128: The Trauma of Caste (w/Thenmozhi Soundararajan)
An ancient text at the root of the culture that gave birth to the yoga tradition says that if an outcaste person—a Dalit—dares to learn the holy language of Sanskrit, they must be tortured. Molten lead must be poured into their ears. Their tongue must be cut out. In the Ramayana, a Shudra (caste oppressed) who dared to practice yoga was murdered so that the sickly child of a priestly family might regain his health. In the Mahabharata, an Adivasi (South Asian Indigenous) boy is commanded to cut off his own thumb for the sin of being self-taught and skilled above his station. The pious are told that these obscene retributions maintain the divine order.Indian wisdom traditions have globalized to the extent that its evangelists have laundered the spiritualization of caste-based violence, and hidden its history from erstwhile progressives. Many of those evangelists have either been caste privileged, or caste apologists. The yoga they constructed for export has become a form of soft power, serving Hindu nationalist objectives. The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition by Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts this history under a microscope. It pulls back the curtain on the carceral impacts of terms like dharma and karma, and concepts like purity, pollution, and reincarnation. In terms of our work here at Conspirituality, Soundararajan's text cuts through the romantic Orientalism used by influencers, cult leaders, and nationalists to exploit emotional vulnerabilities. It also points to—and updates—a vision of spiritual practice first articulated by the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar, rooted in the ancient Buddhist call to compassion and equality. Show NotesThe Trauma of Caste by Thenmozhi SoundararajanThenmozhi Soundararajan: Transmedia Artist, Theorist & FuturistB. R. Ambedkar
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I've seen some of it.
Yeah, it's astonishing.
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Conspiracuality 128, the trauma of caste with Thermori Sondararajan.
So this is a special one today, and instead of formal show notes, Julian, I think you and I can just reflect a little bit on what we heard when we both sat down with Nmori talking about her book, which is just out, I think, today, perhaps, or very close to today, through North Atlantic Books and Penguin Random House.
It's called The Trauma of Caste, A Dullet Feminist Meditation on Survivorship.
healing and abolition.
And I'm just going to open with this.
I think that this is a really important book for our beat because as you've pointed out at length, Conspiratuality depends very heavily on what we call spiritual bypassing, which is the habit of using spiritual ideas and practices to obscure or prematurely solve real-world problems, up to and including trauma.
Is that a good shorthand, Julian?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I think spiritual bypass generally grabs the shiny new belief that will avoid complexity or vulnerability or actual learning and growth.
And then it often will frame any cognitive dissonance or the perception of logical incoherence as being something that you have to overcome in the name of killing your ego.
I noticed that, you know, between you and I, Matthew, we've been talking a lot about speed, about the problem of speed.
And then Maury actually brought it up in the interview.
There's something about the speed at which radical new beliefs about reality can be adopted, and it seems like that speed is usually going to be inversely proportional to their depth, their nuance, their actual profundity.
Right.
And I think this is true, whether we're talking about prepackaged distortions of mindfulness or quantum physics or vaccine science or the nature of covert power structures or even underground journalism, social justice and decolonization.
Yeah, and one flavor of the bypassing that we have focused on on a regular basis is a kind of romanticized Orientalism, a kind of fantasy of India as a place of universal mystical wisdom healing goodness, and even a proposed social equality.
And this really has a long history.
It runs from the fever dreams of Helena Blavatsky to the late 20th century yoga cults, Kundalini, Sivananda, Siddha Yoga, It's an idealization that hides the complexity of a cruel religious history.
And broadly speaking, there are two groups of people who rock this vibe.
On one hand, we have well-meaning, non-Indian progressives who want their India to be an historical, pluralist, and holy land.
And, on the other hand, we have xenophobic, classist Hindu nationalists who pretend that it is.
And those make for some strange bedfellows.
So, then Mori's meditation on the impacts of caste oppression really blows that up.
I mean, I have to say, Matthew, this is some of the earliest mindfuckery that you and I bonded over years ago, because this mismatch was coming up.
Perhaps it's the product of that speed and a kind of superficial inquiry in the name of that idealism, in the name of nostalgic romanticism.
And we spend a good deal of time in our book pointing out that this is foundational to fascist movements.
Yeah, and what's happened over the past 10 years in the yoga world specifically, I would say globally, global north, is that there's been a whole sector of social justice aware yoga people who have taken up, first of all, the mantle of cultural sensitivity, and rightly so, but I would say in a fairly naive and sometimes misguided way.
And a lot of this started with discussions around cultural authenticity versus the sort of aesthetics of superficial, you know, practices.
And then came discussions around cultural appropriation, which were a little bit more difficult.
And then the politics of decolonization entered the chat room or the Facebook threads maybe five, six years ago.
And this has brought up a lot of fruitful soul-searching amongst non-Indians who are considering for the first time how their understanding of South Asian spirituality has been informed by the colonial gaze.
But the discourse was also plagued by a ghost, and it's a kind of absence that I think then Maury's book is filling in.
Because from the Indian side, it was largely driven by a century of upper caste or caste apologist influencers who presented disciplines like yoga and Ayurveda through a contradiction that their non-Indian followers just couldn't see.
Because they claimed that these were India's universalist gifts to the world and that they were instruments of ethno-nationalist soft power.
And what that all led to was some very naive non-Indian progressives thinking things like, you know, Sanskrit was just a uniformly holy universal language, or that they would organize events to support Narendra Modi's International Yoga Day, completely oblivious to the fact that caste-oppressed people in India have historically been banned from listening to or learning about, or speaking Sanskrit, and that Modi and his colleagues are sitting in lotus posture at the top of a Hindu nationalist pyramid supported by neo-fascist elements.
Yeah, and enabling a lot of rhetoric and then a lot of violence against Muslims within India as well.
It's like the well-meaning Western yogis, in an effort to remedy cultural appropriation, chose the orthodoxy of a racist and patriarchal Hindu aristocracy as if this is the true yoga that we really should be paying And it kind of makes sense because Orientalism has always been rooted more in fantasy than in reality.
You know, it reminds me of the phenomenon of how we see so many non-Indian, American, Canadian, European yoga enthusiasts in the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s traveling to India.
