Keywords

Manga; Buddhism; language register; Indian English; multilingual

Manga Literacy in India: Celebrating Multilingualism in The Vanished Path of

Buddhism

Figure 1. The Ruins of Kapilavastu, from Bharath Murthy, The Vanished Path: A Graphic

Travelogue. Noida, India: HarperCollins, unpaginated.

Two people can be seen in Figure 1, a man and a woman. They do not face each other,

however, in the mythic innocence of the twosome of Adam and Eve. Instead they bear the

burden of history, standing as they do at the ruins of early Kapilavastu, the capital of the

ancient Shakya kingdom in Nepal (Murthy ‘Re: Paper’). This is the place where the Buddha,

whose lived existence (ca. 563BC-483BC) has been well-documented in manuscripts and

architecture ambient to his era, is reputed to have spent the early years of his life as the

kingdom’s crown prince (Lopez, Jr. 177). In Figure 1, both people are dressed in baggy
clothing and running shoes, and the woman, armed with a camera, takes pictures of the ruins

diligently. Ought the reader classify these figures as casual tourists or as curious travellers?

Such questions appear to be raised - rather than answered - in this image from the flyleaf at

the back of The Vanished Path: A Graphic Travelogue (2015), written and illustrated by

comics author and filmmaker Bharath Murthy, and published by HarperCollins India.

Figure 2. Cover, from Bharath Murthy, The Vanished Path: A Graphic Travelogue. Noida,

India: HarperCollins.

The Vanished Path in the title of the text refers to the dusky trail of early historic sites of

Buddhism extending through northern India and Nepal, where the religion was born, although

the faith later spread to other regions including Sri Lanka and swept across large parts of

Central, East, and South-East Asia (Lopez, Jr. 165-70).1 The subtitle of The Vanished Path, ‘a

graphic travelogue,’ pictorially betokens the travels of the author himself, delineated by his

first name, Bharath, and his wife, Alka. Being novitiates to the Buddhist faith, the two
protagonists visit the historic sites in northern India and Nepal associated with the beginnings

of Buddhism. The protagonists travel in the spontaneous and meandering style of

backpackers, imbibing ground-level experiences differing from those common found in

comfort travel. Frequently, the protagonists observe and learn about local history and

traditions from random strolls as well as visits to roadside cafes and eateries. As an

autobiographical work of non-fiction, the travelogue presents the protagonists’ attempts at

making meaning of the archaeological remains associated with the birth, enlightenment,

teachings, monastic guidelines, and the death of the Buddha (Murthy ‘Kushinagar’).

The content of The Vanished Path also echoes that of Japanese manga author Osamu

Tezuka’s ten volumes of Buddha (1972-83), an epochal work of hagiography tracing

Buddhism’s beginnings in early Indian civilization. In his list of ‘Acknowledgements’ in The

Vanished Path, Murthy cheerfully pays homage to Osamu Tezuka’s magnum opus (Vanished

Path unpaginated). Indeed, Murthy’s nod to Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha in The Vanished Path

signals not only a deep engagement with the content of his predecessor’s work, but also his

formal adherence to the codes and conventions of Japanese manga. This adherence is evident,

for instance, in the black-and-white artwork throughout the interior of The Vanished Path,

despite the lush watercolour tones in golden, tawn and sepia on the book’s cover seen in

Figure 2, and the monochrome shades on the flyleaf, obvious in Figure 1. Murthy’s

predominant choice of a black-and-white colour scheme for the text of The Vanished Path is

probably deliberate: in a graphic essay entitled ‘A Form of Writing: An Essay on the Comic,’

he has earmarked a visual preponderance of ‘black and white images’ in Japanese manga

(unpaginated). In fact, Murthy’s creative output preceding the The Vanished Path has

developed and sustained a longstanding dialogue with Japanese manga. In 2010 Murthy

filmed a documentary about doujinshi or the sub-culture of self-published manga for NHK,

the Japanese broadcasting corporation, entitled The Fragile Heart of Moé. In his own short-
length comics preceding The Vanished Path, published in national dailies like The New

Indian Express, and in self-published webcomics, Murthy drew upon his direct and intimate

knowledge of manga produced in Japan, gained through his film-making experiences

(Murthy ‘–Bharath Murthy’).

