From Epic Dharma to Domestic Ethics: Moral Negotiation in the Mahabharata and Jane Austen

Abstract

This article offers a comparative ethical reading of the Mahabharata and the novels of Jane Austen, examining how moral decision-making is negotiated across divergent narrative scales and cultural traditions. While the Mahabharata articulates dharma through epic conflict, public crisis, and collective responsibility, Austen’s fiction locates ethical reasoning within domestic spaces shaped by social convention, gendered restraint, and moral perception. Drawing on ethical criticism, feminist theory, and comparative literature, the study argues that both traditions complicate moral absolutism rather than reject it outright and instead foreground ethical uncertainty, self-reflection, and situational judgment. Focusing on women characters such as Draupadi and Austen’s heroines, the article demonstrates how ethical agency is articulated through questioning, resistance, and moral self-revision within patriarchal structures. By bringing epic dharma into dialogue with domestic ethics, the study contributes to debates in world literature ethics and highlights literature’s capacity to stage moral imagination across cultures without recourse to influence-based models.