Transcript: THENMOZHI SOUNDARARAJAN on Annihilating Caste Systems /314
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Thenmozhi Soundararajan.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan It's not accidental to me that we see a rise of polarization and antidemocratic forces at a time when the Earth itself is unstable because of our actions around climate catastrophe. So in many ways for us to come back into alignment with the law of life, we have to choose life, which means choosing each other, choosing to slow down and to try to heal in our relationships with each other.
Ayana Young Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit American Civil rights artist, organizer, and theorist who has worked with organizations around the world to address the urgent issues of racial, caste, and gender equity. Her intersectional, cross-pollinating work helps to create a more generous, global, expansive, and inclusive definition of South Asian identity, along with safe spaces from which to honor the stories of these communities. She was also an inaugural fellow of the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist, Atlantic Foundation for Racial Equity, and is a current fellow at Stanford Center for South Asian Studies. She is also the author of the newly released book The Trauma of Caste by North Atlantic Books. Well Thenmozhi, thank you so much for joining us on this rainy and frozen day where we both are really looking forward to diving into this tender and complex conversation with you.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan So looking forward to it. And thank you for having me.
Ayana Young I just want to say in preparation for this interview, I was really moved by so much of your writing and when I was thinking of how to start this off, I was like, where do I begin, there are so many quotes that I could pull from and so I guess I'll just have to be patient knowing that we'll get to explore a number of things together. But I thought we could start off with reading a quote from your Slate interview titled, Silicon Valley Has a Caste Problem, “The best way to think about it [Caste] is as a system of exclusion based on birth that goes back thousands of years. Its initial origins are an ancient Vedic society, but it came strongly into force in India during the Mughal era, which began in the 16th century. And then in the British Raj, Brahmins were at the top, Dalits at the bottom. It started in scripture and just like race, it’s based on a social myth, where some people at the top said that other people at the bottom are less worthy and therefore set up structures that excluded them from many institutions in society.” I found this really important to understand the history of the caste system and how we are replaying that system in the United States today. And something that really stood out to me about this quote, as well, is the idea of a social myth. And so I'd like to just maybe start off in a general way, where you could describe to us the history of this caste system and how you see it being remade over and over again, into our current society.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan Well, caste is, you know, one of the oldest systems of exclusion in the world. And it's almost, you know, as large as the system of race, but we don't talk about it on a global level, despite the fact that one in four people live in a society defined by caste. So I think it's important that we slow our nervous systems down and think about the staggering scale of the consequences of a system, my caste, because under caste, you know, it's again, built on a social friction, similar to the way that white supremacy is where people at the top basically created this whole, you know, social myth of how people should be divided. And in the context of race, you know, it's about skin color. In the context of caste, it's about purity and pollution and the family that you're born into. So when you live in a society defined by caste, you're born into a family and that family has an assigned task that defines its profession, and that profession has a level of purity. So if you're a priest, you're at the top and then it goes downward. It's like there are priests, there are rulers, there's merchants, there are peasants, and then there are people who are the outcasts, which are the untouchables, like me.
So depending on what your status is that you're born, it determines the whole of your life, from where you worship, who you marry, and what side of town that you live on. And your proximity to structural violence and structural exclusion. The data around caste is very stark, you know, there's a crime against caste people every 90 minutes and you know, the average age of mortality for Dalit women or caste oppress women is 39 because of how many combined exclusionary points we face. So, you know, I think that the thing that really strikes me as so profound about caste is that it is so large and impacts so many people, but it's not as visible in our global discourse, as we try to look at the ways that we deal with historical harms, the way that it's been, that it's being battled for right now around the conversation about race.
