313

Dramatizing Ontology in 18 Days:

Grant Morrison’s Mahābhārata
and the Battle to Save Eternity!
Jeff S. Wilson

In the Summer of 2010, the acclaimed Scottish comic book writer

and countercultural icon Grant Morrison partnered with independent
press Liquid Comics to release the original story bible and scripts for the
upcoming animated series and comic book adaptation of Grant Morrison’s
18 Days. Collected in a single oversized hardcover, the material showcased
Morrison’s unique vision for adapting the ancient Sanskrit epic known as
the Mahābhārata1 for a modern international audience. Indian comic artist
Mukesh Singh complemented Morrison’s text with a series of dazzling Jack
Kirby-esque digital paintings of “techno-Vedic superheroes” and Deepak
Chopra of Quantum Healing fame penned the introduction (CBR Staff, 2010).
Though publisher Liquid Comics had previous experience adapting
Sanskrit epics with its futuristic retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa (Ramayan 3392
A.D.) and its contemporary urban fantasy take on the Devī Māhātmya (Devi),
18 Days marked the first time Liquid had employed a Euro-American writer
for the task, let alone one as internationally acclaimed as Morrison. Indeed,
Morrison’s celebrity itself was a significant focus of the project’s marketing.
As Liquid CEO Sharad Devarajan proclaimed in the initial press release, 18
Days promised to take “one of the most enduring tales of the East” and filter
it through “Grant Morrison, one of the greatest storytellers of the West” to
produce “a book that goes beyond myth, beyond generations and beyond
borders, transcending the story’s origins and showing the world a dynamic
new vision” (CBR Staff, 2010).
Devarajan’s focus on the international nature of the project also fit with
his idea of its overarching theme. If the American superhero began its life
as “an allegory to the atomic age” and grew into “an allegory of the Civil
Rights movement,” Devarajan reasoned that a modern adaptation of the
Mahābhārata would have to be grounded in “the story of our generation,”
namely “the story of globalization” (Gilly, 2013). As timeless as its source
material may be, Devarajan made it clear that any great epic must also find a
way to resonate with the popular consciousness of its given space and time.
It is worth noting that Devarajan’s discussion of Morrison’s
Mahābhārata emphasizes the East/West axis over other common distinctions,
such as that of the Global North/South, the gender binary,2 or indeed,
premodern and the postmodern. While Deepak Chopra does make an offhand
reference to Morrison as a “post-modern myth-maker” (Morrison and Singh,

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

314

Fig. 1. The cover art for Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, featuring the semi-divine Krishna and
the two elder Pāṇḍava brothers. Art by Mukesh Singh. 2010.

2010:4), barely any mention is made of the vast temporal and cultural gulf
that separates the living author Grant Morrison from the origins of a vast text
painstakingly composed and compiled over several centuries around the turn
of the Common Era (Doniger, 2009:252).3
In this paper, I will confront this gulf head-on and show how 18 Days
faithfully reflects the narrative techniques of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata --
notwithstanding the two-thousand-year gap between these two works and
the attendant shift from premodern to postmodern literature. Indeed, I will
argue that the renowned postmodernist Grant Morrison is uniquely suited
to adapting the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, because both the Sanskrit epic and
postmodernism as a literary movement reflect what Brian McHale refers to
as an “ontological dominant” (McHale, 1987).
In laying out this argument, the body of this paper will consist of four
main sections. The first section will draw upon the work of McHale and A.K.
Ramanujan to explain the ontological dominant and its relationship to the two
works in question. The second will show this dominant in action as it unpacks
the interlocking framing devices in Book I of the Mahābhārata. After that,
the third section will demonstrate how the structures of these frames are
adapted and complicated by the images and text of Morrison and Singh’s
original script book.

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

 315

Finally, this paper will draw upon Grant Morrison’s nonfiction work
Supergods to provide an intertextual reading that recontextualizes 18 Days,
the Mahābhārata, and Morrison themselves in terms of a grander narrative
multiverse. By tracing and interrogating the interactions between the Sanskrit
Mahābhārata and the avant-garde comic book writer, this paper will open
further avenues of communication between the disparate textual worlds of
contemporary science fiction, comic studies, Sanskrit epic, and postmodern
literary theory.

