Tava tattwam na janami

kidrishosi maheswara
yadrashosi mahadeva
tadrashaya namo namah.
(I do not know the truth of your nature and who you are-O great God my salutations to your
true nature).1
Shasi Tharoors The Great Indian Novel, published at the end of the penultimate decade of
the 20th century, (24th August, 1989), retold the political history of post-independence India,
through characters, events, ideas and images from the epic Mahabharata. The novel initiated
the practice of looking back at the rich treasure of Indian mythology, preserved in the
Puranas, the Vedas, Upanishads and the two great epics, Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and
recasting the ancient stories in prose narratives in English, a language which has developed
new idiom and syntax in post-colonial India.
At the beginning of the new millennium, in 2003, Ashok Banker chose to recreate the
Ramayana, in a series of fictitious narratives, beginning with the Prince of Ayodhya. Ashwin
Sanghi, Devdutt Pattanaik, AmisTripathi,Christopher C.Doyle,followed Banker, modernized
the myths by placing them in modern settings, and retold them in modern Indian English
prose, to which the newly English educated Indian readers could relate and come close. In the
history of Indian writing in English, mytho-fictionor fiction based on mythology has
become a full-fledged genre, and is a postcolonial phenomenon. A brief survey of this
contemporary literary oeuvre is essential to form a perspective, against which Amish
Tripathis Shiva Trilogy-The Immortals of Meluha, The Secret of the Nagas and The Oath of
the Vayuputras, which is the subject of this present study, can be critically judged.
As mentioned before, Ashok Banker had popularised the art of modernising the myths
in Indian fictional writing, a practice initiated by Sashi Tharoor in his The Great Indian
Novel. Apart from retelling the Ramayana in an eight book series, Ashok Banker has gleaned
love stories from the Mahabharata and transcreated them into modern fictions, which include
Ganga and Shantanu,Satyabati and Shantanu,and Shakuntala and Dushyanta.Devdutt
Pattanaik writes and lectures extensively on the relevance of sacred stories, symbols and
rituals in modern life. He attempts to unlock the mysteries of Shiva in his book, 7 Secrets of
Shiva, decodes Hindu mythology in Myth=Mithya, retells queer stories in The Man Who Was
a Woman,and the Pregnant King.In his Shiva:An Introduction,Pattanaik retells many familiar
and unfamiliar stories of Shiva.Ramesh Menon has given modern renderings of the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and has vividly retold the ShivaPurana for todays reader in
his book Siva the SivaPurana Retold.Ashwin Sanghi in The Krishna Key recreates the story
of Krishna in the format of a historical crime thriller. It attempts to depict Krishna as a
historical character rather than a mythological one.Christopher C.Doyle in his two books The
Mahabharata Secret and The Mahabharata Quest transports the readers into a fascinating
world where ancient secrets buried in legends blend with science and history to create a
gripping story.Anand Neelakantan takes the perspective of Ravana while retelling the
Ramayana in his fiction Asura:Tale of the Vanquished.In his other two novels, Ajaya the roll
of the dice, and The Rise of Kali,Neelakantan tells stories from the great epic Mahabharata.
Rajiv G.Menon projects the king the gods Indra as the protagonist of his novel
1 Pushpadantapraneetam Shiva Mahimna Stotram, Stabkabachmala, Ed.Dr.Dhyanesh

Narayan Chakraborty,Girija Library,Kolkata,2012, 2nd Edition ,pp.39-48.

Thundergod.The Ascendance of Indra.Other important novels in this genre of mythology