And seeking out a kind of self-project discipline that they believed would be liberatory and perhaps even give them insight into how to be more progressive in their own lives or to, you know, form better culture at home or something like that.
And these were all really, a lot of them had family money, but some of them were also just dropouts.
They were, you know, late hippies Who, you know, maybe had frayed family connections.
They didn't have stable jobs.
They were traveling a long, long way from home and probably delaying things like, you know, early career advancement or postgraduate education.
And what they did to stabilize themselves is they fell in love with these super orthodox teachers.
And their families.
I'm thinking specifically of the way in which everybody who wanted to be a senior student of Mr. Iyengar or Mr. Joyce just tried to become like their child, you know?
if they could feel like a son or a daughter, if they could, you know, get in with the family,
if they could spend time having chai with them out on the patio after class, like,
it was just the most wonderful thing to feel as though you were adopted
into what I think they believed was a kind of, you know, liberated and, you know,
relationally sound family structure.
But it really, what they were encountering was something extremely conservative in relation to where
they were coming from.
Yeah, so you have the irony of these countercultural, kind of malcontent, LSD-dropping, open-minded People who thought there was nothing for them in the oppression of American society, who were largely unoppressed, by the way, finding their way into these actually super-conservative systems.
That always struck me with regard to how the Hare Krishna movement was one of the first exports from India to really become popular in the US.
I was like, wow, these are real...
You know, conservative fundamentalist religious adherence.
And yeah, there's something about that paradox where people get to feel as though they've dropped out while they've also bought into something super rigid and super, you know, they've bought into a tradition for the ages, but it's not theirs, so it's okay somehow.
Yeah, so I found a substitute parent.
And I found a substitute family structure and culture.
Somebody who would give me rules.
And a tradition.
They're giving me rules, but it's cool because they're not white people somehow.
They're not white people rules, they're about how to orient myself to the divine, they're about how to stand up straight, they're about how to enliven my entire body so that it can be a conduit for God.
Yeah, they are good rules, they are really good rules, and I'm going to follow them with all of my heart.
It's clean your room, stand up straight, clean your room, and then eat your dhal and do your bhakti, right?
Right, exactly.
Well, I mean, since the pandemic and starting this project, I don't know about you, but most of my work in the yoga world has evaporated.
And, you know, in general, that's appropriate for me.
And, you know, aside from the precarity of it.
But I've already reached out to my most progressive colleagues in that world, my dearest friends, to tell them that this is a book they've been waiting for because I just think it begins to clear up a lot of confusions that a lot of us have intuited for a while.
Can you imagine, Julian, what your yoga culture might have looked like if you and your friends had come across this book in your 20s?
Yeah, it definitely would have been really, really different.
I mean, I'm kind of a weird person to ask because I always felt uncomfortable with the yoga scene in LA in general.
I felt there was this false piety and this pretentious spiritual materialism that was going on with it and all of the spiritual bypass stuff.
So, you know, I always had a conflicted relationship to it.
But of course, I can't wait to refer this book to my yoga contacts.
You know, for me personally, this conversation that listeners are about to hear is just immensely touching and powerful to me.
It resonates so strongly what she's talking about with apartheid in South Africa as this really explicit structure of social stratification and dehumanization of people who are completely lacking in power and material wealth.
Yeah, I can't wait for how people are going to respond to this.
Well, here's our discussion with Tenmori Sondororajan, and here's to another pathway out of the
fever dream of conspirituality where spirituality is always dissociated from history, material
realities, and questions of justice.
Thenmori Soundorarajan, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
So excited to be here, Jay Bheem and Jay Savitri, everyone.
Thenmori, your book, The Trauma of Caste, a Dalit feminist meditation on survivorship,
healing and abolition, is really a tour de force in a vulnerable and volatile time.
And a lot of our listeners have begun to take ownership of just how tangled the Orientalist history of wellness and global spirituality is.
A lot of them I know are going to be blown away by your go-hard but empathetic analysis of spiritually sanctioned violence and oppression in South Asia.
Now, it's one thing for white progressive yoga practitioners to have that uncomfortable realization that the Neo-Hinduism, that globalized yoga, is strongly tied to ethno-nationalism, and that its exercises are tense with a kind of somatic fascism that seeks to purify polluted bodies, but it's a whole other level To go on to learn that the piety and devotionalism that they associate with authentic yoga practice is really soaking in a kind of Brahmanism that has, as you put it, been used to enslave millions of my people.
So, we'll get into the details of your book for sure, but to start, I think if we paint a picture for you to respond to, we'll be in the sort of ballpark.
Okay, so imagine an American, probably white, self-identifying, progressive-in-politics yoga person who really wants to use their practice to investigate their privilege, to explore the idea of decolonization, to fold their social justice desires into their embodied practices.
They are told by another American instructor, maybe white, but maybe daisy, that in order to fully honor the roots of yoga, they should learn Sanskrit, they should read the Bhagavad Gita, they should study the Vedas, they should learn the ancient sciences of Ayurveda and Jyotish, they should travel to India, they should make pilgrimage to holy sites, and they should participate in International Yoga Day.
What would you like that very earnest student to know?
Wow, just right out the gate like that.
Are you doing that?
I think what is really important is that, you know, for every student that is a seeker, it is important to thinking about how you approach your traditions, particularly if you don't come from that context.
With the principle of do no harm and a principle of slowness that allows you to understand the cultural competency that's required to really understand what is at the heart of that tradition that you're beginning to become engaged with.
Because there is no religious institution on earth that doesn't have some form of corruption.
And some form of structural abuse, because, you know, if you separate out the dogma of a religious tradition and its practices, there's its understanding of the divine, but it's still done through a human filter.
And those human filters are flawed and often informed by the systems of exclusion that they come out of.
And so, you know, certainly the yoga practice that we see packaged in the United States is one that is a very particular, consumable, superficial understanding of centuries of tradition that actually has much conflict and oppression inside of it.
You know, especially when you think about the fact that Yoga comes from somatic practices that were, you know, practiced by indigenous communities first, and those were not the people that wrote down the canon of yoga practice.
