Rewriting the Tenth Avatar: Myth, Modernity, and Narrative Innovation in Kevin Missal’s Kalki Trilogy

Publication Details

Publication Date

10/07/2026

Volume / Issue

Vol 1, Issue 2 (2026)

Article No.

020

Journal

British Journal of Contemporary Research

Received

27 Jun 2026

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3

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0

Abstract

This paper examines Kevin Missal’s Kalki Trilogy: Dharmayoddha Kalki: Avatar of Vishnu (2017), Satyayoddha Kalki: Eye of Brahma (2018), and Mahayoddha Kalki: Sword of Shiva (2019) as a significant contribution to contemporary Indian mythological fiction. Kalki, the prophesied tenth avatar of Vishnu, occupies a uniquely incomplete position in Hindu eschatology: foretold in the Kalki Purana and the Bhagavata Purana as the destroyer of adharma at the end of the Kali Yuga, his story exists primarily as prophecy rather than completed narrative. This gap of indeterminacy, to use Wolfgang Iser’s term, makes the Kalki figure exceptionally open to creative reimagination. Situating Missal’s work within the broader “mythology boom” in early twenty-first-century Indian publishing, initiated by Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy, this paper argues that the Kalki Trilogy advances the genre through three mutually reinforcing strategies. First, it radically humanises the divine avatar by recasting him as a Bildungsroman protagonist whose identity is achieved through experience, doubt, and moral growth rather than cosmic conferral. Second, it constructs a syncretic fictional world that fuses Puranic cosmology with post-apocalyptic dystopia and political thriller conventions, enabling an allegorical engagement with contemporary concerns. Third, and most significantly, it destabilises the Puranic myth’s binary moral framework by rendering dharma itself contested and paradoxical, transforming eschatological certainty into genuine moral uncertainty. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Hutcheon, Bhabha, Moretti, and Bakhtin, the paper also acknowledges the trilogy’s limitations: uneven prose, constrained female agency, and reliance on archetype, while concluding that within the compromises of popular genre fiction, Missal achieves a level of philosophical seriousness that merits sustained scholarly attention.

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This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Free to read, share, and adapt with attribution.