Creative Flight Journal: Beyond Immortality: Mnemonic Archives and Psychological Disintegration in Akshat Gupta's The Hidden Hindu Trilogy

Beyond Immortality: Mnemonic Archives and Psychological Disintegration in Akshat Gupta's The Hidden Hindu Trilogy

Ravidev Kumar,

Ph.D. Research Scholar,

University Department of English,

B. R. Ambedkar Bihar University,

Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India,

Dr. Vinamrata,

Assistant Professor,

University Department of English,

B. R. Ambedkar Bihar University,

Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India,

Abstract: Akshat Gupta’s popular trilogy, The Hidden Hindu, reinterprets the ancient Hindu myth of the seven Chiranjivis (immortals) by integrating traditional folklore with the narrative conventions of contemporary techno-mythological fiction. While contemporary mythopoeic studies frequently highlight world-building and epic battles, this paper shifts the analytical focus toward the text's intricate psychological contours. It posits that for these immortal beings, the persistence of past-life memories and perpetual bodily existence functions not as an enviable divine gift, but as a relentless engine of chronological trauma. Utilising Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic framework alongside Cathy Caruth’s foundational trauma theory, this study investigates how accumulated historical grief and ‘unclaimed experiences’ turn memory into an agonising psychological prison. The paper closely interrogates the phenomenon of psychic dissociation, focusing on the split personality (Prithak Vyaktitwa) and deep-seated identity conflicts embodied by Devdhwaja and Nagendra. This study, thus by analysing their fragmented mental states, illustrates how prolonged existence exacerbates existential dread and emotional alienation across centuries. Ultimately, this research argues that Gupta’s modern mythologising offers a compelling premise for a splintered psyche, which can only achieve genuine catharsis and identity reintegration by directly confronting the mnemonic archive of its suppressed historical past.

Keywords: Chronological Trauma, Unclaimed Experiences, Chiranjivi (Immortality), Mnemonic Archive, Splintered Psyche.

“I witnessed my life turning into death and undergoing the process of reincarnation. For me, nothing seemed new; neither the pain of dying nor the joy of rebirth” (Gupta, The Hidden Hindu 3 107-108).

1: Introduction

The landscape of contemporary Indian mythological fiction has undergone a profound structural and thematic transformation over the last two decades. Where earlier twentieth-century retellings of classical epics sought to consolidate nationalistic identity, preserve cultural heritage, or offer allegorical moral lessons for a post-colonial society, twenty-first-century mythological-fiction increasingly treats the vast canvas of antiquity as an arena for deep psychological interrogation. In Akshat Gupta’s The Hidden Hindu trilogy, this literary evolution manifests as a radical, destabilising subversion of one of Hinduism's most revered spiritual and metaphysical archetypes: the Chiranjivi, or the immortal being. Aleida Assmannin Cultural Memory and Western Civilisation: Functions, Media, Archive writes,

“Indian folklore – myths legends, songs, puzzles, prayers - permeates the novel like a web of interwoven threads. Wherever the trauma has torn holes in the pattern and damaged consciousness (the psychoanalyst Lyman Wynne speaks of "thought disorder"), these narrative elements restore a structured perception. The damaged psyche has to learn afresh how to form Gestalten, and this sense for patterns, connections, correspondences, and relationships builds up a web that gradually covers and closes the gaping wound of the trauma. (276)”

Traditionally conceptualised across classical Puranic and Vedic literature as a state of divine grace, elevated consciousness, or timeless dharmic stewardship, immortality in Gupta’s narrative is systematically stripped of its romanticised, transcendental glory. Instead, eternal life is laid bare as an agonising, inescapable psychic prison. These immortals carry the weight of epochs. Ashwatthama suffers an agonizing curse of disease and endless life, a punishment from Lord Krishna for slaughtering the Pandavas' sleeping sons. Parashurama, Vishnu’s sixth avatar, famously purged the earth of corrupt kings twenty-one times with his divine axe. There is King Bali, a righteous demon banished to the netherworld, and Vibhishana, who earned eternal life through his absolute devotion to Lord Ram. The legendary Mahabharata scribe Ved Vyasa, the royal guru Kripacharya, and the eternal protector Lord Hanuman complete this timeless group.

