Iščezli put budizma: vjerski nonkonformizam kao političko disidentstvo u suvremenoj Indiji
The Vanished Path of Buddhism: Religious Non-Conformism as Political Dissent in Contemporary India

Summary/Abstract: This paper takes a close look at the graphic novel The Vanished Path (2015) by comics artist and filmmaker Bharath Murthy. Sub-titled as “a graphic travelogue”, The Vanished Path relates Murthy and his wife’s pilgrimage, as new entrants to the Buddhist faith, through Hindu-dominated northern India and Nepal, where the religion was born but later lost popularity. Murthy himself acknowledges the influence of manga author Osamu Tezuka’s epic series Buddha (1972–1983), set in the era of early Buddhism. However, The Vanished Path departs from Buddha in engaging with religious politics in contemporary India, which has witnessed the recent rise of Hindu militant nationalism. My analysis shows that while the visual text of The Vanished Path presents an overt plea for rehabilitating early Buddhist thought in modern India, the visual text concurrently encodes a covert defence of the longstanding tradition of secular values in the region. This tradition encompasses the acceptance of religious minorities. The paper also addresses creative engagements in comics and graphic novels between two different Asian cultures, as opposed to the critically familiar historical and geopolitical nexus between Western countries and India.

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