Women’s empowerment in India cannot be understood only through contemporary legislation or through measures of income and education. It also requires attention to the cultural vocabularies through which women’s duties, respectability, agency and social worth have historically been defined. This article examines that relationship through a connected reading of selected women’s narratives in the Ramayana and Mahabharata and the contemporary service interventions of Sewa Bharti. The article asks how the movement from historically gendered expectations of women’s duty and honour to present-day programmes of education, livelihood, health, digital literacy and community participation changes the meaning of empowerment, and what remains unresolved when empowerment is not accompanied by meaningful access to rights and justice. Sewa Bharti is the principal contemporary case. Its publicly available materials are examined alongside scholarship on seva, feminist theories of gender and symbolic power, and contemporary Indian criminal-law sources. The article does not assume that epic narratives directly cause present-day gender practices, nor does it treat Sewa Bharti’s organisational claims as independent evidence of outcomes. Instead, it identifies continuities and transformations in the social conditions within which women exercise agency. The legal discussion focuses on the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, judicial rejection of the two-finger test, restrictions on the use of sexual history, credibility, consent and honour, and the constitutional protection of women’s autonomy. The article argues that empowerment has moved from a predominantly normative language of duty and social role toward a multidimensional language of capability, participation and rights, but the transition remains incomplete. Sewa Bharti’s programmes provide an important contemporary site for studying this transition because they combine service, community, skills and socialisation. Their significance for gender justice therefore lies not in assuming that service automatically produces liberation, but in examining whether service expands women’s economic, informational, social and institutional capacity to define and pursue their own interests.