Page - 16 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

16 | Amruta Patil www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 15–30 from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad. But in fact, I don’t see it as a disjointed journey. To me, they’re part of a continuum. My first book, Kari, was, like a lot of first books, very close to the skin. Actually, as a South Asian woman telling queer stories, I could have hit a different kind of mainstream suc- cess, even internationally, had I kept on that wave. But, back then, I was unconvinced about more exhibitionistic autobiography and the two books that followed, Adi Parva (2012) and Sauptik (2016), had a natural turning outward of the gaze. From telling my story, I went to trying to recount stories that belonged to many. I continued to explore personal themes even in these more “detached” works, whether it is the unsentimental mothers of Adi Parva, or injured masculinity and jealousies in Sauptik. The first three books were really written as explorations of my own questions, with the additional benefit that somebody else might also res- onate with what is going on there. My fourth book, Aranyaka, was more self-consciously the first that explicitly relates to who I write for. It is, after all, a book about darśan – a bidirectional visual relation, a shared gaze, between an individual and divinity, or as I propose, between one individual and another – it is about learning to see the other. I’m a loner in my work, but it made sense that a book about seeing the other was ac- tually done with someone else, Devdutt Pattanaik. Those who enjoy the abstract, open-ended form of Adi Parva and Sauptik rebelled against the more defined structure of Aranyaka. Stefanie Knauss: Could you also talk about what influences your art? Patil: In my own imagination, I see myself as a writer first. So primarily, it is the words that move me. I am drawn to writers of cosmogonies, books about everything under the sun, the beginnings and ends of worlds. My influences are not comic books really. A couple of them hit that note, but most graphic novels don’t inch in the direction of that complexity or ambition. I have loved Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors (2010), Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile (2014), Isaac Asimov’s Chronology of the World (1991), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965–1985/2005–2019) and Craig Thompson’s flawed but ambitious Habibi (2011). I am moved by stories of marrow, blood, gris- tle, the juices of life, like Tarun J. Tejpal’s Story of My Assassins (2013), David B.’s Epileptic (2006), or Jason Lutes’ Berlin (2018). It has always troubled me that this sort of roaring, leonine voice is so rarely deployed by female writers – Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood are exceptions. Artistically, my books are all over the place. For a long time, I had an imposter complex, a sense of not being as good as I would have liked to be –