based fiction in Indian-English are Aditya Iyengars The Thirteenth Day, covering three
crucial days and nights during the Kurukshetra war,The Seal of Surya-the Legend of Ikshvaku
by Amritanshu Pandeyn,Pradyumna Son of Krishna by Usha Narayanan and the Scion of
Ikhsvaku-the story of Lord Ram by Amish Tripathi.
Contemporary writings by women have also explored Indian mythology, and while
recasting them into fictions, the women novelists have created a gendered version of feminine
reality, which was overlooked before in the patriarchal domination of mythological
narration.Amruta Patils AdiParva,Churning of the Ocean,Anuja Chandramoulis Arjuna and
Kamdeva the God of Desire,Chitra Banerjee Diva Karunis The Palace of Illusions,Kavita
Kanes Sitas Sister and Karnas Wife bring to the contemporary readers a host of women
characters-Uruvi(Karnas wife),Urmila(Sitas sister),Rati(Kamdevas wife)and Draupadi-who
register their strong presence and establish their definite identity within the male dominated
order in the world of Indian myth.
It is also very interesting to note that not only in Indian English literature, but also in
other literatures of the world, there has been in the twenty first century a trend to rediscover
old myths and retell them in contemporary setting. As an instance it can be noted that
Canongate Books Ltd, Edinburgh,Scotland,has assigned some of the worlds finest writers to
write for its The Mythsseries,each of whom has retold a myth in a way with which a modern
reader can relate. Beginning with Jeanette Wintersons Weight(The Myth of Atlas and
Heracles)in 2005,the books that have followed in the series till 2011 are-The Penelopoid(The
Myth of Penelope and Odysseus)by Margaret Atwood, Lions Honey(The Myth of Samson)by
David Grossman, The Helmet of Horror(The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur)by Victor
Pelvin,The Fire Gospel(The Myth of Prometheus)by Michel Faber and The End of the
Gods(The Myth of Ragnarok)by A.S.Byatt.
Born in 1974, a banker turned author Amish Tripathis first book of the Shiva trilogy
the Immortals of Meluha was published in 2010.It was followed by the second part The
Secret of the Nagas in 2011 .The Oath of the Vayuputras concluded the series in 2013.The
protagonist of these three novels is Shiva, a character based on the still popular god in Hindu
mythology, who is as old as dawn and as young as yesterday. As Pushpadanta,a devotee of
Shiva,who was a Gandharva king, says in his hymn to Shiva-nama varisthaya trinayana
yabisthaya ca nama(I bow down to you three-eyed god, who is the oldest and also the
youngest.)2
Many aspects of Shiva point to the fact that he was conceived during the Palaeolithic
period, when men lived in hunting societies and had not undergone an agricultural revolution.
He is an archer par excellence, associates with animals and lords over them, loves solitude
and mountain caves, even dresses in animal skins of a tiger and an elephant. He is a relic of
the hunting period. So when the early Vedic poet, visualises that point of time, when their
2 Pushpadantapraneetam

Shiva Mahimna Stotram, loc cit.

High God, Prajapati, the Creator had just created Usas, the Dawn, who separated the first
night and day, when time was about to begin, and drawn by her loveliness, desired her, the
gods remembered the Wild Hunter from the primordial past, who had no name, and assigned
him the task of putting an end to the hot pursuit of Prajapati of Usas who fled away from him
in fear. She became a female antelope, and he turning himself into a male stag pursued her.
Evoked in the consciousness of the gods, who watched the scene in horror, the hunter god
with an arrow shot from his bow hit the target-the incestuous father Prajapati.When he was
approaching the pair with his bow and arrow he was howling, and Prajapati turning around
saw him, and addressing the archer in fear said, I make you the lord of animals (pasunam
pati).Dont kill me.Thus his name is Pasupati, lord of Animals.3 In this connection we can
state that some seals of the Indus valley civilization bear the figure of a seated yogi,
surrounded by animals who can be identified as a lord of animals or of forest land and
foreshadows Shiva, who is also known as Pasupati.
In the next step of human progress, in the Neolithic period, human beings invented
agriculture. Giving up hunting, men learnt to plant and harvest crops and domesticate
animals. In the words of Karen Armstrong, We can sense the awe, delight and terror of these
pioneering farmers in the mythology they developed as they adapted to their new
circumstances, fragments of which were preserved in the mythical narratives of later
cultures.4 The powerful wild hunter god, Pasupati, also became Vastospati,the god who
guards the dwelling, the sacrificial altar, and the farmland or khsetra.He also protects the
people and their cattle from famine and pestilence, as their guardian ,and becomes
Baidyanath the possessor of all remedies for all sorts of ills and ailments. As Vastospati he is
also the guardian of the sacred order of the cosmos; he watches over all rhythms and rites of
life.5 It was during this period, that the hunter god, the god of the sacred site and sacred order
merged with an already existing god in the Vedic pantheon-Rudra, the god of storm, and
father of the Maruts.
When human beings began to build cities, Pasupati, Vastospati, became the lord of cities like
Varanasi, Chidambaram or Madurai. With the beginning of the historical age, the gods had
begun their retreat from the human world, but the Lord of Varanasi stayed for ever on earth in
the sacred city, at the bend of the river which was also sacred to the people of India-the
Ganges. In the Satapatha Brahmana,( SB,1.7.3.1.), it is mentioned that when the other gods
attained heaven by ritual means,Rudra remained behind, here on earth.Rudra cried aloud: I
have been left behind: they are excluding me from the sacrifice!.6So the Indians saw the city
of Varanasi as a place where they could encounter the divine. As in his hymn to Shiva Ravana
says:
3 Kramrisch, Stella, The Presence of Siva, pp.3-7, Princeton University Press, United

