The Vanished Path: Speaking Portraits of Different Registers of Hindi

Namaste, welcome everyone. Following that excellent talk by Dr. Ines-Fornell and Mr. Liu
on the methods of learning Hindi, I would like to bring to your attention some of the benefits
and the pleasures associated with using Hindi in everyday life in India. Hence, we will look at
this book called The Vanished Path, by comics artist and filmmaker Bharath Murthy.

Published last year, The Vanished Path belongs to the genre of the “graphic novel,” which, in
contrast to what we usually know of the novels we read, features words in combination with
lavishly-drawn images to tell a story. The Vanished Path is an autobiographical account by
the author, represented through his first name Bharath. The travelogue portrays his and his
wife Alka’s journey through a number of early historic Buddhist sites in the Hindi-speaking
regions of Northern India as well as Nepal. As new converts to Buddhism, Bharath and Alka
explore the archaeological sites associated with the birth, enlightenment, teachings, death and
legacies of the Buddha.1 The bulk of the text in The Vanished Path is in English, but Hindi
occurs in a number of important sections too. Here are some examples: p.14 shows ten rupees
on a currency note,

1
See Murthy, Bharath. “Kushinagar: the Place where Buddha Died.” Yahoo! News. 5 May 2015. Accessed 21
May 2015. Here Murthy illuminates the autobiographical backdrop to his writing of The Vanished Path through
his Buddhist pilgrimage; see Lopez 165-96. The Buddha is commonly considered to have lived through 563 BC
to 483 BC, but Lopez points out that scholars have increasingly questioned these dates, with some even
suggesting that the Buddha may have lived “as much as a century later”.
p. 53 shows a Hindi newspaper run by a Buddhist organisation,

p. 25 shows respective distances to a temple and Benares Hindu University in Varanasi.

These samples of Hindi text, as we will see, differ significantly according to the contexts in
which they occur, offering a revealing window into modern India.

In presenting his travels to the historic sites, Murthy offers the reader a stark contrast between
the quiet and meditative aura of the Buddhist sites and the lively, diverse and often funny life
of the everyday world. Here (p. 29) we see the street life of Varanasi in merciless, all-
inclusive detail.
As funeral chants of “Ram naam satya hai” suffuse the air in the alleyways, men piss in
public and stray cows eat garbage.2 In the midst of all this stinking squalor is a Hindi sign
that coolly advertises the presence, in transliterated English, of the business of “New Popular
Dry Cleaners.” My point is here that only if we read the Hindi text can we appreciate the
ironic joke in this seemingly casual juxtaposition of ideas of health and hygiene with the sight
of an open rubbish dump.

Or let’s look at this image (p. 5), where Bharath and Alka look out casually from an
autorickshaw ride in Varanasi to see this humongous billboard, advertising the antiseptic
liquid “Suthol” which promises “na rash, na khujli, twacha ke liye taazgi ki leher” (no more
rashes, no more itching, a wave of refreshing feeling for your skin).

So this antiseptic promises you not only a simple cure for your skin problems but an actual
wave of good feeling. Consider also this poster (p. 21), which in an overblown visual style

2
Vanished Path 29.
typical of Indian calendar art, proclaims with complete assurance that “Lord Shiva” is the all-
encompassing “guru even today.”3 Given that Lord Shiva belongs to the Hindu pantheon of
gods, it’s not surprising that Bharath, being a Buddhist himself, stares at the poster with a
telling mixture of scepticism and astonishment.

In all these instances where Hindi is used for humour and ironic commentary, we see that the
ability to read Hindi opens up vistas and doors for the protagonists and readers into modern
Indian life in a way that a knowledge of English only cannot. This phenomenon is also
captured visually in The Vanished Path, as these images show (pp. 34-35).

3
See Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham: Duke UP, 2007).
Here, Bharath and Alka are trying to get into the archaeological site of Chaukhandi Stupa,
where the Buddha first “taught the Dhamma” to “five companion monks”.4 The old woman, a
self-appointed guard at the entrance, charges the couple ten rupees for opening the gate, and
to perform this illegal transaction she makes sure that they “speak Hindi”. As soon as Alka
angrily answers “Of course!,” the old woman launches into a volley of personal questions to
the couple (“Do you live abroad?,” “Are you married?,” “Where is the bride from?”). Given
that this woman, obviously from a background of poverty, feels quite lonely sitting beside
that deserted gate the whole day, her desire for chitchat is understandable. Finally, satisfied
by the couple’s replies, the woman is willing to open up the gate, provided she gets paid. The
episode seems to bear out what language scholars have long recognised in India, that the use
of Hindi (or indeed other indigenous South Asian languages) forms an emotional glue that
English cannot displace, despite the status of English as an official and commercial language
that also confers social superiority upon its users. Indeed, the ambiguous status of English as
an “Auntie Tongue” with intellectual but not emotional import, has formed the subject of a
seminal study by linguist Probal Dasgupta. 5

Having said that, I do want to point out that all instances of Hindi text in The Vanished Path
may not exemplify this emotional glue. See, for instance, the use of Hindi in these signs at
archaeological sites. Here (p. 55), you see a sign for the “remains of ancient Kushinagar”
(“praacheen Kushinagar ke bhagnavshesh”)

4
VP 33.
Probal Dasgupta, The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome (New Delhi: Sage, 1993)
5
Here you see (p. 68) the “excavated remains of Ramabhar Stupa” (“Ramabhar stoop ke
uttakhanit avashesh”).

