. The case for caste cruelty being a corruption of scripture rather than a teaching within it is also not new, and not mine alone to make. Dr. Ambedkar, no friendly witness to organised Hinduism, gave an entire chapter of Riddles in Hinduism to the argument that the Upanishads stood opposed to the very Vedic hierarchies later generations claimed scriptural cover from. He arrived at the same fault line this verse sits on, from his own direction and for his own reasons: a society's cruelty and a text's refusal to bless that cruelty can occupy the same tradition without being the same document.

Every one of these five charges depended on stopping a sentence early, or translating a word with a caste meaning it does not carry, or assuming a silence does the work of a verdict. None of them required a counter-scripture, a clever reframing, or even much Sanskrit. They required only that someone read past the half-line that had already been decided would be damning. The accusation that the Gita is casteist and the accusation that it is misogynist both rest on roughly the same move: take a verse out of the sentence it lives in, and the sentence out of the chapter it lives in, and the chapter out of the text's own stated definitions, and almost anything can be made to say almost anything.

None of this means every traditional reading of these verses across the centuries has been faithful to them either. Custom has, in places, claimed scriptural cover for cruelty the scripture itself does not supply, and that is a separate failure worth naming on its own terms. But a separate failure is not the same failure as the one being charged here. The discipline this calls for is not loyalty to a text. It is the same discipline owed to any sentence before judgment is passed on it: read it whole, in its own sequence, before deciding what it was made to confess.

Acharya Prashant is a teacher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life.