Why Indians Hold Grudges for Decades — The Forgiveness Problem

There is a chachi in almost every Indian family who stopped speaking to a bhabhi over something that happened at a wedding twenty-three years ago.

Nobody fully remembers what it was. The two women remember different versions. The husbands have long since stopped trying to reconcile the accounts. The children grew up understanding that certain relatives do not sit at the same table, certain festivals have silent absences, certain names are not taken in certain homes.

Nobody calls it a grudge. It is simply how things are.

This is the specific texture of long-term unforgiveness in Indian family life — not dramatic, not loud, but structural. Built into the architecture of gatherings and visits and who calls whom first. Maintained across decades without anyone deciding to maintain it, because the unforgiveness has long since stopped being a decision and become a fact of the relationship.

Why does this happen so reliably? And why, in a culture that has produced some of the world's most sophisticated philosophical frameworks for forgiveness from the Buddhist concept of kshama to the Gandhian embrace of non-retaliation does the lived reality of Indian family and community relationships so often look like the opposite?

What a Grudge Actually Is And Why It Persists

A grudge is not simply remembered anger. It is something more specific: the ongoing maintenance of a negative evaluation of someone, combined with the withholding of goodwill, as a response to a perceived transgression that has not been adequately addressed.

The grudge persists not because the original emotion stays fresh emotions fade but because the cognitive evaluation does not. The story of what happened, who was wrong, and what it meant gets told and retold internally, each retelling reinforcing the narrative rather than updating it.

Research on unforgiveness the psychological state of maintained resentment describes it as a motivational state that involves avoidance of and revenge against the transgressor. Robert Enright and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, whose work constitutes some of the most rigorous research on forgiveness in the world, define unforgiveness as a cold emotion that is distinct from hot anger one that is maintained quietly over time rather than expressed acutely.

This coldness is what makes the Indian family grudge so durable. It does not require active maintenance in the way that hot anger does. It simply requires the absence of repair and in Indian family contexts, the conditions for repair are frequently absent.

The Honour Culture and the Public Nature of Offence

To understand why forgiveness is structurally difficult in Indian relationships, it helps to understand what the original offence typically involves.

In honour cultures and Indian society, particularly in its family and community dimensions, operates heavily within an honour framework transgressions are not only personal injuries. They are public ones. The slight at the wedding was witnessed. The disrespect toward the elders happened in front of the family. The money dispute involved shared property and was known to relatives on both sides. The unfair treatment of the daughter-in-law was observed by everyone who lived in the house.

When a transgression has a public dimension, forgiveness requires more than an internal emotional shift. It requires a public repair an acknowledgment of the wrong that is visible to the same audience that witnessed the wrong. This is a far higher threshold than private forgiveness, and it is one that the social dynamics of Indian families frequently make impossible to meet.

The person who caused the harm may believe they were not wrong. Or they may believe that admitting it publicly would cost them status. Or the family dynamics may mean that acknowledging the wrong would require taking sides in a way that creates new conflicts. The conditions for the public repair that the honour framework requires are rarely present — which means the grudge remains, because the only resolution the injured party can accept is one that the structure of the situation cannot produce.

Hierarchy and the Apology That Cannot Come

There is a specific and underexamined dimension of Indian grudge-holding that has nothing to do with stubbornness: the hierarchy problem.

In hierarchical family structures where seniority confers status, where elders are not routinely expected to apologize to juniors, where the daughter-in-law cannot directly confront the mother-in-law, where the younger brother cannot tell the older one that he behaved badly — many offences cannot be addressed through the normal mechanism of apology and repair, because the hierarchy makes that mechanism unavailable.

The person who was harmed cannot raise it directly. The person who caused the harm is not expected to spontaneously address it. The intermediaries who might facilitate the repair have their own relationships with both parties and cannot afford the cost of being seen to take sides.

The result is a situation in which the injury sits unaddressed not because anyone has decided to ignore it, but because the social structure provides no legitimate channel through which it can be addressed. The grudge is not the problem. It is the symptom of a structure that cannot process the injury it produces.

