Paper Title
Unification of Spirituality and Mundanity in Lord Shiva: A Study of A River Sutra

Abstract
Myths are the documents of cultural ethos. They are the tales that reflect the collective unconscious of a cultural group. Gita Mehta’s novel, ‘A River Sutra’ (1993), narrates the life-happenings of some common people linked to one another through the age old mythological and folk tales related to Lord Shiva and the holy river Narmada. The intricacies, allusions and analogies inherent in the Shiva’s myths have been portrayed through the mundane lives of the characters. The present paper is an attempt to explore, through the book ‘A River Sutra’, the juxtaposition of Shiva’s spirituality with his association with the temporal life. Simultaneously, it aims to study Shiva’s mythology in relation to the contemporary Indian society and human beings at large. Keywords - Culture, Mythology, Shiva, Narmada, Spirituality, Collective Unconscious, Temporal.