धर्म dharma

The single most contested word in the epic. Debroy retains it untranslated throughout, and rightly so — dharma is not “duty” or “righteousness” or “religion,” and any of those translations sacrifices a different range of the word’s working life.

The root √dhṛ, to hold, is the key. Dharma is what holds: holds the world together (the cosmic order), holds a society together (the laws and roles), holds a person together (one’s role-bound conduct), holds a thing to its own nature (the dharma of fire is to burn). The same word does all of this work, and the epic exploits the slippage.

Several compound senses are operationally important:

• sva-dharma — one’s own dharma. The duty that follows from one’s station, family, age, and circumstance. The Gītā’s argument is built on it.
• kṣātra-dharma — the duty of a kṣatriya. Force, protection, and willingness to kill. The duty that Yudhiṣṭhira keeps trying to refuse.
• yuga-dharma — what is appropriate to the age. The Mahābhārata is set at the cusp of the Kali yuga; what was acceptable yuga-dharma earlier no longer holds.
• āpad-dharma — duty in extremity. When normal rules cannot apply — exile, war, famine — what holds? An entire sub-parva of Śānti is devoted to this.

Yudhiṣṭhira’s whole crisis is the impossibility of holding these together. He is the dharmarāja — the king of dharma — and his anguish is that every version of dharma he might honor contradicts another. The Gītā answers this for Arjuna; it does not, in the end, answer it for Yudhiṣṭhira, who walks into heaven still carrying the question.