Book Review of "Life and Words Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary" by Veena Das

This book was an incredible read. While it offered many insightful ideas, what I loved most was how the author, Veena Das, combined so many different fields of study to present a thorough understanding of the topic. The book contains information and details on philosophy, political events, anthropology, ethnography, and more. This combination really got my mind connecting various topics and fields of study to develop a better understanding. Here are some insights and quotes that stood out to me.

• This book is all about trauma from the Partition’s violence affecting the lives of people every day, or as Das stated, “recess of the ordinary.” Dealing with trauma and adjusting to everyday life is very challenging and was made harder by Indian society, specifically for women. She tells several moving stories about survivors Asha, Manjit, and Shanti, who went through many unspeakable atrocities that were worsened by society.

• Wittgenstein, a British philosopher quoted in Das’s work, explains the idea of “feeling pain in the body of another” — the community should acknowledge each other’s pain as part of the healing process.

• She critiqued the conventional trauma theory as it oversimplifies the complex realities of dealing with trauma, especially in everyday life. The conventional trauma theory is the idea that trauma is a “wound of the mind” and isn’t fully processed. She presents a counterargument on the basis of anthropology, showing how trauma is grounded in the “complexities of everyday life.” According to Das, the theory falls short for several reasons: trauma does not need to be fully expressed for healing — it is not an “all-or-nothing phenomenon,” and sometimes silence can be beneficial; trauma is not an “endless repetition of violence” because people with trauma often embed it into their daily lives instead of treating it as a separate event; and there is no universal pattern for healing, as it depends on many local factors and “patterns of sociality.”

My overall takeaway from this book was understanding how societies can improve the lives of people struggling with traumatic experiences. First, it’s important for society — and even the field of anthropology — to resist stereotyping events like the Partition. Second, it is important to hold the state accountable for such events rather than erasing evidence of the event and the trauma it produced.