Murthy’s express affinity for Japanese manga can be interpreted as artistically

idiosyncratic, I would suggest, when contextualised against the historical and cultural

backdrop of the comics industry in India. Murthy, in another essay entitled ‘An Art Without a

Tradition: A Survey of Indian Comics,’ has noted the popularity of American superhero

comics and European adventure stories of the Tintin-Asterix mould as major influences upon

indigenous Indian comics. Iconic examples of the latter include a series based upon a

vigilante hero named Bahadur (the name means ‘brave’ in Hindi) and another upon an elderly

trickster figure, Chacha Chaudhury (Murthy ‘An Art’ 5-6, 8; Pathak 534). Accordingly,

Murthy argues that Indian comics authors ‘struggle to adopt and adapt a Western form to tell

Indian stories,’ while adhering to Western aesthetic codes of cultural space, as indicated in

the discussion of American superhero comics above (Murthy ‘An Art’ 2; see also Mathur

175-86). That Indian comics authors should largely follow Western rather than East Asian

models is not surprising in view of India’s status as a former major colony of the British

Empire and the country’s consequent and continued cultural proximity to the Anglo-

American world. One may claim therefore that Murthy has contributed a situationally

innovative text to the Indian book market in the form of The Vanished Path.

One must not lose sight of the fact, however, that this artistically experimental text

has been released by the globally-known publishing firm HarperCollins, and large publishing

houses do assess what kind of readers they may target - on a mass level - that would make the

release profitable. In an author interview, Murthy has pointed to the increasing ‘popularity’ of
manga among young adults and teenagers ‘especially from urban middle-class’ backgrounds

(Dundoo ‘Sketches’). The ‘popularity’ of manga may owe to the fact that these young readers

have opportunities to read, discuss or draw and exhibit their own work on fan communities

such as dedicated Facebook groups (‘Manga India’; ‘Manga Planet India’). They may also

view television shows in the related genre of anime on the multinational network Animax.

These young people, for the first time in the history of comics readership in India, are likely

to be equipped with the skills required for reading the aesthetic codes of Japanese manga and

anime, and may welcome a full-length work in manga such as The Vanished Path.

The countercultural impetus of The Vanished Path has provided the raison d’être for

the present article, which exemplifies a hitherto unexplored direction of scholarly

engagement towards global comics studies in the Indian context, particularly for young

readers. There exists, currently, a sizeable body of both full-length and shorter studies on

Indian comics and graphic novels - including, most recently, Pramod K. Nayar’s The Indian

Graphic Novel (2016). However, the bulk of cultural activity in the field of comics and

graphic novels, as Murthy has pointed out, has been weighted towards the West rather than

other parts of Asia; understandably, scholarship on Indian comics appears to have charted

corresponding geographical territory (Chandra; Mathur; McLain; Srinivas). While Nayar

makes a persuasive case for ‘the Indian graphic narrative as increasingly central to the canon

of Indian Writing in English,’ comics/graphic novels or comics authors outside India in

which or whom he grounds his study, including Scott McCloud, Maus and Frank Miller, tend

to be Western rather than Asian (4, 5, 7, 31). To elaborate, Nayar’s study discusses the

graphic novel Bhimayana (2011), based upon the life of the statesman Dr. B.R. Ambedkar

who also features as a public figure in The Vanished Path. Nayar locates influences for the

text’s ‘non-realist representation’ of ‘history’ in Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the folk art of

the Gond community in central India (135, 140). In contrast, the present article maps out a
different psycho-geographic terrain in pointing to Murthy’s creative appropriation,

transformation and adaptation of manga from Japan in India, working through an

investigative framework which takes a hint from Jacqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-

Meibauer’s ‘Introduction’ to Manga’s Cultural Crossroads (2013). As Berndt and

Kümmerling-Meibauer have noted, manga produced everywhere today is shaped by

‘transcultural flows’ inevitable in the dynamics of ‘globalization’ (3). In charting the ‘flows’

newly enabled by the finespun contemporary cross-cultural traffic between two different

Asian cultures rather than the West and India, this article aims to update the critical

topography on Indian comics for young readers, demonstrating the creative impact of freshly

emergent pathways of cultural globalisation. A point to note here is that in view of Murthy’s

explicitly stated debt to Japanese manga, all subsequent references to manga in this article

will allude to manga produced in Japan and not elsewhere. I state this as a cautionary note in

the light of Casey Brienza’s ‘Introduction’ to Global Manga (2015), where she has argued

convincingly for manga as a global cultural medium today, often having little or nothing to

with Japanese origin (1-15).

