CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Caste is one of the oldest systems of exclusion in the world. It negatively impacts 1.9 billion people worldwide, crippling their quality of life. Brahmins, who created this system in Hindu scripture, are at the top of the caste system and have benefited from centuries of privilege, access, and power because of it. Dalits, who sit at the bottom of this hierarchy, are branded “untouchable” and sentenced to a violent system of caste apartheid with separate neighborhoods, places of worship, and schools. 

Dalit American activist and author Thenmozhi Tenmori Soundararajan has been working to end caste oppression around the world for decades. In her work, she endeavors to help Dalit individuals and families heal through international solidarity with other oppressed people, working together to dismantle caste apartheid. In this episode, author, meditation teacher, and law professor Rhonda Magee has a powerful conversation with Thenmozhi about the ongoing trauma of the caste system and Dalit people’s fight against oppression. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on February 16th, 2023. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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Thenmozhi Soundararajan: Hi, Rhonda. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. It feels like we've had centuries in the making to get here. 

Rhonda Magee: [laughs] This is true. And of course, this is not our first time connecting and being in conversation. And yet it seems like it's been a while. So, I'm just really excited to be here now. And I'm so excited to be talking to you about your book. Last time we were together, the book hadn't come out yet, right? Yay!  

So, wow. It's your life story and the work that you've been doing is long, broad, and deep, and deep bows to you just at the front end for all that you have been doing. And in particular for this work, The Trauma of Caste, subtitle is A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition. Wow.  

So, you know this book is a force, I think, in and of itself. It's like a force of light and heat and wisdom. It's very moving. I happen to have been one of those people who had a chance to look at it in draft and send a little bit of a blurb. But for all those who haven't read it, I want everybody to go out and get a copy. But be prepared for a real engagement with things that matter. It's not light reading. It's not going to be easy to read. But there is a lot of love and hope in this entire story, too. So, my dear, can you share just a little bit about what made you write this book at this time? 

Thenmozhi: Well, I think, like everyone, there was a certain point over the last three years where I felt that I was just kind of brought to my knees. And for those of us in the South Asian community, we went from 2019 with the opening of a genocidal project in our homelands in India to the pandemic of 2020. And then, of course, we all saw the uprising and then a coup. And that's just getting us through 2021. We're not even talking about 2022, right?  

I think in talking with many of my elders and other activists, the thing that was so profound is people who had dedicated lifetimes to civil rights, to feminism, to survivor power were watching all of their wins be eroded in front of them as society destabilized and we were getting into more and more increased cycles of polarization. And for me, I have a very specific experience of it, not just from racial justice, but in terms of caste violence and caste discrimination. And I just felt like there had to be another way. And I had such an abiding grief about it, because when you see how broken society is, when you face the fury of the bigoted and you watch, nothing is going to kind of turn them down. It's not about facts. It's not about the right spreadsheet. There's something at a very deep level on how their nervous systems were trained. And I searched and I searched for answers around that. And it wasn't on the outside. It was on the inside.  

And so, I think like the Buddha, in the face of all of this trauma, I just sat. I just sat and I just really gave myself some time to stop firefighting as an activist and going from one rapid response situation, which I'm sure all of us feel like we've been in for the last couple of years. And I wanted to look up from the ground and go to the stars and think, how did we get here and are there ways to de-escalate? And it was in that work that, you know, outside of me doing my inner work and thinking about my own nervous system, I found amazing Black somatic abolitionists and Buddhists like yourself and Ruth King and Resmaa Menakem and Indigenous thinkers like Eduardo Duran and Maria Braveheart, who opened up a whole terrain of the body and the nervous system as a terrain to understand systems of oppression. And so that piece was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was to make those ties to this terrible experience of caste. And then I also had this very personal reason for writing, which was that my mom was diagnosed terminal and- 

Rhonda: So sorry to hear. 

Thenmozhi: Yeah. I mean you know, we both have challenges that we're dealing with in this way, but things just become super dialed in, super real when someone close to you is fighting for their life. And in the backdrop of all of the death of COVID, I just could not help but look at all the structural reasons why my mom was in the way that she was, you know, she has, you know, her kidneys failed. And I'll always remember the first time I went into a dialysis center for the first time, it is all Black and Brown elders and they're bus drivers, they're social workers, they're people who dedicated their lives to servicing society. And now they've been just thrown away in these like dilapidated centers. And it just broke my heart.  

