The most-translated Sanskrit verse in the world turns on a single word. Eight English versions between 1785 and 1897 translate it eight different ways — motive, charge, business, concern, right, and three others. The earliest extant commentary on it, Śaṅkara's bhāṣya from the ninth century, says what the word actually does in Sanskrit, and English has no equivalent for the move it makes. The sixteenth entry of the Translation-Criticism Venue, and its first in Sanskrit.
The Bhagavad Gītā, composed somewhere in the four centuries between roughly 200 BCE and 200 CE and embedded inside the Mahābhārata, has been translated into English more than three hundred times. Of its 700 verses, one is the most quoted in the world — Chapter 2, verse 47. Henry David Thoreau read it at Walden Pond in 1845, in Charles Wilkins's 1785 first English translation borrowed from Emerson. Mohandas Gandhi met it at twenty in a London bedsit in 1890, in Sir Edwin Arnold's 1885 verse Song Celestial, and made the doctrine it expresses — anasakti, non-attachment — the spine of his philosophy. J. Robert Oppenheimer read it in Sanskrit at Berkeley in the 1930s. T.S. Eliot, who had studied Sanskrit at Harvard under Charles Lanman, wove its English in his head into the third section of The Dry Salvages in 1941. It is the verse that, in English, ends up on a recovery-program wallet card.
And it turns on a single Sanskrit word. The verse's opening — karmaṇy evādhikāras te — names what Arjuna has. Eight English translators between 1785 and 1897, working with various degrees of Sanskrit and various theological agendas, rendered that thing eight different ways: as motive (Wilkins, Arnold, Judge), charge (Davies), business (Telang, Besant), concern (Sastri, after Śaṅkara), right (Chatterji). Each English word makes Krishna say a different thing.
The word in Sanskrit is अधिकार — adhikāra. In its everyday modern register it does mean right, the political-modern sense. In Pāṇini's grammar (c. fifth century BCE) it is a technical term for a heading-rule that governs subsequent rules — a kind of jurisdiction. In Mīmāṃsā (the school of Vedic ritual hermeneutics) it is the technical word for eligibility to perform a prescribed rite — what the Brāhmaṇa texts call kartavyatā, oughtness, the warrant under which a given person, at a given station, is bound to a given act. Śaṅkara, glossing this very verse in the eighth or ninth century CE, takes adhikāra in this Mīmāṃsā register, and so reads the line:
English does not have one word that holds Pāṇini's jurisdiction together with Mīmāṃsā's eligibility together with the everyday right. So every English translator has to choose one, and lose the others. The history of the verse in English is the history of which loss each translator was willing to take. This page lines up the eight earliest English translators we have public-domain texts for — every one of them from 1785 to 1897, byte-verified against its named scan — beside the Sanskrit they were rendering and beside Śaṅkara's reading of the word itself.
The whole verse, in every public-domain English translation between Wilkins (1785) and the bhāṣya-translation of Alladi Mahadeva Sastri (1897). Every line transcribed verbatim from the named scan; the rendering of adhikāra highlighted in gold in each. Read them in chronological order and watch the choice migrate: a motive Wilkins set in 1785 holds through Arnold and Judge a century later; the Sanskrit scholar Telang at Oxford (1882) breaks it with business; the Bengali theosophist Chatterji (1887), translating from his own first language, says right twice; and Sastri's English of Śaṅkara closes the circle by saying concern — the word the bhāṣya itself is glossing.
Five different words for one Sanskrit word, plus two that double up — motive (Wilkins, Arnold, Judge), charge (Davies), business (Telang, Besant), concern (Sastri), right (Chatterji). Each move is a real choice between three load-bearing registers: a psychological reading (motive — what moves you), a functional reading (business, concern, charge — what is committed to you), and a jurisdictional reading (right — what you have the authority to claim). The Sanskrit word holds all three at once, and Śaṅkara, glossing it, takes a fourth: qualification — what you are eligible for.
