Decolonized Bharat: A Conceptual Map from Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy

Abstract

This paper explores the idea of Bharat as a civilizational nation through a literary and decolonial reading of Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy. It responds to colonial and Eurocentric historiographical traditions that have frequently marginalised Indian epics by categorising them exclusively as mythological narratives. Colonial scholarship, particularly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often dismissed the possibility of a coherent pre-modern Indian national consciousness, instead interpreting the subcontinent as a fragmented cultural space lacking historical unity. In contrast, this study approaches literature as a legitimate domain for historical imagination and cultural memory. It emphasises how literary narratives can serve as interpretive frameworks that reconfigure the past and challenge dominant historiographical paradigms. Particular attention is given to colonial epistemic interventions that reshaped the ways in which the Indian past has been understood, classified, and narrated.

Drawing upon theoretical insights from thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Walter D. Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Rajiv Malhotra and J. Sai Deepak, the paper situates the trilogy within a broader intellectual project that interrogates the persistence of coloniality in Eurocentric knowledge systems. These scholars have highlighted how colonial epistemologies continue to influence contemporary structures of knowledge, often privileging Western categories of history and rationality while marginalising indigenous modes of understanding. Within this framework, the concept of Bhāratavarṣa, articulated in early Sanskrit texts such as the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, is examined as a cultural and civilizational construct that reflects an enduring sense of territorial imagination and cultural interconnectedness across the subcontinent.

Through a detailed examination of the geographical and cultural landscapes represented in the Shiva Trilogy, the paper demonstrates how Tripathi reimagines ancient Bharat as an interconnected and expansive civilizational entity. The narrative traverses diverse regions of the subcontinent and situates them within a shared cultural framework, thereby invoking a sense of spatial continuity. At the same time, the trilogy presents epic figures in historically grounded and humanised forms, which destabilises rigid binaries between myth, history, and literary narration. Rather than treating mythology as an ahistorical domain, Tripathi’s narrative reconstructs mythological characters within socio-political contexts that resonate with historical imagination. The paper argues that such literary reconstructions may function as cultural interventions that invite readers to reconsider the epistemic hierarchies that separate myth from history in modern historiography. By analysing the geographical mapping embedded in the texts under study, the paper seeks to understand Tripathi’s conception of pre-colonial Bharat and to evaluate his role in contemporary debates surrounding decolonial narratives and indigenous historical consciousness.