2 What, If the Hurt is “Real”? Psyche, Neighbor, and Intimate Violence Anup Dhar This chapter looks at “hurt” at two related levels. One is at the level of the experience of hurt. The other is at the level of the response to hurt. In the process, the chapter argues that the nature of the response— however problematic, however non-Left, not-so-Left-like (Left in the official and orthodox sense)—cannot drown altogether or render redundant the “truth” of the experience of hurt or the need to attend, even if painstakingly, to the sometimes longstanding nature of the experience of hurt—for example, the experience of domestic violence in women, the experience of being untouchable, the experience of being poor, and the experience of being minoritized and branded “terrorist.” 1 Hurt has a psychological substratum; marked by otherness, marked by loss, repeated loss, loss of land, loss of home, the bringing down of the mosque on December 6, 1992, loss of near ones, and the sexual violation of the loved ones in Gujarat 2002 and the trauma therein, all contribute to an experience of hurt. Nearness also contributes to the experience of hurt: how could they do it? We have lived together for so 1 This is of course not to suggest that response cannot as such be examined. This chapter indeed puts response to critical scrutiny primarily in terms of the critical examination of the invocation of blasphemy in politics around hurt.