And even I think the ways that we hear the way Contemporary yoga divides the body in terms of purity and pollution, in terms of the feminine needing to be controlled by the masculine, and the masculine being equated with discipline, and the feminine being equated with sensuality that needs to be corralled, you know?
These are all things that are human interpretation of that which is limitless.
And I think sometimes when you're in these yoga classes, everything is presented as the only way.
And those are situations that are really ripe for abuse.
And we've seen that over and over and over again, different yoga communities where you see yoga teachers who have weaponized their practice to prey on their students, but also the hierarchical nature of yoga and the way that it has erased the contentious nature within which this body of knowledge was coalesced In the background of one of the oldest dominator systems in the world, the caste system, is very profound in terms of both its erasure that happened in the subcontinent, but also in the way that we're seeing it conveyed today.
And that doesn't mean that you can't practice yoga.
It just means you need to be thoughtful about the way that you acknowledge the roots of suffering that also inform the rise of this practice.
And that's a complicated thing to do because most of the times when you're in a yoga class and people are like, we need to talk about white supremacy or we're going to talk about decolonizing, it's five minutes either at the end of practice or the beginning of practice.
And maybe it's like a throwaway session of a yoga teacher training.
But that really speaks to the fact that we cannot franchise liberation.
We cannot franchise mindfulness that doesn't allow for depthful exploration, both of the teachings that we're trying to incorporate, but also the communities we're trying to build through these practices.
So I think that for that earnest student, I would say, be a seeker, but be aggressive in your seeking.
Do not take the easy way.
Look beyond what is told to you and also be open to when you hear contradiction and that contradiction is an opening oftentimes to systems of exclusion and to communities that have been marginalized even by the teachings that are the most dear to you.
Speaking of roots and teachings and communities, turning to your history and influences a little bit, I wanted to ask about some basic figures or some central figures and some basic terms.
Dr. Cornel West compares you to Dr. Ambedkar and you refer to Ambedkar repeatedly.
Can you give us a brief thumbnail of who he was?
Absolutely, and I think even before going into who Dr. Ambedkar is, I want to also paint a picture of what caste is for your audience, because this may be some of the first time people in your audience are really learning about the caste system.
And the way to think about it is that, you know, caste is a system of exclusion as large as race, And has its roots in scripture and is thousands of years old.
And it has been running in the subcontinent in various forms across many different religious traditions, but it had its roots in Hindu scripture, but is now found in all communities of religious practice that have a South Asian foundation.
And so, you know, when I think about who Dr. Ambedkar is, he is this, you know, just, you know, once-in-a-generation historical figure that I think really should be on the liberation altar of anyone that has figures that inspire them in their practice, because He was like our Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. And Ruth King and Resmaa Menachem all rolled into one.
Because he was someone who understood the plight of people that were oppressed by caste.
And, you know, within the caste system, you have this hierarchy where there's people at the top that wrote these scriptures that were the Brahmin castes.
And then you have all these other categories, but there is a group of people that were deeply oppressed by caste, and were told to be spiritually defiling to others, and therefore called untouchable.
And we said, no way are we untouchable.
No one gets to decide our position towards the divine.
And we call ourselves Dalit, or we call ourselves the other religions that we might have converted into.
And also, you might also have heard the term caste oppressed.
And so, Dr. Ambedkar really took up the mantle of the freedom of all caste-depressed people and really said it is time for us to fight for human dignity and throughout his career he did this in so many different ways like he was a lawyer and an economist and a historian and he was one of the first Indians to study abroad and got degrees at the London School of Economics and
Columbia University, but also quite crucially, he was the architect of the Indian Constitution, which was the first law, the first series of laws in South Asia that were written by a Dalit person, which is why they centered freedom for all peoples.
And from that place, you know, he went on to fight these incredible desegregation Campaigns to desegregate temples and water tanks and roads because again, caste is also like an apartheid.
So imagine living in a society where Dalits live in separate parts of a village or don't have access to clean water or have separate places of worship because of the way that we're ritually shunned.
Dr. Ambedkar threw all of that out and led these massive, massive campaigns for our freedom.
But also crucially for your listeners, which is why I think he should be on everyone's liberation altars, is that towards the end of his life, after he, you know, fought political and economic and social battles, there was the terrain of the spirit that he also felt that needed to be addressed.
And so he ultimately, one of his last political acts was to convert to Buddhism.
And when he did, it was the largest conversion to Buddhism in world history, where hundreds of thousands of people converted with him to become Buddhists in Nagpur, Maharashtra.
And I mean, his commitment was really, you know, He's launched a very powerful movement of socially engaged Buddhists and is, you know, one of the most current socially engaged Buddhist movements today.
So his model is so incredible.
And in my book, I actually feature other caste abolitionist ancestors that also approach religious reform, political reform, and social and mental reform in terms of addressing this issue.
And there's just a bounty of beautiful thought and spiritual liberation in all of those thinkers.
Now, Dr. Ambedkar did not coin the term Dalit, but he popularized it.
What does it mean?
So, Dalit means one who is broken by oppression, and, you know, and in many ways we have interpreted it to be also resilient.
And the reality is, is that at this point, you know, caste-oppressed people refer to themselves with many different names, you know, and, you know, a key tenant of the ideology behind the caste system, which, you know, you mentioned earlier, Matthew, which is Brahmanism, named after the top caste that developed This hierarchical model is that so much choice is removed from you.
And, you know, I think that the most powerful thing that caste-oppressed and Dalit people do when they first leave behind this system of oppression and start to claim their human dignity is their choice of their identity.
So for folks who are starting to encounter caste-oppressed people for their first time, They may be using the term Dalit, which is a term that I use.
Some people identify by the religion that they now identify with, so they might say that I'm Buddhist or I'm Rabidassia or, you know, an atheist, you know.
Or other times they might even use their caste name.
It's very specific to each person and people are very passionate about their choices around it because we were named untouchable and an epithet.
So it's like one of those wounds that are so terrible to kind of address and so I think what's really helpful like when you're trying to create you know equitable practices in your sanghas is that as opposed to naming people's castes or asking them, create spaces that allow people to self-identify because they know That there's safe refuge there, you know, and then you'll learn the reasons why people name themselves for that reason and it's a powerful way to build community across this great dominator system.
