kartavya

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Sanskrit कर्तव्य (kartavya).

Noun

kartavya (plural kartavyas)

1. (rare outside Hinduism) A duty, obligation, task.
   • 2017, Vasudha Dalmia, Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, Histories‎^[1], Albany: State University of New York Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 184, →ISBN:

     Tell me what my kartavya, duty, is and I shall follow it. You saved me from burning in the fire, so have the grace to tell me about it.

   • 2002, Hullasa Behera, 50 flowers from Bhagavat Gita: a solace against frightening materialism‎^[2], Delhi: Pustak Mahal, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 62, →ISBN:

     Duty and action are roughly equivalent to kartavya and karma respectively. In popular parlance, duty means what one should do; while karma is the sumtotal of what one did, does and will do. Duty is relative, local and subjective. Gita talks of karma, not of kartavya. How you perform your kartavya in the light of the standards of karma is your comprehension and appreciation of the Gita.

   • 2020, Bhimeswara Challa, The War Within - Between Good and Evil (Reconstructing Money, Morality and Mortality)‎^[3], page 491:

     The key concept here is kartavya (duty), and like other concepts such as dharma and karma, it is difficult to translate it precisely. The fact is we have so many kartavyas, or duties specific to a relationship, as a spouse, parent, family, friend, citizen, professional, social, religious, and so on. And often they are conflicting and difficult to harmonize. […] From time immemorial all great men, faced with conflicting priorities, agonized over what their kartavya was in the ever-shifting circumstances of their life. And they made hard choices, which sometimes entailed suffering of the ‘innocent’, but had they chosen a different course, they would have been guilty of not performing their kartavya. Epics are replete with examples. In the Ramayana, Rama had to abandon his pregnant wife Sita, usually revered as the incarnation of goddess Lakshmi and a personification of purity, at the altar of his kartavya as the king. Was he right? In the Mahabharata, Bhishma fought on the side of adharma or evil, as he felt that his kartavya was to honor his vow to serve the king of Hastinapura. Was he right? Life is far more complex and complicated now, the borders between right and wrong, and between caste, creed, and class are at once blurred and sharper, and our desire to discern our kartavya is far more agonizing. […] We often find that our duties and obligations to different people, entities, and institutions clash with each other, and that our cognition and faculties are inadequate to harmonize them and show the way to our kartavya.