And when I saw that, that also really pushed me to go deeper. And so, you know, out of that journey and also really thinking about what solution can I help bring to people to heal? Because so many of these problems, you know, we assume that they're going to be persistent or, you know, people are trying to find tactical ways to take apart our opponents. And the reality is, is that, you know, when you're in the middle of a genocide, the only choice you have is de-escalation, but you can't de-escalate if your own body is in a constant state of survival. So, for me, it was about trying to find a way to build a path towards light in a time of death. 

Rhonda: Wow. I hope we'll circle back around to some of the specific ways that you accessed that light, like this, you know, you said you just sort of sat and kind of knew that you needed to restore. So hopefully we'll get, we'll come back to a little bit of those, you know, kind of, you know, stories from your own experience of, you know, how you've regenerated, how you've sustained yourself, maybe some of the practices specifically that you do to sustain. But before we get into that, I'm just curious if you could say just a little bit more about, you know, the theme of the book about the trauma of caste. Hoo, there's so much there. Folks on this call may be familiar with what caste is, but if you could share just a little bit about some of those concepts, caste, the trauma. In your book, I know you use the beautiful phrase, soul wound. So, I wonder if you could just help us, you know, unpack a little bit of the concepts that, and the lived experiences that help us understand what those terms mean in your work. 

Thenmozhi: Oh, absolutely. So, for folks that have never heard of the word caste, it's a system of exclusion that has its origins in South Asia but is now found all around the world. And it basically ranks people at birth into these different classes of people. So, the people at the top who kind of developed the system were the priests or the Brahmins, and they have the most power and the most structural control. And then you start to get different grades of other professions that go down in lowering purity. So underneath the Brahmin priests are the rulers who are the Kshatriyas. And then you have the merchants who are the Vaishyas, you have the Shudras who are the peasants. And then outside of this caste pyramid are those that were outcasted and shunned, you know, given the worst jobs and facing extreme physical violence, and even told that they were spiritually defiling to other people. And that's why they were called untouchables. So that's my caste.  

And of course, nobody gets to, you know, decide your place, you know, in front of the divine. And so that's why we call ourselves caste-depressed, and we call ourselves Dalit, or caste oppressed, or you know, a religion that we've converted to out of it. And then there are also Indigenous people who are caste oppressed that are outside of the system, they call themselves Adivasi or tribal.  

But this is the social logic of anyone that comes from South Asia. So, caste impacts 1.9 billion people in the world, you know, that's one in four people. And in the United States, around 5.7 million people, and it's significantly found here. And there are so many dimensions to it. And you know, there are, you know, many books that talk about the economic and political and underdevelopment issues that come with such a punishing system of exclusion. But there's very few that look at caste through the lens of trauma. And I was deeply interested in that, because the way I understood caste, being someone who lived in the diaspora, is that it shouldn't be here. There's no reason for it to be here, right? You know? 

Rhonda: And it's, in fact, technically illegal, isn't it? I mean, to discriminate based on caste, right? 

Thenmozhi: Yes, definitely in India. 

Rhonda: In India. 

Thenmozhi: And the understanding in the US is that it's considered to be under other protected categories, you know, like race and descent and faith and so on. But those protections aren't sufficient, given how grave some of the things that we're seeing here. 

Rhonda: And they're not sufficient given how deep these ideas are, especially in the countries 

and cultures of origin, right? 

Thenmozhi: Exactly. 

Rhonda: The notion of caste goes back really a long, long time. 

Thenmozhi: It goes back to 2000 BC. And even though it started in Hinduism, it's now found in every faith practice within South Asian communities. But I think the thing that I found so challenging about growing up here was that, you know, it shouldn't be here. And yet it defines every aspect of the diaspora. 

Rhonda: Say more about that, because I think for a lot of people who are here, they don't know. 

Thenmozhi: They don't know.  

Rhonda: Right. So, can you just share a little bit more about what you mean when you say, it shouldn't be here, but it is here, even in the United States? 