Then Mori, can you tell us what is Brahmanism and how does it show up in modern India and in the diaspora?
So Brahmanism is a very profound ideology that I think anyone that is a practitioner of Dharmic traditions should really become aware of.
And just like when we are looking at and discussing, you know, anti-blackness or racism, you can't really talk about those terms without looking at the animating ideology that allowed people to become racialized, and that is that of white supremacy.
Similar, the logic of caste that created this bizarre hierarchy where there's, you know, caste at the top and then there's like other castes that come at the bottom and, you know, it divides people up into, you know, the pure and the impure and into these social categories that are fictitious, right?
That ideology is Brahmanism.
And Brahmanism is older than white supremacy, but a similarly corrosive ideology that is based on social fiction, but has been damaging to South Asian cultures for centuries.
And under Brahmanism, there is this idea that certain castes have a greater divine right, and also that certain castes are more pure in their professions.
And I also think this idea that you have to accept the conditions that you are born into of your caste Because of the cycle of Dharma and Karma, you know, and I remember like when I first found out I was Dalit, I thought it was the weirdest thing ever, you know, because, you know, the whole idea of Dharma, which means duty,
And karma, which is like the consequences of your actions, is that you were born an untouchable because you did something bad in another life.
You know, so it's a very carceral logic because, you know, well, you know, you did that in that other life.
Therefore, the consequences are you deserve to be shunned.
You deserve to face more structural violence.
You deserve to be exploited.
And that is your punishment.
And to not fulfill that punishment is to actually be out of your alignment with your duty or your dharma.
And, you know, as a child, when you learn something like that, for me, I was really haunted.
It was like, what was it?
What is it that I did?
Was I a rapist?
Was I a thief?
Was I a murderer?
You know, and, you know, and there's, there's no answer to that because it's actually illogical and it's a social fiction.
But it's an effective fiction because basically you have no No path towards leaving this system behind because the entire system is organized by caste.
And that's why the history of the subcontinent is so interesting because you had, you know, within Vedic times, the establishment of Brahminical institutions with Brahmin priests running all of society and setting up those Hindu scriptures.
And then the entire history of the subcontinent is about the resistance to Brahmanism.
So when you see the rise of shramanic faiths, which are faiths that start to decentralize access to the spirit, you see challenges that come from Buddhism, from Jainism, and even later on Sikhism, you know.
And again, in these traditions, there was an explicit challenge to the spiritual authority of the priestly caste, the Brahmins.
And then later on, you know, you have like, you know, faiths that come into the subcontinent through mystics and, you know, merchants and, you know, conflict and those are, you know, the religions of Christianity and Islam.
And again, you see people converting to those religions as well for the same reason.
They needed to find some sort of Succour, refuge from the tyranny of Brahminical control over not just your spiritual life, but actually every aspect of your society control.
Because again, the order of the logic of the geography in South Asia is broken up by caste apartheid.
You know, so for example, my family, they lived in the Dalit parts of the village.
They were not allowed to have access to the well water.
So they had to like struggle to find access to water.
You know, they're always were living at the point of violence.
And that precariousness again, comes from the normalization of caste apartheid logics in the geography and social structures of our institutions.
So, Brahmanism, especially the way that we understand it now, is much larger than its origins.
Because again, it had its origin in scriptures from Hinduism, but there are many aspects that are Brahminical now that go beyond that religion.
And so people use Brahmanism, like a term like white supremacy, to kind of analyze how much are caste dynamics impacting institutions that you might be looking at.
And Matthew, I know that we talked about this earlier, you know, it's one of the reasons why caste-oppressed people talk about when you want to decolonize something, if you're trying to decolonize something in the South Asian context, you have to first de-Brahmanize and then decolonize because that is the original dominator framework that actually oppressed millions of people.
It seems to me then that to go back to one of our earlier questions, if Very well-intentioned American people involved in the American repackaging of yoga are seeking to incorporate more of a social justice dimension to their practice.
It may be misguided to say you need to adhere to the sort of orthodox version of this faith because that very orthodoxy is rooted in Brahmanism and in fact there's a rich A rich legacy, a rich history and tradition of resistance to that dominator hierarchy that you just described so perfectly, that perhaps Western yogis, aspiring yogis, should seek to familiarize themselves with.
Because there's actually, as you just said, a very different angle from which to consider how these practices and how we think about them can be liberatory.
Oh, absolutely.
Especially because the impetus to ask for decolonization is coming from social movements that are saying, enough with black death.
Enough with the destruction of people of color bodies.
So you cannot have that impetus to mitigate harm in terms of racial violence and be totally ignorant to the caste violence that is occurring even today.
Even today.
And that's why I think there are things big and small that people can consider about de-Brahmanizing.
Because again, I'm not speaking from this as someone who was not raised Hindu.
I actually was raised both Hindu and Christian.
Now I'm a Buddhist, but as a seeker, I've been part of many religious traditions and practices.
Because at the core of my experience was Really trying to create a pathway where I could reclaim my own divinity and also knowing that that began with asserting that I was a survivor of religious abuse.
Because systems like this are abusive at their core in terms of the spiritual domain of caste-depressed people because we are locked out of our pathway towards the existential.
And I think about that even in my own pursuit of yoga.
And I think, Matt, we talked about this in our pre-interview.
I was a yoga practitioner in my 20s for about four or five years.
And I actually gave it up because I couldn't reconcile the practice anymore because of the way I had White and dominant caste yoga teachers shoved down my throat brahminical practices.
And I would go with such an earnestness, like I was actually an earnest yoga student who was struggling with these issues.
And, you know, things that people don't even realize are exclusive to caste-depressed people.
For example, many yoga classes begin with the, you know, the Gayathri Mantra or some form of Sanskrit chanting.
And I was very deeply in conflict and participating in those mantras because, you know, as a language, Sanskrit was actually very exclusive, particularly in those early days of Vedic scripture.
And part of it was is that, you know, if you read a text like the Manusmriti, there are specific Codes in that law that basically say if a caste-oppressed person listens to the law in Sanskrit, we would have lead poured in our ears and our tongue cut out.
