In the supplied attestations, svajana ("one's own people, kinsmen") denotes the relatives and kin whom Arjuna beholds arrayed for battle and whom he recoils from killing. All four loci occur in Arjuna's first-canto lament (despondency before battle): the kinsmen are seen standing intent on combat (1.28), their slaying is judged to bring no good (1.31), no happiness (1.36), and is recognized as a grave act the warriors are poised to commit out of greed for kingdom and pleasure (1.44). The term is consistently affective and relational, marking the moral conflict of fighting against one's own. At 1.36 it stands in apposition with svabāndhava ("one's own kinsmen"), reinforcing the kinship sense.
Senses
The reading surface. A later ingestion attaches a locus to a settled sense, or proposes a new one (dashed) for human triage — it never rewrites settled prose.
1 · One's own people / kinsmen, specifically the relatives Arjuna sees arrayed and intent on b…settledadded v1
One's own people / kinsmen, specifically the relatives Arjuna sees arrayed and intent on battle.
smṛti (epic-philosophical)
bhagavadgita:1.28
2 · One's own kinsmen, whose slaying in battle Arjuna foresees as bringing no good.settledadded v1
One's own kinsmen, whose slaying in battle Arjuna foresees as bringing no good.
smṛti (epic-philosophical)
bhagavadgita:1.31
3 · One's own people (glossed in apposition with svabāndhava), whose killing Arjuna asks could…settledadded v1
One's own people (glossed in apposition with svabāndhava), whose killing Arjuna asks could not make them happy.
smṛti (epic-philosophical)
bhagavadgita:1.36
4 · One's own kinsmen, whom the warriors are poised (udyata) to slay out of greed for the plea…settledadded v1
One's own kinsmen, whom the warriors are poised (udyata) to slay out of greed for the pleasures of kingship.
smṛti (epic-philosophical)
bhagavadgita:1.44
Attestation concordance — tier 2, every locus
Append-only. Grows by locus as texts arrive; stays one collapsed table so the senses remain the reading surface.
All 4 attestations ▾
Locus
Witness
Tradition
Stratum
Snippet
bhagavadgita:1.28
Bhagavad Gītā (mūla)
smṛti (epic-philosophical)
mula
dṛṣṭvemān svajanān kṛṣṇa yuyutsuṃ samupasthitam | sīdanti mama gātrāṇi mukhaṃ ca pariśuṣyati ||28|| vepathuś ca śarīre me romaharṣaś ca jāyate | gāṇḍī
bhagavadgita:1.31
Bhagavad Gītā (mūla)
smṛti (epic-philosophical)
mula
na ca śreyo 'nupaśyāmi hatvā svajanam āhave | na kāṅkṣe vijayaṃ kṛṣṇa na ca rājyaṃ sukhāni ca ||31||
aho bata mahat pāpaṃ kartuṃ vyavasitā vayam | yad rājyasukhalobhena hantuṃ svajanam udyatāḥ ||44||
Editions & provenance
v1Bhagavad Gītā mūla (ch. 1) — +4 loci 4 sense(s) drafted from 4 Gītā locus/loci.
Caveats
All four attestations are from the mūla (root text) of the Bhagavad Gītā, first canto; no commentary loci (Gauḍapāda or Śaṅkara) were supplied, so no commentarial positions can be attributed.
The corpus here is a single text/tradition (Bhagavad Gītā mūla); the senses reflect only Arjuna's first-canto usage and should not be generalized beyond it without further evidence.
All occurrences cluster in Arjuna's despondency speech; the term's usage is therefore uniformly affective/relational across the supplied loci and shows no semantic split.
At 1.36 svajana appears alongside the synonym svabāndhava; the apposition is internal to the supplied text and is the basis for the kinship gloss.