Week 12 Reading Diary B: Nivedita's Shiva

Today, I read the second set of readings from Sister Nivedita's stories about Shiva. These stories were a lot more direct and easier to follow than Nivedita's other writings, and I think I got a lot better ideas about how to describe the characters, physically and emotionally. Especially in the first story, Nivedita goes into a lot of detail in specifying who Shiva is, how he can be characterized, etc. I'm also glad that she included another story about Uma and her role in everything. It was kind of hard to follow all of the different avatars and reincarnations of different characters in the other stories, but here it's laid out much more simplistically. I think doing something that focused on mistaken identity or reincarnation for my story this week would make a lot of sense.

Shiva statue; source: wikimedia