Three Relations and a Dominant: Ramanujan, McHale, Morrison

When it comes to analyzing the relationship between the ancient poem

and the 2010 script book, the works of Indian literary critic A. K. Ramanujan
and postmodern theorist Brian McHale provide especially productive grounds
for comparison. In A.K. Ramanujan’s terms, 18 Days represents a different
“telling” of the Mahābhārata story and as such, it contains a mix of narrative
and stylistic elements that may have iconic, indexical, or symbolic relations
to the earlier source text (Ramanujan, 1991:44-45). Simply put, 18 Days is
iconic insofar as it faithfully reproduces the features of the original Sanskrit.
It is indexical insofar as it reflects its own place and time in the 21st Century
and it is symbolic insofar as it actively subverts or challenges the earlier text.
Thus, if one applies these terms to 18 Days, one finds that the cybernetic
battle saurians, the sky-filling volleys of laser fire, and the rival fleets of
“techno-Vedic” aircraft are all indexical in their reflection of contemporary
science fictional aesthetics. Nevertheless, these features are also symbolic,
because they reflect the idea -- expressed by Morrison, Devarajan, and others
-- that the story of the Mahābhārata is essentially a timeless one.
However, the relationship between these two works becomes more
complicated when one realizes that the stereotypically postmodern elements
of 18 Days -- such as the multi-layered frame narratives, the permeable fourth
wall, and the non-linear storytelling techniques -- are not contemporary
innovations but rather faithful adaptations of the earlier Sanskrit work.
Where one would expect these elements to reflect either a symbolic attempt
to refigure the earlier material, or else an indexical change that reflects
Morrison’s own storied history with postmodernism, one instead finds an
iconic relationship between the two.
Naturally, the iconic nature of the narrative techniques featured in 18
Days presents a problem: If elements of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata can be
mistaken for postmodern literary tropes, then what exactly is it that makes it
difficult to tell one from the other? Obviously, the structural similarity at play
here does not make the Mahābhārata of Vyāsa a postmodern work per se,
because such a claim would be anachronistic and would dilute the already-
IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021
316

unwieldy concept of “the postmodern” beyond the point of usefulness.

Drawing upon Brian McHale’s monograph Postmodernist Fiction, I
argue instead that the Sanskrit Mahābhārata is characterized by a similar
“ontological dominant.” Echoing Roman Jakobson’s usage, McHale
describes a dominant as a “focusing component” that structures a given work
of art around a particular set of broad, cultural concerns (McHale, 1987:6).
Moreover, different levels of analysis reveal different dominants. For
example, McHale claims that poetry as a form of “verbal art” is dominated by
its “aesthetic function,” but that different poetic techniques are dominant in
different historical eras, and different artistic mediums serve as the dominants
of different eras as well. McHale even leaves open the possibility of
specific literary works as “unique text-structures” having their own “unique
dominants” (McHale, 1987:6).

Fig. 2. The wicked Kauravas and their army. Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, p. 101. Art by
Mukesh Singh. 2010.

For McHale, the concept of the dominant plays an essential role in

his analysis of postmodern literature, because it allows him to look at the
poetics of the postmodern literary movement as part of a single “system”
(McHale, 1987:7-8). This broad, systemic approach also sets McHale apart
from other theorists of postmodernism -- such as David Lodge, Ihab Hassan,
Peter Wollen, and Douwe Fokkema -- who instead rely on “heterogeneous
catalogues of features” to describe the movement (McHale, 1987:7-8).

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

 317

The idea of the dominant also provides a framework for dealing with
historical change, as different media, tropes, and artistic themes become
“primary” and therefore dominant, while other, once-dominant features
recede and become “secondary” (McHale, 1987:7-8). Thus, according to
McHale, the contrasts between modernism and postmodernism identified by
previous scholars reflect a more general shift in concern from questions about
the nature of knowledge to questions about the nature of being.
This shift then manifests itself in a change of dominants from the
epistemological dominant of the modernist movement to the ontological
dominant that characterizes postmodernism. Where the former focuses
primarily on the tenuous relationship between oneself and the outside world,
the latter instead casts doubt upon the world and the self as stable, coherent
entities. Simply put, postmodern fiction tends to “dramatize ontological
issues” (McHale, 1987:15). In the next section, I will show how the Sanskrit
Mahābhārata’s intricate web of mutually imbricated frame narratives betrays
an ontological dominant of its own -- one that is far removed from the rise of
postmodern literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

“As Above, So Below”: The Sanskrit Epic as a Chinese Box

When it comes to adaptation, the text of the Mahābhārata (“The Great

Epic of the Bhārata Dynasty”) presents its own special set of problems.
Weighing in at about three and a half times as long as the Christian Bible, the
Mahābhārata is perhaps the most complex and perplexing work of literature
to ever emerge from the Indian subcontinent in the past three thousand years.
It is a grand narrative of gods and heroes that calls to mind the Book of
Genesis, the Homeric Trojan War cycle, and the “legendarium” of J.R.R.
Tolkien in various turns. It tells the story of a fratricidal, eighteen-day war
between the virtuous Pāṇḍava brothers and their wicked cousins the Kauravas,
but it also depicts the war between virtue and wickedness itself in the form of
dharma and its opposite adharma -- and even this sweeping description fails
to do justice to its myriad contents and genres. As the awestruck 19th Century
Indologist Hermann Oldenberg explains:
The Mahābhārata…began its existence as a simple epic narrative. It became,
in the course of centuries, the most monstrous chaos…Besides the main story
there were veritable forests of small stories and besides, numberless and
endless instructions about theology, philosophy, natural science, law, politics,
practical and theoretical knowledge of life. A poem full of deeply significant
dreamings and surmisings, delicate poetry and school-masterly platitudes full
of sparkling play of colour, of oppressive and mutually jostling masses of
images, of showers of arrows of endless battles, clash after clash of death-
despising heroes, of over-virtuous ideal men, of ravishing beautiful women,
of terrible-tempered ascetics, of adventurous fabulous beings, of fantastic

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

318
miracles -- full of empty flood of words and wide, free peeps into the order
of the course of the world (quoted in Sukthankar, 1957:125; his translation).

