Paper short abstract:

While working with persecuted minorities whose life experiences are marked with discrimination, violence, and social exclusion, the paper asks what and how do psychological anthropologists ‘listen to’ while they are ‘listening to injustice’?

Paper long abstract:

Can there be a narrative of injustice? If yes, then who narrates it, and who listens to it? If no, then how do we engage with the theme of injustice in absence of coherent communication? While working with persecuted minorities whose life experiences are marked with discrimination, violence, and social exclusion, what and how do psychological anthropologists ‘listen to’ while they are ‘listening to injustice’? The paper shares one possibility of such listening at the intersections of politics and psychoanalysis, where one seeks to understand contemporary politics psychoanalytically to engage with the political underpinnings of psychoanalytically developed life histories. Drawing upon my ongoing ethnography of Muslims in north India since June 2019, the paper discusses the ways in which Muslims articulate their experience of being the political enemy in the wake of Hindu nationalism and the way I listen to their experience of ‘being hated’ sharing not only their identity of being an Indian Muslim but also inhabiting the shared space of political threat and social violence. The paper explores the struggle in ‘narrativizing injustice’ that requires working through what can be said in words, and what cannot be expressed—how do we ‘listen’ to what is not said? The ‘work’ of psychological anthropology, this paper posits, becomes not only documenting testimonies of injustice that can be described but also ‘remembering’ injustice that which fraught with forgetting.