Sandy Craig in Dream and Deconstruction: Alternative Theatre in Britain uses an image with a Faucaultian ambivalence between enlightenment and destruction. He considers Look Back In Anger by John Osborne to be the torch that ignited the theatre. The play is regarded as a social tirade that highlights the problems faced by the post-war generation in the 1950s. The protagonist ,Jimmy Porter, expressed an inordinate sense of anger at being an isolated individual who can do nothing but look back in anger.

One is expected to consider Jimmy’s character in terms of a disturbed mind, and the internal rather than external circumstances must be taken into consideration. So it was not for nothing that the Haryana BJP leader, Suraj Pal Amu, threatened the West Bengal chief minister that she would meet the same fate as Surpanakha in the Ramayana, whose nose was cut off by Lakshman in the wake of her favourable gesture shown to the Padmavati crew. It bears recall that a renowned leader of UP, Yogesh Varshney, had announced a bounty on the head of Mamata Banerjee for her crackdown on armed religious processions that were organised by political parties in many parts of Bengal. It was a common assumption that Mr Varshney must have been influenced by the leader of Madhya Pradesh who had decreed an even heftier price on the head of the chief minister of Kerala.

Admittedly, the standards of public oratory have deteriorated considerably. Political rivalry in Bihar touched an all-time low with the ruling and Opposition parties threatening each other in public. Former health minister Tej Pratap Yadav threatened to beat up the deputy CM, Sushil Kumar Modi, in his home. The crudeness of the threat seemed still more fierce when the BJP chief of the state threatened that any finger or hand raised against Narendra Modi would be chopped off. Political threats seem to be the robust expressions of the powers that be. Objecting to the film Padmavati, the Rajput Karni Sena threatened to cut off the heroine’s nose as also the director’s head. Mr Amu even offered a bounty of several crores of rupees to one who could behead Padukone.

It is a misnomer to imagine that free speech and hate speech are in the same category. Sometime ago, Abhijeet Bhattacharya, the Bollywood singer, criticised the Khans for allowing actors from Pakistan to work in the Hindi film industry and called the ghazal maestro, Ghulam Ali, “a form of dengue”. Artist. Sonu Nigam expressed his displeasure with the use of loudspeakers, specifically during azaan and resolved to quit Twitter in solidarity with Mr Bhattacharya.

Such expressions of anger or hate speeches are not exactly an Indian phenomenon. However, when Heinrich Heine says about one of his detractors, “Ordinarily he is insane, but he has lived moments when he is only stupid”, he is giving the “sharpest blow without using harsh language”. Here the effective insult is not exactly the use of particularly obnoxious language. British MPs, like Indians, are prone to spending their time by insulting each other. Benjamin Disraeli, when asked to give his opinion of Lord John Russell, said, “If a traveller was informed that such a man was the leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an insect”. Lord Curzon, after visiting an industrial area, had remarked, “I never knew the lower classes had such white skins”.

Churchill had once directed his invective against Hitler ~ “This bloodthirsty guttersnipe launches his mechanised armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation”. Even George Bush knew how to conflate hate speech with free speech. He said during one of his election campaigns, “My opponent has a problem. He won’t get elected unless things get worse ~ and things won’t get worse ~ unless he gets elected”.

Even protests in the form of throwing a shoe or smearing a person’s face with ink are common incidents.

Psychologists believe that the culprits are deviants who end up destroying their personalities and disrupting their social relationships. According to James D Page, an individual’s adjustment or maladjustment depends largely upon the extent to which his desires are in conformity with the demands and standards of his social group.

Frieda Fondham remarked that unconscious manifestations are not limited to the pathological,for normal people generally act from motives of which they are not aware. Psychologists agree that when there is an attempt to force the psychic energy into a rigid channel, the conscious adjustment fails. In the case of the angry politician vowing to beat his opponent, the psychic energy expresses itself in infantile behaviour. Both Strindberg and Ibsen examined the effect of “alien suggestions” on healthy minds. Man’s weapon of victory is not poison or the dagger, as in the days of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, but the weapon of moral or spiritual murder through suggestions.

One is reminded of the bear-and-squirrel game in Look Back in Anger ~ an escape from the pain of human existence. What differentiates Willy Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman from Jimmy is that while Loman is physically exterminated in the end, Jimmy is allowed to exist as an irrational animal.

Freedom of speech and expression is the hallmark of a democratic society. Voltaire observed, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. If anger is to be effective, it should have a defined target. During World War II, the Allies had the Hitler-Mussolini-Japan Axis as the target. Even the wrath of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad was caused by the takeover of his woman, Briseis, by Agamemnon. The angry young man of modern cinema has a single target. But the anger of the offender who expressed his willingness to cut someone’s nose seems to be disoriented. The violent gesture is, of course, a serious breach of decorum. True, fearless critique and expressions are signs of a healthy democracy, but there is no courage or heroism in attacking verbally or through bitter suggestions under the garb of free expression.

In TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men, there is a line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Kurtz was “a hollow sham of a man”, but before his death he had sensed the face of truth ~ an affirmation of a moral victory. The message is about the death of a man who was bad ~ “a lost violent soul”. But he did not die a hollow man. In the other epitaph ~ A Penny for the Old Guy ~ the man who had fixed a particular day for burning the effigy of somebody was also a man of action. Both the epitaphs refer to men who were violent characters in their own way.

Verbal rage is arguably an instant outburst of psychic imbalance of the person concerned. In Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon, the protagonist wants to be heard and seen ~ “That’s all, I need an audience”. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Estragon cries to Vladimir, “Don’t touch me! Don’t question me!” Kafka’s Gregor Samsa symbolises painful isolation in The Metamorphoses, a situation which is also traced in Camus’s Outsider. In Huxley’s Gioconda Smile, Henry tries to conceal her feelings. A character in the play exclaims, “People often make no obvious effort to explain themselves. And you are aware of depths and volumes and psychological spaces.”

Jung describes the psychological journey of an individual as a process in which a person occasionally has to pass through an ordeal. The offender who has his angry outburst in the form of hate speeches seems to be aggressive. Perhaps he is aware of what he is against, but not what he is expected to do.