Moreover, this overwhelming sense of dizzying complexity is not limited to

non-Indians either, as the 13th Century theologian Madhva similarly states:
“Now the Bhārata is hard to understand for everyone -- even for the gods”
(quoted in Sukthankar, 1957:1; my translation). Described in this fashion, the
Mahābhārata sounds like a book that is far too impractical and complicated
to actually exist, like the chimerical, phantasmagoric works described in
Jorge Luis Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,”
or indeed, the Indic “Book of Sand.”4
From a hermeneutic perspective, the textual problems begin almost
immediately. The first chapter of the first book of the Mahābhārata begins
with an unnamed extradiegetic narrator who -- after bowing to the deities
Nara, Nārāyaṇa, and Sarasvatī -- introduces us to the first named narrator,
a wandering bard named Ugraśravas (lit. “the one of fierce fame”), son of
Lomaharṣaṇa (lit. “the hair-raising one”; van Buitenen, 1973:19). Ugraśravas
arrives at the hermitage of legendary sages in the Naimiṣa Forest and tells
them that he has just come from the court of the king Janamejaya, where
he has just heard the wondrous epic Mahābhārata from Vaiśampāyana, a
student of the poem’s author Vyāsa (lit. “editor”). According to Ugraśravas,
Vyāsa first composed the epic in the presence of the elephant-headed god
Gaṇeśa, who served as the mortal poet’s scribe (Fitzgerald, 1985).
This text fit for gods is the very same Mahābhārata that Ugraśravas is
about to recite, but first he must pay proper tribute by bowing to the brahman.
The brahman is an abstract, grammatically neuter concept of Ultimate Reality,
which Ugraśravas describes as “manifest and unmanifest, everlasting…the
existent and the nonexistent” (van Buitenen, 1973:20). This brahman also
exists in human form as Krishna Vāsudeva (who features prominently in the
epic) and in divine form as Viṣṇu or Nārāyaṇa (the same god praised by the
extradiegetic narrator earlier). It is also worth noting that this Krishna shares
his given name with the author Vyāsa, whose name at birth was Krishna
Dvaipāyana. For this reason, the Mahābhārata is sometimes referred to as
“the Veda of Krishna” (van Buitenen, 1973:32).
Ugraśravas continues his non-linear narrative by describing (among
other things) the king Janamejaya’s multi-generational feud with the snakes,
which eventually led to the massive slaughter of the snake sacrifice ceremony,
where Ugraśravas first heard the Mahābhārata. The text then interrupts this
account in chapter four, where Ugraśravas arrives at the hermitage in the
Naimiṣa Forest a second time to narrate the same story -- much like Borges’s
Scheherazade in “The Garden of Forking Paths” (van Buitenen, 1973: 55).
At this point, the narrative stabilizes and the relative coherence of the next 49
chapters makes it easy to forget exactly which Ugraśravas is telling this story.

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

 319

In chapter 53, the narrative finally concludes its description of the snake
sacrifice where Ugraśravas first heard the Mahābhārata and circles back to
the epic proper that Ugraśravas heard. At this point, the poet Vyāsa’s student
Vaiśampāyana takes over as the main diegetic narrator. Like Ugraśravas,
Vaiśampāyana praises Vyāsa for composing the Mahābhārata before he
begins his recitation. This recitation begins with an extensive genealogy that
describes the birth of Vyāsa early on and emphasizes the royal pedigree of
his descendants, who grow up to become the main heroes and villains of the
story.
The text continues on for several hundred more chapters -- filling the
contents of 18 books subdivided into approximately 100 sub-books -- but
all of them take place within this multi-layered frame. However, despite the
painstaking amount of detail in the text’s account of itself, it is unclear where
the Mahābhārata composed by Vyāsa actually begins. Despite his putative
authorship and self-insertion into the story, Vyāsa has no authorial voice
and whenever he does narrate directly, he does so on a “lower” level, in the
story recited by Vaiśampāyana, which is in turn narrated by Ugraśravas, as
depicted by the unnamed extradiegetic narrator.
It is quite possible that the unnamed narrator is Vyāsa. Such a move
would explain, for instance, why all of the diegetic characters speak in poetic
meter and why the named narrators still exist inside of the work they claim to
be narrating. On the other hand, the notion of Vyāsa as the unnamed narrator
does produce something of a time paradox, because the narrators Ugraśravas
and Vaiśampāyana praise the epic as a complete work before they have
chance to perform the specific actions that are recorded in the epic.
Moreover, if one were to entertain the idea that Vyāsa is the unnamed
narrator, then the matter of transmission would pose yet another problem.
Gaṇeśa’s traditional role as Vyāsa’s scribe encourages readers to imagine that
the words on the page were taken down by the hand of a god at some time in
the unthinkably distant past. From this mythical point of origin, the text would
have then been passed down through the ages and mediated by countless other
bards, poets, and scribes, until the text in its present form were to reach its
present-day audience -- an audience that may or may not choose to continue
the epic tradition. In this sense, the unseen membrane between the text and
audience is permeable and anyone who transmits the text verbatim effectively
recapitulates the original recitation of the mythical author-character Vyāsa.
The end result of this lengthy and complicated narratological process is a
fluid, all-encompassing Mahābhārata metanarrative that becomes, in David
Shulman’s words, “coterminous with the world” (Shulman, 2001:26).
While it is beyond the scope of this article to ‘solve’ the narrative
structure of the Mahābhārata, even a cursory analysis reveals a playful
sense of self-awareness that explicitly draws attention to the acts of textual
composition and narration as composed, narrated actions. It should also be

