The stage is not a safe place to push borders, says Shanta Gokhale
Summary
Writer and cultural critic Shanta Gokhale says women are forced to be careful about the way they express anger
Writer, translator and cultural critic Shanta Gokhale, 85, has often returned to the complexities of gender, power and resistance in her writing in Marathi and English, portraying the tensions and nuances of women navigating patriarchal structures while seeking autonomy and agency. Gokhale says women have “a long way to go yet" because all women still don’t have basic human rights. “We have the rights we have because militant women before us, aided by progressive men, have fought for them," she says.
Also read: What does female rage look like?
Gokhale, who recently received a lifetime achievement award at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) Festival 2025, talks to Lounge about the complexity of women’s rage and the ways in which different generations navigate change and structural inequality.
In your novels like ‘Rita Welinkar’ (1995) you’ve portrayed women navigating complex emotions, including anger. How do you see the portrayal of women’s rage evolving in literature over your career?
For centuries, women accepted their secondary status in society as divinely ordained. If they raged against their lot, we have no way of knowing because they had been kept illiterate. They could not write what they felt. But our oral tradition carried some stories forward. Saint Tukaram’s second wife Jijai raged just as Socrates’ wife Xanthippe had raged. Both their husbands had neglected the household and failed to provide for their children. Both women were labelled harridans. Their rage was unjustifiable because their husbands were great men.
When reformism came to India with the colonial presence, women were allowed to be educated. With education came pen and voice to tell the world how they felt. In Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde, a feminist activist, published a pamphlet in 1882, Streepurush Tulana (Women and Men Compared), a well-constructed, strongly expressed, angry critique of caste and patriarchy, which she held to be responsible for depriving women of their rightful place in society. Rabindranath Tagore’s Streer Patra (1914) revolves around a beautiful young woman named Mrinal, married into an aristocratic joint family, who comes to understand through experiences in her marital home, how patriarchy works against women. She is powerless to act on her inner rage till she gets a chance to go on a pilgrimage. She uses this temporary separation from the family to think and writes the eponymous streer patra (a woman’s letter) to her husband declaring her intention not to return. The protagonist of my novel Rita Welinkar also learns through the experience of being exploited by her parents, and having her married lover refuse to honour her love, that even an economically independent woman like her is a victim of patriarchy.
In none of these instances is the woman’s rage overtly expressed. It is channelled instead into constructive action. Their rage is not an emotional outburst that might at best offer momentary catharsis. It is based on an experiential understanding of the social structures that keep women bound. If not channelled towards social good, but permitted to be expressed in the rush of the moment, anger is dangerous and often leads to acts of injustice and disruption of the social fabric.
In your non-fiction too, your interest has stayed on strong female characters. I refer to ‘Playwright at the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present’. How do you see the role of the stage in providing a safe space for expression for women?
In our culture, the stage is not a safe place to push borders because theatre is a community art. Maharashtra is one of two states in India, the other being Bengal, where theatre is a well-established industry. All its stakeholders live off public patronage. To offend public sentiment is to commit suicide. Rage has therefore always been expressed by secondary women characters, never by the heroines. The earliest example of deflected rage is Ram Ganesh Gadkari’s play Ekach Pyala (One Last Drink) about a promising lawyer who nearly destroys his family when he turns gradually into an alcoholic. Women’s anger against drunk husbands who ruin families is expressed in the play by a lower caste woman, also married to a drunk, who rails against such husbands and advises the chaste brahmin wife of the lawyer not to worship him as her god, for he is nothing of the kind.
Pop culture today seems to embrace female expression. Do you think this mirrors real change in the way Indian women express themselves?
I don’t have the right to answer this question since I have assiduously avoided social media and am not conversant with pop culture. As regards films, the finest expression of a woman’s rage I have seen on screen is in the 1937 Prabhat film Kunku, when the heroine, played by Shanta Apte, beats up her husband’s nephew for trying to molest her. The film as a whole is an expression of rage against the practice of young women being married off to men old enough to be their fathers. The film was a hit both in the Marathi original and its Hindi version. However, 40 years on, in 1972, there were calls for banning Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder because, among other things, the play showed a woman beating her husband with a slipper because he will not leave her alone even after she has left him for sexually abusing her within marriage. Typically, she comes from a class which was “expected" to be “uncultured". In the end, she is the one who is killed, and the “chaste" woman lives. If we thought that women’s rage would have gained greater legitimacy between Kunku and Sakharam Binder, we were proved wrong. Even today, women’s rage is allowed to be expressed publicly and admired when the outburst is on behalf of the dominant political or religious ideologies authored by men in power.
How has your own relationship with anger evolved over time and how has that influenced your writing about women’s lives?
I have always thought uncontrolled anger to be dangerous. Personally, I would rather live in peace and harmony with the world. What enrages me is to see truth blatantly distorted and injustice blatantly meted out. I find plays a more effective medium than fiction to express this rage. I wrote a play called Avinash in the mid-1980s about the turbulence caused in a family by a “problem" son. I was not an angry woman. Thirty years down the line, I became one when I heard of the killings of innocents in Manipur. That gave birth to my play on Irom Sharmila. Soon after, the turn that politics had taken in India, prompted me to write a four-act tragedy Maili Chadar and four monologues on truth and justice. If I had been an activist, I would have marched. But I am a writer so I write.