Vikram, 38, a finance professional in Mumbai, describes a conflict with his elder brother that began over an inheritance dispute eight years ago and has never been directly discussed. Both brothers attend the same family functions. Both speak politely about general matters. The specific subject the money, who said what, what was fair has never been raised between them in eight years. It has never been raised because raising it would require Vikram, as the younger brother, to initiate a confrontation with his elder, which the family dynamic does not permit. The injury is present. The mechanism for repair is absent. The grudge fills the gap.

The Confusion Between Forgiveness and Reconciliation

One of the most important distinctions in the psychology of forgiveness is one that most people and most Indian families do not make: forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.

Forgiveness is an internal process. It is the release of the negative motivational state the resentment, the desire for revenge, the withholding of goodwill that unforgiveness maintains. It does not require contact with the person who caused the harm. It does not require an apology. It does not require the restoration of the relationship. A 2025 qualitative study from India, published in Psychological Studies, found that even when reconciliation was not possible when the relationship had broken down entirely there were measurable psychological benefits for people who forgave. The forgiveness was for the forgiver, not for the transgressor.

Reconciliation is the restoration of the relationship. It requires both parties. It requires repair. It is optional, and in cases of severe or repeated harm, it may not be appropriate.

The reason this distinction matters for Indian grudge-holding is that most people in Indian contexts conflate them entirely. The belief is that forgiving means accepting, means excusing, means resuming the relationship as if nothing happened, means allowing the person who wronged you to escape without consequence. And in a culture where consequences and accountability matter deeply where being seen to forgive without acknowledgment feels like surrendering publicly this conflation makes forgiveness feel impossible.

You can forgive without reconciling. You can release the internal burden without restoring contact. You can stop carrying the grudge without pretending the harm did not occur. These are separable. The belief that they are not is one of the primary structural barriers to forgiveness in Indian relationships.

What the Grudge Actually Costs the Person Holding It

The common assumption about grudges is that they punish the person they are held against. This is partially true in relational terms. But the psychological and physiological literature on unforgiveness is clear: the person who pays the highest cost for the grudge is the person holding it.

Mayo Clinic's summary of forgiveness research documents what chronic unforgiveness produces: increased anxiety, depression, and hostility; higher blood pressure and cardiovascular risk; weakened immune function; reduced relationship quality across the board not just with the person the grudge is held against, but with everyone. The emotional state of maintained resentment bleeds into all relationships, not only the one it was formed in response to.

Research by Enright and colleagues on the health effects of forgiveness interventions including structured programmes in which people are guided through the process of forgiving a specific transgressor, has found significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and anger following forgiveness, alongside improvements in hope and psychological wellbeing. The intervention worked even in cases of severe harm including survivors of political violence and people who had experienced significant family betrayal.

The 2024 Journal of Religion, Spirituality and Aging study examining forgiveness in Indian older adults comparing those living in family households with those in old age homes found that the ability to forgive was significantly associated with psychological wellbeing in both groups. The older Indians who had maintained unforgiveness across decades were carrying its physiological and psychological cost into the years when their bodies were least equipped to bear it.

The grudge that felt like protection has, across thirty years, become a chronic low-level stressor whose cumulative effect on health is measurable. The person being punished has moved on. The punishment is being served by the person who issued it.

Why Indian Culture Both Enables and Complicates Forgiveness

The paradox of the Indian forgiveness problem is that it exists in a culture that has more sophisticated frameworks for forgiveness than almost any other.

Kshama forgiveness is one of the foundational virtues in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist ethical frameworks. Paryushana, the Jain festival of forgiveness, involves the explicit practice of asking forgiveness from everyone one has wronged across the preceding year. The concept of karmic consequence implies that holding ill-will produces its own negative outcomes for the person holding it. Gandhi's philosophy of non-retaliation was a practical political application of forgiveness at a civilizational scale.

These frameworks are genuinely present. They are also primarily practiced in formal, religious, or philosophical contexts rather than in the specific, interpersonal, family-level situations where forgiveness is most needed and most difficult.