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

320

noted that this underlying sense of self-awareness cannot be explained away

by scribal errors, multiple authorships, or erratic manuscript traditions either
(Sullivan, 1999).
Rather, the narrative structure of the Mahābhārata consciously
employs what McHale calls “foregrounding strategies,” which are narrative
techniques that intentionally destabilize the integrity of the narrative world
in order to provoke a broader discussion about the nature of being itself
(McHale, 1987:114). In discussing the specific foregrounding strategies that
appear in the mind-bending works of Claude Simon, Gilbert Sorrentino, and
Italo Calvino, McHale explains:
Other such foregrounding strategies are a good deal more complex, involving
logical paradoxes of various kinds. Recursive structures may raise the specter
of a vertiginous infinite regress. Or they may dupe the reader into mistaking
a representation at one narrative level for a representation at a lower or
(more typically) higher level, producing an effect of trompe-l’oeil. Or they
may be subjected to various transgressions of the logic of narrative levels,
short-circuiting the recursive structure. Or, finally, a representation may be
embedded within itself, transforming a recursive structure into a structure en
abyme. The consequence of all these disquieting puzzles and paradoxes is to
foreground the ontological dimensions of the Chinese box of fiction (McHale,
1987:114).

Though the above description is thoroughly grounded in McHale’s study of

postmodern literature, the same could easily be said of the Mahābhārata as
well.
As the frame narratives listed above have demonstrated, the
Mahābhārata is very much a recursive work and like a mise en abyme created
by two mirrors reflecting each other, the epic also creates an infinite loop in
which Vyāsa narrates the story of his own birth and how it was that he came
to narrate the epic, which includes the story of his birth and his narration of
the epic, and so on. Moreover, as both an author and a character in the story,
Vyāsa often helps the story along “from the inside” and blurs the conceptual
boundary between the two roles (Sullivan, 1999).
The Mahābhārata also features its fair share of optical illusions, in
which the text confounds its audience by using vocatives that apply to several
levels of narration at once. Wendy Doniger explains:
In the Mahabharata...when the bard tells us what a sage told a king about what
another king told yet another king, the translation has to indicate this by saying
““““Your majesty....”””” But which king is the majesty being addressed? And
whose voice is addressing him? (Doniger, 2011:97).

As McHale has shown, these same kinds of fundamentally unanswerable

questions are the stock-in-trade of postmodern literature as well as the
Mahābhārata and in both cases, the tangled diegetic structures in play serve
to foreground the dominant ontological concerns of the work in question.
IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021
 321

In this respect, the Sanskrit Mahābhārata fits comfortably within McHale’s

“Chinese box.” In the next section, I will show how Grant Morrison’s
postmodern adaptation engages and transforms the narrative structures of the
Sanskrit Mahābhārata while simultaneously preserving this dominant.

Seasons in the Abyme: Framing 18 Days

As discussed in the previous section, the Sanskrit Mahābhārata is told

backward from the end, as different narrators recount the happenings of a War
that has already concluded. Meanwhile, Morrison and Singh’s 18 Days keeps
a sharper narrative focus on the eponymous 18 days of the Kurukṣetra War.
Instead of looking back on the War as a foregone conclusion, Morrison’s
narrative frame opens two years before those 18 days, with the five heroic
Pāṇḍava brothers (Vyāsa’s grandsons) anticipating the coming war with a
sense of pervasive dread.

Fig. 3. The creator god Brahmā. Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, p. 45-46. Art by Mukesh Singh,
2010

In place of Ugraśravas or Vaiśampāyana, Morrison’s narrator is a

prophetic sage named Mārkaṇḍeya and in contrast to the original Sanskrit,
the diegetic narration begins before the audience is aware of either the
speaker (Mārkaṇḍeya) or his audience (the five Pāṇḍavas and Krishna). The
script opens with a scene of the developing universe after the Big Bang,
all swirling primal gases in an infinite black void. Morrison’s script then
describes a process not unlike the development of the Mahābhārata textual
tradition, in which “incoherent tendrils seem to become focused, forming
patterns, structures, networks of light and dark -- the vast structures…
become apparent” (Morrison and Singh, 2010:46). These structures resolve
themselves into a massive, divine face of unthinkable proportions.
IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021
322

At this point, the voiceover of Mārkaṇḍeya comes in and informs the

audience:
First, there is BRAHMA, the SELF-AWARE IMMENSITY, whose thoughts
unfold as all the known and unknown things…the voices you hear or the words
that you read and you are all Brahma thinking (Morrison and Singh, 2010:46).

