Fixed this with 2 things:
Initial errors were
Unknown directive
. I was trying to add math directives to the template to load latex, but then realized that docutils 0.10 supports math directives by default. Hence just upgraded to docutils-0.10.After that the error was that I was seeing the latex math code enclosed in
\begin{equation*}
and\end{equation*}
tags. Comparing the output of rst2html and django template filter, I realized that the MathJax javascript needed to do latex is not added by django restructuredtext filter. So, in my template file section, I manually added:<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML"></script>
Now, it works!