Bengaluru: Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director and co-founder of Equality Labs, one of the largest Dalit civil rights organisations in the US, received the Vaikom Award for social justice from the Tamil Nadu government on 22 October 2025. The award is named for the Vaikom Satyagraha led by one of her heroes, Periyar E V Ramasamy, a century ago. 

At a time when the work of the anticaste movement in the US is being, as she put it, “eclipsed by the catastrophe and collapse of democracy”, Soundararajan is a leading advocate against caste discrimination, with an impressive body of work and among the handful who speak about rebuilding for a better, more equitable future. 

Like others who speak up against caste discrimination, she is often labelled ‘Hindu phobic’ and ‘anti-Hindu’, but in an age of divisions, Soundararajan focuses on collective healing. 

“I'm hoping regret, suffering, and grief can be inflexion points and portals to greater reflection,” she said of the growing realisation among the Indian diaspora that they may have done the wrong thing by supporting the hard right government of Donald Trump. 

Her 2022 book The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, brings together ideas from environmental justice, trauma therapy, the Black civil rights movement, feminism and Buddhism to provide a roadmap to a better future. 

Soudararajan co-authored the landmark Caste in the United States, a 2018 report that revealed how casteism had immigrated along with our ancestors to the US.  She discovered at the age of 10 that caste had followed her parents to that country, forcing them to cloak their identity. 

The report’s findings were the foundation of a movement that urged colleges and states to recognise caste discrimination in the US. An important step on this journey was SB 403—a statewide bill to add caste as a protected category in California. Though the bill was vetoed by Donald Trump critic Gavin Newsom, the governor of California affirmed that caste discrimination was “already prohibited” under the existing laws. 

Soudararajan said it was unlikely that the US would ever go back to the “Biden era version of democracy” and that the damage done in the first year of the Trump presidency has “unravelled many decades of civil rights work”.  

“Privilege doesn’t insulate you from nationalism and extremism,” she said , referring to the ramifications of dominant-caste Indians voting for Trump.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

Congratulations on receiving the Vaikom Award for Social Justice from the Tamil Nadu government. A hundred years after the Vaikom Satyagraha in 1924, people are still fighting for the right to enter temples. Do you see yourself as a modern-day Satyagrahi? 

I think that I certainly take inspiration from many anticaste ancestors like Ambedkar, Periyar, Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule. And I think the fact that we are still here in 2025 having to talk about caste is such a failure in terms of the lack of the implementation of the rule of law and how much work we have to do to really heal our communities from caste. But it is my hope that we have new tools and mass movements for this work, that we can work to really mobilise and end it in our lifetime. 

So what does this recognition mean for the Ambedkarite movement globally? 

First of all, I think to receive an award in the name of the Vaikom agitation is such a powerful thing from the state government of Tamil Nadu because we have a recognition that at least one government in South Asia is fighting and supports the battle to end caste apartheid. To me, it’s a remarkable thing as someone who is a Tamil person who grew up in the diaspora. I’m sure nobody thought, especially after the establishment of Ambedkar’s constitution, that not only would we see caste continue in the subcontinent, but that we would see it continue in the diaspora.

The whole idea that you cross the kala pani to break caste and then you see people recreating those very same systems is appalling. But that is why when you look at Periyar and his model around self-respect and dignity, when you look at Ambedkar talking about moving his caravan forward, wherever we see the menace of caste arise, those who are Ambedkarite and Periyarist have to stand forward and resist. And not just resist, but actually point the way to a humanistic, rational, secular society. 

For me, as a Dalit feminist, it must include healing, because it’s very clear that no matter how many laws you pass, the nervous systems of dominant caste people, which have been trained after centuries of dysregulation, cannot tolerate equity with caste-depressed people.

In your book, you describe caste wounds as ‘soul wounds’. How can anticaste activists sustain themselves emotionally while they do such work? 

Well, I think in the South Asian context, part of why I wanted to introduce the idea of healing and the psychological dimensions of caste is because it’s missing from the conversation of caste discrimination and exclusion. Caste-depressed people have to fight incredible amounts of gaslighting, violence and lawlessness just to speak about what kinds of experiences we're facing under caste, whether it's discrimination in workplaces, outright caste atrocity or caste-based, gender-based violence. There is always an attempt to diminish, undermine, or say caste does not exist. I think the caste-depressed need to have space to be able to have our wounds acknowledged, our grief given its humanity, and for us to be able to care for ourselves as we metabolise all that has been done to us. As a child, I saw what that was like for my parents, because while they were removed from the immediate geography of caste, you know, the terror of caste stayed with them for a long time. But I think also for the caste-privileged, there is a lot of work to be done to confront the way that they hold the soul wound of caste.

