Emotions are much more than just simple biological reactions. They’re culturally-embedded concepts that don’t exist universally, but are experienced as subtle subjectivities that are often difficult to explain.
The feeling of abhimaan is an example of the nuanced character of emotion. Abhimaan is a term used in the languages of the Indian subcontinent, sometimes translated as pride or ego, but native speakers protest that these English words don’t do justice to the concept.
Abhimaan is something more like an emotion of wounded but stoic disappointment in the hurtful actions of a loved one, accompanying refusal to display offense, but nonetheless communicating emotional suffering through the obvious effort to avoid displays of suffering. Only someone who is intimately familiar with the person feeling abhimaan could pick up on the subtle clues that the person is feeling abhimaan at all.
“I’m fine,” says the person feeling abhimaan, with a tone hinting that things are, in fact, not fine at all.
The therapist Shurjendu Dutt-Mazumdar writes that in abhimaan, “The person suffering suffers with no attempt to let anyone else observe the suffering, almost willfully living in that hurt in a completely private space. ‘Abhimaan’ is a range of behaviors that can only occur between two people who truly love and feel for one other.”
There is no English word for this feeling. Yet, anyone who has been in a long-lasting, loving relationship can begin to grasp the validity of the concept of a person whose suffering causes anguish in the heart of a loved one that is especially poignant because of the effort to conceal the suffering and pretend that everything is okay.
