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Perspective
Gandhi,
Grothendieck and the Gita
by
Vivek Iyer
The Bhagwad Gita has drawn the admiration of some of the greatest
mathematicians of the last century- in particular Andre Weil and
Grothendieck both of whom were concerned with uniting the different
branches of mathematics on the basis of greater generality. In fact
Grothendieck uses the term 'Yoga' for his work. Why should this be so?
After all, according to Michael Witzel – the highly intelligent Harvard
Indologist- the Gita is simply the product of some priestly cabal
involved in a petty dynastic intrigue whose main actors were just jumped
up bandits or cattle raiders. Witzel – in the tradition of Nineteenth
Century Western Biblical hermeneutics- is trying to extract as much
History as possible from our sacred text. However, actual history is a
messy business and extracting meaning from it an impossible task. If
Gita is simply the reflection of some long ago tribal affray, in a far
off corner of the globe, why should the greatest Western mathematicians
and physicists- people concerned with the foundations of thought and
reality- show such reverence to the Gita? Can it be that the answer is
simply that- as Gandhi thought- it advocates doing your duty and
pursuing non-violence? If so, surely there were a hundred other texts,
closer to home, which would have served equally well? Why should a
French Jew, like Andre Weil, take the trouble to learn Sanskrit and come
to India if the true 'Gita rahasya' really was nothing more than
Gandhism?
The answer, I think, is that the Gita and the Mahabharata display
extraordinary properties of Symmetry and it was this that appealed to
the mathematicians and physicists.
Emmy Noether's theorem, in the early Nineteen Thirties, showed that- for
non-dissipative systems- the existence of a symmetry was evidence for a
conservation law. The remarkable symmetry shown by the Mahabharata arise
from there being two conserved properties – viz karma and dharma. Karma
operates across time as a principle of causality binding together and
giving coherence to each individual monad or soul. Dharma operates
across space giving coherence and meaning to the inter-actions of the
various souls or monads whom karma has brought together.
The pullulation of characters and episodes, digressions and
interpolations in the Mahabharata at first may seem quite maddening.
Surely this is evidence that it is a dissipative system in that it
contains superfluous matter? I contend that the reverse is the case.
The Mahabharata actually observes not just Dirac's symmetry, whereby
every particle has its anti-particle, but also super-symmetry. Thus, the
pullulation of characters is like the plethora of new fundamental
particles revealed by particle accelerators. I am not smart enough to
say whether the Mahabharata's ever multiplying cast of characters yield
on analysis a position similar to that of Geoffrew Chew (championed by
Fritjof Capra in the Tao of Physics) whereby there is a fundamental
equality of all elementary particles with none being regarded as more
fundamental than the others. Certainly, the Gita itself offers- to those
with sufficiently mathematical minds to grasp such subtleties- clues to
those more fundamental strings which hold everything together.
At first glance, it would seem that either my claim is false – the
Mahabharata only accidentally shows symmetry, or else it is actually so
primitive a text that it unconsciously mirrors some hard wired
structural symmetry of cognition or linguistics – or else it was not the
work of mere humans for no collection of mortals are capable of such
unswerving adherence to the very rigorous rules of balance and
reciprocity which govern every episode as well as the unfolding of the
whole narrative. While rejecting the notion of divine authorship, I
maintain that even the interpolations and elucidations made from time to
time by priestly redactors do in practice observe these very rules and
recapitulate the foundational method of the original composition.
This is because I believe there was an Adi Mimamsa hermeneutics- not
lost to us but lost to me because I'm no scholar and in any case lack
intelligence- which instilled a tradition, a sampradaya, which enabled
the transmission and elaboration of these great texts in a manner that
did no violence to their ethos.
However, for a section of Indians, during the Nineteenth Century,
Mimamsa hermeneutics first took a purely legalistic turn- (think of the
Court Pundits employed by the British up till the 1860's)- and was then
displaced by a racialist type of Western hermeneutics- whose great
service to the modern age was to demystify the Bible and reduce Judaeo-Christian
Scripture to a sort of imperfect history- that too the history of an
unimportant tribe inhabiting a small patch of land which was only
fitfully- and that too marginally- of strategic importance.
This was a tragedy for India. It meant that commentaries on the Gita and
Mahabharata, published since that time, have tended to get sillier and
sillier- a didactic exercise of the stupid for the stupider, except that
actually no one was ever that stupid. It was just that the one great
axiom everyone subscribed to was that Indians were practically morons.
Not to talk to Indians like they were morons meant you were out of
touch. You couldn't lead those benighted monkeys. The mind numbing
banality of rhetoric, the utter idiocy of our various Godmen and
Gandhians addressing the "Public" on the message of the Gita – as on
every other topic – has to be experienced to be believed.
Mahatma Gandhi- it must be said- was a far better writer and speaker
than those we currently suffer under. However, Gandhi- though keen to
save the handloom weaver from the mills of Manchester- himself imported
some foolish version of Quaker plutocratic nonsense -i.e.
non-violence as a magic charm sure to give success- to drive out of
business India's own home grown hermeneutic of the Gita. This was a
cultural disaster. It meant not only that India had to import nonsense
but also re-export that nonsense. The Indian Guru, Godman, and
'Gandhian' activist became bywords for stupidity, cupidity, and
infantile narcissism.
Gita is there to make you think, it is not a stick to beat people into
idiocy with. It has nothing to do with the moral outrage industry which
the Western bourgeoisie requires because of the dyspepsia caused by
their overly rich diet. Nevertheless Gita and Itihasa have been reduced
to this role in India – to give a platform for nutters and gobshites –
not to inspire us (I should say, to inspire you- I'm too stupid to do
this myself!) to breakthroughs in Mathematics, Physics, Economics and so
on.
February 1, 2009
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