The stage is not a safe place to push borders, says Shanta Gokhale

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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. 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. 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.