The Act Alone

The Translation-Criticism Venue · entry XVI

The Bhagavad Gītā, composed somewhere in the four centuries between roughly 200 BCE and 200 CE and embedded inside the Mahābhārata, has been translated into English more than three hundred times. Of its 700 verses, one is the most quoted in the world — Chapter 2, verse 47. Henry David Thoreau read it at Walden Pond in 1845, in Charles Wilkins's 1785 first English translation borrowed from Emerson. Mohandas Gandhi encountered it while studying in London, through Sir Edwin Arnold's 1885 verse Song Celestial, and made the doctrine it expresses — anasakti, non-attachment — the spine of his philosophy. J. Robert Oppenheimer read it in Sanskrit at Berkeley in the 1930s. T.S. Eliot, who had studied Sanskrit at Harvard under Charles Lanman, wove its English in his head into the third section of The Dry Salvages in 1941. It is the verse that, in English, ends up on a recovery-program wallet card.

And it turns on a single Sanskrit word. The verse's opening — karmaṇy evādhikāras te — names what Arjuna has. Eight English translators between 1785 and 1897, working with various degrees of Sanskrit and various theological agendas, used five distinct headwords for it: as motive (Wilkins, Arnold, Judge), charge (Davies), business (Telang, Besant), concern (Sastri, after Śaṅkara), right (Chatterji). Each English word makes Krishna say a different thing.

The word in Sanskrit is अधिकार — adhikāra. In its everyday modern register it does mean right, the political-modern sense. In Pāṇini's grammar (c. fifth century BCE) it is a technical term for a heading-rule that governs subsequent rules — a kind of jurisdiction. In Mīmāṃsā (the school of Vedic ritual hermeneutics) it is the technical word for eligibility to perform a prescribed rite — what the Brāhmaṇa texts call kartavyatā, oughtness, the warrant under which a given person, at a given station, is bound to a given act. Śaṅkara, glossing this very verse in the eighth or ninth century CE, takes adhikāra in this Mīmāṃsā register, and so reads the line:

English does not have one word that holds Pāṇini's jurisdiction together with Mīmāṃsā's eligibility together with the everyday right. So every English translator has to choose one, and lose the others. The history of the verse in English is the history of which loss each translator was willing to take. This page lines up eight selected English versions first published from 1785 to 1897, checked against the cited witnesses, beside the Sanskrit they were rendering and beside Śaṅkara's reading of the word itself.

Instrument I · the galleryEight Englishes, one word

The whole verse, in eight selected public-domain English versions from Wilkins (1785) to the bhāṣya-translation of Alladi Mahadeva Sastri (1897). The gallery follows the cited witnesses, with OCR repairs and line layout noted in the check; the rendering of adhikāra highlighted in gold in each. Read them in chronological order and watch the choice migrate: a motive Wilkins set in 1785 holds through Arnold and Judge a century later; the Sanskrit scholar Telang at Oxford (1882) breaks it with business; the Bengali theosophist Chatterji (1887), translating from Sanskrit, says right twice; and Sastri's English of Śaṅkara closes the circle by saying concern — the word the bhāṣya itself is glossing.

The renderings, laid out

Instrument II · click the verseSanskrit word-by-word

The śloka, broken into its grammatical pieces. Click any Devanagari word and the panel below fills with the lemma, the grammatical analysis (case, number, root), and the semantic field, drawing on Monier-Williams (1899), the verse analysis at bhagavadgita.eu, and Sastri's translation of Śaṅkara. The gold word is adhikāra.

Instrument III · the parserFour clauses, not three

The verse is an anuṣṭubh śloka — four eight-syllable pādas, two pairs. It contains four clauses: an affirmative opening followed by three prohibitions. English translators handle the clauses differently: Arnold's Song Celestial melts them into a single flowing exhortation; the Bengali Chatterji, who was raising the verse against Christian parallels, preserves each one verbatim and even calls them out twice.

Instrument IV · the bhāṣyaWhat Śaṅkara reads in

The Bhagavad Gītā has been receiving commentary for at least twelve hundred years. The earliest commentary that survives complete — the one all later commentators, even where they disagree, are arguing with — is the Bhagavad-Gītā-Bhāṣya of Śaṅkara, the 8th–9th-century Advaita Vedāntin. Śaṅkara's gloss on this verse, in Alladi Mahadeva Sastri's English, first published in 1897 (quoted here from the Mysore second edition, 1901; the only English of the bhāṣya available for the next eighty years), is the load-bearing thing this page is pointing at:

The English word Sastri reaches for is qualified. The Sanskrit Śaṅkara is glossing — adhikāra — has a technical meaning here that English exactly does not have a word for. In the Mīmāṃsā tradition Śaṅkara inherits, adhikāra-bheda is the doctrine that different people, at different stations in life, are eligible for different prescribed practices — what a person of one class is bound to do, a person of another class is not bound to do, and not because of moral choice but because of the prior structure of the rite. Śaṅkara reads Krishna here as drawing that distinction at Arjuna: Arjuna's adhikāra is for karma-yoga (the discipline of action, suitable to his station as warrior); it is not, yet, for jñāna-yoga (the discipline of knowledge, requiring renunciation). The verse is not telling Arjuna what is universally right; it is telling Arjuna what he is qualified for.

None of the eight English verse renderings selected here carries this. Wilkins's "let the motive be in the deed" makes it a doctrine about motivation; Arnold's "let right deeds be thy motive" turns it into a Victorian exhortation about virtue; Chatterji's "thy right is only to action" makes it a doctrine about entitlement. Sastri's English of Śaṅkara — thy concern is with action alone — is the closest a PD English line on this page gets to the Mīmāṃsā register, and even it has to relegate the technical sense to the commentary footnote.

Instrument V · the stratigraphyHow the verse traveled

A vertical core sample of the verse's path through five languages and two millennia. Gold nodes are the verse itself or its first commentary; jade nodes are scholarly readers who left a written engagement with it; saffron nodes are translators; rose nodes are popular readers whose use of the verse shaped what later readers expected it to mean.

The thing the stratigraphy records is not a corruption but a translation: each English reader of the verse received it through a translator working from a specific lexicon, and the lexicon's gravity pulled adhikāra toward the receiver language's nearest word. The Mīmāṃsā sense, the one Śaṅkara is glossing, has no nearest word in English; so it lifts off, diffusely, into the apparatus.

Instrument VI · live checkThe verifier in your browser

The verifier in your browser, recomputing in real time against the embedded transcriptions. It compares the eight complete gallery quotations, both Śaṅkara pull-quotes, and the banner and parser Sanskrit with the cited witnesses. Whitespace and Arnold's verse-line separators are normalised; the offline verifier also checks the recorded OCR repairs against the saved source text. A changed checked quotation turns the box red. Other prose, the wordpane, and the existing film and images are outside this quotation check.