I really learned a lot from Resmaa Menakem and Eduardo Duran, who do therapy and somatic work with indigenous and black communities. It’s remarkable how they have really honed in on the ways that white body people have held entire policy systems hostage to their nervous systems. Even now, if you’re seeing the dismantling of democracy in the US, you have white families who do not want the teaching of slavery, because they think it’s traumatic for their children to learn about the legacy of enslaved Africans.

You have the administration wanting to hide imagery related to enslaved Africans, because they don't want to be exposed to it. They’ve even reversed Indigenous Peoples’ Day back to Columbus Day. Ambedkar talked about this, the story of the subcontinent being that of revolution and counter-revolution. That is really the story of the soul wound that is not being addressed.

When you think about every iteration of the anticaste movement, whether it was the move from Brahmanism to shamanic faith traditions, whether it was more political reform that came with that generation of reformers in the 1900s, every step forward that we take, we are always pushed back because of this psychological and nervous system dysregulation that accompanies what is actually the trauma of what it is to dehumanise other people. And saying that doesn’t mean we’re trying to create space at the expense of caste-depressed people. 

For my book, I read the testimonies of perpetrators of multiple genocides. And when you talk to people who, you know, held the machetes and murdered people, whether it was the killings in Cambodia or in Rwanda or in Sri Lanka, what you see is that the people who did the murdering don’t remember that they murdered. And in fact, they don’t remember. There’s a blankness. There's a psychological condition of trauma for the perpetrators. And the only way through that is for people who are from families of privilege to really sit with the legacy of their families and ask: What is our relationship to the land and how have we treated other castes around us? And can we tell the real truth slowly enough for us to acknowledge how dehumanising it is? 

I'll give you an example. I remember reading this Tamil cookbook written by a Brahmin author and she was talking about this one festival where the whole village was so grateful for the leadership of the Brahmins that they gave the best of their produce, the best of their harvest to them just to honour their graciousness. And I feel like that is such a very particular point of view that doesn't actually reflect the real material conditions of terror for the people that were working under them, right? And in the diaspora, it’s very interesting when you have these conversations because crossing the kala pani, having people have the distinction of also being racialised, I think there’s an openness to the second generation when they hear their parents describe certain things in their homelands, they question them. 

It's like, ‘Well, mom, do you really think that servants really want to be treated like that?’ Like, ‘Mom, do you really think a servant should be eating on the floor while we're eating on the table?’ Or ‘Mom, why do they have broken cups, you know?’ ‘And how come they don't have a bed but we have a bed?’ It's questions of the social order that come up for those in the diaspora that actually, I think, create lots of great openings for self-examination. Just because things have been a certain way doesn't mean they have to be that way in the future, particularly as India joins the global economy in a different way. Why would we hamper ourselves with the tremendous waste of human capital that caste represents? 

Does Donald Trump’s appeal to white grievance mirror aspects of caste? 

Absolutely. What you see in the rise of Trump is an appeal to a white working class and a white elite that have been uncomfortable with, you know, desegregation, with equity, and with the fact that white people are actually becoming the minority. 

It sounds exactly like the idea of ‘Hindu khatrein mein hai’.

Because of the alignment between nationalist projects, many dominant caste Indian Hindus voted for Trump with the idea that he would have their interests. And now they are seeing the terrible ramifications of it, because there is the unleashing of extremely vile hate speech, there are hate crimes, and of course, the loss of visas and status. Privilege doesn’t insulate you from nationalism and extremism. They bet badly and bet against a racial consensus and equity. And this is what happened. And now they’re facing terrible, terrible experiences, there’s nothing you can say. It’s horrific, you know.

I always remember Ram Madhav’s comments at the India Today Conclave in 2018. That was during that whole cycle of calling people termites and Amit Shah vowing to throw immigrants into the Bay of Bengal. And Madhav said Trump was building his wall ‘for his country’ because ‘no country will tolerate illegal immigrants’. So many people from dominant castes applauded that from the United States. In fact, they said, we will pay for expedited green cards to help pay for your wall. And now they’ve lost their visa statuses, right? So betting on aligning caste interests with extremists and nationalist interests has not worked in the US.