The same culture that produces Paryushana also produces the bhabhi-chachi silence of twenty-three years. The same religious framework that articulates kshama as a virtue also produces family hierarchies that make the apology structurally impossible. The philosophical resources exist. The social structure for applying them in the most common and most painful contexts does not.

The Gender Dimension Who Holds and Who Is Expected to Release

The 2025 Indian research on gender differences in unforgiveness published in the Journal of Religion and Health found significant gender asymmetry in how unforgiveness operates in Indian adult relationships.

Women in Indian family contexts are more frequently the targets of the expectation to forgive — to release grievances, to restore harmony, to model the selfless accommodation that the good woman role requires. The daughter-in-law who holds a grudge against a mother-in-law is read as difficult. The wife who does not forgive a husband's past behavior is read as unable to move on. The cultural pressure to forgive falls asymmetrically on women.

Simultaneously, women in Indian family contexts often have the fewest mechanisms for raising the injury in the first place the hierarchy and social expectations discussed earlier that make direct confrontation impossible. They are expected to forgive offences they were never permitted to name.

This combination compels silence about the injury, compelled performance of forgiveness produces something that is not forgiveness at all. It produces suppression: the outward performance of having moved on while the internal resentment remains entirely intact. The resentment that is suppressed rather than processed does not dissolve. It accumulates, and it surfaces eventually in the chachi-bhabhi silence, in the emotional distance that becomes the relationship's defining feature, in the specific bitterness of a person who was never allowed to be hurt and was never allowed to heal.

What Forgiveness Actually Requires And What It Does Not

The psychological research on forgiveness interventions is specific enough that it is worth translating into practical terms, because the popular understanding of what forgiveness requires is usually wrong in ways that make it feel impossible.

Forgiveness does not require contact with the person who caused the harm. The 2025 Indian qualitative study on forgiveness in non-reconciled relationships confirmed what the broader research has consistently shown: people can forgive in the absence of the other person, in the absence of an apology, and in the absence of any restored relationship. The forgiveness is a change in the forgiver's internal motivational state a release of the resentment not a change in the relationship.

It does not require that the harm be minimized or the wrongdoing be excused. Forgiveness research explicitly distinguishes between condoning saying that what happened was acceptable and forgiving releasing the resentment while maintaining accurate understanding of what happened. You can hold both: this was wrong, and I am releasing my resentment of it. These are not contradictory positions.

It does not happen in a moment. Enright's process model of forgiveness the most empirically validated framework for understanding how forgiveness actually occurs describes it as a gradual process involving uncovering the depth of the injury, making the decision to forgive, working through the cognitive and emotional dimensions of the transgression, and eventually finding outcomes that include deepened perspective and sometimes meaning. This is weeks or months of internal work, not a single moment of decision.

What it does require is the recognition that continuing to hold the grudge is costing the holder more than it is costing anyone else and that the release is available regardless of whether the other person ever provides the apology or acknowledgment that would make the conventional resolution possible.

The chachi and the bhabhi will probably not sit down and have an honest conversation about what happened twenty-three years ago. The family structure does not permit it. The social cost is too high for both of them. But one of them either of them could privately, internally, release the motivational state of maintained resentment. Not for the other person. Not for the family. For themselves. For the cardiovascular health and the psychological wellbeing and the quality of the relationships with everyone else that the chronic unforgiveness is quietly diminishing.

The grudge was never about the other person. It was always about the person carrying it. The release is available on the same terms.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. Why do Indian families hold grudges for such long periods compared to other cultures?

Because the specific conditions that make forgiveness difficult are particularly concentrated in the Indian family context. The honour culture makes transgressions public events that require public repair — a higher threshold than private apology. The hierarchical family structure means the apology that would facilitate repair often cannot come, because social norms do not require seniors to acknowledge wrongs to juniors. The lack of legitimate channels for direct confrontation means injuries sit unaddressed. And the conflation of forgiveness with reconciliation means that forgiving feels like surrendering publicly — which the honour framework makes intolerable. These structural conditions do not exist uniquely in India, but they are concentrated and reinforced here in ways that make forgiveness systematically harder than the culture's own philosophical tradition would predict.

