Vikramaditya: An Archetypal Portrait (Hardbound-2022)

The historic grand narrative of the legendary king Vikramaditya is interspersed with myths and has been scrutinised suspiciously for historical accuracy. Despite this, the intense engagement of Indian culture with the ideology of Vikramaditya has sustained through generations. The book seeks to reconstruct a portrait of the legendary king Vikramaditya based on the paradigm of archetypal literary criticism. It attempts to address the problematic embedded in the narrative of myths with riddled history through its focus on the archetypal core of of meaning—on that constant which does not change, even in the face of change.

The book examines the numismatic evidence of punch marked coins of Ujjain, the mythic narrative and cultural practises of the Vikramaditya tradition through an archetypal lens and synchronically traces its interlinkages with analogous parallels in world culture.

The book consists of essays which provoke abstract, archetypal portraits which stimulate a perceptible rather than an empirical sketch. The book leverages on the autonomy given to the transforming paradigm of historiography to augment the conventional narrative with the often-disregarded element of myths. It innovates the structure and methodology to recreate but does not undermine the central authority of the grand narrative, which it rather seeks to strengthen and reinvigorate. It recolours to restore but takes care not to disfigure as it reshapes the traditional narratives. The archetypal portrait finds a middle ground between the grace of aesthetic conventions and the contemporary frame of redefinition.

Shreeja Tripathi Sharma is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Higher Education, Government of Madhya Pradesh. She is also a management graduate and worked as a banker until she chose literature not just as a career, but as a passion for life. Her areas of research interest include Indian literary historiography, comparative language and culture, new age diasporic consciousness, and constructivist pedagogy for English Language Teaching. She teaches English literature to under-graduate, post-graduate, and doctoral students. She has been awarded fellowships in area of Indian literature and comparative aesthetics. She has worked as an Editor of different publications and supervised research in literature. She has published several books and research papers.