My research project aims to trace the social histories of the Bhagavad Gītā from the centuries just prior to colonialism in North India to the 18th and the 19th centuries. I hypothesize that the Gītā's reading communities underwent a dramatic shift during this period and in this region, enabled by two primary developments. First, the development of non-dualist philosophical traditions in Sanskrit and scholarly lineages which produced sub-commentaries on canonical philosophical texts; second, the emergence of new protocols of adaptation of Sanskrit texts into the North Indian vernaculars. While the Bhagavad Gītā has been widely studied, and is understood to be one of the most widely-read Hindu texts in contemporary India, the histories of its readership and transmission at this time have remained under-examined. I propose in this project to trace the Bhagavad Gītā's social histories during this important and understudied period in its intellectual life, through analyzing a set of texts that I argue were actively engaged in negotiating the place of the Gītā in the canon of philosophical non-dualism, and through an examination of manuscript colophons and paratextual materials that I hypothesize will reveal the widening social worlds of texts like the Gītā. This project will, additionally, contribute to discussions on scholasticism and popular textual production and reception, and interrogate the relationship between these in the early modern North Indian context.