At the core of this saga is Om Shastri. He is a man crushed by a fractured past. Born in the Satya Yuga as Devdhwaja, he originally shared a single physical body with a purely evil entity known as Nagendra. A mystical filtration ritual eventually tore them apart. Driven by sheer hatred, Nagendra murdered him. But death was not the end. Sage Dhanvantari resurrected him using the legendary Mrit Sanjeevani, transforming him into the immortal Mrityunjay—who now hides in the modern world as Om Shastri. Immortality is far from a blessing for Om. It is a relentless, agonizing nightmare. He is forced to watch mortal loved ones wither away while he survives across millennia. To stay hidden, he constantly sheds his identity, masking himself as historical figures like Sushen, Vidur, and Vishnu Gupt. Beyond the profound loneliness, Om is paralyzed by immense guilt. He bears the heavy psychological scars of Nagendra’s atrocities. He endures the trauma of watching his mentors slaughtered and his loyal companion Nibhisha turned to stone. This unending, silent battle against his own dark half condemns Om to a deeply isolated existence. He says,

“I haven’t aged since then. I feel tired at times but without any food or rest, I get energized automatically. I gethurt, I fall ill . . . but right before death can engulf me, I start recovering again. I don’t die” (Gupta Book1 97).

These temporal burden which these Chiranjivis carry across epochs is what literary trauma theory terms "unclaimed experiences” (Caruth 10). To exist across millennia in Gupta's universe is not to achieve spiritual liberation; rather, it is to be condemned to carry the unyielding, accumulated weight of historical violence, grief, and fractured identity across endless temporal cycles. The narrative deliberately pivots away from the grand, externalised feats of gods, demons, and celestial weaponry to focus on the claustrophobic internal pathologies of characters who cannot forget, cannot die, and cannot integrate their pasts into a coherent present. Memory, within this framework, ceases to operate as a progressive, evolutionary archive that guides the soul toward enlightenment through successive births. Instead, it functions as a literal instrument of torture, a mnemonic trap where ancient horrors, forbidden desires, and systemic betrayals are preserved with absolute, terrifying fidelity.

Furthermore, this paper seeks to position Akshat Gupta’s distinct thematic contribution by contrasting his work with the dominant paradigms of contemporary Indian mytho-fiction. While trying to engage in a comparative dialogue with seminal authors of the genre, such as Amish Tripathi, whose approach to immortality in The Shiva Trilogy relies on rationalism, statecraft, and scientific evolution, a sharp contrast is seen with Gupta's focus on raw psychic terror. Tripathi said, “Your challenge is to stay true to your karma,to your duty, in spite of the pain. That is the fate and the duty of a Mahadev. (Tripathi 396).”. Similarly, Anand Neelakantan’s Asura: Tale of the Vanquished, examines trauma from a socio-political, subaltern perspective of the conquered, whereas Gupta investigates an existential, internal crisis of a split soul. Similarly, while trying to differentiate Gupta's project from Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna Key, we analyse that Sanghi, intellectualises myth as a historical puzzle or cryptographic code to be solved, rather than a visceral psychological burden that possesses the protagonist. Finally, we will look at Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, which frames epic destiny as an emotional prison, yet provides her characters with an ultimate path toward transcendental release—an exit strategy Gupta explicitly denies his subjects. Through this comparative and theoretical lens, the paper will execute a deep textual analysis of the specific, documented crises of Gupta's characters across the trilogy. We will examine the literal psychological dissociation of Devdhwaja, whose identity is violently cleaved by the ancient sages via the Prithak Vyaktitwa process, casting his shadow self, Nagendra, into a traumatic state of existential erasure and subterranean isolation. We will interrogate the silent, somatic suffering of the mythical companion Nibhisha, who becomes a frozen monument of grief beneath the snows of Roopkund due to her inability to cognitively process the split identity of her master. Additionally, the paper will explore the trans-temporal captivity of Latika (LSD), reading her cyclical reincarnations across genders and species as an endless preservation of a forbidden, repressed desire originating in the Satya yuga. Finally, we will analyse the mortal observer Parimal, who navigates systemic subjugation under Nagendra but ultimately achieves a semblance of psychological liberation and narrative subversion through a spontaneous act of empathy and compassion in the ruins of Dwarka. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that The Hidden Hindu offers a bleak yet profound philosophy of the eternal self, suggesting that the ultimate victory in a cosmic landscape is not the achievement of endless life, but finding the courage to finally lay the crushing burden of memory to rest.