Thenmozhi: Well, I think that for folks that haven't really examined the ways that we bring our baggage as immigrants, caste oppressed people are essentially a minority within a minority. We are racialized as South Asian, but actually all of this baggage from all of our historical trauma has come with us. So, whether it's trauma related to caste or genocide, or how nations were built through violence and sexual violence, it's all there. And we don't talk about it because we're the model minority. So, it just kind of gets smashed [clapping sound] and people keep going, but the trauma lingers. The trauma is all around us. And I had a personal experience with that watching my parents live in the closet, be terrified about being outed.  

And so that began my inquiry about both understanding who I was as Dalit, but also having a language for the trauma I was seeing. And that's where the work of people like Eduardo Duran and Maria Braveheart and Resmaa Menakem were so impactful for me because in their work, they talk about how as they're working with Indigenous and Black clients, they saw that people had a grief that went beyond their bodies. It wasn’t just about their one lifetime. And that's what they called the soul wound. It's the wound you carry of yourself, but also of your lineage. So in the case of Eduardo Duran and Maria Braveheart, they're talking about it in terms of settler colonialism and Indigenous genocide. And in the case of Resmaa Menakem and in your work and Ruth King's, you are thinking about it in terms of white supremacy. And in fact, he talks about it as white body supremacy. And that was an incredible aha moment for me to kind of read all of these works together and think about how was my body trained around caste? What is the caste soul wound? 

And the process of writing a book that goes deep like this is you basically are bringing all the parts of yourself, your consciousness that have been scattered by violence. And I will say that until I wrote this book, I was definitely an expert about caste and could talk about different data points, have substantial experience supporting survivors in the region and also here in North America. But I think I hadn't claimed or understood the wound I had about being a survivor of religious abuse. 

Rhonda: Wow. 

Thenmozhi: And how much I had felt dispossessed from spaces of spirituality and how absent I was from parts of my body because of the sheer terror and violence and bigotry that I've gone through. And everyone that's a civil rights activist who's been on this call can really relate to it. It's like, you know what you have to do. You got to go and get stuff done. Inside your gut is churning. Maybe you're having your heartbeat really fast, or you go home late at night and you're an insomniac or you have panic attacks. Like our bodies are, it's not that our bodies aren't as courageous as our minds. It's that we're not having a container that's sufficient enough to really hold that structural violence that is represented by those soul wounds because no one person is ever meant to hold that. So, to write this book was really to go through the process of re-embodying myself. And that's hard work to do, you know, and you were asking me like, what kind of processes that I do to restore myself. I feel like before restoration began, I had to acknowledge that I had grief and how afraid I was. And just, you know, how, I mean, I don't know how to explain what it feels like to be dispossessed. 

Rhonda: But it sounds like really, you're talking about just acknowledging, first of all, again, coming home to this body and really allowing yourself the space to notice, recognize, see, right? And then fully appreciate in the sense of acknowledging this is here, this body is suffering. There's fear here. There's trauma embedded in the body and the resonances of this. So, it was becoming aware of what you were carrying, even underneath all the work you were doing. 

Thenmozhi: Not just that, but there is a very particular viciousness when your soul wound is related to spiritual dispossession because there is a deep human right to be able to kind of be a seeker. We'll go outside, it's late at night, you look at the stars and you wonder, who am I and where do I go? And I think for caste oppressed people and other survivors of religious abuse, that right to seek has been robbed. We've been robbed from it. And there were so many times where I wanted to say I am this tradition, I'm part of this community. And I felt that it wasn't for me. There is a lessening of yourself because to really be integrated, it is really the mind, the body, and the spirit. And when you truncate the spirit like that, you become smaller, and you become diminished. And so, to acknowledge the wound was to let it become a portal.  

Rhonda: Yeah, wow. 

Thenmozhi: So, for me, I felt I could acknowledge I was a seeker, I could claim my divinity and I could choose to be witchy and spirit-driven on my own terms without having to circumscribe myself to hegemonies that have been so damning and painful. And having that process was everything. I think that's so much of the healing that I wrote in this book because so many people that are South Asian or are connected to Dharmic lineages or lineages that come from South Asia and these traditions rooted in caste and Brahmanism, the ideology that formed caste, people are trained in a particular way to think that only the divine can be only accessed by a limited few. So, to democratize that, to return consent even into my own body, it was such a powerful opening. 

