ZEE5's new kids' series makes two asura twins the heroes

Indian mythology has always known what to do with an asura. Put it in the villain’s chair, give it the demon face, let the god win in the last act. ZEE5’s newest children’s series does the opposite. Shivlok Ke Kundakka Mandakka, which started streaming on the platform’s KidZ hub on July 17, hands the whole show to two of them: Kundakka and Mandakka, a pair of mischievous asura twins whose pranks pull them into an adventure about courage, friendship and working out who they are.

The source material makes the inversion feel deliberate. The series adapts Anand Neelakantan’s bestselling children’s book The Very, Extremely, Most Naughty Asura Tales for Kids, and Neelakantan has built a whole career on telling India’s epics from the losing side, most visibly in Asura: Tale of the Vanquished, which retold the Ramayana from Ravana’s point of view. Two naughty demon children as heroes is exactly the move you would expect from him.

The world sits outside the familiar beats of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in a stretch of mythology stocked with new characters, unexplored realms and a fair amount of magic. Under the comedy and the bright animation runs a simple argument, that it is not perfection but the choices a person makes that turn them into a hero. It also pushes back on the tired idea that a playful, rule-breaking child has no room for values, letting Kundakka and Mandakka’s curiosity sit alongside kindness, courage and compassion.

That reframing is the point of the platform as much as the show. KidZ on ZEE5 positions itself as a safe, guilt-free viewing space for children, and its Business Head, Chandan Khandelwal, tied the launch to a longer bet on storytelling. The stories that last, he said, are the ones “loved across generations,” which is why the platform is working with writers like Neelakantan to rebuild those worlds for younger viewers with memorable characters, humour and adventure rather than another retelling of what every child already knows.

Neelakantan, for his part, called it a thrill to watch his book come alive as animation for a new generation of children, and said he hopes young viewers enjoy Kundakka and Mandakka’s on-screen scrapes as much as he enjoyed writing them.

Shivlok Ke Kundakka Mandakka is being pitched as the first title in what ZEE5 wants to grow into a larger mythological universe, with more characters, adventures and stories layered on top over time. It streams in six languages: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali and English.