Who speaks · 700 verses, four voices
Four people speak in the Gita.
And no others. One of them speaks once. Here is how the seven hundred verses divide between them, counted from the speaker recorded with each verse.
श्रीकृष्ण
Shri Krishna
The one who answers. Almost the whole of the text is his reply to one man, on one morning, between two armies.
574 verses · 82%
अर्जुन
Arjuna
The one who asks, and the one who changes. His questions are the structure of the book.
85 verses · 12%
सञ्जय
Sanjaya
The narrator. He reports a conversation happening elsewhere to a blind king who cannot see it, and he speaks the last verses of the text.
40 verses · 6%
धृतराष्ट्र
Dhritarashtra
The king who asks. He speaks one verse, the first, and never again. The rest of the Gita is the answer to it.
1 verse · 0.1%
Why these four only
The Gita is a conversation, twice removed.
Dhritarashtra asks one question. Sanjaya answers it by reporting what he is being shown of a field he is not standing on, where Arjuna and Krishna are talking. Everyone else in the Mahabharata is present here only as someone the two of them are speaking about — which is why pages on those figures belong to the epic and not to this text, and why this site does not publish them.
Common questions
How many people speak in the Bhagavad Gita?
Four, and no others: Shri Krishna, Arjuna, Sanjaya and Dhritarashtra. Every one of the 700 verses is spoken by one of them. Dhritarashtra speaks once — the opening question that sets the whole conversation going — and never again.
How many verses does Krishna speak in the Gita?
574 of the 700, on this site’s transcription. The count is taken from the speaker recorded with each verse rather than inferred from where a speaker-announcement falls, which is why published figures differ from one another by a verse or two.
Who is narrating the Bhagavad Gita?
Sanjaya. He is reporting a conversation happening elsewhere to Dhritarashtra, who cannot see it, and he speaks the last verses of the text.