Raudra
Anger is one of the most popular emotions of today. The world around us, as also our loved ones, are angry - some burning, some quietly imploding. I am in the latter category - imploding. But this post is not about my slow implosion, but a reflection on the dark pleasures of anger.
It is not always wrong to be angry. The world is ablaze in genocides and climate catastrophes. Nearer home, there are regular episodes of intolerance and violence that we read about in the newspaper next to our coffee cup every morning. Then, there is the regular mundane anger-motivation. Why does everyone not think like me? Why does the world not agree with me? This, I believe, is the commonest version of human anger. Driven purely by the ego, the burning ego, luxoriatingly burning ego. Even at its most righteous, it fuels a mammoth balloon-doll called “I”. The “I”, at its most fragile state, likes to feel firmer in battle-mode, picking new battles with the surrounding world every day. The battle-mode is indeed a source of dark pleasure. Opposing stances are so attractive, like the madness of the wrestling ring. [I wrote about East-West divergences in attitudes to opposition here.]
We read sections of the Gitagovinda (Love Song of the Dark Lord) , translated by Barbara Stoler Miller, in our university reading group recently. And after reading the eighth and the ninth song, I wondered if students’ modern sensibilities of equality of indivdual human beings, would be hurt by Radha’s continued agony at Krishna’s unpredictability and infidelity. Unlike the modern definition of the empowered woman, she is not looking to straighten out her life, get on a dating app, swipe left a couple of times, and see a therapist. She luxoriates in anger and agony.
Of the nine rasas in Indian aesthetics, raudra takes this form - the furious rasa - a flavour to be indulged in, tasted, savoured. To be performed, but not to be imbibed. In enactment in dance and theatre, it has a distinct role. Gods and kings are allowed to be angry. Scorned women are also allowed to be angry, like Radha. But one doesn’t imagine monks to ever be angry. They, perhaps, smile gently at all the overproduction of anger. They have let go of these hungers of the mind - extreme pleasure, extreme hurt and so on. Perhaps, it is from them that we can learn the lesson that overinvestment in any emotion is a kind of consumption - consuming one’s self. Vengefully. With an intoxication. The current public realm of anger and its variations are a form of mass intoxication, a mass hysteria. It makes us briefly powerful in the world. That sensation of power is transient and illusory. It passes as the violence of raudra subsides. What is left? I’d say, only debris of a whole person.