The śloka, broken into its grammatical pieces. Click any Devanagari word and the panel below fills with the lemma, the grammatical analysis (case, number, root), and the semantic field — the range of senses it carries in classical Sanskrit lexicons (Monier-Williams 1899; Apte 1890; Böhtlingk–Roth's St. Petersburg Wörterbuch). The gold word is adhikāra.
The verse is an anuṣṭubh śloka — four eight-syllable pādas, two pairs. It contains four parallel prohibitions, each pointing at one of four distinct things Arjuna is told to stop doing. English translators rarely preserve all four: Arnold's Song Celestial melts them into a single flowing exhortation; the Bengali Chatterji, who was raising the verse against Christian parallels, preserves each one verbatim and even calls them out twice.
A four-clause grid. KEPT = the prohibition appears as a distinct clause; MERGED = it is absorbed into another; DROPPED = it is omitted or transformed beyond recognition.
Of the eight, three flatten the verse's first pair of clauses into one generalised exhortation ("let the motive be in the deed"): Wilkins, Judge — Judge is openly Wilkins's heir — and Arnold, whose blank verse drops the fourth prohibition entirely. The four PD translators who preserve all four prohibitions are the two scholars (Davies, Telang), the native Sanskrit speaker (Chatterji), and the Theosophist working from Telang's text (Besant). Sastri preserves them because he is rendering Śaṅkara, who reads them as four.
The Bhagavad Gītā has been receiving commentary for at least twelve hundred years. The earliest commentary that survives complete — the one all later commentators, even where they disagree, are arguing with — is the Bhagavad-Gītā-Bhāṣya of Śaṅkara, the 8th–9th-century Advaita Vedāntin. Śaṅkara's gloss on this verse, in Alladi Mahadeva Sastri's 1897 English (Mysore; the only English of the bhāṣya available for the next eighty years), is the load-bearing thing this page is pointing at:
The English word Sastri reaches for is qualified. The Sanskrit Śaṅkara is glossing — adhikāra — has a technical meaning here that English exactly does not have a word for. In the Mīmāṃsā tradition Śaṅkara inherits, adhikāra-bheda is the doctrine that different people, at different stations in life, are eligible for different prescribed practices — what a person of one class is bound to do, a person of another class is not bound to do, and not because of moral choice but because of the prior structure of the rite. Śaṅkara reads Krishna here as drawing that distinction at Arjuna: Arjuna's adhikāra is for karma-yoga (the discipline of action, suitable to his station as warrior); it is not, yet, for jñāna-yoga (the discipline of knowledge, requiring renunciation). The verse is not telling Arjuna what is universally right; it is telling Arjuna what he is qualified for.
No PD English translation between Wilkins and Sastri carries this. Wilkins's "let the motive be in the deed" makes it a doctrine about motivation; Arnold's "let right deeds be thy motive" turns it into a Victorian exhortation about virtue; Chatterji's "thy right is only to action" makes it a doctrine about entitlement. Sastri's English of Śaṅkara — thy concern is with action alone — is the closest a PD English line on this page gets to the Mīmāṃsā register, and even it has to relegate the technical sense to the commentary footnote.
A vertical core sample of the verse's path through five languages and two millennia. Gold nodes are the verse itself or its first commentary; jade nodes are scholarly readers who left a written engagement with it; saffron nodes are translators; rose nodes are popular readers whose use of the verse shaped what later readers expected it to mean.
The thing the stratigraphy records is not a corruption but a translation: each English reader of the verse received it through a translator working from a specific lexicon, and the lexicon's gravity pulled adhikāra toward the receiver language's nearest word. The Mīmāṃsā sense, the one Śaṅkara is glossing, has no nearest word in English; so it lifts off, diffusely, into the apparatus.
The verifier in your browser, recomputing in real time against the embedded sources. Every PD English line on this page is here byte-checked against the paragraph this page has loaded from the named scan; the Sanskrit is checked against the Wikisource Besant 4th-edition Devanagari; Śaṅkara's bhāṣya quotation is checked against the Sastri 1897 djvu. If any line on the page departs from the named source, the box below turns red.