And so it was, you know, when I would read those scriptures, I would just feel like such a deep wound in my body.
I think I felt it in my gut.
I felt it in my heart.
I felt like a chill.
And I would read it again, you know, just because it's like something when you see a law that's written so horrifically like that, your mind can't comprehend it.
And then I would imagine like, what did my ancestor feel?
And express when they knew this and of course they did not have the privilege of being able to read it because part of the oppression of caste oppressed people is that if you are forbidden to read the laws that govern your oppression, you actually don't know the domain of the terror that's being prescribed to you, right?
So, to go to a yoga class then, where you're told that we have to do the Gayatri Mantra, this is going to be our process to free ourself, I would just think about saying those words, and how my ancestor couldn't say them, and I would be in conflict.
And I could feel my heartbeat rise in that conflict, and I would just try to shove it down.
I wouldn't listen to myself, which is actually counter to what you're doing in somatic practices.
It's all about integration and listening.
I could not settle.
And then I would go up to teachers and I would bring up, you know, I'm caste depressed.
I'm really struggling with this.
Like, what would you say?
And they would just like repeat back Brahminical texts to me.
You know, it's like, well, you know, Sanskrit is one of the holiest languages.
Just saying it will actually transform and clear your vibration.
And I was like, in what way?
I was like, you know, and this is someone who's like from, you know, Lancaster, California, asserting this like random garbage about something that they clearly did not know anything about, but also the divine doesn't work like that.
It's not one language through which people are going to be transformed.
It's actually The integration of ourselves.
It doesn't need the filter of one specific cultural practice to do that.
I know that now, but in my 20s, it was so wounding.
And then I would also have yoga teachers that would just say such garbage.
I remember this one Class you know and it was a tantric Shaivite tradition and you probably know more about that than I do because you're I think both of you guys are teachers in that capacity, but This one guy was talking about how in you know his his tradition of
The old masters used to go be with the indigenous Adivasi women in the hills and they would practice sexual congress with them during their periods and it had to be only Adivasi women because they were the ones that were only free enough to be able to do it.
And it was like a way of sexually fetishizing.
These South Asian Adivasi women and the narrative being told in these patriarchal lineages is that the women were just there to be fucked.
And the men turned that Congress into like spiritual mystical knowledge and then created cults, you know, in the way when they're teaching this story so that young women that are taking those classes aspire to be in a relationship with their teacher in a similar way.
And I was just watching this and thinking about this and I was like, this is just fucking garbage.
Especially because I know Adivasi women, I know Adivasi traditions, and this is not how rematriation occurs.
And it's not like a woman is a receptacle for your spiritual illumination and then you just throw them away.
We are ourselves, our own divine power.
And the fact that that was so erased in the telling, it was like the worst game of spiritual telephone I ever saw through the lens of white supremacy and brahminism and also stupidity.
But also I was watching the other students around me lose their critical thinking.
And not be able to say, that doesn't sound right.
Do women actually just lay down and take your semen in this way and think about this as the practice?
Like, get out of here!
Because, you know, that particular yoga studio that was really obsessed about telling people when to have sex, how to have sex.
And this sounds really weird, but there are a lot of yoga traditions that try to socially control the body in this, like, idea of purity and pollution.
And that's why I'm saying that I think that It's a mess.
And I think that in many ways, you know, we have to be empowered to democratize access to the divine.
We have to be fearless in our ability to use our own experience to be able to judge whether or not we're in an ethical, accountable practice.
And also, are we not doing harm?
Because I've seen a lot of yoga teachers lack so much self-reflexivity that they do not know the harm that they're creating in multiple realms.
I need to follow up on three things you've given us so much.
One is, is there a brief definition for our listeners of Adivasi?
Yes, so, you know, in the South Asian context, there is, you know, as I talked about in the caste system, so again, caste has this model where if you think of like, similar to the racial pyramid, there are Brahmins that are at the top that are the priests, and then you have several other categories.
Underneath the priests are the ruling caste, which are the Kshatriyas, and then you have the merchants, who are the Vaishyas, and then you have the Shudras, who are like the peasants.
And then outside of that whole system, you have the people that were seen as untouchable, and those are the caste-oppressed, and that's what my community is from, you know.
And again, we don't use the term untouchable for us.
We use the term Dalit or other preferred terms, whether it's Ambedcrite or Buddhist or our own caste names.
And then you also have people that are outside of the caste system, that never got circumscribed within it, that are from South Asian indigenous tribal backgrounds.
Some of them use the term Adivasi, some of them prefer to use the term Scheduled Tribe or Tribe, which refers to their government designation, or they might just use their tribal name.
And again, this is a thing because Brahmanism has removed so much consent that, you know, while many people use the generalized term Adivasi, I always really defer to letting that South Asian indigenous person define their terms of engagement because it has been such a place of great erasure.
The second thing that I wanted to follow up on was when the California yoga teacher is asking you to recite the Gayatri Mantra and then they are Dharma-splaining to you why you should do it, is there a remedy for this.
Is there ways in which a similar mantra might have been available to a caste-oppressed person in their own language that might be substituted in?
Was there any option there?
No, there was just actually never an ability to challenge the use of Sanskrit or prayer to a particular god.
You know, even though the majority of people taking those classes were not Hindu and didn't know their gods, it was seen as a prerequisite to somatic practice.
And I think that's part of what, you know, I think that some of the insight around de-Brahmanizing as well as de-colonizing yoga should consider is just like we want to have diversity in terms of the approaches and teachers that teach this practice, we also need to think about, you know, the ethical ways that we want to convey curriculum.
And training methodologies within that practice.
So, I don't think there's a teacher training class in the entire country that says, here are the alternatives, the secular alternatives to opening intentions for yoga.
You know, consider that Sanskrit might be exclusive to caste-oppressed practitioners and maybe you would like to use vocalization or, you know, Uh, you know, perhaps something in Pali or, you know, people could be quiet with their meditation.
You know, there is something about collective chanting, which is useful.
Um, you know, but you could do certainly something with like Tibetan singing bowls and just a syllable versus like an entire prayer, um, in that way.
