Trauma of Caste: Survivorship, Healing And Abolition From A Dalit Feminist Lens

For me, the annihilation of caste begins very personally with my choice to say I am a survivor. I identify as a survivor of gender-based violence and police violence, as well as a survivor of the caste system, which means I am a survivor of spiritual violence.

Survivorship is my politics of being human. It’s my politics of life. It’s my politics in terms of how to think about restructuring all of the pieces of society. And it’s also my path as a Buddhist because in many ways to say I’m a survivor is to acknowledge the truth of my suffering without being defined by it. I have simply lived through it, and the process of freeing myself from it is part of my lifetime commitment to becoming free.

Trauma Of Caste: Survivorship

Being a survivor doesn’t mean you’re condemned to the shadows and crippled with brokenness. The fact that you’re alive means you’re a survivor. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, one of the first thinkers on historical trauma, calls the healing circles she created “Takini,” a Lakota word meaning “survivor, or one who has been brought back to life.”11 When you experience violence, it is a death of sorts. Surviving in the process of being brought back to life via healing—cellular, emotional, relational, social, all of it.

"Healing is not the same thing as being made whole: you won’t return to who you were before the violence, but you can make peace with what occurred and find a new path of integration."

A soul wound is a lifelong teacher. Its lessons, when we learn them well, prevent us from passing on the wound to those who come after us. When we don’t listen to it as a teacher, we end up wielding the wound in ways we never thought we would. That’s the cycle of trauma. That’s what’s so hard: the wound demands what the wound demands. Will our inheritance be violence, or will our inheritance be resistance and resilience?

Trauma lives in a place beyond words. So many somatic memories of trauma are illegible. We can’t even see these as memories. We just think of them as habits. We need to be aware of the language of the body, the language of its joy, but also the language of its pain. I think of trauma like a strange fish. If you think of your mind as a deep well, oftentimes in regular everyday life you see only the ripples on its surface.

You don’t know what beast is underneath, roiling the water. And then there are those moments when something strikes the bell of your heart, reminding you that there’s this huge wound—the trauma—that’s still there. You try to grab that fish, but that fish slips out of your hands. It’s an eyeless, mouthless fish, and it’s so slippery. But if you can go slow enough to hold it, you see it for what it is. And then you can just let it go. That’s what Buddhist practice allows me to do: go beyond the ripples, go beyond the squeamishness of what it means to confront the truth. Be just light enough with the touch of it to hold the fish and then let it go. It is really holding what projection or image you have of what happened and understanding that this is only one facet of what it can mean. Then you can let it go.

This allows me to let the fish be the fish, meaning the wound is just the wound. It’s okay for it to surface when it needs to, where I can gently touch it and then let it go. It doesn’t have to receive the attention it demands. Sometimes it’s just about that right attention, that right touch.

As Peter Levine reminds us, Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed, but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative. Trauma has the potential to be one of the most significant forces for psychological, social, and spiritual awakening and evolution. How we handle trauma (as individuals, communities, and societies) greatly influences the quality of our lives. It ultimately affects how or even whether we will survive as a species.

Think about the wound as this really powerful teacher that lets you show yourself all the parts of you that are strong and all the parts of you that are hurt. Feeling pain is not being weak, feeling pain is just being human. If you can simply sit with it and be curious about it, the wound becomes a powerful teacher that shows you all the things that need to be healed in the world. Healing starts with you.

Sometimes people make fun of survivors because of their hyper-vigilance. But the hyper-vigilance of survivors often points to broken boundaries in society that need to be fixed, whether it’s the insecurity of an office, the insecurity of our laws, or the insecurity of our families.

Paying attention to survivors means we’re addressing what needs to be healed in our communities. We need to centre survivors’ stories. We need to create institutions that reflect and love and care for survivors. We need to build a path that allows us to understand consent differently and to take the time to be able to understand consent. Can we imagine a world and healing practices that allow us to have resiliency at every level, whether it’s cellular, relational, interspecies, the earth, or past plus future Generations?

"To openly state you’re a survivor also means that you are not responsible for the violence. It brings sunshine past the shame. In the South Asian context, it’s very rare for survivors of gender violence and caste-based sexual violence to be open about their experiences, out of shame."

I want to be public about being a survivor because it is important for people to know that leaders can be survivors and that the shame is not on us but on the system that created the conditions for this violence. The shame is on the person who was so lost that they tried to steal the humanity of someone else. I want other survivors to know that there is a life beyond the caste wound and that life is wonderful, particularly when we come back to ourselves. That there’s a place where they can feel joy again and not be haunted by anxiety, panic attacks, or nightmares. Some of that comes from recovering joy in the body.

When you think about Brahminism, where it melds with patriarchy, there is so much policing of the body: what it’s allowed to look like, what it can eat, who it’s allowed to breed with, who is pure, who is not pure. The annihilation of caste happens with ">Dalits owning pleasure in our bodies, experiencing life as sensuous, loving beings. Our desire is to connect with other beings. To recover the pleasure from sensation, to recover what it means to have an orgasm, and to own it as your own. And to not have anyone determine the choice of who you love, or what gender you will be. These are all ways that we heal from the violence of Brahminical patriarchy.

I think it’s so important for people to believe, to know, that there is an end to a caste that can happen right now with you taking back control of your inner experience. This act can actually change everything. Oppressive systems and genocidal systems are dismantled by acts of courage, small and large. I find there is a peace that comes with acknowledging that while there are times when we will have more success with political action, there are also times when the inner work will be the way that we stoke what feels like dying embers into the bonfire that lets us cleanse ourselves from the trauma. That’s not to say inner psychological and energetic work is a replacement for political and economic progress around caste.

We need all these tactics to be activated because of how vast caste’s impacts are on our minds, bodies, psyches, and geographies. Yes, many things are out of our control. But part of changing our interior conditions means that we can map the path through our hearts that activates a different outcome because every part of the present is something that we can change.

"I know that feels really hard when your heart feels dead, or your heart feels closed, or you just feel like it’s not possible. Yet I think that Dalit history has shown that you can find a way where there was no way."

That is why a core question in my work remains: Can we dream beyond our oppression? How do we dream of interdependence? We are imagining now for our very lives. We are imagining back from the greatest crisis of our time: the failure of white supremacy and Brahminism to believe that the rest of the world, that even the world itself, matters.

It is a call for freedom in a moment of pain. It is radical dreaming. There is a future that can hold many futures, where we survive and even thrive. Can we find her through a collective imagining? She reaches backwards and forward to us. She whispers in our dreams, “Find me and I will find you.”

She calls through questions into this moment: Are we brave enough to keep dreaming? Are we fierce enough to hold the door open as despair, anger, and greed want to close it? Can we love ourselves enough to not do the oppressors’ work for them, to stop our loved ones from self-erasure? What are we willing to do for the possibility? That is why our imagination is our greatest weapon. We must imagine beyond ourselves and our socialisation.

"Now more than ever, we need art that can be our heartbeat, a north star, a map to the way out of this mess. For me, this is a Dalit feminist mettāverse, where Dalit feminist futures span out glorious timelines of consent, possibility, wonder, and life."

Excerpted from 'The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition'; published by North Atlantic Books, US. You can also join SheThePeople’s Book club on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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