Page - 22 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

22 | Amruta Patil www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 15–30 up with as means to this end. No modern story can compare with epic lore, because it is not a lifetime’s work, it is not ten people’s work. It is a distillate of collective wisdom. History and science are similar in spirit. Mythology is a form of psychology, which is why it remains compelling. Stories stop being relevant because people stopped retelling them. I realise that there is something counter-intuitive about writing books as an ode to oral traditions. But my way of countering that is to use story- tellers and audiences as a narrative device. There are people who are listening, people who are sleepy, sceptical, bored, contrarian, lost. They pre-empt the zeitgeist and also do not present the sūtradhār as infallible. So little in our public or private discourse leaves room for such a possibili- ty: I’m saying this, but how about we make it open-source, and you fix the part that I got wrong? Over-certitude is scary to me. For whatever flaws, too much certitude is something I’ve tried to not embed in my work. Knauss: But these mythologies were narrated in contexts that were quite hier- archical, and similarly with history: the history we know tends to be the histo- ry of a particular elite. This raises questions of (in-)equality and hierarchy, of who gets to speak for whom. How do you deal with that in your books? Patil: My method of dealing with this is to get an underdog to lead the sto- ry. Kari is a queer, androgynous, socially shy person whose most exciting life and best repartee is in her imagination. Adi Parva has a slightly sinister Queen/River as its sūtradhār, not some bearded brahmin. Sauptik takes it one step further – a heroic story is told by a resolutely unheroic sūtradhār, a man who has assassinated his childhood friends’ sleeping children, a man who is naked and crawls about like a feral thing [fig. 2]. Aranyaka has this woman of large body and large appetites living in a cerebral setting that eschews hunger and excess. The minute you change the lens through which a story is seen, the story itself changes – how could it not? How can the Mahābhārat possibly sound the same with a jealous, wounded, abject narrator, rather than a predictable Arjun or Karṇ? Within the story, too, there are people who question figures of author- ity and their actions. That is my method of saying: I’m not sitting in blind devotion at the feet of a self-proclaimed satgūru. Calling-out is part of this, but I don’t over-valorise that either – the lens shifts between respect and irreverence and respect. I’d like to keep what’s good, too. I have a deeply loving relationship with the material that allows me to scrutinise it. You can take the best sort of liberties only with what – and who – you love.