Q1.
Are concepts of rights and duties entirely modern? In the case of India, scholars have often debated this question.
Answer
No — the idea of duty is very old in India; what is modern is the idea of a right that everyone holds equally and can enforce. The chapter sets out three older terms.
| Term | What it meant | How it differs from today’s idea |
|---|---|---|
| Dharma | Often translated as ‘duty’, although it has a much wider range of meaning, including that which is beneficial to people and to the society | Wider than duty — it covers what is good for society, not only what a person owes |
| ṛiṇa (‘debt’) | The debts we owe to devatās, ancestors and parents, gurus, fellow humans, and Nature, by the very fact of being born; the duty of ‘repaying’ those debts naturally follows | More than today’s sense of duty — it also creates deep connections with family, society, nature and beyond |
| adhikāra | The word for ‘rights’ in many Indian languages today; but in ancient texts it referred to capacity, competence or authority — if you were competent to perform a certain task in society, that gave you the right to do so | Rights were not guaranteed universally as they are now in our Constitution — they depended on one’s capacity |
Why the chapter calls ‘rights’ the more ambiguous concept: a duty is something you owe, and you can owe it in any society, ancient or modern. A right in the modern sense is something you hold against everyone else, simply for being human — and that universal claim is what the older adhikāra did not carry. The chapter notes one exception: the concept of dharma implicitly gave everyone the right to justice — in theory at least. That last phrase is doing careful work; the chapter is not claiming the theory was always honoured in practice.
It is worth noticing that even in our own Constitution, duties came late. When the Indian Constitution came into effect in 1950 it had no Fundamental Duties. They were added in 1976 by an amendment — 10 duties in Article 51A (Part IV-A) — and in 2002 an 11th was added, that parents or guardians must make sure children between the ages of 6 and 14 years get an education.
Tip for the exam: the safe form of this answer is “neither entirely modern nor entirely ancient”. Duty is ancient; universal, enforceable, equally-held rights are modern.