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