Rhonda: Wow. Well, I'm just aware that what you're saying is on one hand, a kind of a description of what it feels like to be sort of spiritually alienated in relationship to the religious culture in which you were born because of this sort of embedded oppressive hierarchy around caste that sought at least in its efforts to kind of relegate you to a certain place of disownment or not belonging. And so yes, you're feeling that alienation, and you found your way into a healing relationship with spirit. Because the tradition you were born into was a wound created, this place of wounding.  

So, I'm hearing that particular piece and that your particular piece in your journey in that I'm also hearing the resonances between what you're saying and what African Americans have felt, who especially Southern based ones, as I was born in the South in a community in which my grandmother had been called to religion, my grandmother was a preacher, but women and African Americans were oppressed within Christianity. We're told that enslavement was a punishment for being sons of Ham, right? There's a religious narrative that justified our enslavement.  

So, I think many of us, again, we've got our unique stories, and your book is helping us understand the particular ways that caste oppression is showing up in the bodies of those who were deemed untouchable Dalit beings. And that particular story is so important and we're learning so much about it, but I hope everyone's also hearing that your story helps maybe us all understand that these dynamics happen in different ways through different cultures. And we have something in common and it's important to see the differences and to learn from each other. And I think also if we can become more empathic about how we as human beings suffer similarly through hearing your story and similar stories, then that's really a pathway to deepening our human rights and our civil rights work and our movement work together. Wow.  

So, this healing dimension then is unique, I think, to your study around castes. As you mentioned, you had been doing a lot of caste oppressive anti-caste work. And this book is the first really effort to bring the spirit of healing really strongly to the fore. And so, you know, I'd love it if you could share just a little bit more about some of the ways, if you were willing to talk about specific healing practices that you engage in, that'd be one thing I'm sure the listeners would be curious about, but also ways that you see this sort of anti-caste work and maybe the impetus to do that that comes out of your own Dalit Buddhist commitments, how you see that showing up and enlivening social protests, social movements. In other words, how your own practices, if you could say a little bit about that, but also maybe a little bit about how this orientation is helping inspire and uplift people who are doing the anti-oppressive work right now. 

Thenmozhi: Absolutely. So, I'm going to answer that in two different parts. I think that, you know, one thing in going back to that idea of the soul wound, the thing that I thought was so profound, it really helped me think of new tactical approaches to some of the problems that we're seeing in movement building was that, you know, any system of exclusion, there's always an over-focus on the consequences of that system in terms of the bodies of the oppressed, but we don't have enough focus on what exactly is happening in the bodies and the nervous system of the privileged. And soul wounds really tie us both into that kind of terrible mess.  

And so, I think that when you think about healing within that context, you really have to have different pathways and processes for those who have been struggling with systems of caste and race and those who have been complicit and are the harm-doers of it. And so, I really tried to go back into my own experience with civil rights and, you know, your work was very, you know, pivotal to me because I would sit and think, I was like, Rhonda's a civil rights leader. You know, she's a lawyer. She does strategic litigation. She does legal theory. Why does she go to mindfulness? You know, and you have to read her book to find out. [Rhonda laughs] But I can say in my own practical experiences, I could see it being such a necessary part of our movement toolbox because, you know, especially when we're living in a time right now where there's a reversal of so many rights and you're having parents in Tennessee who are trying to pass laws to ban the teaching of slavery because they don't, using the term trauma, they don't want their children to be traumatized by learning about slavery, you see that there is so much of the flow of civil rights that's stopped by the fragility of the privileged. And that is not going to be solved simply by handing people a book or giving people facts because if facts were going to change the mind of the bigoted, we'd already be done with it because how many great scholars are there about both caste and race, right? But the problem I see is that, you know, dominant classes of people, whether it's in race or in class, they just do not have enough training and self-awareness about how their bodies are reacting to caste and racial stress.  

