A Birthday Party for a Sacred Text

The Gita Jayanti and the Embodiment of God as the Book and the Book as God

Abstract

This chapter discusses Gita Jayanti and the embodiment of God as the Book and the Book as God. For over a decade, various Hindu organizations in Singapore have joined to celebrate an extraordinary series of events, called the Gita Jayanti. The term jayanti literally means “victory” or “victorious” but more usually indicates celebration of the birthday of a holy figure or a deity. Put simply, this is a birthday celebration for the Gita, a compact text that increasingly functions in the Hindu diaspora much like the Bible—a portable compendium of teachings, a deeply poetic source of individual comfort, a text to be memorized, chanted, studied.