Kangana Ranaut has been in the media a lot lately – on one hand, she’s picking up her third National Award; on the other, her name is being dragged through the mud by ex-boyfriends and alleged ex-boyfriends. She’s called a queen on one hand; on the other, she’s called a witch, whore, psychopath. And now, the actress finally has a response to the name-calling as well as some of the allegations made against her by ex-boyfriend Adhyayen Suman, who said she was violent, abusive and did black magic on him.
Here’s her entire statement on the subject in an interview with Barkha Dutt for NDTV:
As far as name-calling is concerned, we as women have been defending ourselves for way too long. These are thousand-year weapons that are still used against women. When they’re jealous of a woman’s success, the first thing she becomes is a daayan [witch]. If she’s crazily successful, she becomes a psychopath. If she’s sexually active, she becomes a whore. All of this is being used, and it’s really outdated. It doesn’t upset me, because I’m an artist and I’ve closely researched people who’ve dealt with mental illnesses, and I don’t find anything upsetting, gross, or degrading about fighting with a mental illness, which a certain portion of the media is trying to suggest – to humiliate a woman, you can use mental illness. It won’t work. I have played a schizophrenic, I’ve played a bipolar patient on screen… and I don’t see anything humiliating when they call me a psychopath, a bitch, or a whore. I’ve also played a whore on screen, and my close interaction with prostitutes has allowed me to be extremely empathetic to them. So it doesn’t work on me. Witches – I love Shakespeare, and like any other artist, I’m also smitten by witches, or faeries, or demons, or Gods, or mysticism, or romanticism. It doesn’t scare me. How would any of us hope to write a Harry Potter or be a Shakespeare if we instill so much fear and xenophobia in our children’s heads? We need to be a bit more open about anybody’s religious practices.
Regardless of who’s telling the truth in this matter, Kangana’s response brings up several important points: women are still protecting themselves from “thousand-year weapons”, nobody is a whore just because they’re sexually active, and there is nothing degrading about fighting a mental illness. Glad she came out and said it!