ABSTRACT How does it feel to observe, participate, document, and eventually analyse ‘material’ where the ethnographer studies her own community's complicity, consensus and actions toward a majoritarian state? When anti‐Muslim sentiment is on the surface of things: temples on ruins of demolished mosques and graves, renamed cities which sound unmistakably ‘Hindu’, saffron artefacts like flags atop homes, stickers of hyper‐masculinized Hindu Gods on vehicles, religious tattoos on bodies; and hate toward the Muslim minority looms gently, casually, as a matter of fact within family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers, the heart (break) of an ethnographer becomes a productive filter to perceive and study this world. Reflecting on fieldwork conducted in Uttarakhand, India I attempt to put in words the unspeakableness of sorrow of doing such work, where fieldwork doesn't just entail yet another field site, but is life itself—a site of recurring loss.
Surya Ghildiyal (2026) studied this question.