The Book Of Pain And Love For Every Thoughtful Indian

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is best known to most as the Dalit feminist who confirmed that caste exists in the U.S. When Equality Labs, the civil rights organisation she co-founded in 2015 and of which she is executive director, conducted the first survey on caste discrimination in that country, the findings showed that Indian migrants’ idea of staying connected to their country included replicating caste oppression in their new home. 

The U.S.-based Soundararajan had a role to play in former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey famously holding up a 'Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’ sign during his 2018 visit to India. The resulting outrage alerted the world to casteism. She fought against revising textbooks in California schools to remove the word ‘Dalit’ and to drop the study of caste; and was, herself, one of the first students to openly say she was Dalit in an American educational institution. All this and more is likely the reason she’s one of the most attacked women of south Asian origin on social media. 

Her 2022 book The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, weaves an intricate tapestry of ideas from the fields of environmental justice, trauma therapy, the Black civil rights movement, feminism and Buddhism to show us a vision of an equitable future and what we will have to do to get there (start acknowledging our history of slavery, for one). In her words, the book is a “series of meditations on the path to freedom”.

Soundararajan, who was in the news last year when her scheduled talk to Google News employees was cancelled in April 2022, after a group claimed she was ‘Hindu phobic’ and ‘anti-Hindu’, writes about the generational trauma of caste and how to begin the process of healing. 

At a time when casteism and ethno-nationalism are rising, this intersectional, empathetic vision has the power to bring a reader to tears. The author revisits Jyotiba Phule’s image of a suffering so deep that it could make the land weep and drown the world. 

She examines her own pain unflinchingly and the “soul wounds” (a term used in the context of Native American trauma) of those closest to her and the wider community because, as she writes, those who suffer rarely allow their pain to be seen or acknowledged. “A human body becomes a billboard to remind the oppressed what the stakes are if you resist domination,” she says, about physical and sexual violence against Dalits.

If we only look, this pain is documented everywhere, even today. The Indian National Human Rights Commission Report said that every hour two Dalits are assaulted, every day three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered and two Dalit homes are torched. A crime against a Dalit happens every 18 minutes.

As Soundararajan points out: 45% of Dalit children do not know how to read or write; one third of Dalit homes do not have basic facilities; Dalits are prevented from entering police stations in 28% of villages; they don’t get mail delivered to their home in 24% villages and are even denied access to water sources in 48% of villages. The life expectancy for Dalit women is 39.5 years.

This book will ensure she is more loved and more hated—by those who agree that caste should be abolished, and those who deny its existence or find even talking about it offensive.

The author draws parallels between caste and race; between the slavery of the American South and bonded labour in our cotton fields; between White Nationalists and homegrown fundamentalists. As you read the book, you might want to make a list (it will be long) of those she is inspired by and quotes, for further reading: Sherri Mitchell, Wahleah Johns, Joanna Macy, Resmaa Manakem, Assata Shakur, Renee Linklater, Gloria Anzaldua, Ruth King…. Her friend, Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo movement, has written the foreword. The last word goes to political thinker Cornel West, whom Soundararajan quotes as once saying: “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

It is thanks only to the efforts of groups such as Equality Labs that the world is now forced to acknowledge the extent and impact of casteism. Brown University became the first Ivy League institution to add caste as a protected class to its Nondiscrimination and Anti-Harassment Policy in December 2022. The same month, the United Nations Economic and Social Council granted consultative status to the International Dalit Solidarity Network—more than 15 years after they first applied.

Soundararajan herself found out about caste at the age of 10, a time when she was “obsessed with side ponytails, roller skates, Star Wars and the colour teal”.  When she asked her mother what caste she was, her mother sat her down for The Talk. The author says it was the kind of talk that Black parents dread having with their children about how unsafe the world is and one in which Dalit families must tell the next generation about how the world views them as “less than, diminished, inhuman”. Caste, she discovered, had followed her parents, both doctors, to the U.S. 

Soundararajan consciously uses the term ‘caste apartheid’ rather than ‘caste system’ which she says “helps neutralise and legitimise it”. She was out as Dalit by the time she was an undergraduate—a time she describes as “violent but also liberating”, a time of rape threats and death threats. 

Professors told her there were no Dalit thinkers and she should focus her research on class, not caste. “Students freely used caste slurs, not even knowing it was the same thing as using the N-word for caste-oppressed people,” she writes. That’s when she discovered mentors in women of colour. 

In the age of the “Brahminisation of the Internet”, she urges readers to “destabilise” disinformation networks that create the perfect conditions for violence; to “act out of love” because “all our lives and destinies are intertwined”; to use empathy with radicalised family members and challenge their thinking instead of exiting spaces they inhabit. 

There is a cost to those who practise casteism and to those who are complicit too, writes Soundararajan. “When you are indoctrinated to believe that someone else is less than, doesn’t deserve to sit at your table, should eat at your feet…—how numb must you become to bear it? How frozen your heart? How fundamentally broken is your consciousness? Because to other another is to lose your own humanity.”

“The truth about othering people is it slices your spirit in half,” she adds. “Half people can’t have whole families or whole relationships, least of all with themselves.”

To quote the author out of context: “This is some profound existential shit.” In these times especially, you will benefit immensely from reading a Dalit feminist who believes that “once you move a heart, you’ve already moved the mountain”.

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.