So the work I'd hoped to do with the trauma of caste was to not only help create a global conversation about what caste is, but also understand that when we find it in regions outside of South Asia, like the United States, or the U.K., or Australia, anywhere that we've seen immigrants of South Asian countries, you know, southern South Asian countries have gone, the reason why these communities replicated is because of the intergenerational historical nature of trauma, that caste begets in our body. And then oftentimes, when communities replicate systems of exclusion, even when we have no reason to, you know, because again, caste is predicated on dominant caste, people being in power, they're not in power in these foreign countries. So then why are we talking about caste? Why are we seeing significant caste discrimination in American institutions, and it comes back to the mindless way that we recreate patterns of violence with each other, and that's really what you know, for people who already are part of the conversation with caste, the data will not be new, but what will be new is thinking about caste through the lens of, you know, trauma, and also how frameworks like understanding caste as a soul wound can help us understand how we embody systems of exclusion. And you know, whether you're privileged or oppressed, we all carry this burden and it's been a training in our nervous system that really is the biggest impediment for us to being collaborators on equity.
Ayana Young I'm wondering, how is abolishing caste dependent upon abolishing other forms of oppression?
Thenmozhi Soundararajan Well, I think it may even be new for some of your listeners to first know about caste, and then that there is a movement to annihilate or to abolish caste. And the thing to know is that, you know, under the caste system not only has there been punishing systemic exclusion and violence, there was also literal slavery. And that's why many caste oppressed people use terms like abolition or annihilate the system altogether, because of how much degradation and dehumanization we faced, but also the term abolition really connects us to other struggles against slavery and other oppressed peoples. So solidarity is not a transaction. It's in fact, an enterprise shared, and mutual solidarity. And, you know, in many ways as someone who was caste oppressed, my personal journey to being able to feel to find my path towards dignity, and rehumanization was being held by other movements and other leaders who were in their own journeys for dignity and reclamation. And Black Internationalism has been one of the North Stars for many oppressed peoples around the world, because in trying to out organize white supremacy, Black Liberation leaders reached out to oppressed movements around the world to find shared resistance, shared community, and mutual language for our freedom. So in many ways, you know, the book is an artifact to that because much of the language that I had to construct to talk about caste through the lens of intergenerational trauma and even how we might consider thinking about healing. Those things could only be done if I use language that came from other oppressed peoples and so, you know, we share analysis, we share, you know, we share meals. And we also share potential power building, because of the fact that our freedoms are intertwined with each other, there is no freedom for one community if any of the other communities are still languishing in oppression and that's why I think that caste abolition is really linked to so many other racial justice struggles, because the same people oppress us, within the South Asian community are the same South Asians who would actually work against racial solidarity in other contexts. So being able to learn about each other's struggles and creating mutual liberatory discourse is a key part of our process.
Ayana Young Thinking about the relationship between caste and ideas of punishment, and I'm wondering, how is the idea of, quote, worthiness, often weaponized and used as justification for punishment, from, you know, the prison system, to access to resources, to educational opportunities, and so on.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan So I think one thing that is really important to think about is that, as people are getting familiar with the caste system, there's also a very key carceral logic that's at the heart of caste, that's really a place where I think that there's a lot of momentum that I think that we need to be able to have more learning around. And, you know, for people that are unfamiliar about what I'm speaking about, the carceral logic and caste is actually related to reincarnation, because the idea is that people were born into a caste oppressed background, or a Dalit background, because they did something bad in another life, you know, maybe they were murderous or a rapist or a thief. And therefore, because they did something that was bad in another life, they deserve to be oppressed and excluded, because that's their sentence in this life. That was the logic that came out of certain scriptures, in the initial development of caste. And so what that has meant is that there's always an understanding that Dalits should accept the conditions of their subjugation, because they deserved it. And I always rankled around that now I was someone who was born both Hindu and Christian, and now move with this. But you know, when we know that caste exists across so many South Asian fates, it is so challenging to see that people are telling Dalit people not to organize for their own equitable conditions. And that's what I'm really, you know, not comfortable with in terms of seeing what's happening in terms of our community, and that's a big part of why I've spoken out about this carceral logic, because we don't want systems that punish, we don't want systems that dehumanize and we want to be able to hold grace and, and connection and community with each other. So these are all things that I think are super helpful to be able to think about, as we move forward and think about how we, you know, want to heal from systems of carceralization.