Kingdom, Mythos paperback edition, 1992.

4 Armstrong, Karen, A Short History of Myth, p. 41,Canongate books Ltd.,First published in

Great Britain,2005.
5 Kramrisch,op cit,p.8.

kadanilimpanirjharinikunjakotare basan
bimuktadurgati sada sirasthamanjalim bahan
bimuktalolalochanalalamvalalagnaka
Shiveti mantramuchcharan kada sukhi vabamyaham
(I yearn for that day, when I will reside in that sacred place on the bend of the river
Ganga,free from all evil thoughts, I will place my joined palms on my head, and I will be
happy chanting the name of Shiva.)7
Invention of writing gave enduring literary expression to the sacred stories, rituals and icon of
Shiva, and the god in all his glory was celebrated in the Vedas, Upanishads, the epics
Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas .While speaking of Shiva Sukumari
Bhattacharji writes: ...in the Siva-,Sivamaha-,Skanda and Devibhagavata-purana,we have
the picture of a god belonging to the supreme triad worshipped all over India, ruling all
spheres of life in his theological and every day ritual aspects. This god does not grow or
change in essence after he has received final shape in the epics.8
As recounted in the Puranas, Shiva is twice married, to Sati, who died at the sacrificial altar
of her father Dakhsa, and to Parvati, the daughter of Himalaya, the king of mountains.Parvati
turned into Kali, the dark skinned goddess, when Kaushiki cloned herself from her cells
(kosh) and went to war with Sumbha and Nisumbha, two demon brothers, who were
disturbing the gods.Ganesh and Kartik were the sons of Shiva, and Parvati was their
mother.Kartik was nurtured by the Plaiedes,known as Krittika in Hindu astrology, which also
has a place for the ancient god Shiva in the night sky. He is Sirius,the Mrigavyadha,hunter of
the antelope Prajapati,who is the star Mrigasira(Orion),his daughter Usas is Rohini
(Aldebaran),and the arrow became the constellation Trikanda(the belt of Orion).The story is
written in the stars, for the movement of Prajapati toward his daughter was observed in the
sky when the sun was about to rise.9.Shiva also fought with and killed many demons,
Andhaka, Gajasur, Jalandhar among them, but his most important feat was the destruction of
the three cities which sheltered the three demon brothers-Bidyunmali,Tarakakhsya and
Birjyaban.
Centring round the cult of Shiva new religious and philosophical systems emerged, most
important of which were Tantra and Yoga.Shiva is known as Yogishwar(Lord of the Yoga).He
is also the cosmic dancer(Nataraja),a perfect singer who has a few raga, or classical musical
compositions, like raga Bhairav dedicated to him. He is also a preceptor of philosophical
6 Chakravarti ,Mahadev,The concept of Rudra-Siva through the Ages,p.16,Motilal
Banarsidass,Delhi,1986.
7 Ravanakrita-Shivatandava-stotram,op cit,pp.61-65.
8 Bhattacharji, Sukumari, Rudra from the Vedas to the Mahabharata, Myths Vedic Buddhist

and Brahmanical, pp.92-125, Progressive Publishers, Kolkata, July, 2002.