2. Literature Review

The theoretical intersection of trauma studies and speculative fiction offers a rich interpretive framework for decoding contemporary mythological retelling. To construct a rigorous methodology for Akshat Gupta’s The Hidden Hindu trilogy, this study integrates Western psychoanalytic paradigms of psychic wounding with classical Indian metaphysical formulations of temporal cycle, Samskara, and karmic loops. The text is not merely treated ascommercial fantasy but as a psychological archive. This paper maps the text’s narrative architecture against the insights of Cathy Caruth, Sigmund Freud, and Dominick LaCapra. Methodologically, this study relies on a close reading of the characters' behavioural disruptions, linguistic silences, and structural repetitions across the trilogy to diagnose how immortality functions as a literal container for what Caruth identifies as unassimilated psychic shocks.

In mainstream Western scholarship, trauma theory remains anchored to Caruth’s foundational text, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (2016). Caruth defines trauma not as a unifocal reaction to an overwhelming event, but as an occurrence experienced too suddenly to be integrated at the precise moment of its transpiring. The mind, incapacitated by the shock, represses the event, only for it to return perpetually in the form of intrusive flashbacks and somatic hauntings. Caruth observes that the traumatised subject is essentially possessed by a history they cannot fully own, defining the phenomenon as the paradox of a past that "is not having been fully faced as it occurred, or as it occurred too soon for the mind to grasp it, returns as a symptom that demands a history it cannot yet find" (Caruth 47). Within Gupta’s architecture of the Chiranjivi, this psychic wound is granted immortality. Here, Freud’s concept of the "repetition compulsion (Freud 14)" (Wiederholungszwang) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle becomes instructive. Freud noted that traumatised individuals possess an unconscious drive to recreate the exact conditions of their original wounding, trapped in a self-destructive loop. Gupta elevates this into a cosmic law; his characters are structural prisoners of a multi-millennial temporal loop where they are metaphysically compelled to re-enact ancient blood feuds across successive yugas. These immortals are thus archetypes, representing the collective unconsciousness burden of the past. Carl Jung explains archetypes as:

“The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear (Jung 22).”

This psychoanalytic reading must be synthesised with the Indian metaphysical concept of Samskara the indelible subconscious impressions left by past lives. While traditional philosophy views the awareness of past lives (Jati Smaran) as an elevated spiritual achievement leading to detachment, Gupta reinterprets it as a source of visceral horror. Talking on myths and mythical hero Northrop Frye writes, “Lists of kings and foreign tribes, myths and genealogies of gods, historical traditions, the proverbs of popular wisdom, taboos, lucky and unlucky days, charms, the deeds of the tribal heroes, were some of the things that came out when the poet unlocked his word-hoard. (57)” The multi-millennial mnemonic archive is not a clean record of spiritual evolution, but a bleeding wound that refuses to scar over. LaCapra’s critical distinction in Writing History, Writing Trauma between "acting out" and "working through" clarifies this tension. LaCapra notes that "acting out" involves a state of profound melancholia where the subject seamlessly relives the past as if it were the present, whereas "working through" requires a conscious integration of the loss to gain critical narrative distance (LaCapra 21). Gupta’s immortals are trapped in a permanent state of "acting out," unable to achieve the psychological distance necessary to transform visceral memories into a settled history.

