Before I wrote poetry, I thought of it the way most people do: as a soft thing. Something with flowers in it. Something you read at weddings, whisper at funerals. Something that lived at a safe distance from the rawer emotions — anger, grief, the kind of love that destroys you.
I was wrong.
When I sat down to write She and the World, I was carrying a particular kind of rage that I didn't know what to do with. Not the hot rage of a specific moment — but the cold, structural rage of someone who has spent years watching women be diminished, dismissed, and denied. The rage of recognising the same story in every woman I spoke to, across every region and class: the story of a person who was taught that her feelings were a problem to be managed.
I tried to write this rage in prose first. It came out as argument — logical, well-evidenced, unimpeachable. And completely without power.
Then I tried poetry. And something broke open.
She learned the grammar of survival —
spoke it fluently,
and still managed to stay whole.
What Prose Cannot Hold
Prose is, at its heart, a form that explains. It builds argument, provides context, moves you from point A to point B through the accumulation of evidence. It is extraordinarily good at many things. But there are emotional truths that resist explanation — that become smaller, not larger, when you try to reason through them.
Women's rage is one of those truths.
When you write in prose: Women in India are expected to perform emotional labour without acknowledgment or compensation — that sentence is accurate. It might even make a reader nod in recognition. But it doesn't make them feel anything. It doesn't lodge itself in the body the way lived experience does.
When you write in poetry: She kept her anger / in the same place she kept her kindness — / small, and useful, and offered / before anyone asked — something different happens. The reader doesn't just understand. They remember. They feel, perhaps for the first time, that their own experience has been named.
Why Indian Women's Rage Is Particularly Difficult to Name
There is a specific burden on women in India who want to write about their own anger. Rage in a woman is immediately categorised as shrewishness, bitterness, or mental instability. The woman who expresses anger is assumed to be failed in some way — failed at womanhood, failed at the project of being pleasant and accommodating.
This means that women who carry legitimate grievances — about violence, about the denial of education, about being invisible in their own families — often carry them without language. The culture has not given them a way to speak their anger that does not also make them available for dismissal.
Poetry, I discovered, offers a way around this. A poem can hold rage in a form that is simultaneously unarguable and beautiful. You cannot dismiss it as shrewishness when it also makes you catch your breath. The aesthetic creates a kind of safe passage for the emotional.
What Prose Does
- Explains and contextualises
- Builds logical argument
- Persuades through evidence
- Reaches the mind first
- Can be debated and countered
What Poetry Does
- Names without explaining
- Compresses experience into image
- Reaches the body before the mind
- Cannot be argued with — only felt
- Bypasses the reader's defences
The Two Halves of She and the World
The collection is divided into two parts, and this structure was not accidental — it was the whole point.
The first part is called, simply, She. It is the part that holds the darkness: the plight, the rights denied, the social indifference, the particular loneliness of being a woman in a world that was not built with you in mind. These poems don't soften anything. They don't offer easy resolution. They sit with the difficulty because I believe that sitting with difficulty is itself an act of respect for the people who live inside it.
The second part is called The World — and it is a pivot. Not a naïve pivot into happiness, but a deliberate turn toward agency: what it means to survive, to choose, to remain whole when the forces around you are working to make you smaller. These poems are harder to write, because hope that has been earned through pain is much more specific — and much more fragile — than optimism.
"The world had spent so long telling her what she was not
that she almost forgot
she had never asked." — From She and the World
What I Hope Readers Find in It
The poems in She and the World are not prescriptive. They don't tell women what to do or how to feel. They don't offer a roadmap to liberation — because liberation is not a destination on a map. It is a daily, imperfect, often exhausting practice of choosing yourself when everything around you has been designed to make that choice seem impossible.
What I hope readers find is simpler than that. I hope they find the particular relief of recognition — the moment when a poem says back to you something you have been carrying alone, in the exact language you would have used if you had known you were allowed to use it.
That is what poetry is for.
Not to explain the world. To say: I see you in it.