kartavya

kartavya noun: a duty, obligation, task.

Noun

kartavya (plural kartavyas)

(Hinduism, regional) A duty, obligation, task.
- 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.2017, Vasudha Dalmia, Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, Histories, Albany: State University of New York Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 184, →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...2002, Hullasa Behera, 50 flowers from Bhagavat Gita: a solace against frightening materialism, Delhi: Pustak Mahal, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 62, →ISBN

Duty and action are roughly equivalent to kartavya and karma respectively.2002, Hullasa Behera, 50 flowers from Bhagavat Gita: a solace against frightening materialism, Delhi: Pustak Mahal, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 62...
The key concept here is kartavya (duty), and like other concepts such as dharma and karma, it is difficult to translate it precisely.2020, Bhimeswara Challa, The War Within - Between Good and Evil (Reconstructing Money, Morality and Mortality), page 491:

plural	kartavyas

Borrowed from Sanskrit कर्तव्य (kartavya).

What does kartavya mean?: Kartavya means a duty, obligation, task.
How do you use kartavya in a sentence?: Duty and action are roughly equivalent to kartavya and karma respectively.
What part of speech is kartavya?: Kartavya is a noun.
What is the plural of kartavya?: The plural of kartavya is kartavyas.

Adapted from Wiktionary: kartavya (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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