This focus on the internal pathology of memory sets Gupta apart from contemporary Indian mythological fiction. For instance, Amish Tripathi, in The Shiva Trilogy, approaches mythology through strict rationalism and socio-scientific evolution. For Tripathi, an advanced lifespan is a biological accident resulting from the consumption of the Somras formula, and his characters operate with a modern, pragmatic sensibility geared toward statecraft and societal reform. Memory in Tripathi's world is a historical text to be rationally managed, largely stripped of raw psychic terror. Conversely, Anand Neelakantan’s Asura: Tale of the Vanquished turns its gaze toward the subaltern, focusing heavily on the externalised socio-political trauma of military defeat, caste marginalisation, and systemic erasure by the dominant narrative. Neelakantan notes the trauma of structural erasure when his protagonist laments how the dominant discourse "destroys the vanquished's pride, their culture, their religion, and their self-respect" (Neelakantan 14).

In a different vein, Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna Key intellectualises mythological history, utilising cryptographic codes to bridge antiquity and modernity. For Sanghi, memory appears as a series of historical clues left behind for a modern academic protagonist to decipher, rather than a visceral burden that actively tears at the protagonist’s sanity. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions frames epic destiny as a deeply personal, claustrophobic emotional prison for its female protagonist, Panchaali, who notes the isolation of her fate by stating, "I was left with my thoughts, which were far from pleasant companions" (Divakaruni 112). Yet, within Divakaruni’s poetic retelling, the characters ultimately find spiritual transcendence and cosmic reconciliation once they discard their mortal forms. Gupta’s distinct, dark contribution to the genre lies in his systematic refusal to grant his characters this easy exit.

3. The Multi-Millennial Mnemonic Archive and Collective Chronological Trauma

The core analytical substance of Akshat Gupta’s trilogy emerges in the specific, textually documented crises of its characters, whose extended lifespans are rendered not as periods of accumulation of wisdom, but as continuous sites of psychic fracture. The most profound exploration of this chronological trauma occurs through the literal, ontological splitting of the primordial entity Devdhwaja into two violently opposed physical manifestations: the benign, amnesiac seeker Om, and the ruthless, hyper-remembering antagonist Nagendra. Born precisely on the precarious threshold between the darkest, demonic hour of the night and the pious, sacred hours of Brahma Muhurta, Devdhwaja inherently embodies a dangerous, irreconcilable psychological duality. Rather than allowing this internal conflict to be processed or integrated naturally through spiritual discipline, the ancient sages attempt a radical, forced intervention known as Prithak Vyaktitwa- a literal process of psychological and physical filtration designed to violently separate the pure good from the absolute evil. From the perspective of clinical trauma theory, this act of Prithak Vyaktitwa is an act of violent, institutionalised dissociation. It does not cure the psyche; it violently cleaves it in two, casting the shadow self, Nagendra, into a state of absolute existential erasure and abandonment.

Left to rot for years in the claustrophobic, pitch-black confinement of a deep subterranean well, Nagendra experiences a profound, prolonged isolation that warps his mind into an engine of pure vengeance. When he finally escapes through a hand-dug tunnel, his driving motivation is not a grand, abstract desire for cosmic domination, but a desperate, pathological obsession with reclaiming the identity, name, and face that were violently stripped from him during his foundational wounding. As Nagendra himself explains when confronting his other half, his entire existence has been reduced to a violent attempt to force the past into the present: "I wanted everything back from him; my name, my face, my identity, my power, my life, and for him to return what was rightfully mine, he had to die" (Gupta, Book 3, 69). This declaration aligns perfectly with Sigmund Freud’s observation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the victim of a severe psychological shock is structurally bound to a "repetition compulsion" which forces them to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something belonging to the past (Freud 18). Nagendra’s violence is an explicit manifestation of this compulsion carried out on a macroscopic scale. By tracking Devdhwaja to Roopkund and brutally assassinating him, Nagendra does not achieve the liberation or completeness he seeks; instead, he triggers his own physical and spiritual decay, locking both halves of the split psyche into an endless, self-destructive loop across millennia.