Casting an eye on the public reception of The Vanished Path, one must acknowledge

that newspaper and magazine reviewers and interviewers were quick to seize upon the avant-

garde quality of Murthy’s engagement with Japanese manga and in a full-length work. A

number of reviews and interviews have deftly highlighted the narrative of künstlerroman

embedded within the progressive elegance of Murthy’s artwork in the travelogue, the

dramatic interplay between the objective and subjective layers of the protagonists’

experiences in their travels, and the autobiographical animus of Murthy’s religious faith in his

turn to Buddhism (Desai ‘The Middle Way’; Dundoo ‘Sketches’; Khanna ‘A Self-Effacing’;

Trivedi ‘Morphing’). However, a key aspect of The Vanished Path, which I consider to have

been overlooked in the public reception of the text, is Murthy’s linguistic craftsmanship
within his deployment of words in the visual text. In situating The Vanished Path within

scholarly conversation, I will highlight the various ways in which Murthy achieves

linguistically intricate aesthetic effects by his creative use of the codes and conventions of

Japanese manga. The Vanished Path is a strikingly wordy text: numerous words are displayed

in two languages, English and Hindi, on billboards and notices at archaeological sites,

currency notes, newspaper headlines, and long pedagogic extracts from Buddhist scripture.

This quality of wordiness may owe to, as Murthy himself has admitted, subconscious

influence from the essay manga of author Reno Amagi, whom he interviewed for his

documentary film on self-published manga, The Fragile Heart of Moé (Murthy ‘Re: a little

heads-up’).

In placing words strategically as visual text, Murthy appears to be bearing out a

particular artistic credo that he has voiced in his essay ‘A Form of Writing.’ Here, he

postulates that the reading of manga exemplifies not just the reading of ‘strictly “visual”

representations’ but counterintuitively, ‘the reading of written text’ (unpaginated). Murthy’s

credo appears to find expression in The Vanished Path in at least two modes. One mode

involves his playing off of words in the different languages of English and Hindi against each

other, and the other appertains to the interplay of words in different registers within the same

language, primarily in English. Each language or language register bears particular political,

economic, and socio-cultural significance in this geographical location, which I will elaborate

upon shortly in my analyses of individual panels in The Vanished Path.2

For a critical understanding of the ways that Murthy draws upon the codes and

conventions of manga in his deployment of words within panels, one needs to first consider

the theoretical grounds on which he has based his predilection for manga, as opposed to

Western comics. Murthy has articulated these theorisations in terms of polemical positions on

the aesthetics of comics, through discursive essays posted on his blog and in e-mail
interviews (Murthy ‘–Bharath Murthy’; Murthy ‘Re: Another’; Murthy ‘Re: Manga’). In the

graphic essay ‘A Form of Writing,’ Murthy posits that the artwork of Japanese manga

displays a tendency towards abstraction, as contrasted with the realistic bent of American

superhero comics. According to Murthy, the abstract qualities of Japanese manga inhere not

only in a bias towards ‘black and white images’ but also visual texts characterised by a ‘2-

dimensional’ arrangement of ‘space,’ comprising ‘simplified cartoon drawing’ and ‘flat

shapes.’ The panels are divided in a ‘non-linear’ manner, which means that

The narrative is grasped not by linear progression of action but by the cumulative

effect of the entire page. The eyes need to take in the entire page at once.

Contrapuntally, in American superhero comics, Murthy maintains that artwork in colour

forms the norm, while spatial arrangements tend to be three-dimensional, and characteristics

include an ‘illusion of depth,’ an emphasis on ‘shading rather than lines’ and the phenomenon

of ‘figure drawing.’ ‘Panels are divided to represent consecutive actions, in a linear way,’ and

the reader’s ‘eyes follow each panel separately’ (unpaginated) The characteristics of

American superhero comics appear to be rooted in the Western visual culture of perspectival

representation, which goes back all the way to European Renaissance painting at least

(Murthy ‘Re: ‘Another’; Khanna ‘A Self-Effacing’).

In the following analyses of particular panels, I will show that Murthy depicts the

interplay of languages and language registers, mentioned above, via the spatial arrangements

of manga, asking the reader to be attentive particularly to ‘the cumulative effect of the entire

page,’ The reader is required to scan the ‘entire page at once’ as mentioned in ‘A Form of

Writing,’ in order to absorb information that may seem tangential to the narrative of the

protagonists’ travels, but is important in triggering an interrogation of the socio-cultural

status quo (unpaginated). Murthy’s potential mass readership of young readers in India,

habituated to manga, may indeed be skilled in reading texts in this manner. However, one
must take into account that an understanding of this interplay within different languages and

language registers in The Vanished Path presupposes a degree of multilingual literacy on the

part of the reader. One may apprehend the term ‘multilingual’ in a broad sense here to

include the sense of a reader’s sensitivity to different languages and language registers.

