THE HIMALAYAN MYTHSCAPE: INDIGENOUS MYTHS, FOLKLORE AND SACRED GEOGRAPHY IN GOKHALE’S WRITING

Abstract [English]

Namita Gokhale occupies a distinguished position among contemporary Indian women novelists, not merely for the range of her themes but for the distinctive spatial imagination that animates her fiction. Born in 1956 and raised across diverse cultural landscapes that included metropolitan centres and the Himalayan foothills, she developed an early sensitivity to contrasts between urban modernity and mountain life. These formative movements shaped a layered consciousness in which place is not a static backdrop but a living force that informs memory, identity, and narrative voice. Her long association with literary culture, including her role as co-director of a major international literature festival, has further sharpened her awareness of how local histories can be articulated within global literary conversations. Gokhale’s writing draws deeply on lived experience, transforming personal memory into a shared imaginative resource. Her novels set in the Kumaon region and around Nainital reveal a sustained engagement with the Himalayas as both a physical environment and a psychological landscape. In works such as The Book of Shadows, A Himalayan Love Story, and Things to Leave Behind, she constructs a coherent Himalayan trilogy in which the mountains function not merely as setting but as an active presence shaping human lives. This narrative strategy aligns closely with the principles of literary regionalism, a theory that emphasizes the depiction of specific locales to explore broader social, cultural, and emotional realities. Unlike surface-level scenic description, regionalist writing seeks to capture the rhythms, memories, and inherited knowledge of a place, and Gokhale’s fiction exemplifies this approach with remarkable consistency. In this paper we shall further delve into the works of Gokhale to understand the Himalayan imagination and her incorporation of myths, folklore, sacred geography and so on.