This lecture looks at characters from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads and other literary texts in the Sanskritic canon who occupy socially marginalized positions, such as Shudras, outcastes, women, and forest-dwellers, but nevertheless play an important role in bending the arc of the epic’s moral universe towards justice. Through significant encounters with human and divine protagonists, figures like Shambuka, Shabari, Ekalavya, Kak Bhushundi and Satyakama, among others, open up possibilities of critique and resistance to a patriarchal socio-political order dominated by brahmins and kshatriyas. They breach the hegemonic discourse of dharma from within the text, where the strategic use of narrative structure as well as poetic language enables the reader to make moral judgments contrary to the dictates of caste and gender. Some of these critical openings are actively debated in the commentarial traditions. Episodes involving such characters also throw light on the contingent and dynamic nature of identity, which emerges from specific interactional contexts and turns out not to follow the rigid normative classifications of varnashrama-dharma. I will draw on Sanskrit sources, but also the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, which is composed in Awadhi and Brajbhasha.