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A dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna within the Mahabharata. Ganguli translated its eighteen chapters as part of his English prose version of the epic.
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Before the battle at Kurukshetra, Arjuna asks his charioteer Krishna to draw up between the two armies. Across the field he sees relatives, teachers and friends. His reluctance to fight gives the Bhagavad Gita its setting. The conversation belongs to the sixth book of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. Its audience inside the epic includes a king who learns what happened through the narrator Sanjaya.
Across eighteen chapters, Arjuna’s question about his obligations broadens into a discussion of action, knowledge, devotion and freedom. Krishna speaks as both Arjuna’s companion and a divine teacher. The scene in which Arjuna is granted a vision of Krishna in cosmic form gives that relationship a scale the opening conversation scarcely suggests. The work has circulated both within the epic and as a scripture in its own right.
Kisari Mohan Ganguli translated the wider Mahabharata into English prose in the late nineteenth century. His Gita appears in sections 25 through 42 of Book VI. In this edition a paragraph can carry a stretch of continuous speech. A reference such as “chapter 2, paragraph 5” identifies Ganguli’s prose division. A conventional reference to Sanskrit verse 2.5 uses a different system.