And so, as a result, just a small amount of exposure since their wheel spinning, you know, and I will always remember I was, you know, part of this community process to try to get caste as a protected category in Santa Clara. And there was this woman that was so unhinged in her testimony, and she would say things like, are you ready Santa Clara Board of Supervisors to have the blood of Hindus on your hand? Do you want Santa Clara to be ground zero for genocide? Do you want me to wear my caste on my arm like the Star of David, because that's what you're going to do. And you know, she was yelling at the top of her lungs and, you know, the thing that I thought was so interesting is that the only thing that was being proposed was that caste would be added to a list of protected categories for non-discrimination clauses. That doesn't do anything. But the fact that she viewed it with such terror and such vehemence and such rage, that really made me understand that we have to go under that hood. And that also the people that deescalate the privileged aren't the oppressed. It has to be their own kin. It has to be families and friends that have said, I am going to put down and really address my part, you know, my part in this caste soul wound and really, you know, start to do my work of unlearning caste supremacy and take, talk to my aunties, talk to my uncles and figure it out, you know.  

And so that really began a process in our work in Equality Labs where alongside of our advocacy, we built a whole somatics mindfulness centered racial and caste equity training program called Unlearning Caste Supremacy, which really helps give people the history, but also, the training in terms of somatic abolitionist practices that are rooted in Dalit feminism to help people understand how they can deescalate together. And that's changed everything because in terms of my healing process, I think one of the hardest things when you're fighting a system of oppression is when you feel alone in it. And also, that your inner experience has no empathetic witness. And so, I think there's a huge part of when people enter communities of practice together, where they are speaking to the pain and also getting, you know, appropriate containers for release, but then also returned into beloved community. It's a very transformative process because we're not like burning our bodies just to get the political win. We're also looking at what are ways that we can really meaningfully transform our outer world because our inner worlds are grounded and looking our ancestral and pain right directly in the eyes for release. So, for me, you know, that work and seeing it on such a mass scale, because thousands of people have now taken our Unlearning Caste Supremacy workshop, it's taught me the importance of inner work. And it's taught me to really be confident to say, I need to take that hour and go do meditation. I need to listen to these binaural beats, which is another thing I find healing. This is that time I'm going to go for that hike and spend time in nature and feel expansive. You know, there's so many ways that our bodies know how to, you know, regulate our nervous systems, you know, in silence with other people and with other species and the planet. We have to draw on all of those allies, whether it's plant allies or, you know, an ecosystem where you're forced bathing. And those things fall away when you're deeply under stress and under the gun from systems of oppression. So, it's almost like the other thing I do to really kind of keep me healthy and grounded is try to have effective boundaries. And say that to any woman of color and you're going to be like, oh, yeah, okay, we're trying.  

Rhonda: We're working on it. Cough, cough, overscheduled, overscheduled, overscheduled. 

Thenmozhi: Right. Yes. And also, the fact that we're the oftentimes the people doing the majority of caregiving in our communities and in a time of pandemic, we're holding, we're the ones holding society together in these very unseen ways. But I still think even within that, there are small things you can do to restore, even if it's just five minutes, that commitment to your inner resource allows you to be a greater, you know, resource to the world. 

Rhonda: Indeed. Yeah. So, I hear you just talking about ways that you sustain yourself, these various different commitments you've made to, you know, touching in, tapping into and restoring your inner resources. But also, I'm hearing you describe this really fine offering you've made, unlearning caste supremacy, right? [Thenmozhi:That’s right.] That workshop. And which, you know, I'm sure we can all find a little bit more about that if we Google and look for these things online, because I'm sure listeners would be curious to hear more. But those, the way you're describing personal inner work, interpersonal work, perhaps with other, you know, caste oppressed people in affinity groups is what we often call it in this work of BIPOC or people of color or healing amongst those of us who have experienced depression. Getting in groups of folks who look like us and have similar experiences so we can share. But I'm also hearing you describe again, ways that those who identify with or have been among groups who have been identified as amongst the oppressors, those who are privileged in various ways, whether by race or by caste, come together and learn practices for regulating their nervous systems and for sitting in spaces of discomfort long enough to learn how to actually do some things differently and to teach others to do the same. So that is inspiring. And it's a lot of work.  