For those of you who speak Hindi with some fluency here, I need not tell you that words such
as “bhagnavshesh” for “remains” and “Uttakhanit avashesh” for “excavated remains” would
sound very pompous if one were to use them in everyday conversation. These words belong,
rather, to the solemn, information-oriented vocabulary of official reports and news
broadcasts. Now, I’m not an expert on the history and development of Hindi as a language
(unlike a number of highly respected scholars in this room), so let me just summarise some of
the implications of the Hindi register we’ve touched upon.6 According to the scholar of
language politics Selma Sonntag, before Indian independence in 1947, architects of the
would-be nation including Gandhi and Nehru had favoured the use of a colloquial form of the
language “Hindustani” for independent India, which exists in a continuum bearing loan
words from Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and of course Sanskrit sources.7 In contrast, Hindu
revivalist and reformist organisations favoured a Hindi closer to Sanskrit, which they argued,
with its roots in theological texts such as the Vedas, had the seriousness necessary to discuss
the weighty matters of education and governance. Ultimately, the battle was won by
proponents of this register of Sanskritised Hindi, which is now referred to by linguists as
“Modern Standard Hindi” (Gumperz)8. This register of Hindi can be distinguished from its
counterpart Urdu, which bears a greater proportion of Persian, Arabic and Turkish
vocabulary.
In The Vanished Path, we see Sanskritised Hindi in this image (p. 144), advertising
the State-owned Allahabad Bank.

6
Selma Sonntag, The Local Politics of Global English: Case Studies in Linguistic Globalization (Lanham,
Maryland: Lexington, 2003) 60-63. For a discussion of the origins and development of the term Hindi, see Irfan
Habib, “Hindi/Hindwī in Medieval Times: Aspects of Evolution and Recognition of a Language,” The Varied
Facets of History: Essays in Honour of Aniruddha Ray, ed. Ishrat Alam & Syed Ejaz Hussain, Delhi: Primus,
2009, 105-13.
7
See McGregor, “Introduction” vii-x
8
Gumperz, John and Naim, C.M. (1960), “Formal and informal standards in the Hindi regional language area,”
Linguistic Diversity in South Asia (International Journal of American Linguistics 26:3), eds. Charles A.
Ferguson and John J. Gumperz, 92-118.
The tagline promises the customer “apni ashaon se adhik paiye,” i.e., “get back more than
you expect.” Users of Hindi here will probably agree that the word “adhik,” meaning “more,”
of Sanskrit provenance, would, in an informal context, have been replaced by “zyada” from
Arabic, which would make for an Urdu register.9 Now compare again this advertisement for
Suthol, where the keyword “taazgi” or “freshness” comes from a Persian source.10

On p.29 there is no attempt at translating the term “dry cleaners” from English, unlike the
“Bharatiya Puratatva Sarvekshan” on p.55 for the “Archaeological Survey of India.”

9
Ed. R. S. McGregor, Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993)
45, 385.

10
McGregor 446
The emotional glue of everyday Hindi, found in the public sphere, that is, street life,
commerce, business, and the print media appears to be more cosmopolitan in spirit, therefore,
than the homogeneous Hindi of governance, and more open to a range of indigenous and
transplanted influences. Particularly in its receptivity towards English as well as Arabic and
Persian loan words, harking back to contact zones featuring Islamic presence in India’s past,
everyday Hindi appears to substantiate public intellectual Amartya Sen’s position, as
expressed in his history of ideas The Argumentative Indian (2005).11 Sen postulates a
tradition of secular thinking in the Indian subcontinent that goes back to ancient times,
embodying “the tolerance of heterodoxy, and acceptance of religious beliefs and customs”.12

In conclusion, I would just like to add that even as we celebrate Hindi Diwas formally every
year because on 14th September, 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India adopted Hindi in
the Devanagari script as the official language of the country, and Modern Standard Hindi has
become the officially legitimate register, let us keep appreciating the richness of Hindi in its
flexibility and its capacity for growth and accommodating change, which makes Hindi a
living language today unlike the wonderful but mummified language of Sanskrit, for
example.13 Dhanyavad aur shukriya.

Malini Roy
roym26@gmail.com

11
See Habib
12
Sen 45-72
13
See http://indianexpress.com/article/research/hindi-diwas-celebration-how-it-all-began/