The Gita for Children

This is the children’s Bhagavad Gita that adults keep ordering for themselves.

Roopa Pai’s project is unusual. She has not selected a few highlight verses and woven them together; she has walked through all eighteen chapters of the Gita, retelling each one in conversational, modern English, with footnotes, running asides (“if you’re wondering what this means, hang in there for two pages and Krishna explains it himself”), and the steady authorial voice of a clever older friend who has read this book many times and likes it. The book is almost three hundred pages long. It is read by middle-school students in Indian schools, by Indian-diaspora parents teaching their kids about a text they themselves have never quite gotten around to, and — increasingly — by American and British adults who tried Easwaran or Mitchell and bounced off the older translations on our own site.

What makes it work is that Pai refuses two equal and opposite failures. She does not strip away the religious framing in order to sell the Gita as “universal wisdom literature” — Krishna remains Krishna, the divine is addressed as divine, the philosophical content is not Westernized into self-help. But she also does not flatten the book into a devotional tract. Hard concepts — karma yoga, the imperishability of the self, the three guṇas, the nature of action — are taken seriously and explained at length. Where the Gita is genuinely strange or counterintuitive (chapters 11 and 17, for instance), Pai says so and explores why.

The level of address is high. Pai assumes her young readers are intelligent and patient. She is rewarded for the assumption: this is the rare children’s religious-text book that grown readers reach for after their kids are asleep.

If your child is curious about Hindu philosophy, or about why the Gita is so often quoted, or simply about a story where the most important conversation happens between two armies before a battle, start here. If you yourself have wanted to read the Gita and have never quite managed it, also start here. You will come away with the actual content of the text, presented honestly, and you will probably want to read it again.