Sanjay Patel enjoyed success on YouTube with his colorful shorts and is about to release a richly illustrated book that tells the story of the longest poem in the world

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz - Senior Editor

September/October 2025

Lord Krishna—an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu—begs the antagonist, Duryodhana, not to launch a war. Sanjay Patel The* Mahabharata* is the longest epic in recorded history, seven times the length of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey put together. The Sanskrit verses, attributed to the ancient sage Vyasa (who is also a character in the tale), describe the events leading up to a massive war. The story, set some 5,000 years ago, is loaded with so many divinities, characters and subplots that one European scholar, writing in 1922, characterized the Mahabharata as “the most monstrous chaos: Alongside the main narrative, there were veritable jungles of smaller narratives, as well as countless and endless teachings.”

Sanjay Patel, an artist and former Pixar animator, cuts through these verbal jungles with clear, powerful images. His 2010 version of the Ramayana—another (shorter) Hindu epic—has already been added to grade school classrooms across the United States. His animated 2023 YouTube series, “Ghee Happy,” introduced Hindu stories to preschoolers, depicting the gods as adorable children. In his richly illustrated 400-page Mahabharata, Patel’s imagery takes on a more somber tone, with sharper angles and darker hues.

It’s a serious story, but Patel hopes his retelling will capture the imaginations of middle schoolers like his oldest son, Arjun (who shares the name of the Mahabharata’s hero). “You have to remix these ideas,” he says, “if you want them to survive.”

Did You Know? What is the Mahabharata about?

• The Mahabharata focuses on the Hindu concept of dharma—living in accord with one’s specific purpose on earth.

Patel spoke with Smithsonian magazine in advance of the book’s release this October.

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You grew up in San Bernadino, California, with Indian immigrant parents. Did they read these epics to you when you were a kid?

Nothing was ever formally taught, but my parents had rituals. Every day, I’d have to participate in a meditation or puja practice. But I didn’t understand or appreciate what was behind these symbols and rites and rituals.

I remember that from “Sanjay’s Super Team,” your Pixar animated short nominated for an Academy Award in 2016. You showed yourself as a little kid, imagining that the gods your father was worshiping were like the superheroes you liked to watch on TV.

Part of that story was poetic license. I absolutely was required to participate in these rituals. But my epiphany really came later on when I picked up a book of Hindu miniature paintings. Art was the medium that finally unlocked all these stories and philosophies. That was the context where it finally made sense to me. I started to see these gods as characters, and I sort of got underneath the philosophy that way.

Mahabharata: Designs of Dharma

Adapted and illustrated with both humor and heart for a contemporary audience, this stunning visual retelling of the Indian epic the Mahabharata features more than 400 pages of illustrated text in Academy Award-nominated animator Sanjay Patel’s iconic style.

The Hindu gods are obviously very visual. They have multiple faces, or multiple arms holding weapons or books or musical instruments. That visual element seems to be built into the religion, as a way to understand what the gods represent.

I honestly think one of the strengths of Hinduism is that there’s no one dogma. There are a lot of symbols and rituals, but in many ways, it’s like a buffet of diverse options. There’s room for people to bring what they want to these symbols and images. If you want more, obviously there are thousands of years of writings about what these symbols and images mean. If you don’t want more, that’s fine too. You can just hang out with a cool image of elephant-headed Ganesha.

Tell me about the illustration from your Mahabharata book where Krishna becomes enormous.

That’s the theophany [a deity manifesting himself in front of human beings]. I love that moment. I had the great fortune of getting a lot of guidance from Arti Dhand, a professor at the University of Toronto. She’s a Mahabharata scholar, and she has an amazing podcast. Anybody who knows the text would know about one scene where Krishna reveals his cosmic form to the hero, Arjuna. But not as many people know about this other moment, a second theophany, where he reveals himself to the antagonist, Duryodhana. He’s trying to get Duryodhana to change his ways, to not start a war. Sadly, he doesn’t succeed.

You show Duryodhana as a tiny little wispy figure, silhouetted against Krishna’s huge image.

That’s the idea—a big cosmic form, a really intimidating image of Krishna—this fierce aspect of him looming over Duryodhana.

The open mouth is something you see a lot in images of Hindu gods, like Kali, the fierce goddess who is usually shown with her tongue sticking out.

I love this idea of the mouth, of eating. We recycle energy, and we eat it, and then it gets reborn. There’s a story where Krishna is a baby. His mom catches him eating some dirt, and when she looks in his mouth, she sees the entire universe, all this cosmic energy. In my preschool show, “Ghee Happy,” I was excited about putting that grand, brain-breaking idea into a form little kids could understand. There’s a whole episode about something getting lost in Krishna’s mouth. Krishna has a portal mouth.

