Ramayana: Divine Loophole

Sanjay Patel was a lead character designer at Pixar — Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, eventually his own short Sanjay’s Super Team, which won an Oscar nomination. He spent years on this Ramayana as a personal project on the side, and the result is the rare children’s religious book that adults buy for themselves.

Patel does the thing that is hard to do with the Ramayana and that almost no English retelling has managed: he makes it visually contemporary without making it irreverent. The colour palette is neon-pop. The character designs are clean geometry. But the story is told straight — Rama is Rama, Hanuman is Hanuman, Ravana has ten heads and Patel commits to the bit. There is no Westernizing apology, and no academic distancing either. The book opens with “This is the story of Rama” and proceeds to tell it.

The end-paper deity guide is its own little reference work. Each major figure gets a single illustration and a paragraph: who they are, what they did, why they matter. It does the job of a Who’s Who of Hindu mythology in twenty pages and is the part of the book children return to most.

For a child meeting the Ramayana for the first time, this is the first book to buy. For a household where the parents are themselves new to the material, this is also the first book to buy — Patel’s text quietly assumes the reader knows nothing and supplies what’s needed without ever sounding like a primer.

Patel’s companion volume, The Little Book of Hindu Deities, came out earlier and is also on this list. Divine Loophole is the more ambitious of the two and the one to start with.