Author: Apurvi Kotwal

Abstract: This paper applies Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (1977) to Ashwin Sanghi’s Keepers of the Kalachakra (2018), arguing that the novel narrates its criminal and extremist characters’ trajectories with unusual developmental detail, showing how ordinary people are shaped into terrorists, spies, and killers by their environments, mentors, and media rather than presenting them as born dangerous. The paper pursues three lines of analysis: first, the acquisition of extremist behaviour through observational learning and modelling, centered on the character Alim’s transformation into the terrorist Abu Ahmed al-Mafraqi; second, the role of vicarious reinforcement, through propaganda media and institutional settings like prisons, in sustaining that behaviour once learned; and third, reciprocal determinism in the depiction of Chinese intelligence officer Zhang, whose career is shaped by family, state institutions, and ideology in a continuous feedback loop. The paper treats Bandura’s framework both as a mechanical checklist and as an interpretive lens, and draws on later criminological and terrorism-studies extensions of SLT (including Akins and Winfree, and Pauwels and Schils) to test how far a mid-century psychological theory built on laboratory studies of childhood aggression can account for radicalization in a contemporary Indian English thriller.

Keywords: social learning theory, observational learning, vicarious reinforcement, reciprocal determinism, radicalization

Article Info: Received: 24 Jan 2026; Received in revised form: 19 Feb 2026; Accepted: 23 Feb 2026; Available online: 28 Feb 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.111.76