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Edition #20 · September 2026
Dear Inner Circle,
Every few months a university announces that it is teaching the Bhagavad-gita, and within a day the country has an argument about it. Both sides arrive fully formed. One hears an ancient text finally restored to the place it deserves. The other hears a state curriculum drifting where a constitution says it should not. The argument is conducted entirely on the strength of the headline, and it is over before anyone has opened the document.
I went and opened the documents. Four Indian institutions now teach this text for credit, and they have arrived at four different answers to the same question: how much of an eighteen-chapter Sanskrit dialogue can you responsibly fit inside a modern degree, and what exactly are you certifying when a student passes? The answers differ by a factor of forty. That spread is the story, and almost nobody is telling it.
Lucknow University has added two vocational papers built on the Gita — one on holistic wellbeing, one on navigating contemporary challenges. Organiser reported the move on 19 May 2026. The stated content is self-management, duty and responsibility, leadership, conflict resolution, decision-making under pressure, and holding steady through difficulty.
Read that list without the Sanskrit and it is indistinguishable from a corporate soft-skills module. Read it with the Sanskrit and it is a compressed course on sthitaprajna, the steady intelligence of the second chapter. Which of those two things a student actually receives depends entirely on who is standing at the front of the room. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the operational risk built into the whole design.
The University of Delhi publishes its version in full, which makes it the most useful document in this discussion. The Gita for Holistic Life is a Value Addition Course carrying two credits — one lecture hour and one practical hour, no prerequisite in Sanskrit or anything else, placed before the Executive Council in an appendix dated 13 February 2025. The theory runs to roughly fifteen hours. The practical component runs to thirty: students conduct a SWOC analysis of themselves, keep a ten-day pranayama or selfless-service diary, classify a friend’s qualities as sattvika, rajasika or tamasika, and perform a Krishna–Arjuna role-play in pairs.
Two-thirds of the contact hours go to structured self-reflection. One-third goes to the text. The verse list attached for classroom use comes to around twenty-five verses out of seven hundred.
I want to be careful here, because this is where the argument usually turns shrill in one direction or the other. That design is not a scandal. Self-reflection is a reasonable thing for a university to ask of a nineteen-year-old, and the reading list it hands them — Sankara’s commentary, Tilak’s Gita-Rahasya, Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita, Easwaran — is serious. But those four commentators disagree with each other profoundly. Tilak read the Gita as a mandate for action in the world. Sankara read it as pointing beyond the world. A two-credit course that assigns all three without the hours to work through the disagreement is not teaching philosophy. It is offering a shelf.
“The disagreement between the commentators is not an obstacle to the teaching. It is the teaching.”
Put numbers to the policy and the shape of it changes.
The UGC’s guidelines for incorporating Indian Knowledge into higher education curricula set a floor: students in an undergraduate or postgraduate programme should take IKS courses amounting to at least five per cent of their total mandated credits, on a ten-year implementation horizon with revision every five. A four-year NEP undergraduate degree runs to roughly 160 credits. Five per cent is about eight. Delhi’s Gita course supplies two of them.
So the interesting question is not whether the Gita belongs on the list. It is what fills the other six credits — and nobody is arguing about that at all.
At the far end of the same spectrum sits IGNOU’s MA in Bhagavad Gita Studies, launched in open and distance mode from July 2024: eighty credits over two to four years, priced at the time of launch at Rs 12,600 for the full programme or Rs 6,300 a year, with 500 seats and Hindi as the medium, English described then as a plan rather than an offering. Forty times Delhi’s weight, for less than the cost of a weekend workshop. And at the opposite end, the AICTE folded portions of the Gita into an Indian Traditional Knowledge System module in its model engineering curriculum back in 2018 — a fragment inside a survey course.
Same text. A two-credit elective, an eighty-credit master’s, and a few pages in an engineering module. All three are now defensible as “the Gita is taught here.” That elasticity is precisely why these announcements are easy to make and hard to evaluate.
In a written reply to the Lok Sabha on 20 December 2021, the then Education Minister set out the existing footprint: Gita content in NCERT’s Class 11 and 12 Sanskrit textbooks, references in the Class 6 and Class 7 history texts, Gita portions inside the UGC-NET Yoga paper, and the AICTE module — while making plain that universities are autonomous and decide their own curricula.
Read that list again and a bottleneck appears. UGC-NET Yoga is the only route in it that produces certified teachers with examined Gita competence. Everything else produces students. If IKS credits are to reach five per cent of every degree in the country, the binding constraint is not student appetite. It is the number of people qualified to stand in a room containing both a devout student and a sceptical one and do right by them both.
Lucknow appears to have seen this early. In 2020 it ran an online Gita certificate course not for its students but for its own faculty. A university that teaches its teachers first has understood something about sequencing that the noise around these announcements consistently misses.
Which returns me to the question I started with. What does a pass certify? Not that the text has been read — twenty-five verses is an acquaintance, not a reading. Not that the student has been changed; no examination branch can mark that, and it would be improper to try. What a two-credit pass honestly certifies is exposure: that someone sat in a room where this material was taken seriously for a term.
I think that is worth having, and I think it is worth saying plainly that it is all it is. The text asks for something a credit sheet was never built to measure. A syllabus can put sthitaprajna on a reading list. Steadiness itself is not awarded at the end of a term; it is practised, unwitnessed, on ordinary Tuesdays, for years.
Delhi’s classroom verse list points at 3.18–19 and 3.42 — the karma-yoga core, the chapter that opens with a resignation letter. Karma-Yoga at Work: Bhagavad-gita Chapter Three for the Working Professional works through exactly that material at length. It is on the site at Rs 39.
Get Karma-Yoga at Work — Rs 39 →The essay behind this edition is on the blog, free to read.
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