Ayana Young Yeah, gosh, there's so much here. And there's so much in your work that I am trying to wrap my head around. There's a quote from your book, The Trauma of Caste, and you write “Caste Trauma is generally reduced to the discussion of the consequences to only Dalit people, Yet the suffering that caste causes is not limited to those of us born at the bottom. Never discussed are the networks of privilege that benefit from caste and the ways that the dominant-caste psyche also is defined by suffering.” And I'm wondering about this topic that I've thought, you know, or discussed on the podcast a lot around white supremacy, or supremacist culture in general. It's like everybody is actually suffering under this type of belief system. Now, of course, some people have it much more comfortable and have privileges that make life convenient and easier in many ways. But I think even on a spiritual level, the type of disconnection and spiritual bankruptcy that either caste systems or white supremacy leaves for all of us, is extremely detrimental. And I think that's really manifested in how, you know, we see what's happening to the world, to the Earth, to the land, you know, poisoned water, poisoned air will eventually impact all of us, like, even those at the top can't run forever. And so I just wanted to open up this thought process with you and maybe you could speak to this quote that I recited of yours and take us a bit into this, these ideas.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan So what is really profound to me about even in my own writing journey for this book, as someone who's advocated on the issue of caste for almost 20 years, was how much I was still dehumanized and not embodied about my own pain, about caste. And that might seem strange for your audience. But, you know, I think many oppressed people in order to survive in very violent societies, they go to the cerebral, you know, and they're troubleshooting about how to get from point A to point B, whether if it's the hustle of their work, or lifting their family out of poverty, you know, whatever, whatever these situations are. They are focused on the practical and the material, but not about the pain that lingers in your body about what you're seeing. And so much of what I wrote there was about first giving permission for caste oppressed people, and really all oppressed people to slow down enough to be embodied about the container of grief that they might carry, related to the system of exclusion that they're navigating. And certainly for me, I just, I was not doing that, I was really just shoving it down and trying to really just be focused on the work that needed to happen. And I was getting health problems from it, I was getting high blood pressure, I was getting, you know, panic attacks. And I also was moving so quickly, I couldn't acknowledge how much violence that you're exposed to as a caste oppressed person. So there's a piece in that quote, that's about first allowing cast suppressed and oppressed people to humanize by being embodied around our pain, because the world may not recognize it. But if we can even begin that journey to a global conversation, if we don't embody ourselves first. But additionally, there's a call for accountability and a calling for people of privilege to know that there is a wound, there's a part of this wound that you also carry, because you can't other another without losing some part of your humanity.
So whether you're witnessing atrocity, or you're staying silent in the face of a slur, or maybe you're an active contributor to discrimination and bigotry, each time you take down another human, you actually take down a part of yourself, and you have to close yourself off from the web of life in order to do that. And that's a profound wound as well. And we don't talk about it because it's much easier to focus on the consequences of caste, and not the origins of caste and the people who benefit. So there's a political logic for looking at who benefits. But if we're also using the lens of healing, we want all of us to come back into the family of humanity. And that's really part of the negotiation around this conversation.
Second, I think that the other piece of this, which is what you spoke to, is that there's an interconnectedness that we have as humans with other species and the Earth. I think what systems of exclusion do well is to silo us off from each other, and the Earth. In times of deep polarization, we see ourselves leaning into trauma worlds, made up of filter bubbles of a hellish landscape where no one can be trusted, and that there are, you know, projections of what we're assuming about other communities, and the reality is, is when someone is in a trauma bubble, you're not going to be able to get through to them through direct attack. You have to de escalate their nervous system, you have to actually work to reregulate their nervous system to be in relationship with you again in a relationship of trust enough so that the de escalate their nervous system, and the ways that you do that have to be not just with each other, but you do that with nature. And you do that with other species. These are all ways that we're connected to the web of life. So it's not accidental to me that we see a rise of polarization and antidemocratic forces at a time when the Earth itself is unstable, because of our actions around climate catastrophe. So in many ways for us to come back into alignment with the law of life, we have to choose life which means choosing each other, choosing to slow down and to try to heal in our relationships with each other.
