Page - 27 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

Playing with Words, Worlds, and Images | 27www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 15–30 brace”. Now, one day, I was in India, and rain was pouring down, and I was standing outside of a market stall, and this song bāhon ke darmiyān started playing on the radio. And in one second, everybody from cobbler to cowherd, from the shopkeeper to a gentrified person like me, we were all in an escalated romantic, yearning mode because of the notes of that song, we were united by the metaphor of that song. And I find something similar happens with the epics. So when I say, “Don’t be a Śakuni Māmā” [a character of the Mahābhārat, the mastermind behind the war between the Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas], or “Stop behaving like Mantharā” [a schem- ing character in the Rāmāyaṇa], or “He’s fast asleep like Kumbhakarṇa” [a demon, brother of Rāvaṇa, known for having mistakenly asked the gods for the boon of infinite sleep], you speak a viscerally familiar language for a large tract of South Asians. What else can cut to the chase like that? I don’t need to develop my own language, instead, I can tap into an exist- ing idiom. And that’s what I find this sort of lore does. I grew up in Goa which has a fair presence of Roman Catholic Chris- tians, so I grew up with that idiom as well. You can see it in the references that appear in Kari [fig. 4]. Fig. 4: A “Last Supper” in Kari (Patil 2008, 58–59; printed with permission).