Speaker on Campus in Columbus, Ohio – Fall 2019

Hindu YUVA at The Ohio State University, 10/4/2019:

Hindu YUVA OSU organized a Speaker on Campus event, the topic being “Transgenerational Trauma”.

Dr. Rajat Mitra is a New Delhi based author, psychologist and an authority on victims of trauma. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and is a clinical psychologist who has worked with militants and radicalized youth on one hand, and survivors of mass violence and genocide on the other. He was given the Ashoka fellowship for pioneering work in changing the core of the criminal justice system in India. In 2011, Dr. Mitra accepted the UN Public Service Award for gender justice, the most prestigious international recognition of excellence in public service.

The many narratives he heard over a thirty-year career of providing support for human rights violations and abuses, gave him psychological insights into two of the most disturbing issues of our times: how radicalized youth cope with religious indoctrination and how psychological trauma of survivors gets passed on as narratives from generation to generation.

In 2014, while studying at a Harvard Program for Refugee Trauma conducted by Harvard Medical School, Dr. Mitra became aware of the deep link between trans-generational trauma, collective memory and the effort to preserve them through poems and literature. This along with his first-hand experience in the refugee camps in Kashmir led to his recent book, “The Infidel Next Door”, a fiction to help understand the trans-generational nature of trauma among the Kashmiris of Hindu Heritage.