Ayana Young Yeah, yeah, I really am seeing the connection that you're speaking to with healing and slowing down and the nervous system and realizing there's not some ten-step intellectual solution. Like, I think it's important that we understand the history and we can intellectually grapple with the harms being done. But so much of the work is this somatic psychological healing and I really see that in so many ways. I guess I'm just interested to hear your insight into the ways that caste has been brought into structures of extraction and even been intertwined into systems of colonialism, because I'd say, for our listeners, and on the podcast, you know, we speak so much about colonialism and structures of extraction, but not so much caste. And I think it would be really helpful. I know, for me to understand how all of these things fit together?
Thenmozhi Soundararajan Well, I think what's important to know is that, you know, caste is one of the oldest systems of exclusion in the world, it has its origin in the BC era. It’s been a continuous thread and understanding the dynamics of power, you know, from that time period to present and, you know, the way to understand it, and how I kind of look at it is that before a single English person, you know, sort of boots on the ground in India, there were already centuries of exploitation of caste oppressed people across the subcontinent. So it is its own system of exclusion that needs to be addressed. And, you know, colonialism just brought another layer to the intersectional kind of violence that occurred for caste oppressed people, both as people who experienced subjugation at the hands of dominant caste people, and also the ways that the caste system was manipulated by colonial masters. And, you know, for the English, they certainly saw caste as an efficient way to organize a few to control the many. And in fact, they use the blueprint of caste as the architecture for apartheid in South Africa, because they saw how efficient it was to have the few to control the many and to kind of put these little gradations of classes of people to be pitted against each other so that they never achieved solidarity to take down the actual fundamental, you know, powers that be at the top.
So, you know, I think that, you know, again, it's really important to understand that we need to decolonize? Yes. And in the context of South Asians, in order to decolonize, we must first de-Brahminize. And what that means is, that, you know, the caste system has an animating ideology called Brahmanism and just like we wouldn't talk about anti-Blackness, without talking about white supremacy, Brahminism is that ideology that set that framework in motion. And for people that want to dig in, like, why that name? Where did that come from? Well, in the caste system, as I mentioned earlier, there's a pyramid where you have a priestly caste at the top called Brahmins that basically structured the scriptures to allow for the categorization of the other communities. So, under Brahmins, you have the rulers, you have the merchants, you have the peasants, and then outside of that whole system, you have people that are untouchable, because they were seen as spiritually defiling to other people. And because they were spiritually defiling, they shouldn't be touched. That's why we were, you know, called untouchable, but of course, that's, you know, ludicrous and extremely offensive. And so we use other terms, like Dalit, or Ambedkarite, or, you know, Bahujan and you know, it's basically everyone chooses their own name as a way to free themselves from this construct. And then you have South Asian Indigenous people who are also outside of the system. So they might call themselves tribal or their tribe names. So Brahmanism, set up this entire framework like this. And we see its ideology stretching way beyond its origins, into many aspects of South Asian society, and to even other communities of faith practice today. So you use Brahmanism, interchangeably, the way that you might use white supremacy, to understand dominant thinking when it comes to systems of exclusion in our region. And so for me, it's very important that, yes, we acknowledge the pain of colonization, but we can't really solve you know, what got harmed in colonization if we don't look at the first wound, which is the caste system and so, you know, decolonizing requires us first to examine where we might debrahminize.
