The Bhagavad Gita is often accused of supporting caste and misogyny through selective quotations that ignore context, grammar, and the text's central teachings. A closer reading shows that its emphasis is on inner qualities, conscious action, and spiritual equality rather than birth-based hierarchy or gender discrimination. Misinterpretations arise when isolated verses are detached from their broader meaning, while the Gita consistently points toward self-knowledge, freedom from ego, and the universal possibility of liberation for every human being.
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Originally published in The Pioneer
Last week, I sat through a mock trial of my own making. Three young people played prosecutors and a particularly theatrical bailiff, charging the Bhagavad Gita with crimes against caste and gender in front of a judge. I played the accused. The cuffs were mimed, the gavel borrowed from a prop box, but the charges were not invented for the occasion. They are the same charges that circulate constantly now, in reels and comment threads and the kind of confident paragraph that gets forwarded without anyone checking the verse it claims to summarise. Two accusations dominate that circulation more than any other: that the Gita is a casteist text, and that it is a misogynist one. Both charges, when actually placed next to the verses they claim to be reading, turn out to be built on a method rather than on evidence, the method being to lift a line, strip its grammar, and hand the remainder to an audience that has no reason to check the original.
I want to walk through how each of these charges was built in that room, because the building is more instructive than the verdict. A strawman needs raw material, and the raw material here was always real, a real verse, a real word, sometimes a real silence. What got added to that material, every single time, was an inference the verse itself does not support.
