On “The Trauma of Caste” with Thenmozhi Soundarajan
A Q&A with the prolific Dalit American activist about her new book
I first met Thenmozhi at one of her “Unlearning Caste Supremacy” workshops in San Francisco, California, four years ago. That eight-hour training exploded my awareness of caste into new frontiers. Expertly weaving through history, politics, religion, and language, Thenmozhi facilitated a group of mostly Savarna (upper or dominant caste) South Asian Americans into “unlearning caste.”
Thenmozhi is probably the most prolific Dalit-American activist in history. She has contributed, along with other Dalit feminists, to much of how American society is currently discovering and engaging with caste. She helped coordinate the groundbreaking 2018 “Caste in the U.S.” survey, leads Dalit rights organization Equality Labs, and has organized across groups and decades to forge a formidable political coalition against caste—which she’s currently spearheading to win caste protections across the state of California.
Her new and first book The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition is a memoir of these experiences—and much more. It invites readers into a thorough, personal, poignant, and inspiring engagement with caste apartheid. And it does all this while speaking directly and tenderly to its Dalit readers—a welcome literary contribution on such an embattled issue. I sat down to speak with Thenmozhi about her new book. Topics include: the notion of caste as a ‘soul wound,’ religious conversion, the diasporic Dalit experience, and addressing caste across varying contexts.
Daniel: You have experience advocating for many different kinds of interventions—political, educational, social—but this book addresses caste as a “soul wound.” For your first book on this topic, why focus on the soul as the primary site of intervention?
Thenmozhi: We have many, many books that talk about the political and economic materiality about caste. We have very few that look at caste through the lens of trauma, and none looking at caste as a form of intergenerational harm. When we look to our colleagues and collaborators from Black, Indigenous, and other brown movements, this is where the discussion is at with systems of oppression. It’s not a game of logic and facts.
Reza Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands brought it home for me—if we were going to end racism with books, workshops, and seminars, we already would have done it, because how many brilliant pages have been written? That really rang a bell for me, because isn’t that true for the the caste abolition movement? How much writing, movement, and transformation have we put on the line, and yet caste persists? And that’s not our fault. The insight that the conditioning of our nervous systems contributes to the pervasiveness and resilience of these systems was a new one, coming from the innovations of Black, Indigenous, and Brown thinkers.
The idea of the ‘soul wound’ comes from Eduardo Duran. He wrote about it first when examining the pain of his clients who were indigenous, who were coming in with substance abuse issues, aggression, depression, or suicidal ideation. And when he would work with members of the indigenous community, he [observed] this is a pain that doesn’t logically exist because of one person’s lifetime. It’s because of pain across a lineage—huge, cataclysmic situations, like that of settler colonialism for Indigenous peoples, and the genocide that followed. For Black folks, the tragedy of enslavement, and what it meant to be brought here, racialized, and dehumanized by White supremacy.
As I heard those stories and saw the experiences of those practitioners, a bell rung in my own soul. As a Dalit person, there are certainly moments when you know the grief you carry is beyond you. You grieve for everything that has been stolen from your ancestors, for the conditions of your people now, that there has never been enough, and we have always been forced to do with so little, and it’s led to us being tortured, traumatized, and toxic even amongst ourselves. And in looking at that great turmoil, the lens of the caste soul wound was so appropriate. It gave us a word, and when you have vocabulary and language, you can find pathways of healing. It was very profound to see that you could transform those processes through an understanding of intergenerational harm.
That idea of the caste soul wound is that both the caste-privileged and oppressed are connected by this wound, going back centuries, and it really requires us to do our own work of healing and mapping our own nervous systems’ conditioning, related to caste stress. And when we are self-aware, we can basically [create] a little bit more distance and detachment, and be more nimble as we unlearn caste supremacy together. The soul, however you want to define it, is that piece of us that is eternal and connected to our ancestors, and to those who we will be ancestors for. It was important for me to see healing as the way that we address caste. How many books are there that look at caste through the lens of healing? Zero. And that’s why I wrote this book.
Daniel: I recently referenced your book in an article on Dr. Ambedkar’s “What Path To Salvation” speech, where he directly condemns Hinduism and advocates for conversion as the primary solution for Dalits being crushed by the caste order. This has been the most influential intervention for many Dalits. You diagnose caste similarly—as a problem arising in the spiritual domain—but you write that you’re not condemning a particular religion nor arguing for caste abolition through religious reform. What do you think of Ambedkar’s policy of conversion from Hinduism? Is your ‘soul wound’ intervention an evolution of it?