Murthy’s representations of shop signs, which are omnipresent through the narrative of

The Vanished Path, offer the most prominent examples of such linguistic interplay. In Figure

3 for instance, Murthy depicts a street scene typical to the northern Indian city of Varanasi in

visceral and all-inclusive detail.

Figure 3. The Streets of Varanasi, from Bharath Murthy, The Vanished Path: A Graphic

Travelogue. Noida, India: HarperCollins, 29.

The protagonists walk through the alleyways of the city, and pass a group of men on their

way to a Hindu cremation ground, bearing, on their shoulders, a corpse laid out on a pallet.

The air is suffused by the men’s funeral chant of ‘Ram naam satya hai’ (meaning, in Hindi,

‘the name of Lord Rama is the very truth’).3 Concurrently, a man man urinates on a roadside

wall, and a stray cow eats garbage from an open rubbish dump. A man fries small balls in a
huge wok, probably making typically North Indian sweets, in blissful oblivion to his less-

than-salubrious surroundings. Bharath and Alka are immersed in a grave discussion about the

possible historical causes for ‘the end of Buddhism’ in medieval India despite the faith’s

concurrent status as ‘a successful world religion’ (29).

Figure 3 therefore presents the reader with an environment reeking of death,

dilapidation and decay. In the midst of all the gloom and doom, a reader in the habit of

scanning the ‘entire page at once’ in manga texts may notice a Hindi sign in the language’s

usual Devanagari script, coolly advertising the presence of ‘New Popular Dry Cleaners’

(Vanished Path 29; McArthur 316). The name of this small business firm is given in

transliterated English. Murthy’s artwork juxtaposes an impression of overwhelming squalor

with a wry depiction of a ‘new’ business firm that promises to cleanse one’s best clothes,

importing sensations of puissance, gentility and hygiene. However, Murthy’s seemingly

casual ironic dig only makes sense if the intended reader is able to read Hindi in addition to

English.

Here, in calling for an act of bilingual reading, Murthy shows the English language

constant jostle for linguistic and cultural space between English and Hindi, the indigenous

language, in northern Indian city and small-town life. This situation of linguistic diversity

mirrors that in much of India, where English occupies a peculiar position within regions

attuned to the locally prevalent languages of Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi, and others. The number

of such languages stands at 22 at least according to the Indian Constitution, and Hindi is

understood by many people even if they speak another language at home (‘Census of India’).

On the other hand, although not indigenous to the region, English plays a definitive role

within Indian everyday life owing to the linguistic legacies of former British colonialism

(Viswanathan 3-12). Today, the use of English abides in India in a wide range of key areas,

covering ‘education, administration, law, mass media, science and technology,’ and ‘trade
and commerce’ (Pingali 5). Despite this position of socio-political predominance, English

continues to occupy the uncertain status of an ‘Auntie Tongue’ in India, possessing

intellectual rather than emotional import, as explored by linguist Probal Dasgupta in a full-

length study entitled The Otherness of English (62). Murthy’s projected average young reader

of manga in India would most probably be able to read Hindi and tune in emotionally into the

absurdly incongruous dry cleaners’ sign in Figure 3. Such a reader would therefore exercise

literacy in the English used by the protagonists for their sombre conversation, in transliterated

Hindi in the funeral chant, as well as in transliterated English for the in-joke.

In other instances Murthy demonstrates the fine-tuned operation of different registers

of English within the same geographical region, letting the practised reader of manga

appreciate the ‘cumulative effect of the entire page’ (Murthy ‘A Form’ unpaginated). These

instances occur when Murthy appears to transcribe the use of English directly from the

speakers, particularly when the speakers happen to be from different social backgrounds and

classes. As the protagonists visit Sarnath, they are greeted by a peddler girl, who invites the

protagonists in halting utterances: ‘Hallo…come…feeding deer.’ Perhaps the girl speaks in

English in case the protagonists happen to be tourists from abroad. Given the linguistic maze

of the girl’s pidgin, the protagonists appear to understand from her body language and

context of deer roaming the park nearby that she is selling them food items, presumably for

the pleasure of feeding the deer. Alka buys a ‘papaya’ from the girl in response and asks the

girl, speaking in grammatically correct English, herself, ‘Do you know English?’. The girl

assents with complete self-assurance, treating her listeners to a superfluous recital of the

English alphabet (Vanished Path 13-15). Being merely a second-year student in primary

school, however, the girl’s bold rise to Alka’s challenge indicates perhaps her childishness

rather than her level of literacy. A more telling instance of the operation of different registers

of English occurs when the couple visits the Archaeological Museum at Sarnath. The
archaeologist, Mr Srivastava speaks to the protagonists in a fairly formal register of English

himself, beginning with a standard expression of courtesy: ‘What can I do for you?’ Bharath

replies, equally formally, that they are ‘interested in knowing whether there have been any

excavations in the area.’ At this point the conversation appears to be interrupted by a clerk

who slides in a number of forms to his senior colleague which need to be signed immediately.