In the first line of dialogue, Morrison effectively problematizes the chain of

narrative transmission. The most immediate issue is that Mārkaṇḍeya seems
to address both modern-day readers and the Pāṇḍavas at the same time. More
than the visual framing and the voiceover, is the reference to reading that
hints at the double nature of Mārkaṇḍeya’s narration, because as the modern
audience will see later, the Pāṇḍavas are having an in-person conversation,
not reading. The second major conceptual issue raised by Mārkaṇḍeya’s
narration is that like the descriptions of Vyāsa composing the text of the
Mahābhārata within the text of the Mahābhārata, Mārkaṇḍeya’s description

Fig. 4. The sun rises on the First Age. Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, p. 49. Art by Mukesh
Singh, 2010.

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

 323

of Brahmā’s thoughts creates an infinitely recursive mise en abyme in which

the description of the audience experiencing Brahmā’s thoughts are mutually
reflected by Brahmā’s thoughts themselves, and so on.
The modern audience barely has time to process the implications of
Mārkaṇḍeya’s words before the focus shifts to a description of the four
ages (yugas) of the world. In Mukesh Singh’s art, the swirling galaxies of
Brahmā’s face give way to an earthly sunrise (Morrison and Singh, 2010:49-
50). In the idyllic world of the First Age, pious men offer oblations of crystal-
clear water to the rising sun and as they do, the water reflects and refracts the
light of the sun, just as the people of the First Age reflect and refract the light
of the divine (Morrison and Singh, 2010:49-50).
In the First Age, all needs are met by the presence of magical “wishing
trees” (kalpavṛkṣas) that allow early humans to live in complete harmony
with nature, but everything changes when, in apparent homage to the Book of
Genesis, an envious man bludgeons his neighbor to death with a large rock.
Following greed and murder, war comes into being in the Second Age. The
invention of war then kicks off an arms race characterized by the development
of divine super-weapons and the people of the Second Age create a race of
genetically engineered super-warriors (Kṣatriyas) to keep the peace. The
greatest of these warriors is the divine prince Rāma, who slays the ten-headed
demon king Rāvaṇa in the Mahābhārata’s sister epic, the Rāmāyaṇa. For a

Fig. 5. The battlefield of Kurukṣetra. Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, p. 62-63. Art by Mukesh
Singh, 2010.

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

324

short time, ideal heroes like Rāma maintain control, but over time, the super-
warriors are inevitably corrupted by their power and with widespread moral
decay comes the advent of disease.
In Morrison’s script, a disgusted super-warrior sees a bright red pimple
on his perfect face. He pops it and the pus splashes against the camera. After
that, the pus dissolves into a literal fog of war, as the scene transitions to
the battlefield of Kurukṣetra -- the ultimate result of the super-warriors’
corruption. Morrison and Singh’s battlefield is not a place of glory but a gory
hellscape, where scavengers pick at the bodies of the dead. In Singh’s artwork,
a smug-looking vulture seems to smile as he moves for a dead boy’s eye,
and according to Morrison’s script, this fallen warrior is not a generic stock
character, but Abhimanyu, the noble son of the Pāṇḍava hero Arjuna. This
scene makes it clear that it is not the virtuous Pāṇḍavas, but the scavengers
who are the true victors here.

Fig. 6. The man in the monitor room. Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, p. 65. Art by Mukesh
Singh, 2010.

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

 325

The Kurukṣetra War also marks the end of the Third Age and the rise
of the current Dark Age, where the inner corruption of humanity grows to
encompass all the world. This is the time of modernity, pollution, and absolute
social and moral decay. It is also a time of unprecedented mass surveillance,
personified by a nameless, faceless man in a dark room full of TV monitors.
Morrison’s script describes how the man himself is reflected back in a wall
of monitors and Singh takes this further by giving the man a reflective dome-
like helmet that reflects back the reflections, creating an infinite loop. The
mise en abyme created by these interlocking recordings, projections, and
reflections becomes a flat, artificial parody of the mise en abyme created
by Mārkaṇḍeya’s earlier description of Brahmā. Where Mārkaṇḍeya’s
description implies a deep kinship and shared consciousness between
Brahmā and the audience, the abyme of the monitor room is characterized by
appearance over consciousness, oppression over understanding, conformity
over diversity, and alienation over community.

Fig. 7. The great sage Mārkaṇḍeya. Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, p. 71. Art by Mukesh Singh,
2010.

This Dark Age ends when corruption inevitably consumes all life
on earth and the destroyer god Rudra arrives in the form of seven suns to
obliterate the dead world. Mārkaṇḍeya’s vision of the future dissolves in a
flash of white and the scene finally arrives at the diegetic present in the Third
Age, where Krishna lights a candle in the presence of the great sage.
In Singh’s artwork, Mārkaṇḍeya is a vast clockwork machine with a

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

326

human face and taking their lead from Singh, Morrison describes him as “a
great engine of prophecy,” a holdover from the unimaginable technological
advances of the Second Age (Morrison and Singh, 2010:34). In the silence
following his account, the Pāṇḍava brother Bhīma asks Mārkaṇḍeya if there
is really a point to fighting the Kurukṣetra War if the world is destined to end
in corruption and death anyway.
In response, the sage defers to Krishna, who picks up a fruit and speaks.
Krishna answers that in the Dark Age, what little light there is shines brighter
against the surrounding darkness. In a certain sense, Krishna continues, the
Dark Age is the best to be born in because anyone who speaks Krishna’s
name once in the Dark Age will be saved by his power. The Dark Age is also
unique among the four ages because it holds the promise of a New Golden
Age that will reset the cycle back to the beginning and change the world for
the better. However, if the War is lost, then Krishna’s name will not survive
and salvation will be next to impossible in times to come. Krishna concludes:
Billions unborn await the outcome, brave Bhima. In time to come, you see,
every human being will be called in some way or another to take his or her
own place on the battlefield at Kurukshetra and they will look to you for
their instruction…be inspired to action by this: your success or failure will
determine the future fate of all humankind…No pressure, I hope (Morrison
and Singh, 2010:74).

