THE DANCE OF ANGER

Rage is a luxury, a privilege. It should be more inclusive of the vulnerable and the forgotten.

Women think multiple times before expressing anger because the trope of a ‘crazy girl’ has been force fed to us since the minute we understood anger. We weren’t allowed jurisdiction over our own indignation. Anger has always been the enemy emotion—so unfeminine that huge chunks of our emotional reserves are expended on keeping it in check. This shows most starkly in the way we navigate the men in our lives. The perceived harm to their emotions is always placed above our own actual emotional damage.

Anger is a form of defence

Half the world had been defanged of its instinctual ability to defend itself and its ideals because it would impinge on the lopsided arrangements within which we exist. This awareness often comes as a shock to women too. The moment you start unpacking all the years of repression, you realise how much of it was unconscious. 2017 has been the year of the women’s march, of Hollywood’s Weinstein moment, of #MeToo, of Kangana Ranaut’s feisty challenge to Bollywood status quo, of strong feminist characters lighting up our screens. It’s been the year of watching women reclaiming their right to religious places and storm towers of ‘purity’, and Raya Sarkar’s list polarising social media. It’s been the year of Gauri Lankesh’s murder becoming a rallying cry for free speech and journalistic courage. It’s been a year of women taking to the streets and breaking the cages that hold them. It’s been a year of women stitching together severed voice boxes and screaming—loudly, angrily, exuberantly. It’s been a breathless, sometimes uncontrolled torrent of voices realising that they can, should, and will be heard.

Anger is an attractive marketing commodity

This year is barely the beginning. The anger we managed to display excluded crucial, vulnerable people who possibly need it the most. We saw an active, uncomfortable exclusion of non-savarna voices, of differentlyabled voices, of voices that represent everything but the standardised norm. Our anger should help us cede space and amplify those we’ve forgotten to include. It’s easy to let this anger dissipate; it’s easier still to lose control over it. It’s easy to sell outrage. It will be especially difficult to not let this anger become a pandering exercise.

We need to start with an acknowledgment of the fact that the personal is political, and anger, especially when expressed by women, is deeply so. There is much to be added to this anger, and much to be taken away. The first step would be to possibly acknowledge what a privilege it is, even now, to have the luxury of anger. This paradigm is new and unknown territory for most of us, and we have to persistently discover, explore, and stretch its contours. This year, I hope to stay angry and do it in ways that hold up and celebrate the anger of the women I know and love.