And again, when I think about the models of Periyar and Ambedkar there was a spirit of internationalism in both figures that was about linking with movements beyond the colonial struggle in order to align oppressed people with other oppressed people. And I think that the best of the caste equity movement has always built alliances with the poor, the dispossessed, and those that have, you know, struggled under other dominator systems. And so it’s a commitment, social justice isn’t limited to one group. Until every oppressed person is free, none of us are free.

Tell me how things have changed since January. When we last spoke two years ago, Seattle had become the first US city to add caste to its anti-discrimination laws. And the big universities were recognising caste as a protected category in their anti-discrimination policies. And it was a good moment, right? 

Yes. So there are still cities and counties and institutions that are adding caste as a protected category. However, obviously, all of this is being eclipsed by the catastrophe and collapse of democracy occurring right now. And so I think members and organisations that are part of the caste equity movement are part of many, many powerful progressive alliances working to support constitutionally-protected activity and trying to ameliorate the incredible suffering that's going on right now, as well as working towards a restoration of democratic norms. I would just say that while we are still pushing those efforts no movement of rights can happen when democracy itself is suspended.

What is your mood at this moment in America? 

Again, I really take the words of Ambedkar as comfort. The history of the subcontinent, I think you would certainly say of many places, is one of revolution and counter-revolution. And I think that we’re in a moment of counter-revolution. There’s been deep investment by billionaires to de-platform American democracy. And so there’s a lot of reformations and rethinking of strategies, but also a continued commitment to fight for constitutionally-protected democratic processes as much as possible, you know. So I think that I have great grief for the suffering that is happening, especially in terms of our community.

When you think about caste-depressed Americans, many of them struggle with immigration issues, with discrimination in the workplace. This is a catastrophic moment for them. But I think, you know, seeing the community come together, seeing people have courage, even in a time of darkness, I think that’s what keeps me going.

And knowing that we as a community have experienced very, very dark times. I was talking to one of my members, and she was telling me that her mom was like, ‘America is not our country’. And she said, ‘Mom, don't be dramatic. I remember Partition. We thought that was our country, and then we had to leave’. There’s a part of her that never unpacked her bags in her heart, you know. The Trump era brings up a lot of historical trauma for many members of the South Asian community. 

Saying that we’re in a time of collapse is not about trying to disempower people. It’s about saying things with compassion, but also frankness. Because I think when people understand, okay, it’s collapsed, so now do we continue to do things in the way that we always have? Or do we begin to pivot? Do we begin to move from rapid response to becoming architects of what comes next? It’s a different orientation to power building, and a different orientation for hope.

Because there were still some people that thought, oh, we’re going to go back to a Biden era version of democracy. And that’s not the case. You know, the damage in this first year has already unravelled many decades of civil rights work. So to build this back will take a long time. But the way we build it back, we can have a vision for that, right? I think this is where somatic work is so important. If we stay present right here, right now, know that we have many tools, like an ancestral strength behind us, we shall and we can move forward with dignity, and find a path through this very challenging time.

How did people like Trump aide Peter Navarro start using caste in interviews? He said that Russian oil purchases by Indian refineries were about Brahmins profiteering at the expense of Indian people.

You know, I have no idea. Having an understanding of the political economics of caste is not extremist. It’s just facts, right? But how right wing folks might take a factual narrative in order to spin their own racial framework is out of our hands. But what I will say is that there is an attempt by the right wing to say any discussion of caste is Hindu phobic. And that’s absolutely untrue. There are many Dalit Hindus who experience caste discrimination, it's actually not a religious thing at all. It's a system of discrimination recognised by multiple governmental bodies. One of my theories about this is that part of the reason why it’s very apparent to right wing counterparts is that dominant caste people brag about their caste pretty frequently.

The reason why people know that people are Brahmin is because, especially the higher castes, talk about their caste privilege and their caste points of view very openly in the workplace. That’s one of the things that came out in our work on caste and technology. 

Recently,  NR Narayana Murthy and his wife Sudha Murty refused to participate in Karnataka’s socio-economic and educational survey saying that they do not belong to a backward community. On WhatsApp neighbourhood groups people are making the same argument. What would you say to them?