But I can say that I'm not the only, um, caste oppressed person that has felt, um, difficulty at reconciling, you know, historical violence and classes like that.
And that's a big part of why I really found that ultimately I left my yoga practice
and then I was able to come back when I realized that the yoga that was being trained to me was again,
it's like an awful game of telephone.
You know, we all have a right as humans to practice somatically methods that help us integrate our material and spiritual selves.
And you can do that on your own.
You can certainly do it in collective spaces, but we have the ability to do that without taking the dirt that comes with the human ego and its interpretation, you know?
And even that whole idea of, you know, the division of thinking of yoga practice as Shiva and Shakti being the energy that Shiva is taming.
I've always found that metaphor so absurd to me, you know, especially because in its most extreme form, you know, you have these very kind of sadomasochistic cults where you have men that have like a cat of tails, you know, And in their attempt to like, you know, quell the sensual, the sensual, the senses that Shakti is trying to engage, they'll like beat themselves and they'll say, you whore Shakti, you whore Shakti, with the idea that the discipline, whether it's the discipline of the whip, or if you take Kundalini yoga, the discipline of Shiva, Shiva being yoga practice, forces the, you know, the Shakti up for Kundalini practice, you know.
Those are all things that could be done without, you know, this unnecessary filter that is both misogynistic and also very violent in its division of gender, you know?
It could simply be that we want to bring attention.
We want to bring focus.
To bring in this other layer of, you know, you whore!
Why are we talking like this?
But this is actually things I've heard in yoga classes.
Right.
And is that true?
Have you guys also experienced that as well?
100%.
Okay.
Yes.
I just wanted, I was like, this can't just be a California thing, but it's a yoga thing, you know?
It is a yoga thing.
And it's, it's characteristic of, I would say more extreme devotional tantric informed, but really pseudo tantric, I suppose.
Yes.
Organizations.
Yeah.
Now, before you began, before we started recording, you made the very, very clear point that when we speak of Brahmanism, we can't just be speaking of what happens in historical Hinduism because the Brahmanical ideology can be seen in many religious backgrounds.
And I'm thinking, as you're saying, that it was extraordinary to realize As a child, that your Dalit label meant that somehow you had done something criminal, you had done something polluting in a past life, made you want to
really understand what that possibly could have been.
It made me think of growing up Catholic and how I didn't necessarily have the sense that I had already done something wrong except in a general sense of being a fallen human being apart from God.
But what I did have was this very, very hyper-vigilant feeling that at any moment I could do something wrong.
Or, I could find myself on the wrong side of God.
And I'm wondering if your experience also had that forward-moving kind of hyper-vigilance to it as well.
You know, I think that there is a soul wound that comes with caste.
You know, one that ties the caste-depressed and the caste-privileged.
And I think for the caste-depressed, there's a part of you that always feels less than, that never feels good enough, that never feels clean enough, and certainly doesn't feel like you're ever in a position to be of spiritual authority or control.
And that also the same existential rights that other people have are denied to you.
And I always think about that because when you hang out with white people or you hang out with spiritual types, you go out to the stars and you look up and you think about, what's my place in the universe?
The ability to have that expansiveness and the slowness to be able to say, I want to know, I'm a seeker, right?
That's denied to us as Dalit people.
And I think about that one story that's in the Ramayana of this shudra who is, you know, caste oppressed but not untouchable named Shambuka.
Who, um, and, you know, that story actually really haunted me as a kid, you know, because in this narrative, you know, the hero of the Romanum is this guy named Rama, of course, who is like one of the big heroes in Hindu mythology.
And he's a king and, you know, this family comes to complain and they're saying, you know, our son has died.
Our son has died.
They're a Brahmin family.
Something, and it was basically a moment where they say it's kind of like, you know, there's something wrong in the force.
Something has gone on that our child would die.
You have to find out what this is.
You have to find it out.
And through, you know, through one of his advisors it was found out, oh yeah, the thing that's wrong is actually there's a shudra trying to do penance and trying to get into heaven by doing, you know, spiritual practice.
So, you know, the whole story is about how Rama then gets into his chariot and then, of course, he finds Shambhuka and he's there hanging from a tree doing some form of yoga pose.
And Shambhuka isn't a bad guy.
He's just someone who's a Shudra that wants to get to heaven through spiritual, you know, spiritual practice.
And Shambhuka doesn't even finish the sentence when Rama comes.
He's just saying, oh, I just wanted to, like, just from the minute he sees him, he decapitates Shambhuka.
And the moment that Chambuka is decapitated, the child of the Brahmin family that had fallen ill or died wakes up and comes to life.
Oh my gosh.
And I remember as a kid thinking, like reading this story, and thinking about the fact, like, what did he do wrong?
All he wanted to do was to get to heaven.
All he wanted to do was just to practice spirituality.
Those are things that are good.
Why was it bad?
And the only reason it was bad, because he is from a caste that is not allowed the pathway to the divine.
That is a very profound message to tell a people.
And that's why this book is so radical, because there are very few books that come from the South Asian continent, subcontinent, that you have a Dalit woman, let alone a Dalit feminist woman, articulating a pathway of spiritual equity and political agenda that addresses the wound of Brahmanism and caste.
And because you've never really heard of it.
It's not been something that's you know, uh popular in terms of definitely in the west, but also It's it's very rare to have a dull woman take, you know, these kinds of matters right in the crosshairs But with compassion and empathetic witness With the idea that we can heal, you know my job.
This is not like a call-out book.
This is really An act of knowing that we are at this choice point as a species and that we all have to do our parts to understand
what do we need to remove of ourselves from the dominator systems
for us to be integrated back to each other as humans and for us to have greater unity
as we face some of the most greatest cataclysmic issues of our time,
whether it's climate change or the destabilization of democracy around the world.
We have a spiritual acceleration that we must commit to in order for us to take on these species level challenges.
And we can't do them with dominator systems dividing us left and right.
Hearing you tell that story about the shudra who is summarily decapitated in a way that then magically restores the health of the higher caste child, I wanted to share with you that I grew up under apartheid in South Africa.
