REIMAGINING GENDER: MYTH AND FEMINISM IN THE SHIVA TRILOGY

The academic discourse has long grappled with issues of identity and gender roles, universally recognized as asource of tension and conflict across cultures. Scholars and authors have significantly enriched this legacy throughboth authentic and fictional narratives. These texts frequently illuminate previously unaddressed voices, therebyunderscoring the constraining nature of prescriptive gender roles. Emerging authors are actively ‘reformulatingand rethinking female characters’, imbuing them with a new dimension of status and moral experience that oftencritiques traditional literary portrayals. This research aims to analyze ‘Amish Tripathi's ‘treatment of womencharacters’ in his legendary work ‘Shiva Trilogy’. Tripathi's female characters’ challenge conventional portrayals,effectively highlighting the ‘diverse and often overlooked identities of Indian women’. This paper will offer aconcise and authentic exploration of the ‘status of women in India during the Vedic period’, specificallyreferencing these female characters in across various facets of social order, including ‘education, philosophy,religion, administration, and warfare’. The present paper also examines the select texts from the standpoint of theconcept of identity and gender on the basis of the theoretical framework of gender theories, specifically that ofJudith Butler and Geetha V focusing on socially prescribed gender roles.