Sanskrit
मां हि पार्थ व्यपाश्रित्य येऽपि स्युः पापयोनयः । स्त्रियो वैश्यास्तथा शूद्रास्तेऽपि यान्ति परां गतिम् ॥
māṃ hi pārtha vyapāśritya ye 'pi syuḥ pāpayonayaḥ striyo vaiśyās tathā śūdrās te 'pi yānti parāṃ gatim
Translation
They who take refuge with Me, O Partha, though of the womb of sin, women, Vaishyas, even Shûdras, they also tread the highest path.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
One of the Gita’s most historically significant verses, and it deserves neither overstatement nor dismissal. Grouping women, vaishyas, and shudras under pāpa-yonayaḥ (“born of a womb of sin,” or lower birth) reflects, rather than challenges, the strict varna hierarchy the text assumes elsewhere — the phrase itself encodes the era’s caste and gender assumptions. What’s genuinely striking is the claim layered on top of it: that devotion to Krishna is sufficient, by itself, for any of them to reach parāṃ gatim, the highest goal, with no ritual or caste qualification attached — a route to liberation the orthodox Vedic path of verses 20-21 never offered them at all. Read against its own context, that’s a real and historically consequential opening, not a statement of parity; it builds a devotional bypass around the hierarchy rather than dismantling it, which verse 33’s “how much more, then, for brahmins” immediately shows is still calibrated to that same hierarchy.