This dissertation investigates a significant but little-studied aspect of one of Hinduism’s best-known texts, the Bhagavad Gītā: its textual and interpretive life in Northern Indian Advaita traditions, in Sanskrit and Hindi, in the period between 1400-1800 CE. I examine a set of interpretive works on the Gītā, written and read between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries CE, which engaged in different ways with non-dualist traditions of reading and interpreting the text. These are: Śrīdhara Svāmī's Subodhinī [Source of Clear Understanding], a Sanskrit commentary composed around the fourteenth or fifteenth century; Madhusūdana Sarasvatī's Gītāgūḍhārthadīpikā [The Illumination of the Hidden Meaning of the Gītā], a sixteenth-century Sanskrit commentary likely composed in Varanasi; Theghnāth's Gītā Bhāṣā [Vernacular Gītā, or Commentary on the Gītā], composed in vernacular verse at the Gwalior court in the sixteenth century; and the Paramānanda Prabodha [Understanding of the Highest Bliss], a vernacular commentary attributed to Nājar Ānandrām, an official in the eighteenth-century Bikaner court.

This dissertation explores processes of textual canonization and their relationship to early modern modes of exegetical writing through this set of early modern interpretive works. In premodern South Asia, the Sanskrit commentary exemplified the act of scholastic, religious reading; it was a genre which was hyper-conscious of its place and predecessors in its circumscribed traditions of reading. The commentary mediated canon-creation, fixed meaning through negotiating prior and opposing interpretations, and imbued the text with authority while simultaneously keeping it in a state of constant dialogic confrontation, always exhaustive but never completely stable. While commentaries and their development as philosophical or literary genres have been theorized both in premodern traditions and modern scholarship, we lack an account of how these constantly shifting modes of interpretation themselves enabled texts to emerge into popular religious spheres, and as guides to conduct.

I argue that the project of recovering the interactions between different forms of textual exegesis during this period is central to our understanding of canon-creation in premodern and modern India. The question of how individual interpreters framed their works, in the context of the interpretive resources they chose and which were available to them, is central to this dissertation’s analysis, as well as what interpreters found they were able to do with commentaries, translations, and modes of exegesis more generally. The commentary was a significant mode within which authors could locate their interpretations within traditions of reading the text, and sufficiently capacious that they could bring a range of new genres with them. The question of formal choices in genre and hermeneutic approach as relevant to the trajectories of scholastic thought in early modern North India, then, implicates the ways in which commentary as genre was itself open to change. As I have suggested in this dissertation, accounts of the canonization of the Bhagavad Gītā, and its status in the early modern period, must also account for processes and genealogies at various scales—of the text, the pedagogue, the court, the specific instance of transmission, and the many interpretive communities that existed in early modern North India.