Sita, Mithila, and Indian knowledge systems: reimagining myth, gender, and civilizational ethics in Amish Tripathi's Sita: warrior of Mithila

Abstract

This article examines Amish Tripathi's Sita: Warrior of Mithila (2017) as a revisionist mythological narrative that reconfigures Sita from a devotional icon into a politically aware, intellectually trained, and ethically decisive subject. Engaging with Simone de Beauvoir's foundational feminist argument in The Second Sex that women are socially constituted as the Other, Vandana Shiva's ecofeminist framework in Staying Alive, and C.G. Jung's theory of the archetypal feminine in Aspects of the Feminine, the paper argues that Tripathi's novel draws on both Western feminist theory and indigenous Indian knowledge traditions to reconstruct Sita as a civilizationally grounded feminist icon. Rashmi Luthra's concept of women-centred interpretations of Indian epics, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's critique of Hindu goddess imagery, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's framework for decolonizing feminist scholarship provide the critical scaffolding for the discussion. The paper also foregrounds Amish Tripathi's own civilizational vision articulated in Immortal India. The study argues that the novel's importance lies not only in its feminist recasting of Sita but in its portrayal of Indian tradition as a living, rational, and adaptive system of ethical inquiry.