Ayana Young I want to explore something that you bring up again, in your Slate interview, titled Silicon Valley Has a Caste Problem and, and it you say “In the United States we have a very North American understanding of race. As long as we’ve got a diverse workforce and we’re challenging white supremacy, we think we’ve got all of our boxes checked. But the reality is that these are American companies working in a global context. North American models of race aren’t going to cover all of the issues of inequity. Think about Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Meta—their largest market isn’t the United States. It’s in India.” I really was moved by this quote, because I, you know, I can admit, for myself, it's easy to get wrapped up in what whether it's like a local mental framework or a national framework where, you know, like, I don't know, I don't know if it's called American exceptionalism, but definitely this thought around, you know, being in the United States and thinking about, you know, seeing it through the lens of being here. But reading that, quote, it really expanded my thought process around how other places like India are interfacing with these large multinational corporations that are truly trying to control us. And so I just wanted to open up this question to you, or this thought process with you about frameworks of discrimination. But I also think, talking about big tech and discrimination when it comes to other countries who have bigger markets than ours. It's something that I can honestly say I haven't even really been aware of.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan Well, I think there's kind of like two ways to really kind of think about the way our minds might be opened around this. So the first is that you know, because of American dominance in the global economy, we've never really had to step out of the comfort zone of thinking about our definitions for race, they are not the only definitions for exclusion in the world. And in fact, we have so many ways that different communities around the world are thinking about decolonizing, and also experiencing, you know, rapid conversations around the shifts of power around the lens of race, but in their own logic, you know, so whether we're talking about countries like Brazil, or, you know, the different countries in the African continent, or in Asia, the conversation about equity looks really different, because it's not about necessarily a white dominant class, it could be and is oftentimes about dominant gatekeepers that come from historical legacies of trauma in that region. So we have to really be specific about the manifestations of historical violence that we're trying to remedy with policies that are focused on DEI and equity, and an American framework is not a one size fits all because of how complicated those colonial and local histories are. The issue of caste is a really good example of that, because it has both an American discourse and discourse in the region.
So the American discourse is that, you know, the the IT industry, because of the high amount of South Asians that it hires, has a great deal of caste discrimination happening in American borders, which means it's subject to civil rights law and labor law here in a way that really needs to be addressed. And then I think, you know, outside of that what we have is outside of the United States, is when American companies do business in other global contexts, our legal laws here are not going to be robust enough to understand the systemic discrimination there. And that's why we need to have global policies that kind of speak to keeping all of the workers and all of the users safe to the same standards and that seems like that would be obvious and logical, but it's actually not been the business practices of many of these companies. So you know they either have inconsistent policies where castes are not listed in HR policies outside of South Asia, they have to do it in South Asia because it's a protected category, or refusing to acknowledge that it's happening in the United States, even though there are significant caste oppressed tech workers that are raising their appropriate civil and labor rights around these issues and are concerned about it.
So it's just, it's a very, very complicated, you know, landscape that Americans need to quickly become familiar with, because we cannot afford a vision of justice that, you know, ends at our borders, especially when our companies are multinational. The flows of our capital are multinational. And we have billionaires that are American citizens that are destabilizing democracies through their tech, and they're, you know, across the world. And you know, I think about, you know, Twitter, which has been in the news because of Elon Musk's takeover, and 90% of the India team was laid off. And this isn't one of their largest markets, and one in which dangerous, genocidal hate speech is the norm. If there are so many people and human rights and academic research and legal compliance and moderation that are fired, how will you stop and address the duty of care you know, companies like Twitter and Meta have around the human rights crisis that's happening there. So it's just really important that we expand our notion of equity and justice and get familiar with these global conversations, because they're already impacting us here. We're already seeing the impact of what happens with biased tech, like bias companies create bias tech, and when we have people that are not adhering to the law, we find that they will skirt accountability for tech that creates harm in all of our communities.
