Quite so. His understanding of the Gita was more like a symbol or an allegory of the psychological struggle within man. Quite a few interpreters, especially those influenced largely by pietistic Christian thought and modern ideas of good and bad, duty etc tend to do the same. By doing so we rob the Gita of its beauty, its strong emphasis on action, in fact all actions including on the battlefield, which gives the Gita its great pragmatic value making it conterminus with life as it unfolds in real-time. In trying to give it a purely symbolic significance we rob the Gita of its completer sense and the context in which it comes into existence. In fact the entire first chapter is dedicated to the context and if we look at the whole Divine dialogue the repeated insistence to Arjuna to take the challenge of war thrust upon him unjustly rather than escape from it is clear to any reader. This context makes the Gita unique in terms of the setting as well as its profound conclusion that yoga can and must be practiced amidst all the varied circumstances of life and not merely in a hermitage.
The second error in the understanding is to make the Gita either a gospel of violence as if its bidding Arjuna to fight is to ask us to engage in all kinds of aggression. The Gita rather encourages the cultivation of divine qualities such as kindness, non-injury, absence of anger and hate, forgiveness, etc. Nor does the Gita asks us to rigidly follow the doctrine of non-violence under all circumstances. It bids us to rise higher beyond the dualities of good and evil into the Divine Consciousness and act impelled by His Will alone. It does not seem that yogic concepts were within his grasp given his rigid outlook and certain queer moral principles.
To get a true understanding of the Gita one should read Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita that is born both from Sri Aurobindo’s deep study of the Sanatana Dharma including the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as well as his own Yoga that had led him to not only the highest divine experiences and yogic realisations but also a complete identity with Sri Krishna. Gandhi, for all his merits was at best, an apologist for non-violence which was typically of his own brand conceived by a rigid dogmatic mind. At worst he was a politician with no clear grasp on outer or inner realities who was used and hence promoted by the British for their vested interests and hence became the indirect cause of much violence perpetrated upon the Hindus. If India would have followed upon his advice it would have been a seriously weakened state. But that is a different matter on which many people have spoken. But as far as Hindu thought is concerned and especially the Gita his interpretation is as if seen with the lens of a Christian priest (not even a Christian mystic) rather than anything else.