You know, you and I mentioned just briefly on a call before this as a preparation, I mentioned to you in the work that I do with lawyers and activists these days. So, I find myself working with people who are already inspired to try and change the world, who already see the importance of it, just as you were for much of your career, but who haven't necessarily come to understand the importance of doing their own work. So, it's a struggle for them to actually devote time.  

And so, if you have any tips or any advice to those who kind of hear this, they are in the midst of it, they know that while we, you know, are already feeling compassion, we already know that there's work to be done, it's hard for us to take time for ourselves. Is there anything that you can offer as a bit of advice for people who might just need to remember, Thenmozhi said I should take some time for myself and here's why. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to speak to that directly. 

Thenmozhi: Well, you know, I think that, you know, I think that I feel like one of the things that I keep seeing as a pattern is that even though everything looks okay, you know, in society, inside everything is really kind of held together with bubblegum and toothpicks. We're talking about the beforehand, right? And we're not all the same the way that we were before the pandemic. We're very, very frazzled. We have lost so much. And it's not like society said, oh, pause, everyone's going to have six months to grieve. We have to work through tremendous family ending types of grief and pain, some who are still going through it. And I think that when you fight for civil rights, or if you're in a justice battle right now, the tactics of your opponents are just so brutal. You know, and you know, we're on this major campaign to get caste as a protected category in Seattle City right now. We have seen absurd things where activists are dealing with rape threats and death threats, you know, people making insinuations that people are terrorists, you know, or, you know, anti-Hindu, or, you know, you name it, everything under the sun, you know, whatever they can stick to try to demoralize you to try to deform you.  

And so, what I found is actually that people are willing to stand up, people are willing to be people of courage, but they don't know often how to restore in the face of that pernicious violence. [Rhonda: Right.] So, I actually find the opposite is that in my in the in the work that I'm doing, people are actually gravitating to the work that we're doing in Equality Labs. And in the end, it's really a Dalit feminist model, or a woman of color feminist model where we're not going to have people, you know, run up against violence and not do something to restore, you know, because this is the other thing that I think that's so critical about mindfulness practices, especially as articulated by BIPOC thinkers, is that this is not about going into a mountain and having your own retreat. This is about really learning about the fact that suffering, suffering exists, you know, for us, this means, you know, structural violence. And we often cannot remove ourselves from that signal of violence. So, we have to really learn how to attenuate it so that we can process it, and still be able to be whole as can be, you know, but whole, so that we can proceed. And that attenuation process is something you can only do through lived practice. You can't you can't just read about it and be like, okay, yeah, you have to really metabolize.  

Rhonda: And it takes time. 

Thenmozhi: It takes time. 

Rhonda: Right. And sometimes we need a break, we need to pull back and rest, right from the go, go, go impetus of the particular project that we're involved in, giving ourselves that time to restore, you know, burnout is a big problem for many of us, speaking of the many different, you know, slings and arrows we have taken within the things we're holding together with chewing gum, and so on right now, people are really overwhelmed and exhausted. So, knowing the signals in our bodies that suggest we actually do need to rest, if we're going to sustain in this struggle for the long haul, we do need to go to Equality Labs, you know, meditation session or whatever is being offered to help restore. Really, I hope folks who are in the struggles because we need you all we need everybody, and we need our all of us to be able to sustain. I hope you're hearing this part of it, because I do think it's really, really important. And so at the same time, the teachings that are available now, through Equality Labs and as you read this book for those who are invited to do the change to do the reckoning right that has been ongoing and people of good conscience, who are privileged white body upper caste people, people of all different walks of life were invited into the social justice challenges of our time these days. Many of them do need extra support to and need support as you're describing it right for all of the challenges that come to the body when you realize many ways you've been miseducated despite what a fancy education you got somewhere right where you didn't learn all of these things that you should have learned, or all the things about, you know, the some aspects of your own personal history or community history that have been buried that have not been brought to the surface that you now have to confront doing that is not easy. So, thank you so much for naming and exploring in different ways in this book and in your work with Equality Labs, how all of us can discern what our curriculum is like what is the healing we need to do, it's going to look different for me than it is for you know my white male colleagues somewhere. It's going to look different for you than it will perhaps for an Indigenous American, but we all have some healing to do, and we can lean into a kind of a set of practices that helps us with this healing that you're just beautifully introducing into the work in the trauma of caste.  

