In 2024, I told Al Jazeera something most Hindus in Bangladesh probably did not want to say out loud. There had been attacks on the Hindu community, I said, that part was real. But the numbers circulating in the Indian press were exaggerated, and the interim government that had just come to power was not the radical Islamist takeover being sold on Indian television.
A relative of mine did not speak to me for a while afterward.
It was not that she thought I had lied. She never disputed the numbers. What she could not get past was what the quote did once it left my mouth and landed in the world. Hindus were frightened. Houses had been burned. People were sleeping away from their own homes. And into that fear I had handed a foreign newsroom a line that read, to anyone moving fast, as minimization.
It did not matter that the Indian figures really were inflated. The fear on the ground was not inflated. She was not arguing with my facts. She was telling me that being right and doing harm can happen in the same sentence, and that I had just shown her how.
We were both correct. I have sat with that for a long time now and I still cannot find the seam where either of us was wrong. I am not going to pretend I can resolve it in this essay. I am not sure it can be resolved anywhere.
Simone de Beauvoir opens The Second Sex by asking what it means that woman is always described in relation to man, never simply in relation to herself. Man is the standard. Woman is the deviation that requires an explanation. She is not defined as a thing in her own right. She is defined as whatever the default happens not to be.
Swap out man for Bengali Muslim and woman for Hindu, and the sentence still holds. Being Bengali Muslim in Bangladesh needs no justification. It is the unmarked condition, the water everyone else is presumed to be swimming in unless told otherwise.
Being Hindu is the deviation that gets explained, accounted for, asked about. I have had my full name requested with a particular emphasis often enough to know that nobody asks a Bengali Muslim to confirm his own name the way people ask me to confirm mine.
But Beauvoir's argument has a second half that is easy to skip past, and it happens to be the half that explains my own community better than it explains anyone standing outside it. She does not only say that woman gets cast as Other. She says woman often participates in her own Othering, because refusing the role costs more than accepting it does. Mothers teach daughters the same limits their own mothers taught them, not out of confusion, but because those limits kept people alive.
I grew up hearing a phrase in my own community, whispered more often than said outright, the kind of line an elder drops almost in passing. “Amra Hindu manush to...” We are Hindu people after all. It was never spoken as a complaint. It read closer to instruction. It meant: know your ceiling. You will not be president. You will not be prime minister. Do not build a large house. Do not live loudly. We are Hindus, and we live inside precarity, and precarity does not reward people who forget their place in it.
I have heard some version of that sentence from my elders more times than I could count or date. Not once, tied to a single house or a single ambition quietly talked down. Constantly, in the background, across years, until it stopped sounding like advice and started sounding like weather.
By the time I was old enough to understand what the word Malaun meant, most people around me had already stopped saying it out loud. It had become the kind of slur you were not supposed to use where anyone respectable could hear you. I have had it aimed at me directly to my face only a handful of times in my life.
What I have heard far more often is a request for my full name. Not asked casually. Asked with a small pause before it, or a raised eyebrow after, or a follow-up question that makes plain the person already suspects what the surname will tell them. A relative of mine believes his surname cost him two years without a job. He is certain of it. I have not seen his rejection letters.
I do not know what else was happening in those interviews, what the market looked like that year, what other explanations might fit two hard years just as well. I cannot hand you data. I can hand you the story the way he told it to me, and the fact that I have heard some close variation of it from more people than I can count, none of whom were comparing notes with each other.
I am not building this essay on court records or hiring audits. I am building it on what Hindus in Bangladesh believe happens to them, whether or not any single case would hold up in front of a tribunal. And I have come to think the belief is the fact that matters most here. A community does not organize its fear, its job-hunting caution, its whispered warnings to its own children, around a threat that isn't felt as real.
Whether the mechanism is provable in any given case or not, the perception is doing the work. It disciplines behaviour the same way a proven fact would. Maybe more, because you cannot argue someone out of a fear that was never claiming to be a statistic in the first place.
I should also say plainly that I am not the one in this essay who has paid that particular price. I have not been passed over for work because of my name. If anything I have been chosen, over and over, called on specifically because I am Hindu, visible, and willing to talk. That is its own strange position, being useful rather than excluded, but it is not the same wound, and I am not going to pretend it is.
I do not want to believe any of this. I want, quite badly, to simply be Bangladeshi. Not Bangladeshi Hindu. Not a minority anything. Just Bangladeshi, the way my Muslim friends get to be Bangladeshi without a qualifier riding along in front of the noun. I have wanted that for most of my life, and on some mornings I still manage to believe it might be possible.
Beauvoir already told me why that wish does not survive contact with the world. In that same introduction she writes that to decline categories like the eternal feminine is not to deny that women exist as a group today, and that this kind of denial is not a liberation. It is, in her words, a flight from reality.
I have read that line for years as being about gender alone. It works just as precisely applied to me. Declining to be a minority Hindu does not make the category disappear. It only means I have stopped looking at what keeps happening around me while I insist otherwise.
At some point the accumulation stops being anecdote and starts being a pattern, and pretending otherwise is its own flight from reality, the exact one Beauvoir was warning against.
So here is the answer to the question in the title. Why do communal slurs still bother me, after everything I have built, after Oxford, after everything that was supposed to make me feel secure by now.
I can absorb almost anything thrown at me out of ordinary anger. Call me stupid, call me arrogant. None of it lands anywhere permanent. It rolls off because it is aimed at something specific about me in that particular moment, and it stays contained inside that moment.
A slur does not behave like that. A slur does not introduce anything new. It reaches straight down into everything already sitting there waiting. The slur does not create that weight. It only switches it on. That is the whole answer. It was never really about the word. It is about everything the word has learned to stand on top of.
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Anupam Debashis Roy is the editor-in-chief of Muktipotro. He can be reached at writeranupam1101@gmail.com