The Song Celestial

The poem opens far from the fighting. A blind old king asks his minister what is happening on the plain of Kurukshetra, and everything we hear comes to us through that report. Two armies of one royal family are drawn up. Conches roar, drums and gongs burst out, and the earth seems to shake.

Then Prince Arjuna does something small. He asks his charioteer, Krishna, to drive him into the open ground between the two lines. He wants a closer look at the men he will have to kill that day.

That is the whole setup of the most loved spiritual dialogue in India: a soldier who, a moment before the battle, asks to see his enemies up close.

What he sees is not an enemy. It is his family. Arnold's list reads like a roll-call at a wedding: grandsires and sires, uncles, brothers and sons, cousins, sons-in-law, nephews, friends and honoured elders, some on this side and some on that.

Across the field stand Bhishma, the revered grandsire of the whole clan, and Drona, the teacher who put a bow in his hand. The war is a real quarrel over a kingdom, but from the middle of the field it looks like kin turned into targets.

This is the detail the rest of the book depends on. Arjuna has not suddenly become squeamish about fighting. He is a trained warrior, the finest archer on his side. What breaks him is seeing, all at once, who is standing on the other side.

His body goes before his arguments do. His limbs fail, his tongue dries in his mouth, a shudder runs through him and his hair stands on end. "From my weak hand slips Gandiv, the goodly bow; a fever burns my skin to parching; hardly may I stand."

Read that as a description of a panic attack and it is startlingly exact: the dry mouth, the heat, the legs that will not hold.

So the Gita does not begin with a doctrine. It begins with a man coming apart, in front of two armies, at the worst possible moment. Everything Krishna says over the next seventeen chapters is said to someone in that state, not to a calm student at a desk.

When Arjuna first looks at the ranks facing him, what happens before he makes any argument?

• He sends a messenger to offer the enemy a truce
• He calmly asks Krishna to explain the nature of the soul
• He orders Krishna to turn the chariot back to camp
• His body gives way and his bow slips from his hand✓Correct answer

Chapter I gives the collapse first: failing limbs, dry mouth, burning skin, and Gandiv slipping from his hand. The teaching about the soul only comes later, in answer to this breakdown.

Then the reasons come, and they are good ones. The first is simple: what would winning be worth? He does not want triumph, wealth or rule if it has to be paid for in the blood of his own people.

The men he would kill are the very people for whose sake he wanted a kingdom at all. Victory over the people you love is not victory; it is inheriting an empty house.

He pushes it further. He would not strike a single blow to rule all Three Worlds, so how could he do it for one earthly kingdom? This is not the voice of someone afraid of losing. It is the voice of someone who has suddenly seen what winning would cost.

His second argument is about guilt. Even if the other side are the wrongdoers, killing them would make him guilty too. They are blinded by greed and anger and cannot see the crime; he can, and seeing the wrong obliges him not to take part in it.

His third argument is about what comes after. When the great families are destroyed, the household rites stop, the ancestors are left without their offerings, and the order that held family life together falls apart. Some of this belongs to his world, with its rules about caste and lineage.

But the shape of the fear is familiar to anyone: a violent act does not end with the people it kills. It runs on through the generations that were never on the field.