Thenmozhi: You have to slow the pace down of strategy-making when you’re working from a lens of trauma, so you can be really aware of the choices you’re making. Because religion is one of the domains where caste operates in, when people hear about caste, one of [their first responses is]: “If we talk about this, am I going to lose my faith? Is this going to attack my way of life?” And there’s already a jump to a million other places—that’s the nervous system’s conditioning. This is a big reason why we need to take it really slowly, down to basics.
What we’re talking about with caste equity is implementation of the rule of law and the prevention of grave discrimination. This is a civil rights issue, a human rights issue, a gender issue. When we start to then couple that with the religions we’re practicing, it becomes too big of a container for just Dalit people to hold, because now we’re responsible for freeing ourselves and doing religious reformation—and that’s too much.
The way that Brahmanism, the ideology that animates and started the caste system, works, is that it removes consent in all the domains. One of the biggest truths for me, that I had to hold and name in writing this book, was that being a Dalit means you are a survivor of religious abuse. It’s not just that you were told that you are a spiritual criminal who did bad things in your past life, but your life here, the conditions you face, are a punishment for things you did in another life, and therefore, you deserve it. You can’t organize around your conditions. For me, that’s an untenable situation and sentence. But in being a survivor of religious abuse, one of the ways to heal from that is you reassert consent in all domains—particularly in that of religious choice.
For me, it’s less about “is conversion the answer?” I just want every human being to have a choice to choose their path and be able to explore, existentially, their place in the universe, without being told what the right way is, without being told they are not worthy, without being told that choosing can cost them their families, their freedom, their relationships in society. It should just be a choice made out of an open and willing heart. And that’s what I hope caste-oppressed people will give to themselves, so that every decision doesn’t have to be held with such high stakes. “If you have this religion, that’s the only way to be free”—those are really high stakes for folks, and everything around our freedom is always driven by these very high stakes.
Daniel: I chose to call this blog “Dalit Americana,” because there are ways we as Dalit Americans fuse these dual and multiple identity experiences to make sense of caste, religion, politics, etc. in a unique way. I see you do that throughout the book, including in the kinds of solidarities you invoke, comparisons with race, and recycling policy proposals popular in America into the Indian caste context—like reparations. What are ways that your American nationality and experience has informed or connected with your perspective as a Dalit person?
Thenmozhi: The intersectionality of my Dalit feminist politics is directly related to being a Dalit American. At every step, I was seeking language for what had happened to our people. It wasn’t other South Asians that were like, “Here’s the path, here’s what happened.” It was other BIPOC women leaders who introduced me to intersectional thought, like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Through their writings and mentorship, I could see the path of where Dalit American people need to build power.
As someone who was seeking justice, I was hungry to also learn about how other communities learned of justice. In my own pursuit, I would go to meetings by Black organizers, Brown organizers, AAPI organizers—I saw my struggle in their struggles. I spent at least five or six years of my 20’s just building and working with other movements, because I wanted to know about the human condition and how other people talked about their lives and struggles. As I heard that, I also gained such a deep, graded vocabulary of what it was to be caste-oppressed, but also caste-oppressed American, because we are racialized under South Asianness—we are settler colonials, we are part of the flow of history here, and we are caste-oppressed. What does that mean?
These are not transactional solidarities. They are lived, material alliances that come from years of friendship, breaking bread, and carrying each other’s water—and that really lays the framework for the work that we do in Equality Labs. It was really important for me to be in touch with everybody that could help me find myself, and I think that’s true for many Dalit Americans. As soon as we’re in touch with our own experiences and we connect with other movements and struggles, we find welcome collaborators. They see us in their struggle, and we see them in our struggle.
It is also the necessary next step for our people to do the work that we want to do. This is not a movement where we can just sit around. Because our community has been closeted for a long time, we’ve been hesitant to be out and make collaborations across our different communities, and we cannot afford that siloing. On our own, we have a tremendous opponent that very few people understand, but every global civil rights movement has won because of their stakeholders. I saw that over and over again, when I’d travel both in the United States and around the world.
