Vases and Snarling
Dear reader,
Like many other women in their thirties, I have found myself to be angry. Frequently and at the slightest of provocations. As though some part of my body has become aware of the futility of being accommodating or patient or terribly well-mannered. It has taken all of us – those around me, and my own self too – some time getting used to this new version of me. A new tongue in my mouth, that fusses and fidgets and enters the room before I can.
What is most amusing to me about my anger, is the reception to it. The ones who are curious are simply trying to understand why I have changed. Some, welcome it with a knowing smile and open arms, and a sisterhood that says they have been here too. The others are cold. To them, my anger is a problem. The problem, if I am to frame this story correctly.
Well-mannered young women do not get angry. In my culture, it is not rare as much as it is impossible. Any anger felt, especially towards an elder, must be immediately swallowed. Chewed fifty-two times and shredded into vowels and consonants. Even a shadow of it isn’t tolerated in the room where decisions are made and people broken.
Female rage and female anger have been subdued for centuries. Women have not been permitted the luxury of displaying the wrath they feel, simply because the patriarchy has deemed us as delicate beings incapable of holding such fire. All whilst finding more and more reasons to burn women.
I remember being told the story of Kaikeyi’s Kop Bhavan from the Ramayana. A special palace (or wing in the palace) built for King Dashrath’s youngest queen for when she was angry. If she were to reside in it, the king would have to go appease her. It was in this Kop Bhavan that she asked the king for the two promises that led to the events of the epic - her son being crowned King, and her step-son, the eldest and heir-in-waiting to be banished for fourteen years.
But in oral retellings of the story, and in conversations, Kaikeyi is often portrayed as a selfish young queen, not just determined to protect her own (and her son’s) future and status but also greedy. Beautiful, and she let that beauty go to her head. Never mind that she was brave enough to go into battle with her king. Never mind that she saved his life. Never mind that he had promised her two boons and did not place any restriction or limitation on what she could have asked for. Never mind all that context.
The moral of the story was clear - anger in a woman was something to be ashamed of. Something to not give in to. Something to quash, and quickly.
In my twenties, when I first read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, I spent months charting out a way for me to have a room of my own. I wanted to be a writer. I would be a writer. It would entail financial independence and a certain amount of IDGAF. Both of which would need work. Both of which, I am still working towards.
But sometime ago when I got angry - in a place I am told I must consider my home - it was made clear that my anger was unnecessary. There was an unwillingness to understand the reasons for it. There was an implication that it was immature and not something to be discussed further.
I could only think of Woolf’s text. My anger had no place in this home. It needed a room of its own.
Where could it go? Where would I take it? What handbag or suitcase did I possess that would contain it? I craved a Kop Bhavan of my own and lauded the foresight and feminism that King Dashrath surely had for he had ordered the creation of a space for his wife’s anger. Unafraid to let the entire palace and subsequently the city, even the whole kingdom, find out that his wife was angry. Unafraid that centuries later, we would still be talking about it.
Not only did he give her the time and place to process her feelings but he then went to her himself to understand what he could do. To validate the way she felt. Why is this not one of the takeaways from one of the greatest epics of our land?
Why did the sages and the scribes and the writers and storytellers not use this part of the story to teach men how they must both view and deal with female anger?
For the answer, we must return to Woolf.
“Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Spoiler alert, but in the Ramayan, the King refused to give into Kaikeyi’s demands. He understood her anger but did not bend to it. It was his son - the Maryada Purushottam, who gave in. Who accepted. Who let the catalyst of this story lead him to an exile in the forest for fourteen years, so he could complete what he took his earthly form for.
Did the people who painted such a poor portrait of Kaikeyi, ever wonder where we would be without her anger? Would this Earth have fallen to Ravana’s greed, had it not been for it? God forbid, but without her anger, would we never have had an ideal man to look up to and build temples for?
And it is not just Kaikeyi. In the Ramayana itself, Sita, consort to Rama, returns to the Earth, into the arms of her mother, leaving behind a husband, two sons and an entire kingdom. She will not have her virtue questioned again and again. She will not tolerate disrespect. She would rather leave.
In the Mahabharata, when Draupadi is gambled by her husband into slavery, and disrobed in a court full of men – her five husbands, her brothers-in-law and all the uncles and grand-uncles stay silent in the face of her logic and her disrobement. Her anger then comes alive to curse each and every one of them.
The stories I was told growing up did not shy away from displaying female anger. They celebrated it as a part of life. As a necessary organ of being a woman.
Still somehow, across cultures and across time, society has insisted that women are to be viewed as gentle creatures. In the first season of Bridgerton, Eloise and Penelope are viewing portraits of women and attempting to ascertain what feels wrong. The answer, once you arrive at it, cannot be forgotten. The artist has painted the women like “decorative objects”, like “human vases”. Beautiful, but lacking.
What society often forgets is that all things of great beauty have thorns and teeth.
Perhaps this is why Taylor Swift’s performance of Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me and the TTPD set in the Eras Tour struck a chord with us. Feral and snarling and loud. Unafraid to display rage, and inspiring us to do the same.
I do not have a Kop Bhavan of my own. But the first order of business is to create such a thing.
Love,
Sukriti
P.S. This newsletter has also gone through a little bit of a renaming this week. Half A Moon sits better in my body and I carry the hope that these essays and poems will bring some moonlight to your inboxes and screens.