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VOL. 12, ISSUE 3 (2026)
Evil as temporal category: Historicist ethics and the sociologisation of the yuga theory in Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy
Authors
Sanjay Singh Chauhan, Dr. Ashish Kumar Gupta
Abstract
Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy (2010-2013)
proposes a category of evil that the existing scholarship on the novels has not
adequately identified: evil as temporal rather than ontological, produced by
duration and scale rather than by fixed essence. This paper argues that the
trilogy’s most philosophically significant contribution to the tradition of
Hindu mythological retelling is its deliberate departure from the Puranic Yuga
doctrine’s cosmological fatalism. Where the Puranic tradition treats the ages
as cosmologically predetermined, Amish converts the Yuga into a quality
generated by collective human choice. The Somras drawn from the Vedic Soma
tradition functions throughout the trilogy as the central symbol through which
this conversion is dramatised: a substance genuinely beneficial under one set
of conditions, genuinely harmful under another, whose moral status changes not
through any change in its nature but through the persistence of its production
beyond the conditions that justified it. The Nagas and the dying Saraswati
together constitute the human and ecological testimony to this temporal evil.
Reading the trilogy against the Puranic background and through Ricoeur’s
hermeneutics of symbolic meaning, this paper argues that the sociologisation of
the Yuga theory is the trilogy’s single most original intellectual contribution
to both the living Hindu tradition and the broader tradition of contemporary
Indian English mythological fiction.
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Pages:14-20
How to cite this article:
Sanjay Singh Chauhan, Dr. Ashish Kumar Gupta "Evil as temporal category: Historicist ethics and the sociologisation of the yuga theory in Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy". International Journal of English Research, Vol 12, Issue 3, 2026, Pages 14-20
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