Telling and Selling: The Contemporary Popular Literature of Hinduism

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.   

The papers in our panel demonstrate the broad expanse as well as the crucial points of alignment in this growing body of literature. By way of geographic breadth, our papers investigate works that were (and are still being) published across South Asia and North America, and that are being marketed to international English-reading audiences even more widely than that. The novels and comics we discuss are targeted to very different age brackets: adults and older adolescents (Kalki and Devi), younger adolescents (Aru Shah), and children (Ajay to Yogi Adityanath). They adopt a range of genres and mediums: the dark, borderline dystopian graphic novel (Devi), the small-town superhero comic (Ajay to Yogi Adityanath), the cosmopolitan fantasy novel (Kalki), and the coming-of-age comedy (Aru Shah). The two children’s stories have strong political overtones, though they sound utterly different: Ajay to Yogi Adityanath preaches Hindu fundamentalism; Aru Shah preaches Hindu progressivism. The prior knowledge of the imagined reader shifts from piece to piece as well—each of the four works seeks to estrange and familiarize different aspects of Hindu narratives for readers who may or may not recognize those archetypes to begin with.

The symmetries between our chosen archives are, in some ways, even more revealing than the differences between them. All are written in English and are therefore intended to be consumed by certain demographics—educationally, economically, and geographically. All are published and publicized by deep-pocketed sources, including international conglomerates such as Disney and Virgin. And, although this may be obvious, it is important: all four works remain firmly within the world of Hindu storytelling—wide as it is—without venturing into the narrative terrains of other religious traditions. Borrowing from the (supposedly) secular mythology of Star Wars, Batman, and Percy Jackson is one thing; borrowing from another religious tradition, at least overtly, seems to be a step too far. They proclaim the depths of the narrative wells of Hinduism by appearing in eager multiples; the books are never “one-off” publications, but rather trilogies, quintets, and longer series. Installments, too, are a classic feature of traditional Hindu narrative styles as well as fantasy literature from further West.

Our first paper, “Putting the Fun in Hindu Fundamentalism: Selling Children on the Hindu Nation,” discusses Shantanu Gupta’s widely published children’s comic Ajay to Yogi Adityanath: Fascinating Story of Grit, Determination and Hardwork (2023), which emphasizes its hero politician’s radical commitments to cow protection and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Through games, activities, and the story itself, the book attempts to normalize Hindu extremism and sell Hindu fundamentalism to a new generation of English readers in North India.

Our second paper, “‘This Tiny Claim to Magic:’ Progressive Hindu Education in the Aru Shah Fantasy Series,” addresses a very different demographic of young English readers: North American adolescents. Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah novels (2018-22), a bestselling fantasy series published under Disney’s “Rick Riordan Presents” imprint, frame Hindu knowledge as subjective, emotional, and interpersonal. They paint a progressive portrait of American Hinduism, trying to show that it has been there in Hindu mythology all along.

Our third and fourth papers turn to adult readers. “Kalki and Cosmopolitanism: Chronicling the Life and Times of a Lesser-Known Vishnu Avatāra in Kevin Missal’s Kalki Series” shows how Missal’s books (2018-19) make use of the narrative features of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Godfather, The Dark Knight, and Terminator 2 to tell the story of Vishnu’s tenth avatāra. The series embodies the “telling/selling” symbiosis of global markets, reveals an ambivalent relationship to Hindu nationalist discourse, and reflects the cosmopolitanism of an elite Hindu audience that is fully at home with English-language media.

“Retelling Goddesses: The Devi Graphic Novels of Virgin Comics” continues this line of inquiry, exploring how Shekhar Kapur’s Devi (2006-8) takes various Hindu goddesses’ fights against demonic (male) forces and blends them into contemporary urban settings—all while selling them through internationally-recognized celebrities and framing their heroine as an affectionate, “all-too-human Goddess.”

Given that we aim to have this panel be cosponsored by the Hinduism Unit and the Religion and Popular Culture Unit, we are framing the session as a collaboration. While our panelists come from (various parts of) the study of Hinduism, our respondent is a scholar of religion and popular culture more broadly. The respondent’s portion of the session will invite us to approach our archives through a wider and more intercultural lens. On the flip side, we also hope that our collaboration will make room for the specifics of Hindu storytelling in the study of religion and popular culture as a field. We conceived of the panel in conversation together, and we want it to be an opportunity for scholars from the fields of Hindu studies and religion and popular culture to actually engage with one another. Finally, it is worth noting that our panel has a diversity unto itself: our speakers are at various stages of their academic careers; we come from very different kinds of institutions; we are geographically (indeed internationally) diverse; and we belong to a range of racial, religious, and gender identities.