Rama is celebrated as one of the best adherents to the Hindu expectation for an individual to follow rules of dharma. Use your best abilities to try to discover in what ways contemporary Indian laws relate to dharma. What laws in India today relate to caste? Is there any connection between religion and legislation in India? What is it? Has it always been as strong as (or as weak as) that same connection today? How can you tell?
You’ve gone outside of materials from our class to learn something more about materials in our class. This is the spirit of research. For this inquiry, your research doesn’t need to be groundbreaking, and it doesn’t need to meet the strictest bounds of scholarship. In other words, I’m not expecting you to make a discovery that nobody else in the world has made, and I’m ok with you bringing back a lesson derived from a few Wikipedia pages. Having said that, I’m still expecting you to use only sources that are credible. Avoid conspiracies that have little basis in evidence.
Your efforts add value to the discussion. This might seem a tricky thing to understand. Basically, the work that you’re doing by discovering things and reporting back on them needs to show that you’ve done more than search for the “answer” to a problem and then reported that answer. You will look at information from two or more web pages (at least) and summarize your findings. You will put everything in your own words; don’t copy and paste. You will be responsible for providing order to the thoughts and ideas you report on; don’t just follow someone else’s outline and change the words. I suggest jotting down notes while scrolling through different web pages, keeping track as you independently discover the things you’ll write about.
You will show authority by providing links to the sources you’ve used. I’m not asking you to build a formal bibliography or a list of Works Cited in MLA format. At the end of your write up, just include a list of the URLs to the web pages you used to discover your material.
