Walk into an airport bookstore in South Asia or North America and you’ll find the narrative worlds of Hinduism packaged between the covers of paperback after paperback. This panel addresses the big business—and the global business—of Hindu literature. We ask: How are Hindu stories currently being told in popular literature? How are they being sold to mass-market readers? How do patterns of “telling and selling” shift to accommodate different genres, media, and imagined readers in a range of locales? By analyzing Kevin Missal’s Kalki trilogy (Fingerprint), Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah series (Disney Hyperion), the Devi graphic novels (Virgin Comics), and Shantanu Gupta’s children’s comic Ajay to Yogi Adityanath (Itihasa Academy), our panel explores how, in the last fifteen years, there has been an explosion of popular literature that roots itself in Hindu mythology—even as it borrows openly from the modern literary categories of fantasy and science fiction.
On June 5, 2023, Shantanu Gupta’s graphic novel for children Ajay to Yogi Adityanath: Fascinating Story of Grit, Determination and Hard Work was launched across Uttar Pradesh. This statewide launch earned the publication recognition in the Asia Book of Records and the comic continues to be launched across the globe. Influenced by the widely popular Amar Chitra Katha (the Immortal Illustrated Tale) series, Gupta’s book aims to educate Indian youth about Yogi while stressing the Hindutva values to which children should aspire. Employing comic panels, Ajay to Yogi Adityanath emphasizes Yogi’s radical commitment to cow protection and, in particular, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. My paper examines how Gupta’s graphic novel––marketed to upper-middle-class and middle-class children––attempts to normalize Hindu extremism and, through games and activities printed in the book, sell Hindu fundamentalism to a younger generation.
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.
The last decade has seen an explosion of Hindu mythic fantasy literature. This paper examines one such example, Kevin Missal’s trilogy Kalki: Avatar of Vishnu. Kalki is most well-known as the tenth, future avatāra of Viṣṇu. The Kalki Purāṇa, a secondary or upa-purāṇa, narrates the future life of Kalki. Missal’s series reimagines this story, combining elements of the Kalki Purāṇa with story elements from American and British movies and television like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Godfather, The Dark Knight, and Terminator 2. This kind of narrative mixing reflects the cosmopolitanism of twenty-first Hindu elites who are fully at home with English language media and are reimagining Hindu narrative, incorporating story elements from outside of Hinduism that have shaped their worlds and have become part of their religious lexicon. Missal’s books also reflect the “telling/selling” symbiosis of global markets and an ambivalent relationship to Hindu nationalist discourse.
This paper discusses the mythologies and iconographies of Hindu goddesses such as Durgā, Kālī, and Śakti as they are presented in one popular graphic novel series—Shekhar Kapur’s Devi (Virgin Comics, 2006-8). How does the Devi series—which is explicitly aimed at a global audience—transmit, popularize, (re)interpret, and consolidate earlier understandings of these goddesses? What methods of storytelling and visualization are used to reach audiences who have little or no prior knowledge of Hindu goddess narratives? And how have these strategies landed with audiences? In addressing these issues, we explore how Hindu goddesses’ fights against demonic (male) forces are blended into contemporary urban settings, how the novels are marketed through celebrities (Shekhar Kapur, Priyanka Chopra), how the novels’ central figure is portrayed as an affectionate, reflective, “all-too-human Goddess,” and how audiences have responded to the novels in reviews and other forums of public discourse.