Arvind Sharma is Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University, Canada. He has held fellowships at the Center for the Study of World Religions, the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life, and the Center for Business and Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, and at the Brookings Institute. He also received a Maxwell Fellowship and was elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. His publications include Hinduism and Human Rights (2004) and Hinduism On Its Own Terms (2016). He is also the general editor of the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions (2017).
Arvind Sharma has been a member of the faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University since 1987. He has held fellowships at the Center for the Study of World Religions, the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life, and the Center for Business and Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, and at the Brookings Institute. He also received a Maxwell Fellowship and was elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. He is the author of Are Human Rights Western? (2006) and Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology (2005).

This pioneering work examines the existing understanding of Hinduism in relation to human rights discourse.
Written by a leading Hindu scholar, Hindu Narratives on Human Rights is organized around specific rights, such as the right to own property, the rights of children, women's rights, and animal rights. Within these categories and in light of the questions they raise, the book provides a guided tour of Hindu narratives on ethics, ranging from the famous religious epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, to various forms of secular literature drawn from almost a thousand years of Indic civilization.
The realization that Hindu ethical discourse is narrative rather than propositional is a relatively recent one. Hence, the prevailing tendency in the West has been to overlook it in the context of the discussion of human rights. This book was written to correct that oversight. It shows that the presence of the universal in the particular in Hindu stories is a key to understanding Hindu thinking about human rights-and it indicates ways in which Hindu ethical discourse can interact creatively with modern human rights discourse.

Introduction
1. Right to Justice
2. Does Hinduism Possess a Concept of Rights?
3. Freedom of Religion
4. Hinduism and the Right to Property
5. Hinduism and the Right to Livelihood
6. Hinduism and the Rights of Children
7. Marriage and the Rights of Women: Sakuntala
8. Marriage and the Rights of Women: Savitri
9. Marriage and the Right of a Women to Choose Her Husband
10. Animal Rights and Hinduism
11. Do Hindu Women Possess the Right to Study the Vedas?
12. The Rights of the Child and the Right to Parenthood: A Case Study
13. A Discussion of Law and Morality from Ancient India
14. Hinduism and Egalitarianism
15. Hinduism and the Rights of the Dead
16. Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Alexander's Invasion of India
Appendix I Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Appendix II Hinduism and Human Rights: A Critical Excursus
Notes
Index
About the Author