Rearticulating Dharma: Just Sustainabilities and the Bees Quarter in Amish Tripathi’s <i>Ram Chandra Series</i>

The Bees Quarter episode in Amish Tripathi’s <i>Ram Chandra Series</i> rearticulates dharma by relocating it from a transcendent cosmic mandate to a framework enacted through spatial and procedural ethics. Traditionally understood as a sustaining principle of moral and social order, dharma in Tripathi’s narrative is reconfigured through the spatial reorganization of Mithila, where environmental vulnerability and infrastructural design shape the conditions of ethical governance. Interpreting this transformation through the framework of just sustainabilities, the article argues that the episode reconfigures dharma not as a transcendent principle but as a practice grounded in resource equity, institutional responsibility, and the consistent application of law. The crisis surrounding the Battle of the Bees Quarter and Ram’s subsequent self-exile further dramatizes a dharmic dilemma between sovereign authority and procedural justice, foregrounding tensions between power and legitimacy. Read through this lens, Tripathi’s retelling situates dharma within contemporary debates on sustainability and justice, reframing it as a normative response to ecological precarity and institutional fragility.