From Mountain Ascetic to Ethical Leader: Reimagining Lord Shiva as a Spiritual Master of Social Upliftment in Amish Tripathi's Shiva Trilogy

Abstract

Modern Bharat has repeatedly turned to its spiritual traditions to imagine models of ethical leadership and social transformation that exceed merely constitutional or institutional frameworks. This paper reads Amish Tripathi's Shiva Trilogy comprising The Immortals of Meluha, The Secret of the Nagas, and The Oath of the Vayuputras, as a contemporary literary site where Lord Shiva is re-envisioned not as a distant mythic deity, but as a humanised spiritual master whose inner transformation ground a vision of social upliftment and just governance.