Vismarana—Forgetting as a Form of Harm and Resistance

In Bhakti, vismarana—forgetting the beloved—is a kind of spiritual death, a severing of the connection that sustains the soul. Mirabai could not forget Krishna; to have done so would have been to lose her reason for living. In collective mourning, forgetting—the cultural tendency to move on, to let a tragedy fade from public consciousness—can feel like a betrayal of those we lost. This concept reframes remembrance as an act of sacred resistance against the flattening of human lives into historical footnotes. Collective practices of memory—annual remembrances, archiving stories, maintaining vigils, teaching the young about those lost—are not nostalgic but devotional acts. They resist the logic of consumerism and attention cycles that would erase the lost from public consciousness. By creating persistent practices of remembrance, communities say: you mattered, you are not forgotten, your absence continues to shape us. This resistance to vismarana becomes a form of ongoing love and, in cases of injustice, a form of accountability.