The 14 Best Devdutt Pattanaik Books, in the Right Reading Order

Pattanaik cuts the entire epic into 108 chapters, each short enough to finish in a chai break. What separates it from every other retelling is the margin. After each chapter he adds notes on how Odia, Tamil, Javanese and folk versions tell the same episode differently, which is how the book quietly teaches you that there was never one Mahabharata to begin with. The stick-figure drawings are his own and they look like a lecture whiteboard, so some readers find them charming and some find them cheap. The prose stays flat on purpose, because he wants the structure of the story visible rather than the writing.

This is the book that made his name, published in 2006 as Myth = Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology and later reissued with the Decoding subtitle, so check before you buy it twice. It answers the questions people are too embarrassed to ask aloud. Why does Shiva sit still while Vishnu keeps taking birth. Why is the goddess a bride in one temple and a blood-drinking mother in the next. Why do Hindus have one god and also a few hundred million. He treats mythology as a language a culture uses to think about itself, then teaches you the grammar of it. Short, dense, full of small diagrams.

Same 108-chapter format as Jaya, same notes running down the margins, this time applied to the Ramayana with Sita's choices in the frame instead of Ram's duty. The best material is in the variants. In some tellings she is Ravana's own daughter. In others she kills a demon that Ram could not. In one she walks away at the end and does not look back. Pattanaik lays them side by side without ranking them, which is the entire point of the exercise. If you grew up on the Sunday morning television Ramayana, this feels like somebody opening a window in a room you assumed had no windows.

The Bhagavata Purana is the Krishna book, and most of us only know its middle: the flute, the gopis, the raas. Pattanaik runs the whole arc, from a birth in a prison cell to a death that is small, quiet and almost embarrassing. It is his most emotionally loaded retelling, partly because Krishna keeps changing job description across it, cowherd to lover to diplomat to charioteer, and partly because the ending refuses to be grand about any of it. Same 108 chapters, same margin notes on regional versions, same line drawings. If Jaya taught you the format, this is where the format finally carries some weight.

Rather than walking verse by verse, he breaks the Gita into eighteen ideas and rebuilds the argument around them: what property is, what fear does, why Arjuna's problem was never really the war in front of him. The My in the title is doing honest work, because he states up front that this is his reading and that yours may differ, which is rarer in Gita commentary than it should be. There are diagrams. There are a great many diagrams. For a text most Indian homes own and almost nobody finishes, it is the most usable version I have read.

The 7 Secrets books run on temple art and calendar prints rather than narrative. Each chapter takes an image, the linga, Shiva as Bhairava, the family portrait with Parvati and the boys, and works out what the culture was encoding in it. Shiva is the hermit who has to be argued into becoming a householder, and Pattanaik makes that tension the spine of the whole book. The layout is unusual and worth knowing about before you buy: every left-hand page carries pictures with captions, every right-hand page carries the essay. Read the captions properly, they are not decoration.

The companion volume, built exactly the same way, images on the left and the essay on the right. Vishnu is the god who keeps returning to the world, and the ten descents get treated as stages rather than a greatest hits list: fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, short priest, angry axeman, obedient prince, trickster cowherd. Along the way he explains why Lakshmi is shown at Vishnu's feet in almost every print, and why that is not the insult it looks like to a modern eye. The reading holds together even in the places where you want to argue with it.

The strongest idea here is a split he keeps returning to, the goddess as nature who needs nothing from us against the goddess as culture who is bound by our rules, with everything from Durga's lion to Sita's exile sitting somewhere along that line. He is careful in this one in a way he is not always careful, because the material runs straight into live arguments about women, purity and worship inside Indian homes. Same format as the others, pictures left, essay right. It is the most quietly political book in the series and the one most likely to start a fight at dinner.

Before the Shiva and Vishnu volumes there was this one, and its subject is the cheapest and most widely distributed religious art in the country: the calendar print that comes free with a sack of rice. He takes seven of those images and reads them as documents, which makes the book double as an argument that popular art is not degraded art. It is the least polished of the four and the most original, because he had not yet settled into a formula. Later editions circulate as 7 Secrets of Hindu Calendar Art, so do not order both by accident.

Closer to a long essay than a book, and it does the thing the Sita retelling does not: it tracks Ram through history rather than through plot. Valmiki's Ram, Tulsidas's Ram, the Ram of the Tamil and Thai and Jain versions, the Ram of political posters and street corners. By the last page you can see how a figure gets rebuilt by every century that needs him for something. He stays even-handed on ground where staying even-handed takes effort, and the book is stronger for refusing to pick a side.

Yuvanashva rules well and fights well and cannot father a child. A ritual goes wrong, he drinks what he was not supposed to drink, and he ends up carrying a son. The rest of the novel is a society trying to file him correctly: father or mother, king or queen, and whose name the throne passes under. It sits inside the world of the Mahabharata, with Shikhandi and Arjuna's year as a woman moving in the background, and it is a proper novel with people who bleed rather than a decoder with diagrams. It is also the best writing he has done.

He turns the same decoder on Zeus, Athena, Oedipus and the rest, and the value sits in the comparison rather than the retellings, which are competent and fast but nothing you could not get elsewhere. His argument is that Greek myth assumes a single life and therefore builds everything around glory, fate and a fixed self, while Indian myth assumes rebirth and builds around cycles and a self that keeps dissolving. Once you see that, the distance between Achilles and Arjuna stops looking like a difference of temperament and starts looking structural.

Written for children and perfectly readable by an adult on a train. The device is simple and it works: five decisions Sita takes, each one a hinge the story turns on, with the cumulative point being that she is not a woman carried along by events. Large type, plenty of illustration, and the marginal notes survive in a lighter form. I have handed this to two grown adults who found Jaya intimidating, and both of them finished it in one evening and asked what to read next.

The companion to The Girl Who Chose, and the harder job of the two, because the Mahabharata has no clean heroes and he refuses to manufacture any for a young audience. Duryodhana is given a case to make, and Yudhishthira gets a scolding over the dice game. The frame is dharma as a question about what the strong owe the weak rather than a contest between good and evil, and it lands, because children handle moral mess better than adults expect them to. Illustrated throughout, short chapters, and he does not soften the ending.