Page - 28 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

28 | Amruta Patil www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 15–30 Ornella: Today in Europe and in particular in the UK, there’s a very low rate of religious practice and people aren’t familiar anymore with the kind of religious lore you use. What might that mean, for society or for your work, when you’re trying to enter people’s bloodstreams through these stories, but people aren’t familiar with them anymore? Patil: I deal with this continually, on multiple levels. In France, where I lived for a decade, there was a great suspicion towards anything not “laic”, it was all seen as a cult, except Mahayana Buddhism which got a clean chit, just as de-Islamicised Sufism does. I have met many fundamen- talists amongst secular people, because fundamentalism comes in many stripes. Back home, there is now a vast segment of Indians, upper-middle class and elite, that is English-speaking and completely deracinated. They re- ceive their university degrees and intellectual value system in the west, usually North America or England, and return to India with that gaze as their only convincing reference point. They not only absorb the good critical traditions, but also the inherent biases towards non-academic systems, towards sadhakas and their gnosis. They come at spiritual tra- ditions with a lot of dismissal or self-loathing, as if whatever there is, is frozen in some dated “book” like the Manusmṛti, stuff that cannot be adapted or spring-cleaned, just called out or burnt. But we aren’t a people of the book! Our systems were open-source, and need to be taken in that direction again. It is hard, on an ongoing basis, to explain my choices, because people are actually not as liberal as they would like to believe. Bornet: That’s very insightful; we have people who are religiously illiterate, who cannot understand religion because they are so afraid of it, who don’t even want to learn about anything religious. Patil: Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar has written about the role that religious systems played in offering psychological care for people. The reason why people weren’t institutionalised is that the system managed to pull them into the fold and give them some structure. So many of my fundamentalist, irreligious friends are reading tarot cards, keeping feng shui turtles in their room and rose quartz crystals in their drinking water, attending yoga-pilates and mindfulness meditation classes. They’re still yearning and seeking but they just do not even have the vocabulary to ask for the right thing in the supermarket to plug the existential hole in their heart. Knauss: Let’s turn to a different topic for a moment: one recurrent, important