“This Tiny Claim to Magic:” Progressive Hindu Education in the Aru Shah Fantasy Series

In Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah novels (2018-22), a bestselling fantasy series published by Disney-Hyperion under the “Rick Riordan Presents” imprint, the prototypical fantasy quest is remolded so that the protagonists—the Pandava “soul sisters,” middle-schoolers in Atlanta who also battle demons in a Hindu mythological Otherworld—do not encounter a new fantasy world so much as they develop new relationships with a familiar one. In the novels, Hindu knowledge is framed as subjective, emotional, and interpersonal. Hence the second novel showcases the Otherworld as a socially accommodating space: queerness is a given, gender is a construct, marriage is a problem, and the category of “family of origin” is questioned. Contrasting with conservative models of Hindu education, the Aru Shah novels adopt the Riordan ethos of “different is divine” to paint a progressive portrait of American Hinduism—and try to show that it has been there in Hindu mythology all along.