So, you've already been alluding in your, your conversation so far, my dear to some of the good news or the things that give you hope. You're talking about some of the wonderful projects you're engaged in bringing caste into the law and policy of anti-discrimination in Santa Clara, in Seattle, different places where you're actually making progress. There is good news out there by the way in my work I'm seeing changes being made in California to how we train police, and you know requirements for police in terms of anti-racist education, new programs being offered so you can become a social justice trained police officer, right.  

So, things are happening, it may not be changes overnight. We know there's a lot of pain still out there, but I'm curious if you could get the listeners a bit of a view out the window that you can see when you are seeing things that give you hope. What are the things, what are the kinds of experiences? You know for me I like to say that the work that we do as part of justice, including this conversation and being in contact with other people who are doing the work is justice and feels like justice in my heart, right. It feels like it's love in public as Cornel West would say. So, but I'm curious when you feel and see some of that love in public, what are some of the things that you're seeing that give you hope in these times? 

Thenmozhi: Well, I think that you know again I feel like when you really deeply understand your roots you are able to reach for the stars. And you know part of why I also did this deep dive is that again for people of South Asian descent and especially those that are Indian American, our diaspora is being ripped apart by this genocidal project back at home. And it's been a terrifying thing to watch social norms and communities being just targeted in this like endless absurd way you know ultimately leading to a project that's going to put millions of people in concentration camps. And I think there is no greater eclipse of life than to see such an enormous terrifying project for death. And part of what I had to do to generate hope around it because that's a pretty hopeless situation is you know after I you know my book I go through like the social history of caste. I talk about casting the United States. I talk about its religious origins you know which my seeker self really loved. And then after talking about it in many institutions I really go to thinking about this genocidal project and what does it take to turn away from death? And I read all of the testimonies from the genocides that have occurred in South Asia. This was a very difficult thing to do but you know while most people think of South Asia as the place of like eat pray love enlightenment. In fact, we have terrifying genocides you know whether it's the Sikh genocide the Sri Lankan genocide the violence that happened at the partitioning that led to India and Pakistan and then later the Bangladesh independence war where there was the world's largest mass rape of over 300,000 you know bodies and of course caste which is the blueprint for all this violence. 

Rhonda: And when you point to the 2019 project which are you specifically just so the listeners know exactly. 

Thenmozhi: For sure. So, in 2019 the government of India under Narendra Modi basically passed a law that created religious specifications for citizenship with the intention of saying that anyone that didn't fit this model would be put into intent- you know detention camps. And they already have 14 of them. There's already million you know million like a close to like two million people in jail and the project was intended to grow and it was stopped in part by the pandemic. But there's other ways that you know and this this really targets Indian Muslims primarily and then caste oppressed people and poor and trans and non-binary folks. And it's a terrifying thing to watch especially our homelands that are you know were really known to be secular to watch it turn into this like very terrible religious ethnonationalism.  

But I bring this up in terms of the context of hope because I would read those testimonies of genocide no matter how dark it got, each of those stories always had someone who chose to be a light in the darkness. They might have been a friend. They might have been a neighbor. Maybe it was someone who was the delivery person. They were the ones that basically helped people escape or hid them underneath the basement or you know rolled them in a rug and then you know pushed them out on the cart. Whatever the story was there was someone that chose to break away from the death cult to choose life. And I think that is the tremendous place where I find so much hope because you know it's one thing to read about genocide. It's another thing to watch the dynamics of genocide within your community. And I see so many people of courage who are speaking up. You know they know that they might get targeted and their families at home might be you know facing arrests or being raided. But everyone is finding big ways and small ways to resist. And that's the loving beloved community that I really generate so much hope for because I think that there are more of us that want to choose life than those that want to profit from death. 