Q2. What is the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation?

Forgiveness is an internal process — the release of the motivational state of resentment and ill-will toward the transgressor. It does not require contact, apology, or the restoration of the relationship. A 2025 Indian qualitative study in Psychological Studies confirmed that forgiveness produces psychological benefits even when reconciliation is impossible. Reconciliation is the restoration of the relationship — it requires both parties and active repair. Conflating the two is one of the primary barriers to forgiveness in Indian contexts: people believe forgiving means restoring the relationship and excusing the harm, which the honour framework makes impossible. Separating them — understanding that one can release internal resentment without restoring contact — makes forgiveness psychologically accessible in situations where reconciliation is not.

Q3. What does holding a grudge actually do to the person holding it?

The research is consistent: the primary cost of chronic unforgiveness is paid by the person holding the grudge, not the person it is held against. Mayo Clinic's summary of forgiveness research documents that chronic unforgiveness produces increased anxiety, depression, and hostility; elevated blood pressure and cardiovascular risk; weakened immune function; and reduced relationship quality across all relationships, not only the one involved in the original transgression. The 2024 Indian study on forgiveness in older adults found significant association between maintained unforgiveness across decades and reduced psychological wellbeing in later life. The grudge that felt like protection has, over thirty years, become a chronic stressor whose cumulative health cost is measurable.

Q4. Why is the forgiveness burden distributed unequally between men and women in Indian families?

Because women in Indian family contexts are simultaneously the most frequent targets of the cultural expectation to forgive and the people with the fewest mechanisms for raising the injury in the first place. The 2025 Indian gender research on unforgiveness found significant asymmetry: women are expected to release grievances, restore harmony, and perform selfless accommodation, while simultaneously being prohibited by hierarchy and social norms from directly confronting the people who harmed them. The result is compelled suppression — the outward performance of forgiveness while the internal resentment remains intact — which is not forgiveness but its opposite. Suppressed resentment accumulates and surfaces eventually, producing the specific long-term bitterness of a person who was never permitted to be hurt and therefore could never genuinely heal.

Q5. Does Indian philosophy support forgiveness — and if so, why doesn't it translate into practice?

Indian philosophy contains some of the most sophisticated frameworks for forgiveness in the world — kshama as a foundational virtue in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist ethics; the Jain festival of Paryushana as an annual structured practice of requesting and offering forgiveness; the karmic framework's implication that maintained ill-will produces its own negative consequences for the person holding it. These resources are genuine. They are also primarily practiced in formal, religious, or philosophical contexts rather than in the specific interpersonal situations where forgiveness is most needed. The social structure of Indian family life — its hierarchies, honour dynamics, and absence of legitimate channels for confrontation — creates conditions that override the philosophical resources, producing a gap between the tradition's teaching and the lived reality of how injuries in family relationships are actually handled.

Q6. What does forgiveness actually require — practically speaking?

Less than most people believe. Robert Enright's process model — the most empirically validated framework for how forgiveness actually occurs — describes it as a gradual internal process that does not require contact with the transgressor, an apology, the minimization of the harm, or the restoration of the relationship. What it requires is the recognition that the motivational state of maintained resentment is costing the holder more than it is costing anyone else; a decision to release it, not as a gift to the transgressor but as a choice for oneself; and the internal cognitive and emotional work of processing the injury rather than rehearsing it. This is weeks or months of internal work, not a single moment. The 2025 Indian study confirmed what the broader research shows: people can forgive — and benefit psychologically from forgiving — even when reconciliation is impossible and the other person never provides the acknowledgment that the conventional resolution would require.

The specific emotional cost of being the person who is always expected to absorb and accommodate — who is never permitted to name the injury — connects to the broader pattern explored in The Emotional Cost of Being the Responsible One. And for the particular difficulty of honest conversation within Indian families — why things that need to be said almost never are — Talking to Parents About Your Relationship — The Indian Challenge covers the structural dynamics in depth.