Traditional wisdom: How India’s repository of jnana is lying unread and unstudied

The Ashtavakra Gita is not very well known; most Indians have heard of only one: the Bhagavad Gita, a part of the Mahabharata. Most don’t know that there are some 60 Gitas in the Mahabharata, besides others that are not part of larger treatises. The Ashtavakra Gita is one of the most profound and yet most esoteric of those standalones, whose most recent English translation is, appropriately, by Bibek Debroy, who has also written about the Mahabharata’s other Gitas.

In New Delhi last week, Nirmala Sitharaman launched Life, Death and the Ashtavakra Gita by Bibek Debroy and Hindol Sengupta not as finance minister (as Debroy also did not translate it as chairman of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council!) and “not even as Nirmala Sitharaman”, as she put it. And the portions she read out from the ancient treatise, which is a conversation between Ashtavakra and King Janaka, explained her seemingly cryptic assertion.

Chapter 5, Verse 4 of the Ashtavakra Gita, as translated by Debroy avers: “You are not the body. The body is not yours. You are not the enjoyer, or the doer. Your form is that of pure consciousness. You are the constant witness, indifferent. Roam around happy.” The gentle smile on Sitharaman’s face indicated that she has indeed internalised this wisdom, perhaps because she had been already introduced to Ashtavakra Gita’s wisdom as a child by her grandmother.

Grandparents as repositories and disseminators of traditional wisdom within families is a disappearing phenomenon. Not merely because ‘nuclear’ families make interactions with grandparents rare, but also because very few of today’s Nana-Nanis and Dada-Dadis are familiar with our ancient texts anyway. Due to decades of educational policies and social narratives that looked askance at India’s past, recent generations have grown up culturally deracinated.

Today’s 50-something and 60-something grandparents, even if “educated” and “successful”, have garnered very little of our ancient wisdom; some may dimly remember what their own forebears had told them when they were kids. Maybe some have attended lectures of spiritual teachers, heard a few podcasts. But did they gather enough knowledge to want to (and be able to) inculcate a love of India’s philosophical precepts among their own progeny? Very rarely.

Yet that knowledge is there for the asking. Though there has been increased interest of late in treatises like Ashtavakra Gita, millions of other manuscripts holding a wealth of wisdom lie untranslated, their precious thoughts denied to 1.4 billion Indian legatees. In fact, the Union culture minister told the Rajya Sabha this July that the national mission for manuscripts (Namami) has already conserved 90 million folios, of which 5.2 million have been documented.He also stated that 3.5 lakh of these documents (totalling 35 million pages) have been digitised and around 1.4 lakh manuscripts have been uploaded to a portal, of which 75,000 can be accessed free. Over 100 books have also been published, apparently. But how many know about this repository? How many have been reading the documents? How many can even understand them, given the sad lack of interest in ancient Indian languages due to previous official apathy?Debroy, with his Sanskrit erudition coexisting happily with his economics prowess, is a rarity. More scholars must be encouraged to translate ancient texts, less known and unknown, and provide lucid commentaries in modern Indian languages. These would be written too late for today’s Indian grandparents to benefit. But if a knowledge bank is created in the coming decades, future grandparents may quote Ashtavakra Gita again-like Sitharaman’s grandmother.