Ayana Young Thank you for opening our eyes or many of our eyes to this, it's heavy and so important to understand how insidious these systems and corporations and big tech are, to so many of us around the world. Ah, goodness. Yeah, there's, of course, more to talk about. With big tech. I mean, there's so much here, definitely thinking about investigating the many horrific ways big tech acts as a mediator for global issues of power, you know, just that seems really frightening. And, like holding us back from actually healing, or being able to find a way through some of these really intense issues.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan I think that we have the reins of power in our hands and we've surrendered control, because we think we're really limited to only being users. But we are, in fact, citizens, you know, we actually have the rule of law and we are seeing people with money behave as if they don't have any accountability to anyone else. And to me, I think these conversations about these tech companies, it's not just about one feature, it's not just about one act, it's actually a battle of futures. Because, you know, the, the model that many of the billionaires have is that they viewed the Earth as a husk, you know, everything, you know, especially if you take someone like Elon Musk, and, you know, the movements that, you know, he comes out of, they really do believe that the Earth is meant to be a husk for us and our only purpose and only way that we survive as a species is if we burn all of our resources and get to Mars and start to colonize the stars, you know, and using, again, that term colonization, you know, and, and I think that there are alternative futures. I think that, you know, in this time of great climate catastrophe, we can use this as a moment of reexamination and consider, is there another way for us to return back to balance because the Earth, you know, in its own, if it didn't have humans is the apex predator here, you know, generally tends towards balance between the different species that are here, we're the ones that are causing the great kind of catastrophe here.
So I think if we can think about things like the great turning that, you know, that, you know, we've heard in other circles, and use this moment of the just transition, to think about ways that we calibrate our relationships with each other. And tech is certainly part of it, tech is just a tool, and we do not have to adhere to the visions of these billionaire titans that don't know how to run companies, don't know how to run democracy, but they just have a ton of capital and are antidemocratic in their engagements. I think remembering that we have the rule of law, remembering that we have the ability to vote, remembering that we have the ability to bring litigation and support people towards that process, I think is to accountability and also towards love is something that we still have in our power. And I think that sometimes people get in despair because they see the vision of these very rich people and they're like, “How can I compete with that?” I think that the love of millions of people is as strong as you know the money of a billionaire, and to be able to return back to love, to return back to humanity. I think that means everything
Ayana Young That's really beautiful and thank you for empowering some of us again, because I think, with big tech, it can feel really overwhelming. With these issues of control and power within a rapidly growing and often unregulated space, that's technology, it can be like, “Oh my gosh, how do we even stop this monster.” And thanks for giving us some ideas of how to move forward. I want to jump to it another topic and I want to read a quote from your book, The Trauma of Caste, where you detail the experience of caste saying, quote, “You are not even allowed the consolation of spiritual practice, some kind of relationship with a higher power, because you are considered spiritually defiling before god.” Gosh, it was just such an intense, you know, thing to take in, because like thinking through the complex relationship between caste and religion, and I'm wondering if you could provide some more depth on that relationship and the spiritual struggles that come with it.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan You know, I think writing those words was very hard for me to write, because I had to confront the totality of some of the pain that I had, as someone who is a survivor of religious abuse, and even to say it out loud, was, you know, it was kind of like a bell rang in my soul. Because all of the pieces of what I had been running from, I had to hold and really just say, this happened to me, and it happens to millions of Dalit people. Because, again, I think the problem with caste is that it is a system of exclusion that has its roots in religious communities. So it's not just that you're excluded from society, it's that you're actually excluded from the Divine. And, you know, that is a very profound thing because for other people, like when you decide that you want to become a seeker, you might go out into the stars, and look up and wonder about your place in the universe and think deeply about, you know, who am I? Where do I belong? And what do I believe, and that practice, that ability to have freedom to do that is really denied to Dalits, because we are from the jump, thought to be spiritually polluting and others. And the path to becoming part of a community feels so deeply pained. It's not an easy one to reclaim your divinity. In fact, you have to fight tooth and nail, you have to fight centuries of conditioning, you have to fight, you know, societal programming that tells you that you don't have a right to this, to actually surrender and say, I absolutely do, because all of us are divine.