While the confrontation between Nagendra and Devdhwaja forms the loud, central axis of the plot, the structural weight of collective trauma is most poignantly borne by Nibhisha, the mythical navgunjara creature. Representing absolute, unyielding fidelity, Nibhisha is described by Devdhwaja as his most trusted friend and sibling, capable of altering her form to protect him at all costs. Her very loyalty becomes her psychological executioner, because Nagendra and Devdhwaja share the same original face, voice, and spiritual essence. Nibhisha cannot cognitively process their separation. When the two entities clash at Roopkund, she experiences a paralysing cognitive dissonance, unable to determine which entity is her true master and which is the intruder. This confusion causes the ancient, repressed trauma of the original split to violently fracture her consciousness, creating a state of absolute psychological paralysis. Devdhwaja recounts this terrifying collapse of her internal archive:

"The traumatic flashes of the past still occupied a part of Nibhisha's memory. I sensed fear in her body language and saw the pain in her eyes. She didn't know how to separate the two identities standing right in front of her because, for her, we were not two, but one" (Gupta, Book 3, 75).

This paralysing cognitive breakdown perfectly illustrates what Cathy Caruthterms the ‘unclaimed experience’- a response to an unexpected or overwhelming culture of violence that hurts precisely because it cannot be placed within the parameters of normal historical comprehension (Caruth 5). Nibhisha’s trauma culminates in a literal, somatic inscription of grief. When Nagendra exploits her confusion and holds her life hostage to force Devdhwaja’s submission, Devdhwaja is cornered into a horrific choice. To save her from Nagendra's immediate cruelty, he commits the ultimate transgression of commanding his loyal companion to transform into a lifeless rock. Nibhisha's willing acceptance of this command is an act of pure love, but it freezes her in a state of eternal, unmediated agony. She becomes a literal monument of ancient trauma, trapped beneath the freezing, red snows of Roopkund, carrying a silent, unaddressed suffering across millennia. Her petrification symbolises the ultimate silencing of the witness in spaces of monumental, immortal violence.

Gupta further expands this lexicon of chronological trauma by redefining reincarnation not as a pathway to spiritual evolution, but as an inescapable cycle of temporal captivity. This is most clearly illustrated in the character of Latika, also known as LSD (Lisa Samuel D'Costa). Latika explicitly recognises her own existence as a structural prison, describing her path to Parimal as an unending containment: "…a captive soul who is transferred from one body to another for salvation that was once promised to me but never granted" (Gupta, Book 3, 91). Her current psychological subjugation under Nagendra is traced back to a deep, trans-temporal displacement that took place during the Satya yuga. At that time, existing in the male body of a sage at Dhanvantari's camp, the character experienced an intense, unexpressed romantic fixation toward Nagendra when the latter arrived, dragging Devdhwaja’s mutilated corpse. Romantic desires between two male ascetics completely violated the rigid spiritual codes of renunciation and hence this attraction was violently repressed, transforming into a torturous internal desire. Across thousands of years, this unresolved psychic knot binds her soul to Nagendra, forcing her through a succession of agonising human and animal incarnations where she is continuously drawn back into his orbit. She is stripped of her agency, compelled to act as an eternal servant to an immortal tyrant because of a desire that could neither be expressed nor integrated in her original life.

This cyclical entrapment exemplifies Dominick LaCapra's theoretical formulation of "acting out" historical trauma. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, LaCapra notes that when a subject is caught in the cycle of acting out, "the past is lookfully present, as a ghost or a double that possesses the self, making the present a mere repetition of an unmastered antiquity" (LaCapra 42). Latika cannot escape Nagendra because her contemporary consciousness is perpetually possessed by the unmastered antiquity of the Satya yuga, reducing her subsequent lifetimes to mere structural echoes of her original, repressed desire.