With that last sarcastic remark, Krishna takes a bite into his fruit and the
scene ends, leaving both the Pāṇḍavas and the modern audience with plenty
to think about.
There are two interconnected problems raised by Krishna’s account.
The first is the question of how he could possibly know what he knows and
the second question asks how it is that people from every time and place
could possibly participate in the Kurukṣetra War, which occurs at a particular
time and in a particular place. The answer to the first question involves time
travel, because according to Morrison’s story bible, the Krishna of 18 Days
is not only an avatar of Viṣṇu, but also a “highly evolved, hyper-natural
intelligence” from the far future of the New Golden Age, projected back into
the past to assist the Pāṇḍavas in the coming battle (Morrison and Singh,
2010:18).
In light of this information, Krishna’s fruit becomes a potent symbol
that is both a playful homage to the Garden of Eden from Genesis, and a
significant callback to the wishing trees of the bygone First Age. Appearing
in the same room as Mārkaṇḍeya (of the Second Age), the Pāṇḍavas (of
the Third), and the audience (of the degenerate Fourth), this “Golden Age”
Krishna of the New First Age completes the quartet. Thus, in Grant Morrison’s
Mahābhārata, representatives from all four ages are present at Kurukṣetra
simultaneously -- even as they are all present within the mind of Brahmā.
Krishna’s trans-temporal nature creates yet another problem when one
IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021
 327

considers that his presence creates a closed time loop, wherein the Pāṇḍavas
have to have already won in order for Krishna to come into being in the future,
so he could be projected back into the past which is the diegetic present. This
logic notwithstanding, Krishna’s words still carry a sense of urgency to them
that implies that the diegetic future yet remains uncertain. Morrison confirms
that this is indeed the case in the story bible, when they describe how it is
not just the destiny of humankind but “all time and space” that hinges on
the outcome of the War. According to Morrison, this War is not a passive
spectacle either, because in the world of the text, “We all become participants
in a battle to save eternity!” (Morrison and Singh, 2010:18).
The key to unravelling the knotted timeline of 18 Days comes early on
in the story bible where Morrison says:
As I see it, the whole of the Mahabharata, and indeed the whole of Hindu
thought and ultimately of all contemplative thought, expands outwards like
the Big Bang from one timeless Singularity -- the moment when Krishna stops
time to deliver the terrible wisdom of the Gita and reveal to Arjuna his -- and
our own -- place in the cosmos (Morrison and Singh, 2010:6).

Taken literally, Morrison’s idea of the Bhagavad Gītā as a kind of “Big Bang”
implies a new kind of time that does not extend from beginning to end, but
rather outward from the center. This model would also explain Morrison’s
description of the Kurukṣetra War as “the prototype for every war ever
fought,” because even though it is not the first war to occur in the chronology
in 18 Days, it is the central war that occasions the aforementioned Big Bang
that is Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna (Morrison and Singh, 2010:12).
Given the continuum shattering nature of the Gītā, it is appropriate that
Singh’s depiction of Krishna’s “universal form” (viśvarūpa) bears a strong
resemblance to the earlier figure of Brahmā. Though portrayed on the same

Fig. 8. Cosmic Krishna. Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, p.118-119. Art by Mukesh Singh. 2010.

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

328

cosmic, widescreen background, Singh’s cosmic Krishna is more definite

and concrete than Brahmā. Instead of representing merely the overlay of
combined galaxies like Brahmā, Krishna has his own distinct body that seems
to be approaching the reader from somewhere entirely outside the world of
the text. While the psychedelic rainbow vapors around Brahmā anticipate
the formation of galaxies from primal gases, Krishna’s blazing white lights
seem to imply an ex nihilo sort of creation, where white lights blend into the
white space of a blank page, where everything that exists can be redrawn,
recolored, and rewritten.
Though Morrison’s text does not include a full rendering of the
Bhagavad Gītā, the self-revelation of Krishna to Arjuna is accompanied by
its very own mise en abyme in the Sanskrit:
Arjuna saw all the universe
in its many ways and parts,
standing as one in the body
of the god of gods (Stoler Miller, 1986:99).

In this passage, Arjuna, an inhabitant of the universe, witnesses the vast

cosmic engines of the universe from outside as he sees them contained in the
eternal body of his friend Krishna, which is simultaneously contained within
the universe. Here, the Sanskrit Mahābhārata is very much in the same spirit
as 18 Days, in that both works feature infinitely recursive structures that head
off any attempt to exit the ontological plane of the text.