Each form, in Murthy’s depiction of written text, asks explicitly for a ‘signature.’ However,

the clerk, who appears to hail from a lower middle-class background, requests Mr Srivastava

obsequiously not for a ‘signature’ but: ‘Sir, one more sign, sir’ (23). The clerk’s colloquial

and dialectal substitution of ‘sign’ for the term ‘signature,’ however, works here as a

ruthlessly efficient method of communication. Mr Srivastava understands the clerk’s message

at electric speed, attesting to a set of ‘social norms’ shared in this ‘speech community,’ to

borrow terms commonly used in the field of sociolinguistics.4

In the above examples of English spoken by the peddler girl and the clerk, Murthy

portrays samples of a linguistic category prevalent upon the Subcontinent, at least in

colloquial use, as ‘Indian English’. This category has been analysed in scholarly works such

as a full-length study by Sailaja Pingali in the Dialects of English series published by

Edinburgh University Press, as well as by other linguists (Balasubramanian 7-9; Lange 13-

23; Sonntag 2-3, 39-78). ‘Indian English’ appears to be distinct from the Standard English

normally used by linguistically-skilled speakers from India in formal or international

contexts. A representative sample of Standard English in the latter contexts would be the

variety spoken by Indian writer Arundhati Roy in the service of her civic and political

activism to global audiences, as aired on BBC programmes (‘BBC Newsnight Interview’). As

linguist Claudia Lange has posited, in such instances the speakers, being well-educated, use

English in ways oriented towards ‘the written norm’ - the norm being ‘modelled on British

English or International English usage.’ As Lange argues, in these scenarios ‘Indians speak
English at the level of functional nativeness,’ a situation natural to ‘multilingual societies

where English is an official language, but not necessarily’ the language that people speak at

home. Given ‘the unequal access to English within the Indian education system,’ however,

registers of English used across India tend to vary widely across class and social strata, as

evident from Murthy’s realistic depictions cited above (Lange 1-2, 4). Additionally, not all

scholars in this field have agreed to a monolithic, supposedly homogeneous (and

insufficiently empirically verified) category of ‘Indian English,’ given the large range of

‘regional and ethnic variation’ across the Indian subcontinent. Many prefer the moniker

‘English in India’ instead (Balasubramanian 9; Lange 1-2). Nevertheless, given that certain

common usages of English across India have been observed by Lange and other linguists in

independent investigations, the subtleties of English usage portrayed by Murthy possess the

ring of authenticity. Furthermore, Murthy’s projected young readers in India may be able to

relate cognitively to usages of English such as ‘sign’ instead of ‘signature’ in their immediate

environment, which they may hear or even speak on a regular basis. In such cases, ‘Indian

English’ or ‘English in India’ may strike chords of positive emotion with readers, in which

case the status of English might surpass that of a so-called ‘Auntie Tongue’ in India

(Dasgupta 62).

In contrast to these portraits of speakers in everyday life, a conflict of different

registers of English appears to be absent in Murthy’s rendition of the protagonists’ trips to the

actual historic sites, which are presented chiefly in Standard English. As opposed to the

vignette of the throbbing, aleatory and diverse life of the quotidian in Figure 3, encompasses

for instance, in Figure 4 Murthy offers the reader a taste of the meditative, rarefied and

eschatological atmosphere of the Buddhist historical sites.

 Figure 4. Votive stupas, from Bharath Murthy, The Vanished Path: A Graphic Travelogue.

Noida, India: HarperCollins, 11.

But even in these parts of the narrative, Murthy’s manga-style positioning of words

through the ‘entire page’ may make the visual text appear pedagogic but not didactic or

condescending to the young reader. The historic sites display a number of stupas, that is,

‘hemispherical reliquaries’ in which the remains of the Buddha are said to be enshrined

(Lopez, Jr. 181). These ‘stone-and-clay’ stupas offer elegiac testimony to the astonishing but

certain historical disappearance of Buddhism from India. These ‘votive stupas’ are explained

as either ‘devotional offerings, gifted by pilgrims’ or ‘memorials.’ The explanation is given

by the fictitious and recurring figure of a bhikku or monk, a spiritual inheritor of the

Buddha’s teachings (Vanished Path 11; de Bary 3-54). In Figure 4, the bhikku quotes a

‘dedication’ of liturgical significance often found on these stupas:

Of those phenomena that arise from a cause,

the Tathagata has said, this is their cause

and this is their cessation.