Well, isn't this the truth of how the pedagogy of caste is discussed in research? Caste is only looked at in terms of the impacts on the bodies and minds and spirits of the caste-oppressed, not in terms of the minds, the psychological training and the wealth hoarding of the privileged. And the lawlessness of the privileged. And this is why there has been a push from many caste-oppressed scholars for savarna studies, just like there are studies in white privilege; we need to really look at the mechanics and the structures of caste privilege. 

Going back to Modi’s Hindutva and Trump’s nationalism, how do you see these projects intersecting? 

Well, they used to have great intersections, right? And now, now in this administration, the white nationalists and the Christian nationalists are upending that relationship over and over again. And again, if you interact with Nazis, it’s pretty clear that at a certain point, they’re going to jettison you because of their racial attitudes towards you. So I'm not sure why they were surprised that all of a sudden, racism was going to occur. All of a sudden, their national interests were not going to align, because white nationalists chose their white nationalist agenda, right? White nationalists basically see themselves as the top of the racial hierarchy. And it didn't occur to the caste dominant extremists that they could be racialised and subsumed within a white nationalist framework. And now they know it doesn't matter if Usha Vance is the second lady, you're still going to be called P-a-j-e-e-t [racist term].

You know you’re going to lose your jobs and your immigration, and you're going to have politicians use slurs towards you and your children will be traumatised by the open bigotry and violence. Again, if you get into bed with Nazis, you should expect this behaviour from Nazis, right? But I'm hoping, and this is the part where my Buddhist hat comes in…regret, suffering, and grief can be inflexion points and portals to greater reflection.

Because there is no question that the H-1B [rules] and the attacks on immigration have changed our community. You have elders that are afraid to go outside. The terror that we’re feeling is tremendous. And I have empathy for that, even for folks that voted against their own interests. No one should go through what we’re having to go through in this period. I would just hope that people can use that feeling of terror and find that little tendril of empathy that might open them to a different worldview that could help them escape the extremism that married them to policies that they never should have been involved in the first place. And then perhaps reconciliation and repair.

What lessons can an activist like yourself offer to scholars trying to make sense of all these racial and economic hierarchies under Trump? 

Well, I think what’s very important to think about is that the polarisation didn’t come from just nowhere. Neoliberal policies created very extreme cracks amongst the working poor, amongst immigrant communities. And what you had was very, very, very heavy investment by billionaires on the right that took advantage of those cracks to basically create an extremist juggernaut that could take over and do a soft capture of the government and dismantle the policies that were leading to equitable democracy.

So I don't think people should look at this as an accident, I think they should follow the money. How do we move forward without such a heavy level of billionaire capture of our electoral process? You know, that's the tragedy that we’re seeing here. Because even when you’re looking at social media and big tech, you know, all of those companies were built with tax investments. They don't care that they’ve upended American democracy, they’re actually making tonnes of money now.

So do we need more global solidarity among people who are fighting all these different systems of racism, patriarchy? 

Yes, absolutely. 

How do we build this solidarity? 

Well, you know, I think the thing is that global platforms are going to get more and more surveilled, you know, I think that, in some ways, we want to be able to have more discourse, whether that’s happening through the internet or through in-person gatherings. For people to have curiosity and think about solidarity is not transactional, but materially connected to their self determination. I think that's going to be the pathway. So to have that hunger of internationalism, that actually sees other people's experiences as part of your pathway to freedom, I think that's going to be really necessary.

And I think that, you know, the one thing I’m very proud of in the work of Equality Labs is that we really focused on building material solidarity between Dalit feminists and other feminist movements. And because of that work, we have so many different organisations around the world that have familiarity with caste, and understanding. I think it's so interesting that I have Americans that probably could not place Tamil Nadu on the map, but are like, wow, the Vaikom Award. That sounds amazing. And then, as they read about the Vaikom award, they're like, why did people have to agitate in order to get equitable access to a space of worship? You know, or the Mahad satyagraha. Like, really, you know, caste depressed people weren’t allowed access to water tanks and roads?

I think that there was a moat around the stories and the histories of caste depressed movements and leaders that really prevented our experiences, our histories, to be connected to the pantheon of other internationalist struggles. And I think that because of the work of anticaste movements today, because of the transnational vision of Dalit feminists, we are breaking those silos and we are helping create wonderful platforms. 

