Set among the chapter's statements about divine action is one short verse that has been fought over for a century and a half. The fourfold order, it says, was created by Krishna according to the distribution of quality and work; and though he is its author, he should be known as the actionless one who does not change.
Traditional commentary reads the verse as establishing the social orders on divine authority. Quality and work describe what each order is characterised by, and since a person's inherited nature is understood to determine both, the arrangement is inherited in practice. The chapter's own later verses on acting without attachment then apply within whatever station one occupies.
Reformers from the nineteenth century onward read the same words in the opposite direction. The verse grounds the orders in quality and work, they argue, not in birth, so a person's order follows from their disposition and their occupation and can be neither assigned nor confined by descent. On that reading the verse is a critique of hereditary caste using the Gita's own authority, and it was deployed exactly that way by figures across the reform and independence movements.
The atlas does not pick between them, and records the point as disputed. The Sanskrit will bear both, which is precisely why the argument has lasted. What is worth adding is that the disagreement is not a modern intrusion into a settled text. Commentators before the colonial period already differed on how tightly quality and work were bound to birth, and the verse has been a site of argument for far longer than the argument's current terms have existed.