All(Together)Now: From Kurukṣetra to Kathmandu

Soon after the publication of the initial script book, Grant Morrison
left the 18 Days project in the hands of Liquid Comics and their subsidiary
Graphic India. As the subsequent comic books and animated Webisodes
continued, the more radical metanarrative tropes of Morrison’s original
vision were repeatedly downplayed in favor of a more conventional, linear
style of narrative. However, even though Morrison’s Mahābhārata never
saw completion, a book published the following year contained several more
hints as to what could have been in 18 Days.
Morrison’s first nonfiction book Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes,
Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About
Being Human details the history of the comic book superhero genre,
interspersed with reflections on their own personal history, and some tentative
speculations on the future of the human species and its fictions. The book also
contains a surprising number of references to Hindu cosmology.
The most notable of these references occurs in a discussion on parallel
universes in comics, brane cosmology, and the many-worlds interpretation of

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

 329

physics. The paragraph is worth quoting in full:

Flash Fact: Our universe is one of many, grown inside some unimaginable
amniotic hypertime. It may even all be hologram, projected onto a flat mega-
membrane, which is, in turn, embedded, along with many others like it, within
a higher dimensional space some scientists have dubbed “the bulk.” In the
brane model of the multiverse, all history is spread as thin as emulsion on a
celestial tissue that floats in some immense Brahmanic ocean of…meta-stuff.
Got all that? (Morrison, 2011:113).

By taking a theological term and applying it to modern brane physics,

Morrison’s use of the phrase “Brahmanic ocean” here implies that scientific
cosmology acts as a kind of secular revelation that affects not just the perception
of what the universe is, but what it means as well. For instance, Morrison
attaches special significance to the idea that multiple universes existed in
the world of comic book superheroes before they were ‘discovered’ by the
calculations of real-world cosmological physicists (Morrison, 2011:113).
For Morrison, this is not a mere coincidence, but rather evidence that fictional
and non-fictional worlds are characterized by a kind of nested, self-similarity
that reflects the old maxim of Hermetic philosophy: “As above, so below”
(Singer, 2012:19).
According to Supergods, Morrison sees evidence of this self-similarity
first hand when they experience a kind of “alien abduction” in Kathmandu.
Despite its science fictional elements, Morrison insists that their experience
of the Kathmandu incident did not feel unreal, but rather “far more ‘real’”
than real (Morrison, 2011:277). To summarize: the incident begins when a
number of blob-like beings emerge from the walls and furniture of Morrison’s
hotel room. They then “rotate” Morrison off their native three-dimensional
plane and take them to the higher-dimensional realm of the aforementioned
“Brahmanic ocean” that is the bulk. Looking “down” at human existence
from the impossible height of the bulk, Morrison sees all moments of time
simultaneously and all of space becomes a “flat” representation of higher-
dimensional processes -- not unlike the flat pages of a comic book. Finally,
Morrison sees that human thoughts can be “read” by the creatures of the
bulk just as easily as human beings read the thought bubbles of comic book
characters. The creatures then return Morrison to earth a changed person
(Morrison, 2011:261-263 and 272-277).
Occurring in 1994, the Kathmandu incident would go on to have an
inestimable impact on Morrison’s future work, serving as a major inspiration
for projects as diverse as The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, and even the
mainstream superhero property All Star Superman (Morrison, 2011:262).
Over the years, Morrison’s experience of the bulk would appear in these works
under several names, such as the Supercontext, Hypertime, the AllNow, the
Fifth Dimension, or indeed, the Brahmanic ocean. In all of these cases, the
bulk serves as a space of radical destabilization that serves to literalize the
IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021
330

ontological dominant of the work in question.

At first glance, it would seem that in the text of 18 Days, the Brahmanic
ocean is simply the realm of the god Brahmā, who like the blob beings of the
bulk, has the ability to read the thoughts in a person’s head as easily as one
would read words on a page. In reality, however, the Brahmanic ocean of

Fig. 9. Grant Morrison’s first published reference to the Mahābhārata in The Invisibles #5,
p. 1. Art by Jill Thompson. 1995.