I just discovered yesterday that you also sing. You have a Sufi Blues album. And you have such a beautiful voice. And you’ve written a new book, ‘We Sang Down The Empire’.

I'm looking for representation right now.  I started this book on my mom's death bed, I applied for this workshop through Clarion West which is this amazing science fiction writer’s workshop based in Seattle. Mini Mondal actually went through that programme and, you know, I was so exhausted and I was applying for it and my mom was like, you know, you were always meant to be a writer, I want you to stop writing about atrocities and I want you to dream, you know? She said, just try. 

And so I wrote my application on her deathbed. And two months later was the first class and that was the first week of her hospice, and then she died in that first month. 

There's so much in this book that's about hope against the despair of empire, you know? There's a lot of continuity of the themes of healing that I wrote about in The Trauma Of Caste, where the characters really grapple with issues like how does Empire wound? And how do somatic processes and community heal?  And what does that work do to help you resist and ultimately move beyond Empire, you know? So it's a really fun book. It's also a very soothing book. 

There's great music and lots of fun rock and roll. And then also a really beautiful love story. So, you know, it's everything you'd want in a Bollywood movie, but in a book.  And it's like giving it like decolonial, space-y Bollywood, you know? 

I saw some descriptor where you say the book is also about the choice we make between revolution and redemption.  Can you elaborate on that? 

I think sometimes when we engage in struggle, there’s strictly a political lens, which is actually very important. We often see organisers who are detached from their bodies. Working for the community, but also very isolated from the community and also very traumatised by the violence that they're engaging with. And healing is a huge part of being able to come forward. 

And I also think that when you have societies that are extremely polarised by extremism, the after genocide is a very profound time because you’re still neighbours with the people that murdered your family. Think how often this happens with caste atrocity. You know, whether it’s Khailanji or Tsunduru or, you know, Kilvenmani, everybody knows what's happened. The blood is spilled and dried, but you still have to go forward, right? But right now, the way people go forward is they go forward knowing violence has occurred and there is no restoration, there is no repair, there is no justice. 

And the fight for justice is not necessarily the same as repair, right? Especially when you're looking at the Indian justice system, which is so overwhelmed and oftentimes complicit. But I think redemption allows for a space where we can talk about repair. 

We can talk about harmdoers, confronting what they’ve done and also moving to a process of accountability and restoration. And also thinking about those of us that have experienced harm, what would it take for us to actually meaningfully have human relations with those that have hurt us, you know? And that is not an easy question, right? 

But I think if we can spend centuries thinking about how to dismantle democratic processes, I think we can spend decades thinking about what repair, restoration, and care might look like. 

One last question about your mother, you have said she was the love of your life. She was sick for four years, how did her illness influence your understanding of trauma, healing and caregiving? 

Oh, so much. I think she would have been so happy to know that I got this Vaikom award. I think that every person that is a caregiver, you don't know what you're getting into when the journey starts, right? There's the before you were a caregiver and then there's the after because how tremendously it shifts your life. 

My mother had diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. These are all somatic diseases that result from continuous stress and genetic conditions, right? My mom was a social worker and I think she spent a lot of her life using her body and her life spirit to fill the gaps of broken systems. And there was a certain point when her body could no longer take it.

Caring for her and thinking about how much she sacrificed and then watching the disease ravage her body was tremendous. I actually wrote The Trauma Of Caste in the early years of her illness. My love for her and my reflections of how I want those that come after me to have a different approach to how they carry the stress of the soul wounded caste really came from watching, from having to nurture her and care for her as her body was crumbling underneath those systems. 

But I also felt like her love was such a sustenance in the face of dominator systems. A mother's love is the first shield that you have for the dehumanising narratives of the world. And I just think about all the ways that my mom just poured her love into me so that no matter how awful society was, her love gave me the strength to know that I had dignity, I had purpose, I belong to a people, and I was loved, and that love was stronger than any disinformation campaign, any gaslighting, discriminatory bigot, because that love was so infinite and connected to an intergenerational lineage of love and strength and power. And so I always feel like when she loves me, I feel the hugs of all the grandmothers that came before her.

(Priya Ramani is a member of Article 14's editorial board.)

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