In his new book, Gurcharan Das turns to the Mahabharata in order to answer the question, ‘why be good?’, and discovers that the epic’s world of moral haziness and uncertainty is closer to our experience as ordinary human beings than the narrow and rigid positions that define most debatein this fundamentalist age of moral certainty.

The Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma—in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero falters, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. The epic’s characters are flawed, but their incoherent experiences throw light on our familiar dilemmas.