Finally, the narrative introduces Parimal, who represents the mortal subject caught within the devastating crossfires of these macroscopic, immortal traumas. Parimal is bound by heavy systemic obligations and trapped in a state of complete vulnerability and is forced to endure severe psychological humiliation as he watches a newly resurrected Nagendra assert absolute dominance over Latika, the mother of Parimal’s own unborn child. Nagendra’s psychological cruelty is precise, utilising Parimal’s helplessness to reinforce the insignificance of mortal emotions against the backdrop of immortal connections: "I told you not to fall in love with her. She carries your child, and you have mated with her, but you must know that I am her soulmate. Let's all celebrate this twisted family equation and our reunion." (Gupta, Book 3, 17). Despite being utterly crushed by his circumstances and feeling like a defeated slave, Parimal manages to execute a crucial, quiet narrative subversion. While participating in a diving mission within the submerged, ruinous depths of Dwarka, Parimal witnesses Nagendra ruthlessly slaughtering a family of giant sea turtles. Looking into the eyes of a surviving baby turtle, Parimal experiences a profound moment of empathetic projection, recognising the creature’s terror as a mirror of the vulnerability of his own unborn child. In a spontaneous act of defiance, he chooses to disobey direct orders, rolling a massive boulder to conceal the baby turtle from Nagendra's destructive path.

This micro-rebellion establishes an ethical pivot within the overarching narrative. While the immortal characters continuously perpetuate their ancient traumas through reclamation, vengeance, and cosmic wars, the mortal subject achieves a genuine moment of psychological liberation through an act of quiet, empathetic protection. Parimal breaks the cycle of absolute obedience, demonstrating that compassion, rather than the pursuit of immortal power, offers the only real fracture in the prison house of memory. His action suggests that the multi-millennial mnemonic archive can only be dissolved when the subject ceases to demand a violent reclamation of what was lost and instead chooses to protect the vulnerable in the immediate present.

4: Conclusion

Throughout The Hidden Hindu trilogy, Akshat Gupta demonstrates that when memory is preserved with absolute fidelity across cosmic epochs, it ceases to be a tool for spiritual enlightenment and instead becomes a vehicle for profound psychic destruction. The text's grand, external mythological conflicts are framed as the direct consequences of deep internal pathologies, the narrative completely subverts the classical pursuit of immortality. The text repeatedly suggests that eternal life, when severed from emotional resolution and the capacity to heal, is merely an endless, agonising reiteration of suffering. The structural crises of the characters reveal a bleak psychological reality. Nagendra’s unyielding vengeance is born from the trauma of forced dissociation, Nibhisha’s petrification represents the complete silencing of the traumatised witness, and Latika’s cyclical reincarnations expose the tragedy of unresolved, trans-temporal desire. Parimal’s story is similar to burden of past carried by the rest of the characters, coming from the ancestral oath of serving Nagendra. Parminal is obligated to follow all the commands of Nagendra,

“…her child would gain vision and a complete human body only if Sarputi took an oath that would obligate her lineage to serve Nagendra for generations to come. This would continue as long as they served Nagendra and once their sons were fit enough to serve Nagendra, the generation that had been serving till then would eventually die in their original appearance of half-snake and half-human” (Gupta Book3 109).

Ultimately, The Hidden Hindu offers a significant redefinition of the classical concept of Moksha. True liberation, Gupta implies, cannot be achieved through the strategic acquisition of ancient artefacts, the manipulation of cosmic venoms, or the physical extension of life across the yugas. Instead, genuine salvation requires the painful, conscious process of "working through" fractured memories, confronting the shadow aspects of the self, and exercising spontaneous acts of compassion in the face of absolute tyranny. As Cathy Caruth notes, to survive a trauma is not simply to continue living, but to face the reality of an encounter that demands a totally new way of understanding one's history (Caruth 56). By shifting the focus of Indian mythological fiction from the glorification of external immortality to the internal struggle for emotional autonomy, the trilogy demonstrates that the ultimate victory is not living forever, but finding the courage to finally lay the crushing burden of memory to rest.

Works Cited

Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilisation: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge UP, 2011.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016.

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Palace of Illusions. Picador, 2008.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton & Company, 1961.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. With a foreword by Harold Bloom, Princeton University Press, 2000.

Gupta, Akshat. The Hidden Hindu: Book 1. Penguin Random House India, 2021.

---. The Hidden Hindu: Book 2. Penguin Random House India, 2022.

---. The Hidden Hindu: Book 3. Penguin Random House India, 2023.

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1959.

LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Neelakantan, Anand. Asura: Tale of the Vanquished. Leadstart Publishing, 2012.