And it's always the caste system as I understand it in India has always struck me as similar in that it's this explicit structural political hierarchy that demonizes the lower groups of people based purely on an accident of birth, right?
But perhaps what's unique and different about caste is that there's this spiritual or kind of metaphysical justification.
For why the hierarchy is divinely ordained, and that it's, as you said, as you talked about struggling with as a child, the sense that it's your own fault.
You must have done something terrible in your past lives in order to have manifested this destiny as someone who is on the bottom of that hierarchy.
And it makes me think about how, I don't know if you've come across this, sort of in Western New Age syncretism in which yoga is sort of contextualized, there's this appropriation of karma that basically It's almost like the good vibes only kind of aesthetic that says, you know, everything that's happening, you need to just accept as part of your karma, part of what the universe has a perfect plan for you.
You know, not only are you being guided towards enlightenment by the difficulties that are happening, and I've even seen this rationalized to talk about oppression and the Holocaust and things like that, but you're getting what you deserve.
I think that people use these terms and they don't know what cudgels they are.
You know, because there's like a kind of McDonaldization of these very deep and old and traditional words that actually have centuries of violence behind them.
And again, I very specifically use the term carceral logic because we have a conversation about policing that's going on today.
And people know that it is bad or are considering that it's bad to condemn people into endless slavery.
And I think that what people don't realize is that, you know, Caste, you know, at its core was a slave, you know, a system that enslaved millions into wretched, wretched, wretched conditions.
And that's why, you know, the caste abolitionist Jyoti Bhaifule wrote and used the term abolition because he saw so many Of the conditions that he experienced as a caste oppressed person in the experience of enslaved Africans and in the experience of abolition of their communities, he felt that there was a pathway for freedom, especially as shared communities facing that deep suffering.
So, you know, I think that, you know, when I think about people that, you know, use terms like dharma, like dharma bums, or, you know, or dharma punks, or when I think about karma, these are terms that have been used so viciously against my people.
And oftentimes we don't get the space to actually consider how violently they have been.
And in fact, you know, Duty as, you know, Dharma, when you think about a term like Dharma, duty as we understand it in Buddhism is so openly interpreted.
You know, in fact, Black Buddhists talk about, you know, our duty is really to get free.
You know, to be free from suffering is to be free from systems of exclusion.
But Dharma in the scriptural context that originated caste has so many other contexts which has to do with staying in alignment of the social order as prescribed by Brahmins.
And if you step out of that, you not only, you know, break your social compact, you're actually creating chaos in the cosmic order.
That's a huge set of consequences to deal with and that's what people are talking about in terms of the accumulation of your deeds under karma.
And so I actually struggle with using those terms and I actually really even struggled with the idea of reincarnation because of how punitively it was shared with me.
But, you know, I had a really, you know, really kind teacher who, you know, talked to me about it and I said, well, you know, I just feel ethically I cannot talk about reincarnation because of how it's weaponized against my people.
Can you give me another framework?
And, you know, she said, You know, it's your path how you're going to use this, but you know, the way I think about it is that your many lives are like an onion, and each layer is a different life, and you are co-learning across times and spaces in a way so that your soul can evolve.
And I thought that was a much more gentler framework to understand how we might be in interconnection around different parts of our soul's journey, as opposed to, you fucked up in another life, therefore you're gonna live in a fucking apartheid, I'm gonna rape and murder and pillage your labor, and fuck off if you try to organize, because guess what?
You deserved it.
And if you step out of line, you're going to break the cosmic order.
That just creates such a level of terror in anyone that listens to that, let alone people that have had to endure centuries of oppression of that.
So I just, I feel like, you know, it's just something for people to think about in terms of people who are thinking about doing as little harm as possible with their practice.
When people think about what it means to practice Metta, when people think about really trying to learn about what it means to be interconnected to all beings, Dalits are some of the beings that you would be connected to.
To integrate our experience as your own means you have to listen to some of our stories of religious abuse.
And that's hard, because in listening and integrating that, it might challenge some of your most cherished teachers, you know, your most cherished teachers and Communities, but I think that we can sustain that challenge because all we're feeling is discomfort at the point of integration.
But discomfort is just discomfort.
It's a passing state.
And I feel like there's so much more that we gain in us learning the lessons of those that have survived religious abuse that transforms all of our communities of practice than it does for us to practice as if this doesn't exist at all.
Because what we do then is create communities that are prone to predation and abuse and other sorts of bad things, which we see all the time in American yoga communities.
Discomfort as a temporary state brings us, I think, to the fact that you ground your discourse in your practice of Buddhism.
And so I wanted to note that the Buddhism that I think derives from Ambedkarite thought is very different from the forms of modern global Buddhism.
are often devoted to a kind of apolitical neoliberal project, you know, whether it's, you know, increasing worker output at Google or letting soldiers be more mindful as they use their sniper rifles.
So, these practices of non-attachment and equanimity can be easily used to justify political dissociation, and they can be used to promote emotional and moral resilience.
So how do you negotiate that part of your life and what would you advise Buddhist teachers who don't want to, you know, meditate on behalf of the state?
Well, I think that, you know, I always think of myself as a Buddhist, you know, not like a spiritual teacher, but like as a Buddhist kind of like Alex Walker or like Tina Turner.
I'm a lay practitioner who has a lot to say about the practice because I used it to free myself from spiritual abuse.
Um, but I do not necessarily claim one particular lineage because I actually got different components from particular lineages.
And that is one thing I think when you're a survivor of religious abuse, you're really afraid of joining any one dogmatic community because You never want to enter a terrain of subjugation again.
So if anything, I always feel like I was on the outside looking in before integrating those particular lessons.
But I bring that up because I always think it's so interesting because some of those first writings about socially engaged Buddhism actually forgot that Buddhism began as a socially engaged practice in a revolt against Brahmanism.
So, caste-oppressed Buddhists actually reflect one of the longest lineages of socially engaged practice in all of Buddhist, you know, history.
And, you know, and part of the reasons why there are so many different, you know, lineages is because, you know, just because Buddhism started as a revolt against Brahmanism doesn't mean it wasn't complex, doesn't mean that there weren't battles in different types of doctrines and You know, I think as, you know, one of the kind of traits of Brahmanism is that as soon as a space gets carved out for autonomy, there's an immediate attempt to appropriate, to incorporate, and bring it back into the fold of Brahmanical thinking.
