What is the meaning, in the Indian context, of stating that words or works of art injure or “hurt feelings”? This paper examines the specificity of the entanglement of the rhetoric of censorship with the language and performance of emotions in India today, by looking closely at the discourses mobilized around the controversy surrounding the painter M. F. Husain, and the mobilization of the Delhi-based collective of artists Sahmat. It aims to understand how agency can be derived from injury, and to analyze how “feelings of pain” are used by and distributed across both groups who mobilize in favor of or to counter censorship.