Thus the Great Samana teaches.

 (Vanished Path 11)

A discussion of the full philosophical and theological import of the above passage

would be beyond the scope of the present article, but the spatial arrangements through which

Murthy presents the teachings of the Tathagata (that is, the Buddha) showcases his skills as a

storyteller (Vanished Path 6). These teachings are encapsulated as an expression of the

‘Samana,’ a term explained on the same page later as the body of ‘Indian religious and

philosophical traditions’ that historically counterpoised the cultural weight of upper-caste

Hindu ‘scripture’ in early Indian civilisation (11). The figure of the bhikku works as Murthy’s

mouthpiece for his exposition of the presence of the stupas and their inscriptions. His glasses,

unruly curls and exaggerated whiskers appear to make him an alter ego of Bharath in

caricature, lending a touch of both humour and humanity to the protagonists’ solemn search

for personal moorings in their religious faith. In fact, the cartoonesque, impish bhikku keeps

punctuating the narrative of The Vanished Path in the role of storyteller in several successive

episodes. Through the fictitious character of the bhikku, Murthy cleverly shows rather than

tells his readers the annals of the disappearance of Buddhism from India, with the practised

élan of the professional filmmaker.

Murthy’s telling of this tale serves the pedagogical role of informing thinking young

readers of a history of ideas that they may be acquainted with cursorily through their school

history textbooks. However, the full range and importance of such ideas may not constitute

common knowledge in the regions which gave birth to the religion of Buddhism (Singh,

Dhillon, Basu, Shanmugavel 42-60). In endeavouring to reinstate this history of ideas within

contemporary public discourse, Murthy draws upon solid and trustworthy sources, including

scholarly works on Buddhism. These works include those of Buddhist scholar Rupert Gethin

and Indologist Richard Gombrich, which Murthy lists in his ‘Acknowledgements’ (Vanished

Path unpaginated). With the help of sources such as these, Murthy informs the reader, for
example, that ‘Having spread over Asia over 1,500 years, Buddhism was forgotten for nearly

800 years in the land of its origin.’ However, from 1861 onwards, Sir Alexander

Cunningham, archaeologist of the British Raj, ‘initiated a series of excavations that led to the

rediscovery and restoration of these historical sites’ (Vanished Path 6). However, Murthy

also lets the reader know that this tale of ‘rediscovery and restoration’ has been told by

different tellers in history. The overall process of the ‘rediscovery and restoration’ of the sites

appears to have been far more onerous than Cunningham would have probably liked, and also

riddled with unfortunate episodes of petty politics and thievery. Figure 5, for instance, is

framed by a narrative running parallel to those of Cunningham’s late-nineteenth century

projects of archaeological recovery.

Figure 5. The missing casket, from Bharath Murthy, The Vanished Path: A Graphic

Travelogue. Noida, India: HarperCollins, 9.

Here, Murthy relates that in 1794, the very year Sarnath was originally ‘rediscovered as a

Buddhist site,’ an important official of the native princely state of ‘Banaras’ (present-day

Varanasi) gave orders to dismantle a key pillar from the site, with the utilitarian aim of using

the ‘bricks’ for ‘new buildings.’ In Figure 5 the reader learns of a ‘green marble casket’
recovered from the process of digging, which appears to have been a reliquary for ‘bone’

(perhaps the Buddha’s), as well as a container for precious items including ‘ornaments and

gems.’ Imperial administrator Jonathan Duncan appears to have written ‘an account’ of the

casket, which was lost subsequently, but appears to have become mysteriously associated

with him at his memorial at St. Thomas Cathedral in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Perhaps

dead men do tell a few tales, but Murthy’s written text does not state explicitly what Duncan

himself might have done with the casket. Murthy simply presents the photograph, which

appears to offer a documentary record of the reality of the past, and inserts the enigmatic

sentence ‘The memorial’s central image is a large casket’ (9). Through the strength of

suggestion rather than statement, Murthy lets the reader muse on the possibility that the

casket, which constitutes the public property of Buddhist heritage, might have been

appropriated by Duncan for his personal use.

