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Abstract This book examines how characters in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana debate questions of justice. The epics depict discrimination based on social categories such as gender, varṇa, species, age, and disability, and important characters often support discrimination. But the epics also criticize oppression in two ways—first, philosophically, through debates, and second, practically, through characters whose actions demonstrate that discrimination is wrong. Many characters in the epics (including men and women from all varṇas and those later considered outside the varṇa system) repeatedly proclaim the principle of sameness (samatva). All bodies are made of the same matter and are vulnerable, all consciousnesses are essentially the same, and all categories constantly change, and are ultimately unreal. This book considers debates about friendship and the family, about the meaning or non-meaning of varna and gender, about male–female interactions and the questions of consent, sex-change, gender-crossing, disability, and masculinities. The dharmas of singleness, marriage, friendship, parenting, and rulership, especially in relation to violence and non-violence, are explored, and Yudhishthira’s idea of complete non-violence is critiqued as impossible and undesirable. The book argues that kindness to animals is at the heart of the epics’ idea of universal dharma. Non-cruelty to animals is a dharma available to all humans, regardless of status. Approaching the epics as bhakti texts, the book concludes with an extended study of how bhakta poets of all persuasions, from Kabir and Raidas to Jnaneshwara, Rahim, and Tulsidas, draw their philosophical frameworks and ideas from the epics.
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