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

 331

Supergods has more in common with the realm of Krishna as the brahman.
As with the bulk, the realm of Krishna exists beyond the “fifth wall” that
separates fiction from scripture, or reality from Ultimate Reality (Morrison,
2011:277).
There is also a historical argument to be made, since the Kathmandu
incident took place in 1994 and Morrison’s first published reference to the
Mahābhārata occurred in 1995 (Morrison, Thompson, et al, 1995:2). A later
interview revealed that Morrison’s interest in the epic was far from casual,
as they were at around that time engaged in reading through all “1.8 million
words” of the received text so that they could adapt its narrative structures in
their work on The Invisibles (Gilly, 2013). It is not impossible that Morrison’s
experience of the Mahābhārata influenced the outcome of the Kathmandu
incident -- their own personal Bhagavad Gītā moment -- just as the incident
itself influenced 18 Days. It is even theoretically possible that Morrison had
a volume of the Mahābhārata in their hotel room on the night they were
abducted.
Leaving all conjecture aside, it is nevertheless obvious that Morrison’s
encounters with Hindu cosmology and especially the Mahābhārata have left
an indelible mark on their life and works. This influence shows itself in a
particularly revealing comment Morrison makes in Supergods when they refer
to Vyāsa’s divine scribe Gaṇeśa writing “the story of existence with his own
broken-off tusk” (Morrison, 2011:30). In this moment, Morrison implies that
“the Mahābhārata” and “existence” have become literally indistinguishable
from each other. They also imply yet another mise en abyme in which the
sage Vyāsa dictates to the elephant-headed god the very reality that contains
them both -- just as the Vyāsa of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata narrated his own
narration of the Mahābhārata, thereby creating an infinite recursive loop.
Here, Morrison once again offers a striking reinterpretation of the
Mahābhārata narrative that is not so much a postmodern subversion as it
is an iconic, triumphant return to form. In Morrison’s hands, the ontological
dominant and its destabilizing implications become a space of hope and
optimism rather than anxiety and despair. The threat of meaninglessness
gives way to the promise of infinite possibility and the notion that human
beings have the means to create their own reality in the spirit of Vyāsa.
In this respect, Morrison would have certainly agreed with the opinion
of Mahābhārata Critical Edition editor Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar in 1943.
Responding to Hermann Oldenberg’s claim that the Mahābhārata had
devolved over time into a “most monstrous chaos,” Sukthankar countered
that the great epic of India was not a work of chaos but rather “the cosmos”
itself (Sukthankar, 1957:124).

Endnotes
IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021
332

1
In this paper, I will render all Sanskrit words and names in accordance with
the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) -- with the
exception of the name “Kṛṣṇa,” which I will render as “Krishna” to keep the
spelling consistent with Morrison’s usage.
2
Grant Morrison came out as non-binary in 2020 (Townsend, 2020). Though
Morrison was publicly using he/him pronouns when the 18 Days script book
was published, this article will refer to Morrison with the updated they/them
pronouns.
3
It is beyond the scope of this paper to give a full account of the myriad
ways in which the interpretive insights gleaned from Morrison and Singh’s
18 Days can be applied to the academic study of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.
Instead, I will limit my discussion of Mahābhārata Studies as a field to this
paper’s companion piece, which will be presented in November 2021 as
part of the Religion and Science Fiction Unit at the American Academy of
Religion Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas (Wilson, 2021).
4
It is worth noting that Borges himself was also familiar with the Mahābhārata
(Borges and Jurado, 2000).

References

Borges, Jorge Luis and Alicia Jurado. 2000. Qué Es El Budismo. Madrid:
Alianza.
CBR Staff. 2010. “Morrison Spends ‘18 Days’ with Dynamite.” CBR.com.
<https://www.cbr.com/morrison-spends-18-days-with-dynamite>.
Accessed May 1, 2021.
Doniger, Wendy. 2009. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York:
Penguin.
Doniger, Wendy. 2011. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Fitzgerald, James L. 1985. “India’s Fifth Veda: The Mahābhārata’s
Presentation of Itself.” Journal of South Asian Literature 20 (1):
125-40. Accessed June 28, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40872715.
Gilly, Casey. 2013. “SDCC: Grant Morrison Spins Epic Myth and Legend in
‘18 Days.’” CBR.com. <https://www.cbr.com/sdcc-grant-morrison-
spins-epic-myth-and-legend-in-18-days>. Accessed May 1, 2021.
McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge.
Morrison, Grant and Mukesh Singh. 2010. Grant Morrison’s 18 Days.
Runnemede: Dynamite Entertainment.
Morrison, Grant. 2011. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous
Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being
Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau.Bottom of Form

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021

 333

Morrison, Grant, Jill Thompson, et al. 1995. “Arcadia: Part Four -- Bloody
Poetry.” The Invisibles #5. (Jan.). New York: DC Comics/Vertigo.
Ramanujan, A. K. 1991. “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and
Three Thoughts on Translation.” In Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity
of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman, pp.
22-49. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Shulman, David Dean. 2001. The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu
and Sanskrit. New York: Oxford University Press.
Singer, Marc. 2012. Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary
Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Stoler Miller, Barbara. 1986. The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time
of War. New York: Random House Publishing Group.
Sukthankar, V. S. 1957. On the Meaning of the Mahābhārata. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass Publishers.
Sullivan, Bruce M. 1999. Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in
the Mahābhārata. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.
Townsend, Amber. 2020. “The Green Lantern Writer Comes Out as Non-
Binary.” CBR.com. <https://www.cbr.com/the-green-lantern-grant-
morrison-non-binary/amp>. Accessed May 30, 2021.
van Buitenen, J. A. B. 1973. The Mahābhārata. Volume 1. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, Jeff S. 2021 (forthcoming). “On the Field of Dharma, the Field
of Hypertime: The Mahābhārata and its Ontological Dominant.”
Paper to be presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual
Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, United States, November.

Jeff S. Wilson is a Ph.D. candidate in religious studies at the University

of Texas at Austin. He is currently writing a dissertation on military ethics,
political theology, and narrative structure in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. His
other interests include comparative theology, New Age religion, esotericism,
and the works of Grant Morrison.

IJOCA, Spring/Summer 2021