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

Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah novels (2018-22) are a bestselling middle-grade fantasy series published by Disney Hyperion. The protagonists are a group of middle-schoolers growing up in Atlanta—all children of Indian immigrants, and all inheritors of mythological powers. The novels follow the young Aru Shah (her generation’s incarnation of Arjuna) and her Pandava “soul sisters” ”—Mini Kapoor-Mercado-Lopez (Yudhiṣṭhira), Brynne Rao (Bhīma), and Nikita and Sheela Jagan (Nakula and Sahadeva)—as they encounter various marvels in the Otherworld, develop their celestial powers, negotiate with the devas, and battle a neverending stream of asuras. A number of peers join the Pandava sisters’ makeshift mythological family, such as the boy across the street, Aiden Acharya (Draupadī), and a foster sister, Hira (Hiḍimbā).

In my previous work on this series I have shown that the Aru Shah novels subtly challenge the form of the classic children’s fantasy novel, reshaping it to reflect adolescences that unfold at some distance from those represented by earlier heroes of the genre—Alice, the Pevensie siblings, Harry Potter, and the like. What makes the Pandava sisters unique is that they have, in a sense, lived in the world of the fantasy from the beginning: Hindu mythology has always been part of their worlds. They repeatedly discover that all they need to navigate an explicitly Hindu mythological “Otherworld” are their own memories and experiences of growing up in Hindu families. This means that in the Aru Shah series, the fantasy quests are not prototypical journeys of discovery. Rather, they are journeys of rediscovery and self-integration.

In this paper I explore a different side of that argument—namely, that in the Aru Shah novels, inheritance only counts for so much, and knowledge is what the protagonist makes of it. I focus on the second book of the series, Aru Shah and the Song of Death (2019), in the interest of demonstrating how Chokshi remolds the prototypical fantasy journey so that it becomes less about the earned knowledge itself and more about developing new ways of knowing. Aru has to learn how to tell the story herself. Crucially, in the second book of the series, that mission involves learning how to participate in a community of storytellers with very different voices. Aru develops the ability to harmonize with her fellow Pandava sisters and the larger mythological family they create together.

To that end I discuss three interconnected themes that emerge in this second book of the Aru Shah series. The first is the highly personal, individual, and emotional nature of the Hindu education that Chokshi’s books offer. The second is the specifically diasporic, second-generation location of that knowledge. (I use the word “location” literally—one of the Pandava sisters’ quests takes them to Edison, NJ.) And the third is the classic challenge of adolescence: love. It turns out that when it comes to navigating crushes, friendship, and the complex construction of family, Hindu mythology—and the Mahābhārata in particular—makes a great deal of wisdom available to the Pandava sisters.

The central idea I explore in my paper is that Chokshi takes great care to construct “Hindu knowledge”—that is, familiarity with Hindu mythology and also the protagonists’ understandings of themselves as participants in various Hindu worlds—as unique to each character, and deeply interpersonal in nature. This presents a powerful contrast with prior models of Hindu education for children growing up outside South Asia. One such model is set by temple summer camps and Sunday schools. Chokshi explicitly disengages from these settings in the first book in the series, when we learn that Aru often gets into trouble in these more conservative environments: in temple she does not comport herself with the grace expected of a young girl; she refuses to care about having “fair” skin; and she has no interest in finding a future husband. In many ways the denouement of that first novel is constructed around Aru’s entrance into a more empowering replacement—Otherworld training, where she and her soul sisters learn how to use the celestial weapons they have inherited from their divine ancestors. Much of the second novel is devoted to showing that the Otherworld is a progressive space: queerness is a given; gender is a shape-shifting rākṣasa; heterosexual marriage causes more problems than it solves; and the very category of “family of origin” is constantly called into question.

Another model against which we might view the Aru Shah “school” of Hindu education is the contemporary Amar Chitra Katha comics, which increasingly use full-page inserts to educate their readers on topics such as “The Hindu Pantheon” and “Cuisine in Ancient India.” The Aru Shah novels loudly seek to dismantle any idea of Hinduism as a monolith; in plot and narration alike, the series repeatedly emphasizes the subjectivity and diversity of Hindu knowledge and experience. In my paper I highlight the difference between these two approaches by comparing the glossaries that are included at the back of some contemporary Amar Chitra Katha comics (which include Devanagari as the reference script and Sanskrit as the reference language, and are largely staid) and the glossaries at the end of the Aru Shah novels, which are deliberately irreverent and, as the series develops, increasingly feature terms in regional Indian languages.

Here it is helpful to recall that the Aru Shah series is published under the imprint of “Rick Riordan Presents.” I would argue that its framing of adolescent education accordingly takes its strongest cues from Riordan’s bestselling Percy Jackson series, in which the protagonist’s ADHD and dyslexia are (in Riordan’s words) “indicators of Olympian blood.” Chokshi herself consistently speaks about the value of oral communication—particularly listening to her grandmother’s stories—in her own learning journey. Thus the Aru Shah novels adopt the Riordan ethos of “what makes you different makes you divine” so that it drives an explicitly progressive vision of American Hindu education as individual, emotional, and context-specific.