The war depicted in the Mahabharata is a family feud. Here, Patel presents some of the main characters on both sides, including the warrior Arjuna and his antagonist cousin, Duryodhana. Lord Krishna and the sage Vyasa serve as spiritual guides. Sanjay Patel Lord Krishna counsels Queen Draupadi and her five husbands, the Pandavas, who have just been banished to the forest for the second time. The characters will spend the next 13 years in exile learning spiritual lessons as they assume a series of disguises. During one episode, the warrior Arjuna will temporarily become a eunuch and teach music and dance to a princess. Sanjay Patel You’ve brought these stories across in so many different visual ways. In “Ghee Happy,” all the gods are little kids, and the stories become really, really cute. Tell me what that process is like.

I’m not adding anything new to the Indian philosophical tradition or the mythological stories themselves. The only thing I’m doing bringing a new voice, a fresh perspective—which, in my case, is a laid-back Southern California artist-guy perspective. I want to tell these stories in a way that fits me and my lifestyle, to show the characters in a way I think looks cool and evocative and interesting.

With “Ghee Happy,” I thought, why not try to find the cutest thing, the happiest thing on the planet and give the Hindu deities that makeover? People get so grouchy about religion that I thought maybe we can disarm people if we crash together the iconography of Krishna with Hello Kitty. You have to remix these ideas if you want them to survive. If I want my kids to love these stories, they have to be as good, as much fun, as visually captivating as anything else they’re watching on TV.

There’s an episode of “Ghee Happy” where Lord Vishnu takes a nap. In the original story, it’s terrifying when Vishnu goes to sleep—the whole universe stops existing. But in the cartoon, the preschool gods help Vishnu take a “nap-a-roonie,” and then everything starts disappearing with cute little pops.

There was a big team behind that episode, helping to figure out a way to simplify this concept. We also wanted to introduce the grand philosophical idea that once we go to sleep and lose some version of consciousness, it’s like the entire world dematerializes. What exists when we’re not aware of it? That’s an idea that pervades so much of Indian thought, and I wanted to offer it in a small dose to kids—kind of an appetizer, I would say. Who knows? Maybe in 20 or 30 years from now, the kid will grow up and become more interested in these ideas.

According to tradition, the* Mahabharata*was composed by the sage Vyasa, who then taught it to his student Vaisampayana. Here, Vyasa looks on as his student recites all 100,000 verses to King Janamejaya, a descendent of characters in the story. Sanjay Patel Who came up with the phrase “nap-a-roonie”?

That was the head writer for the series. I giggled when I heard it. It made me think about Ned Flanders, the neighbor from “The Simpsons.” But then I thought, “Ned is a good neighbor. He helps out and he’s always trying to do good. And Vishnu sort of has that energy. He’s the cosmic preserver. So maybe it can work!” We weren’t taking ourselves too seriously with that series, so I said, “Sure. Let’s do it!”

The visual style of the Mahabharata is very different from the cute cartoons in “Ghee Happy.”**

With this book, I did want to sink my teeth into something grittier and more grown-up. The style is also different from the Ramayana, which I did 15 years ago. It’s more distorted, almost more human. The* Ramayana* takes place in an age when things were more perfect. The* Mahabharata* takes place at the beginning of Kaliyuga, which is the lowest point in the Hindu cycle of time. Essentially, humanity is deteriorating. I wanted to reflect that in the artwork itself.

What would you say is the main lesson of the Mahabharata?**

What’s underlying this whole story is that humans are so badly informed that it’s hard to make good decisions. They know so little about the past and nothing about the future. You see people making the wrong choices, again and again, because they don’t understand the philosophy of action. And then you have Krishna—who is a form of the god Vishnu—and he explains to Arjuna that the way of action is unfathomable. What you have to do is find your dharma, which means the things in the world that you’re meant to do.

Your books are in schools all over the country now. For a lot of kids, this is their first introduction to the Hindu worldview.

These stories are in no way meant just for Hindu kids. After my book Ramayana: Divine Loophole came out in 2010, I started to get emails and letters from all these kids across America. Apparently, that book was adopted as part of the curriculum, including in Los Angeles, where I live. Suddenly, all these kids were being exposed for the first time to this great mythology. I was really excited by that. When I sat down to work on the Mahabharata book, I was looking at my 12-year-old son, Arjun, and thinking how neat it would be for him to see another story from this great tradition.

Kids have been reading for so long about ancient Greek myths. Why not add Hindu mythology to the storehouse of images and symbols and ideas that children from all backgrounds can draw upon throughout their lives?

Well, that’s just it. And that’s why my collaboration with Professor Dhand in Toronto was so great, because she teaches the* Mahabharata* as literature. She’s not teaching it as a religious text per se. There’s been more of a scholarly movement toward sharing these texts as great world literature. If more people get behind that, it really does open the door to giving more people access to these stories.

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