9 Kramrisch,op cit,p.24.

discourses and a tactful ambassador.Kaushiki had sent him to Sumbha and Nisumbha at the
peak of war with a proposal of peace and so got the name Shibaduti.He is easily pleased and
has countless devotees some of whom have composed beautiful hymns and psalms to please
him. Shiva is also worshipped in the form of a phallic stone or Shivalinga.As there is never a
single orthodox version of a myth, the stories of Shiva have varied versions in traditional
mythology and his character thus gets summed up in sets of binary opposites. He is the god of
life (Mritunjay) and also the god of death and destruction (Bhabanashanam).He is the healer
and also brings pestilence. He is an ascetic and also an erotic.He is male and also female,
both at the same time (Ardhanarishvara).He displays a complex network of features that
resists every attempt to derive a univocal pattern. In the words of J.Bruce Long: But Rudra
must be viewed as a deity whose nature is quintessentially bi-polar and ambivalent. He is the
god from whom all the opposites spring into dynamic manifestation (life and death, good and
evil, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness).He is the divine agent of both procreation and
dissolution, throughout the natural and social spheres. He is the divine source and cause of
both illness and health, poverty and wealth, terror and bliss. When he manifests himself by
means of his auspicious and sublime form (siva-,aghora-tanu),he provides all the energies
required by living beings for survival and growth. When on the other hand, he operates by
means of his terrible and demonic aspects (bhima-,ghora-tanu),he removes living creatures
by withholding those same life-supports.10
It is such a multifarious god, who encompasses a wealth of traits, powers and activities that
Amish Tripathy has chosen as the main character of his three novels. It is the story of a quest,
the quest of a man with a mission, who becomes a god by his exemplary character and
activities.Shiva, the protagonist of Amish Tripathys trilogy is riddled with the question,
What is evil?,and finally finds out that it is good that turns into evil, because evil has no
separate existence of its own. As in India of the time in which Shiva exists (1900B.C.), it is
the somras, manufactured by the scientists of Meluha in huge quantity in their factory on
Mandar mountain and in an underground facility in their capital city Devagiri, because
though providing long life, healthy existence and cure from various ailments, the toxic
substance from the wastes of somras production is causing deformed babies, barrenness in
women in Meluha itself and fatal disease in Branga, where, the toxic waste deposited in Tibet
in the lake from which the river Brahmaputra origins, is carried down by the river which
flows through the land bringing death. The quest ends with the destruction of evil or the end
of Devagiri and the somras factory.
Amish Tripathys skill as a novelist depends on the fact that his protagonist can be
identified with Shiva of Hindu mythology but at the same time he becomes a human being
who can be located in history, and his way of attaining godhood can be traced. It is a process
of scaling down from the state of divinity and then again rising up to godhood. Shiva
becomes convincing as a remake of the composite god of traditional Hindu mythology.
Snippets of mythology, pseudo-science, facts of history blend together to form a new
10 Bruce Long J.,Rudra as an embodiment of divine ambivalence in the Satarudriya

Stotram,Experiencing Siva,Encounters with a Hindu Deity, pp.103-128,Ed(s).Fred

W.Clothey and J.Bruce Long,Manohar Publications,New Delhi,1983.

