An afternoon class is on in a primary school. Children are reciting the second chapter of Bhagvad Gita, in the Gujarati poetic translation by Kishorelal Mashruwala, a close associate of Gandhi. I am not sure if it was the third standard or the fourth, but much of the details are fresh in my mind. The music teacher’s voice, the rhythmic recitation, all of us getting supremely bored and waiting for the bell to ring, the class to end.

We were bored because we could not make head or tail of what we were reciting. ‘Bhuta’ means spirit, for example, but what would be the image that would come to mind for a ten year old? What does it mean to say, “Sthitpragya is the one who has withdrawn his senses as the tortoise withdraws his organs?” As you can possibly make it, we are in chapter 2, dealing with characteristics of a stable-minded yogi. Our minds were wandering, watching the trees out of the window and imagining what we would do after returning home.

Later, during the teenage, I dabbled in the Gita once again, memorising a chapter (15th) in Sanskrit – without understanding a word of it. It was only in recent years, well into the thirties, that Lord Krishna’s advice to Arjuna started making sense. And, yet, there is a lot that remains difficult to comprehend in initial readings. Is devotion or bhakti yoga the ultimate way to liberation? Do karma yoga and gyan yoga – the path of action and the path of wisdom – go together (as many commentators hold) or are they mutually exclusive (as Shaankar vedantis argue)?

Anyway, the point of this column is not to debate matters spiritual but to react to a move afoot in two BJP-ruled states, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, to introduce the Gita in schools.

People across the world and down the millennia have found inspiration from the Song of the Lord, secular philosophers and religious leaders of various denominations have praised it. And there can’t be anything wrong in teaching such a sacred text to anybody.

But can it be a productive exercise? Can schoolchildren make any sense of it? One can imagine them memorising it while cursing their teachers. If there are going to be exams too, one can imagine cheap booklets with expected questions and model answers. ‘Gita for Dummies’, ‘Master Gita in 30 days’.

In other words, the move can at best be unproductive and at worst end up trivialising the scripture, reducing it to a political tokenism. And that is talking of only the Hindu students.

Gita is incomparably relevant to politics as Tilak, Gandhi and Vinoba have shown. But the current move is profane. The difference between these two approaches is the difference between religious politics and communal politics.