Dharma Jurisprudence: Revitalizing Indian Knowledge System in Law

The Indian legal system is a palimpsest, where all the most important statutory law is written over a social frame that ignores a large number of indigenous philosophical foundations of justice. As the main concept of this composition is to explore the concept of “Dharma justice," the basic argument is that the revivification in the Indian Knowledge System (IKS) is not just an exercise in nostalgia but a need for achieving true “social justice." By differentiating it from the Western right, which is the grounded approach, from the Dharmic, which is the duty-based approach, the purpose of this paper is a conflation where the Constitution of India is interpreted through the lens of Dharma, which is not defined as just religion but as the eternal order of righteousness and cosmic balance.