Rhonda: Yeah, and there always have been and I believe there always will be. I mean we are standing on the shoulders of generations of those who have chosen life right. This is how we got here. So, thank you so much for sharing that and I guess as we prepare to bring our conversation to a close, you've been pointing to this sort of beloved community of those who are choosing life in these you know horrifying times in a certain sense right on a certain I mean let's be real to talk about contemporary genocide and the ongoing absolute horrors of caste oppression. You know and it doesn't take it's not that hard to find folks are not sure what specific types of horrors we're talking about, and you haven't had a chance to read this beautiful book which I hope you're ordering right now if you don't have it already. While you're waiting for your book to arrive if you're not getting the Kindle just do a search right. You can see caste-based violence and you will see and yet we are here and yet we are finding places where we can feel safe and we're creating beloved community.  

So, I'm wondering if you could just uplift the names of a few Dalit diaspora heroes, sheroes, people who inspire you because I do believe in amplifying the names of those whose work is going under seen and underappreciated in these times. Who comes up for you? Who are people who inspire you right now when you think about the work being done? 

Thenmozhi: So, for me you know I think what caste-pressed people want is for people to be in beloved community with us. Lift up our ancestors, lift up our stories, join our movements because we want to be part of your movements. [Rhonda: Yeah.] This is shared liberation and two people that really come to my mind. One is Dr. Ambedkar who is just like a towering figure in Dalit liberation. He was the architect of the Indian constitution. He was everything. He was a statesman, a lawyer, he was a civil rights activist, and he was also socially engaged Buddhist. Every domain he went into was an intervention for freedom and I think what I just have really appreciated about him so much was not just the precision of his mind. [Rhonda: Tremendous.] Yes, and that unrelenting commitment to freedom but also his that unrelenting pursuit of justice was also there for him as a seeker because he was also trying to find a place what is the appropriate spiritual and political home for people who have been dispossessed by many traditions. 

Rhonda: And it all led him to Buddhism right and to really converting right. 

Thenmozhi: Led one of the largest conversions in world history of mass conversion of Buddhism. It was like close to 400,000 people. So, he is one of the first Dalit Americans and he went to school in Colombia. We worked with Representative Rokano's office to celebrate his birthday on April 14th and to have Congress recognize Dalit history month. So, to me I always carry him everywhere with me. 

Rhonda: Baba Ambedkar. 

Thenmozhi: Yes. And then another set of ancestors I want to bring up are the Phule, Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule. And they were two, they were a really amazing caste oppressed couple. They wrote beautiful, beautiful poetry and books and were just fierce anti-colonialists 

and also called out Brahmanism. And what they're known for is the fact that they created some of the first women's schools because girls were not allowed to go to school under Brahmanical tradition. And when they would go to school every day, dominant caste people would throw shit and urine at them. And they had to carry a change of clothes in order to be able to go and finally teach women and young girls. And that commitment of what it was to educate in the face of violence, to stay focused on life. I love their spirits and their spirits really energize me every day. So those three ancestors are there and there's actually a lot of different ancestor profiles in the book. 

Rhonda: In the book. 

Thenmozhi: In the book! 

Rhonda: In one of the appendix, in the appendix, right? 

Thenmozhi: Yes. Because there are so many things when people want to unlearn caste, they're like, okay, what's the history? What's the data? What do I do? And then it gets personal. It's like, well, what is it for me? So, there's also worksheets, there's meditation and a glossary so that people don't feel intimidated about entering this world because the vocabulary is unfamiliar. And so, but I also think that this book is never meant to be read alone. I think you need to read it in beloved community and think about these ideas because it really does shift your perspective. If you come from a dharmic tradition, you will probably be like, it's like a matrix moment where you're like, whoa, everything is different than what I understood. Things like dharma, things like karma, things like reincarnation, and really thinking about duty and purity and pollution. These are all kind of like, you may have been exposed to if you're part of a tradition that comes out of a dharmic lineage. And you have to examine them differently when you understand how much pain is at the root of some of those processes. So, there is tremendous opening, but you really want to take your time to do that work and see where it sits in your body and in your own understanding. 

Rhonda: Right. And to do it in beloved community. I love that as a suggestion, because again, these are not historical only in terms of the pain and suffering that your book is helping us see. You know, the things that you're describing are happening right now as well. So, it- thank you so much.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
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