That, again, was a much easier thing to say than it was to actually practice in my real life, because I really always felt ashamed and never felt good enough to be part of spiritual communities. And it's part of the reasons why I was a seeker. And I would read every religious text, and I would go to different community gatherings to see if I could find a political home and a religious home. But I always felt other because of that core caste silo. And I had to, I had to love myself, and I had to really, really be kind, to acknowledging how deep this pain was in me, and give myself space to self examine. And once I was witnessed both by myself and other people, I could then feel like I could make my choice about returning to a spiritual practice that was on my terms. And you know, you don't have to be delicate to understand this experience, because there are many survivors of religious abuse. But the path towards surrendering to a mystery or a divinity that's greater than yours is so hard, when you've been wounded in this way, and the trust has been broken. And for me, what really helped me here was a connection to the Earth, a connection to you know, to life, and to see the divine in everyday things as well as in grand and mysterious things. You know, you see the divine in the blooming of a flower just as you would in like a grand religious spectacle of an institution. You know, it's about that interconnectedness to that that larger sense of who we can be as a species, and I had to give myself permission to take up space spiritually. That was also part of my healing, you know. And so to talk about this in this way was to give words to an experience that many Dalits don't talk about, because the wound is so intimate, and it's so shameful, but my hope in talking about this was really to create space for people to consider that the divine belongs to everyone and to democratize access, and to give space to people who've never been able to hold how horrific this kind of wounding is, to be witnessed, and to hear.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing that with us. Cornel West, who wrote the afterword for your book, writes in his book, Race Matters, “In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately.” Thinking about Dr. West’s work in conversation with yours. I'm wondering, what is at the heart for the searches for justice, and solidarity? What worlds could solidarity build?
Thenmozhi Soundararajan Well, you know, one of the things that I've always admired about Professor West is the way that he leads with love. And he has a quote, where he talks about love is what justice looks like in public and I think about that a lot when you think about solidarity, because for me, solidarity isn't like a big political, you know, concept outside of yourself. It's actually embodied in the relationality you have with someone about shared liberation. And, you know, I always think about his mentorship, because, you know, when I met him, I was like, so eager, and I just wanted to be witnessed, I wanted someone who understood how big this problem was, and would would see me as a person, because I spent years like, not getting support. And I always remember that first meeting, I was so nervous, and I wondered, like, is this gonna, you know, do you think you'll only give me five minutes, and I was ready to rush in and just kind of make my peace, and hopefully, it would work. And, you know, Professor West gave me so much time and so much empathetic witness. And he had piles of paper of work he needed to do, he had people outside the door waiting for him. And when we talked, it was like, we were the only two people in that room because of the power of how deep his Black Internationalism is, and his empathetic witness was in holding space for another oppressed person.
I'm not the only Dalit leader that he has mentored. And I think that what is profound about shared solidarity is that because of our love for each other, we view like an injury to another as an injury as if it happened to us. And, you know, if I have a plate of rice, I want to give half of it to my collaborator, and my colleague, because how can I eat when I know that they're hungry.
That shared sense of survival, it actually is a counter to the capitalist notion of individual survival of the fittest, when actually there's as many stories in nature of collaborative species survival as there is of competition. And I think that solidarity is we have between oppressed people are an example of that. And another friendship, which I think is really another example of that is, you know, my friendship with Tarana Burke, and we both came up, as you know, gender based violence organizers who, you know, worked on issues related to sexual violence with Black and white communities and when we were in our 20s and didn't know where our lives were going to land, you know, we just always dreamed of a world where Black and Dalit young girls and women could be free and and could live without the violence both inside and outside of our community and those dreams are the freedom dreams that actually lay the path for solidarities like this, because we just always think about ways that our movements and our lives might intersect and when we know that someone is in the point is struggle, you know, we always just offer that friendly ear that, you know, tactful suggestion that opening to a colleague, you know, whatever it is to kind of help leverage our collective resources. That's really the power of what I've been so grateful to witness and also contribute to with many other leaders and movements. So it's a process, I think, that really is, is thoughtful and takes time to really consider but I'm just really grateful to see it develop, you know, in many different ways.