Daniel: This book is huge—not necessarily in size, but topically, you cover caste as it affects religion, gender, the environment, psychology, geopolitics, etc. A common reaction to caste by genuine listeners is a kind of paralysis. It is impossible to comprehend the scope, brutality, the constancy of caste, to rethink so much about the nature of our world and society, and to take responsible action. What would you say to someone reading this book or coming into contact with this issue, who finds it overwhelming?
Thenmozhi: I think unlearning caste is a lifetime process. It’s okay to be overwhelmed, and you don’t have to solve it in one day. It really helps to dial in on the [particular] manifestation of caste that you’re seeing, or that you’re working on on. Maybe you’re a worker and you’re seeing caste-based discrimination in your workplace. You can find other workers to work on that, or joining worker collaboratives like the Alphabet Workers Union or Tech Workers for Caste Equity. Maybe you’re someone working on this in gendered contexts. As a Dalit feminist organization, we were seeing a lot of the practical, tactical manifestations of caste showing up amongst restaurant workers, people who were trafficked, domestic laborers, the building trades. It’s not just one single profession, there are many professions.
I want to help people find pathways to building those relationships, because a lot of people feel, “I’m not enough of an expert to speak on this.” If you’re not someone that’s South Asian, you’re often told by opponents of caste equity that you’re being racist by bringing up these issues. I wanted to empower people to say, “No, this is a human rights issue,” you have a stake in it, and to find your caste-oppressed allies. And I also wanted to empower South Asians and caste-oppressed peoples to say we can work on this issue. It can start with the psychosocial, the somatic, working on a bill, or transforming a yoga studio or place of worship. Whatever it is, caste abolition has acts both big and small.
It took a long time to build caste, and it will take a period to dismantle it. However, our commitment to it should be invigorated every day with big and small acts to reclaim and heal ourselves. And having one act towards healing yourself from caste everyday is not a large ask. We’re not asking people to be in extended struggle, but extended inquiry, and to put forward the path towards healing, empathy, and care.
Daniel: What’s the response to the book been like?
Thenmozhi: I think about this book as a little, odd artifact. It’s written in a way that’s multidimensional. It’s like a prism. If you hold it up to a light, it speaks to one audience. If you hold it up another way, another light comes through. If you’re a socially engaged Buddhist, you’ll find something in this book. If you’re a survivor, if you’re a Dalit that’s reckoning with religious abuse, if you’re South Asian, or if you’re reckoning with your own grief and healing, you’ll find something in this book. I found that my consciousness was fractured by the violence of caste and racism and gender-based violence, and this book was about integration, reclaiming all those broken pieces myself, bringing my whole attention to everything that was a result of that violence, and then beginning to heal it. It gave me strength to speak to these different contexts.
To me, the most surprising thing about this book was how emotional the response has been. I’ve not heard from anybody that hates the book. What I’ve heard is how much this book means to them. People have written me and told me they were suicidal, and reading the book made them get help. People have told it me it helped finally give them words about things going on in their family and organizations. The book provided both a container for grief for these different audiences, but also for hope and healing. I think I knew, logically, that would happen, but I didn’t know what it would be like for me to be a conduit of that healing.
Because of the way Brahmanism works, how often do we see Dalit leaders lead with the spirit, with healing? We’re not allowed to have any commentary in those domains. That belongs to Brahmin Ayurvedic doctors, Brahmin yoga teachers, and Brahmin priests. When is it that a humble Dalit person, let alone a Dalit woman from the diaspora who isn’t a part of any of those lineages, gets to be an expert on it? But aren’t we all experts on the human experience? This book was a license for me to have a position, and to say things. In writing this book, I found that I created a pathway for many more people to democratize their pathway to the divine, their access to the right to heal, and their access to political agency.
The fact that people are meeting me on the field of discourse is pretty shocking! As a Dalit person, you always suffer a little bit with imposter syndrome. Will people really listen to us? Dominant caste people are trained to be the supermen of our society. They’re trained to dominate, lead, control, and we’re not given those same tools and powers of divinely sanctioned leadership. So we often question ourselves, and wonder if we have a place at the table—but we always were at the table. It was a social fiction to say that we don’t. I feel really inspired by the vehicle of love that the book has become, and the way it keeps giving back to the community.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
You can find and read Thenmozhi’s book The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, published by Penguin Random House, here or at major book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram (@dalitdiva) and learn more about her work with Equality Labs here.