Svadharma, “one’s own duty,” is Krishna’s answer to a specific problem: if right action depends on dharma, whose version of dharma should you follow when duties conflict? His verdict, at the close of chapter 3, is stark — better is one’s own dharma, though imperfectly performed, than another’s dharma well performed; death in one’s own dharma is better, for another’s dharma is fraught with danger (3.35). He repeats the principle almost word for word at 18.47, signaling how central it is: don’t imitate someone else’s more admirable-looking path; do the one that is actually yours. What makes svadharma harder than it first sounds is the question of where “yours” comes from. Read one way, it locks people into the social role — the varna — they were born into, which is how the verse has often been used to defend a rigid caste system. But the Gita itself complicates that reading elsewhere: at 4.13 Krishna says the four varnas were created “according to the differentiation of guna and karma” — qualities and actions — not birth alone, which is why many modern commentators, including Gandhi, argued svadharma names an inner nature and vocation rather than an inherited social station. On that reading, svadharma isn’t “stay in your caste” but something closer to “stop performing a role that isn’t authentically suited to your temperament and abilities, however impressive it looks from outside” — a claim about integrity, not hierarchy.