montage in which we fascinatingly watch the process of an ancient god being reduced to a
man and then being transformed into a god.
But myth is not meant for entertainment. It strengthens our faith in an invisible but
more powerful reality which is called the world of the gods. The divine realm is richer,
stronger and more enduring than our own. In the words of Karen Armstrong: The myths
gave explicit shape and form to a reality that people sensed intuitively. They told them how
the gods behaved, not out of idle curiosity or because these tales were entertaining, but to
enable men and women to imitate these powerful beings and experience divinity
themselves.11 A sacred story or myth is always associated with rituals. As for an instance in
the month of Shravan(July-August) devotees make a bee line to the Shiva temples to pour
water on Shivalingam because myth relates that it was in this month during the churning of
the ocean the terrible poison halahal or kalkut came up, and Shiva drank the poison to save
the world which otherwise would have been destroyed. But the poison caused terrible pain to
the god, and all the other gods poured water on him to cool his pain. The ritual of pouring
water on the Shivalingam reminds the devotees of this myth and self sacrifice of Siva.
Mythological tales contain a sense of timelessness. A myth happened once but also happens
all the time. It is in a constant state of reinterpretation and reinvention.
As Amish Tripathys source material is mythological stories of Shiva (he admits in an
interview that he had gleaned materials form what he had heard from his family members
over the years and the Amarchitrakatha comics. Express Features, The Raconteur, The New
Indian Express, 11 March 2010, A. Web), comparing and contrasting the god who has
evolved through aeons of myth, and the man who becomes a god in the time bound history of
Meluha(the Indus -Saraswati valley civilization) is essential for a critical study of the Shiva
trilogy. The present treatise intends to build up an image of Shiva from the scholarly texts of
authors who have made Shiva myths the object of their research, authors like Mahadev
Chakravarti, Sukumari Bhattacharji, Wendy Doniger, Wolf-Dieter Storl, J.Bruce Long, Stella
Kramrisch, Alain Danielou, Devdutt Pattanaik, A.Sarkar, Namita Gokhale,Ramesh Menon,
and the ancient scriptures which speak of Shiva, Shiva Mahapurana, The Vedas, the
Upanishad ,the two epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and legends and folk tales, and
then set against it the character of Shiva in Amish Tripathys Shiva trilogy, and find out how
the two resemble and differ from one another. It will explore the meeting point between the
sacred and divine and earthy and human. One was conceived by the gods and meditated on
by the sages and poets, and the other shapes itself in the creative imagination of a modern
Indian-English novelist.
Thus the present study will find out if Amish Tripathy has succeeded in gifting his
readers, a new insight into the deeper meaning of life, and in giving them lessons about how
we should behave and what we should do in order to live more fully and more richly and
become a complete human being, as the old myths which he has followed and yet broken to
remake his own, cutting and adding, modernizing and rewriting, had done and still continues
to do. They had the power, to lift men and women onto a different plane of existence so that
11 Armstrong,op cit,p.5.

they saw the world with new eyes.12 The question is , Has Amish Tripathy been successful
in conveying a sense of the sacred, and reacquainting us with the mythological wisdom of the
past and providing a fresh insight into the human condition, by recasting as the protagonist of
his three novels one of the oldest continuing deities in human history?The present
dissertation intends to find out an answer to this question, by probing into the three novels
(The Immortals of Meluha, The Secret of the Nagas and The Oath of the Vayuputras,), and
working out an in-depth analysis of the protagonist Shiva, and his quest for evil. The study
will persuade the reader to get interested in Indian mythological fiction, and the rich world of
Hindu mythology centring round the cult of Shiva.
Two images of Shiva one from traditional mythology, and the other from one of the
three novels on Shiva by Amish Tripathy, The Oath of the Vayuputras,will be of help to form
a perspective from which to judge the two creations, one evolved through ages in the
collective consciousness of people from different cultures and different countries but still
living in the religious and mythical vision of the Indians, and the other shaped by the creative
imagination of a contemporary Indian-English novelist, who attempts to humanize and
modernize the divine, though he is set in a fixed point of history, in a definite phase of the
Indus-Saraswati valley civilization. In traditional mythology Shiva is myriad manifestations,
but his most revered icon is that of an ascetic seated in meditation, who has dread locks some
of which are tied up in a knot on the top of his head, on which a crescent moon rests like a
diadem and the river Ganga flows down from it. He has five faces and three eyes; the third
eye is on his forehead and has the power to flare and burn. He is as fair as camphor (karpura
dhavala) and his beautiful body is smeared with ash. He wears a tiger skin as a skirt and an
elephant hide as a wrap. He has four arms one carries a trident, the other an axe, the third a
kettledrum and the fourth a bell. He wears snakes as ornaments but precious gems collected
from their heads also bejewel him. His throat is blue and lips bronze like in colour and well
shaped (tamradharam sundaram), lit up by a faint smile.

12 Ibid, p.6.