Murthy’s description of the loss of the casket appears to epitomise the ‘vanished path’

of Buddhism itself, forming an epitaph to public memory that keeps haunting the landscape

of the present as insistently as the ‘votive stupas’ mentioned in Figure 4. In Figure 4, the

‘dedication’ introduces yet another language to the linguistic potpourri: the bhikku mentions

that the ‘dedication’ inscribed is in the language ‘Pali’ (Vanished Path 11). Later on, the

bhikku explains that Pali is ‘a literary language based on the various middle Indo-Aryan

dialects’ existent in the region during the Buddha’s own times. Pali is the language in which

the ‘Tipitaka’ or the ‘three baskets’ were written, that is, the body of texts which forms the

‘canon of the Theravada tradition of Buddhism’ (20).

A brief explication of the Theravada tradition of Buddhism may be helpful here for an

understanding of the scriptural significance of Pali, and for the relevance of Pali in the

polyglot text of The Vanished Path. According to scholar of comparative religion Donald

Lopez, Jr., after the Buddha had preached to diverse audiences for over four decades, his
followers initially attempted to commit his teachings to memory. About four centuries after

the Buddha’s death, these teachings were written down in Sri Lanka, where Buddhism had

spread through the agency of the Indian Buddhist emperor Ashoka. These writings comprise

the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture, which has been considered to form the core of the

Theravada tradition, i.e. ‘the tradition of the Elders’ (165-6).5

Murthy’s rendition of the Pali translations in Standard English therefore can be said to

double, in modern times, the elevated yet nonconformist role of this ancient language within

the serrated history of Buddhism. The sociocultural role of Pali in earlier times can be seen in

counterpoint to that of Sanskrit, the other dominant language in early Indian civilisation.

Historian Romila Thapar has observed this linguistic bipolarity in an essay that about the late-

twentieth century emergence of a militant-minded ‘new Hinduism’ in India, which, according

to Thapar, draws ideological sustenance from an ‘imagined Hindu identity from the past.’

Accordingly, Thapar has marked the association of sacred Buddhist texts with the Pali

language, in contrast to Sanskrit which was commonly used by brahminical priests and other

‘elite groups’ whose belief-systems were rooted in the ancient texts of the Vedas. The Vedas

are now commonly historically associated with the Hindu religion - a notion constructed

retrospectively, according to Thapar, by proponents of the ‘new Hinduism,’ given the

absence of ‘the notion of a uniform, religious community readily identified as Hindu’ in early

Indian civilisation (210, 222). Thapar’s observations about the historical position of Pali

correspond to the views of Lopez, Jr. As per the latter scholar, the ‘Buddha is said to have

spoken not in Sanskrit, the formal language of the priests of his day, but in the vernacular’

(Lopez, Jr. 192). This ‘vernacular’ presumably refers to the ‘various middle Indo-Aryan

dialects’ cited in The Vanished Path, with Pali being the ‘literary language’ based upon these

‘dialects’ (20). That Murthy chooses to represent the translations from the written language of

Pali in Standard English is therefore unsurprising, given that Standard English, as discussed
above, remains the usual medium of expression for educated speakers in India. The Pali

translations, couched within the socio-cultural authority of Standard English, focus the

reader’s attention in duplicating the sacral space of the Buddhist sites within The Vanished

Path, and do not allow the distractions associated with the carnivalesque uses of demotic

Hindi and Indian English.

Figures 3, 4, and 5 may therefore be said to present a world of oscillation between the

spiritual aura of the Buddhist historic sites and the chaos of everyday life. This oscillation

works through consistent and fruitful oppositions, as words collide against each other in the

visual text. The (ideal) reader would be poised to make meaning through the multilingual

appreciation of the different language registers of Standard English and Indian English, as

well as the different languages of English, Hindi and Pali (in translated form). One may

appreciate Murthy’s emphasis on words in The Vanished Path in the light of the axiom in

comics studies presented by theorist and practitioner Scott McCloud, stating that the medium

of comics works through ‘a little playful competition’ between ‘words and pictures’ (156).

Murthy’s representations of ‘words’ themselves as ‘pictures’ may be said to go one better in

the process of setting different words into a dynamic of creative interplay. Through

multilingual word-play The Vanished Path appears to remain suspended in an uncertain

equilibrium, which may recall the premises of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s

aesthetic theorisation stipulating that a ‘poem’ or art object generally achieves a ‘balance or

reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’ (‘Biographia Literaria’).

Worth mentioning, in this context, is that The Vanished Path also achieves aesthetic

effects through the deliberate absence of words as much as their presence. The Vanished Path

is interspersed, for instance, with a series of pictorially dazzling close-ups of silent insects,

birds, and animals (Vanished Path 88, 100, 108-9, 115, 121, 123, 131; Khanna ‘A Self-

Effacing’). These vigorous images appear to lead up, self-evidently, to the the image on the
flyleaf at the back of The Vanished Path, depicted in Figure 1 at the beginning of this article.