Ayana Young This has been such a beautiful conversation, I've really appreciated your time and there's something I wanted to close us out with, in the appendix of your book, you introduce readers to caste abolitionist ancestors who have inspired you and I'd love if you could share a bit about one of these ancestors with our listeners.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan Well, I think one ancestor, and there's many in there to really learn deeply from, but one that I really love is Dr. Ambedkar. And, you know, he was like the equivalent of our Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. But he's, you know, a once in a generation figure because he did it all, you know, he was an economist, he was a historian, was a scholar, he was a lawyer. He was one of the first Indians to go to school abroad, and went to Columbia University in the United States and the London School of Economics and his mind was worked in all of these dimensions, because he was basically creating a critical theory for the liberation of caste oppressed people. And he was coming up during the time of the consideration of what it would be like to have a free and independent India because he grew up in colonial India. So his learnings really informed an activism that had many different phases, as he was trying different tactics to freedom and people.
So in his first wave, he was an independence movement leader and then he went on to become the architect of the Indian Constitution, which is the first legal document in South Asia to have a delegate author. So it has a weight beyond India, because many other South Asian republics used it as a blueprint for their work. And then also, you know, he helped to set up the first Reserve Bank of India. He also fought, you know, tremendously for women's rights and his battles to free you know, all women from, you know, restrictive and conservative religious codes, set the framework for many of the civil rights laws that protect women from land property to, you know, discrimination and then also he very much like, the civil rights movements in the United States, led significant battles to desegregate key institutions across India, and he led desegregation marches against temples that wouldn't allow Dalits to enter, around roadways where Dalits were not allowed to walk, to water tanks were Dalits are not not allowed to even drink water. And, you know, throughout this time, he's also writing and sharing his work through many, many different kinds of books.
In his final act, he converted to Buddhism because he said that “Though I was born a Hindu, I don't want to die one.” And he demonstrated what it meant to choose in the face of Brahmanism, and I think that that was a very profound thing to observe, because when he converted, hundreds of 1000s of people converted with him, eggnog pour Maharashtra. It was the largest conversion in world history. And, you know, when I think of his figure, and I think about his history, the thing that I am so inspired by, is that there was no domain that he did not feel that was his as a Dalit to enter.
In fact, all of life’s experience he was going to consume and consume greatly, in a way to be able to to bring delegates to the seat at the table as fellow humans and his brother's engagement and the way that he navigated entering religious practice as socially engaged, but this was also very deeply inspiring to me. So he's a figure that I really would like to lift up for people, because fundamentally, we're having this conversation about caste, not because we just want to talk about the problem, but also because we want to heal and if I can leave anything with your audience members to think about, it said systems of exclusion are not permanent, they are only lasting as long as we hold on and have attachment to that suffering. And so if we're willing to let go, and step through the doorway of our discomfort, to be able to welcome new ways of interacting with each other, many things are possible. And that's the pathway towards healing. And I think it's just a really a profound thing to be able to see how that really manifested through Dr. Ambedkar, his career, and now to the millions of people that in his name, continue to take forward the commitment to annihilate caste and be caste abolitionists. So his name and his work and many ancestors, and I think about my own grandparents and people who come from my lineage, you know, we're all artifacts, as Dalit people we have 1000 generations of love and so if we can build this movement on love and healing, we have so much that we can win, and so much that we can travel towards as we work with other people to heal the Earth and heal each other.
Ayana Young Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed and been moved by this conversation and just really appreciate all the love and care and effort you've put into helping us heal.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan I really appreciate that and you know, just want to thank you for holding space and in our movements. We always give a salutation of justice as we end and begin a conversation. And we use the terms Jai Bhim and Jai Savitri, which invoke both Dr. Ambedkar and another ancestor. So I would leave your listeners with that ending and knowing that we are now beloved community with each other and look forward to keep building.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Justin Crawmer, Te Martin, and June West. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell and Julia Jackson.