Dharma, Complicit Narrator and Decent Meaning Formation: A Subversive Reading of The Mahabharata

Abstract

This paper offers a radically subversive and secular re-reading of The Mahabharata, challenging the traditional sanctification of the epic as a moral and religious scripture and instead positioning it as a literary text shaped by ideological compromise, narrative bias, and power politics. The study seeks to develop a critical methodology for reading myths as autonomous literary narratives, deliberately separating religious reverence from philosophical and ontological inquiry. Treating supernatural figures as human agents operating within worldly power structures, the paper interrogates the dominant conception of Dharma as a fixed ethical absolute and exposes it as a strategically deployed narrative device.

Through an extensive and polemical analysis, the paper critiques the ideological construction of justice, morality, and divinity in the epic, arguing that Dharma functions less as an ethical principle and more as a justificatory tool wielded by the narrator and select elite characters—particularly Krishna, Bhishma, Drona, and Vidura—to legitimize violence, deception, and political domination. The study foregrounds the marginalization and systematic humiliation of characters such as Karna and Duryodhana, reinterpreting them as ethical, humanist figures who embody integrity, loyalty, and self-made dignity in contrast to the manipulative and partisan conduct of the so-called champions of Dharma.

The paper further examines themes of authorial complicity, narrative injustice, and poetic imbalance, highlighting how the epic suppresses alternative moral possibilities by privileging one ideological outcome. By engaging with comparative philosophy, existential thought, postcolonial critique, and cultural theory, the study dismantles the myth of divine moral authority and reframes The Mahabharata as a contested, discursive text with multiple, erasable meanings. Ultimately, the article argues for a human-centred, disinterested, and ethically detached reading of the epic—one that restores critical agency to the reader and reclaims literature from doctrinal absolutism.