This image, in full colour, reproduces a black-and-white image featured earlier in the text

where Bharath and Alka contemplate the ruins of Kapilavastu, where the story of Buddhism

itself began with the Buddha’s early life (Vanished Path unpaginated, 106). Only two sound

effects appear to interrupt this symphony of silence: these are the onomatopoeic

representations of the clicking camera (‘Clic’) and the parrots (‘Twee twee’) flying into aerial

horizons. The onomatopoeic words are not the recognisable English ones of ‘Click’ for the

camera, or ‘Squawk’ or ‘Screech’ for the parrot, but appear to ensue from ‘private

associations of sounds,’ as Murthy has termed of the sound effects in his works in another

context (Murthy ‘Re: Re: Another’). Here, the text of The Vanished Path seems to have

collapsed under the weight of its own multilingual plenitude. Instead the text crosses over to a

multimodal space where the aural dimensions of the Buddhist historical sites appear to be as

important as the visual in bidding the reader a fond adieu.

Nevertheless, the multilingual aspect of The Vanished Path remains crucial to the success

of Murthy’s endeavour in producing the first major publication of a full-length work of

manga in India. Although Murthy borrows the technique of placing words strategically as

visual text from Japanese manga, his linguistic method of addressing historical and

contemporary realities in India through his spatial arrangements remains an original

contribution. Written by an adult author, The Vanished Path appears to demand that the

young reader persistently perform and enjoy acts of multilingual callisthenics in decoding the

varied messages within the visual text. Murthy’s ‘graphic travelogue,’ therefore, ultimately

constitutes a creative departure from his early personal and professional encounters with

Japanese manga, even as the text reads telltale and numinous inscriptions in the arcane and

lost language of Pali.

Notes
 All translations from the Hindi are my own.

Some sections of this article (particularly the introductory parts on the cultural

implications of Murthy’s artistic alignment with Japanese manga rather than Western

comics), of necessity, intersect with another article of mine under preparation, which

highlights Murthy’s plea for religious tolerance against the political background of the

upsurge of Hindu militant nationalism in recent decades in India. Acknowledgements due

have been made in the other article.

1. The practice of Buddhism subsequently split into two main branches. As Donald Lopez, Jr.

has observed, these branches include the ‘Southern Buddhism’ of ‘Sri Lanka, Thailand,

Cambodia, Burma, Laos, and parts of Vietnam,’ and ‘Northern Buddhism,’ which refers to

Buddhism practised in ‘China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, and Mongolia’. Thus, Southern

Buddhism has been often been considered as Theravada and Northern Buddhism as

Mahayana (169-70).

2. I am borrowing the term ‘register’ here from sociolinguist David Crystal, who has

explained that ‘there are linguistic consequences of the shift from [any] activity to

another’; priests, for example, ‘engage in a wide range of activities, such as leading a

service, giving a sermon, exorcizing spirits, hearing confession,’ and so on. ‘Linguistically

distinct activities are often referred to as genres or registers’ (327).

3. I am grateful to Indologist Dr. Indu Prakash Pandey (‘About Us’) for pointing out

the subtleties involved in the translation.

4. The term ‘speech community’ has provoked a significant amount of commentary and

debate in the field of sociolinguistics, but I am using the term here in the basal definition of

J. Gumperz (1968): ‘regardless of the linguistic differences among them, the speech
 varieties employed within a speech community form a system because they are related to a

shared set of social norms’ (quoted in Coulmas 563-81).

6. Lopez, Jr. cautions, however, against the common assumption, often prevalent in Western

scholarship, that the Theravada represents an original form of Buddhism and that all other

forms are derivative, pointing out that the Buddha’s teachings have in fact been lost in the

mists of history and are onerous to ‘recover or reconstruct.’ In contrast to the Theravada

tradition, Mahayana Buddhism or the ‘Great Vehicle’ (referred to earlier in this article)

began as a countercultural movement based upon ‘newly composed texts’ or sutras, which

the earlier Buddhist schools refused to accept ‘as authoritative’. The followers of the

Mahayana referred to these earlier schools as Hinayana, ‘often rendered euphemistically’

as the ‘Lesser Vehicle,’ although hina also signifies ‘inferior,’ ‘base,’ and ‘vile.’ The term

Hinayana is commonly substituted in the West by the term Theravada, although the

Theravada constitutes only one of many Hinayana schools which still exist today (165-70).

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