And so various different traditions had those different battles and some of that had to do with, you know, do you talk about the realm of the spiritual?
And this is actually a very, you know, kind of poignant piece of the challenge is that, you know, some of those early caste abolitionist thinkers were so afraid of reintroducing spiritual components to this conversation because it's so ripe for abuse, they just said it doesn't exist.
We're not going to work there, we're just going to look at just the practical material, because anytime we bring in a superstitious frame, it creates the conditions for abuse.
So, I think that, you know, throughout the different kind of iterations of Brahmanism, and also the reason why Buddhism left the subcontinent was because there was deep political persecution of Buddhist practitioners as Brahmanism reasserted itself.
Um, is that as it traveled across Asia and, you know, began, it's all its different components, this history of the resistance of Brahmanism was, was, was lost, I think.
And, um, and I think with Dr. Ambedkar and even before him, you know, Ayodhya Das, you know, there was a return, you know, in the early 1900s of Dalits again returning back to Buddhism as a form of resistance to Brahmanism.
So within that framework, I think one thing I would ask with this practitioners who are looking to center equity and justice and integration of all peoples into their sanghas is I would ask that you incorporate de-Brahmanizing rituals as part of your creating space for healing and practice.
And We know that we've seen certain things be normalized within American sanghas, like land acknowledgements, you know, to acknowledge the violence and us being settler colonials in terms of indigenous genocide, and also acknowledgement of racial discrimination, whether it's, you know, acknowledging what happened with George Floyd or committing to, you know, non-carceral practices and dealing with community safety and using transformative justice.
And similarly, one of the things I would ask folks to do is to commit to de-Brahmanizing.
And I think you can do that in several ways.
You know, many social justice sanghas will have like an altar of different leaders that inspire them that are Buddhist and that come from radical backgrounds.
Bring in the story of Dr. Ambedkar.
That is a beautiful, beautiful story that is very inspiring in terms of the transformation for millions of Buddhists today.
I also think that you can work to commit to celebrating holidays that lift up caste-oppressed people.
So even celebrating, you know, Dalit History Month in April, Or if you have, you know, Buddhist holidays that you're celebrating, reach out to the Buddhist community of practice in your city.
And there are Buddhists that are Dalit everywhere who often rent or use other sanghas because they don't have their own spaces, but integrate them into your community conversations or interfaith practices.
And also, I would say, don't be silent as we see the unfolding tragedy that's existing in South Asia related to the rise of ethnonationalism and multiple genocides.
And I think sometimes, you know, we as Buddhists, because, you know, Buddhism gets that pass of being like the peaceful religion, the mindful religion, We forget that there was two genocides in Buddhist names in South Asia.
One in Sri Lanka with Tamil, the Tamil genocide, and most recently in Myanmar with the Rohingya people.
So we actually have to speak out deeply about the violence that is being done in our religious names.
And it can feel awkward and uncomfortable because if you are from a Buddhist practice that has bantajis or priests, you don't question that process, right?
But we have to actually question and hold accountable the violence that's done in our name.
To center survivors from those experiences, to sign letters or be part of processes that where Buddhists are also aligning with other communities to ask for accountability in genocide is so crucial.
And then of course, there is the current genocide occurring in India, which is also tremendous under Hindu ethno-nationalism.
That is a profound, profound thing to be observing and we cannot afford to be silent about it.
Well, to bring it home, I wanted to quote back to you one of the passages that stood right out because I think it will speak to our listeners and to the demographic that has gathered around this podcast in a really clear way.
You write, �One of the further ways that Brahmanism is perpetuated is the widespread belief across the West that South Asia, in particular India, is the home of ancient wisdom and mystical experience.
Under the hypnotic influence of Orientalism in the 1800s, there was a valorization of Sanskrit by renowned authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
And later in the 20th century, Aldous Huxley, J.D.
Salinger, and Joseph Campbell all reflected Hindu philosophy in their work.
The fascination led to Harvard University offering a degree in Sanskrit studies and the founding of an elite society, the Boston Brahmins.
Everyone from the Beatles to Steve Jobs to Gloria Steinem famously went on pilgrimages to India, inspiring millions of other Western seekers.
You are owning us so bad here.
This is so accurate!
Yoga, Ayurveda, Kirtan, in wanting to escape the rat race of superficial capitalist lifestyles, people have widely embraced these spiritual and somatic practices.
Terms like karma and dharma, as well as the concept of reincarnation, have become commonplace in the West.
Ideas that have been used to enslave millions of my people.
My question for you is that for the earnest non-Indian yoga practitioner who has found value in the traditions of Indian wisdom culture.
And who listens to a paragraph like this, and to many of the other things that you've said today, and feels disillusionment, feels that they might be in a kind of mourning for the loss of something that they considered to be precious, or spotless, or something that replaced or filled a gap in their lives.
People who, as you say, believed that India is the home, and I think what's implied there is kind of like a special or maybe even exclusive home of ancient wisdom and mystical experience.
What would you advise the person who feels kind of overwhelmed by the complexity of what you've presented?
Well, I would say to first take a breath and know that it's going to be okay.
There's no institution that is worth a life.
And I think that's one of the profound things that gets erased when we surrender to these flawed institutions, is that we are willing to surrender the most precious thing we have, which is each other and our own autonomy and self.
And You know, I too went through grieving.
I think everyone grieves when you first find out something that is so precious to you is flawed.
But actually, if we really believe the lessons that we're learning in many of these traditions, we know that the ego is flawed.
It has to be because it's actually not a full representation of the limitlessness of our divine beings.
We would have to assume that any interpretation that we hear from another human about this is going to be a game of telephone interpreted to that person's cultural context.
And that's why it's going to be okay.
Because all of the things that you value about your somatic practice that you've learned will not go away just because you actually ask for the practice and the teachers that have taught you that practice to be more accountable to the harm that is occurring to your fellow human.
All we're asking for is a more expansive nature of these institutions and for us to be better integrated with each other as a species.
And fundamentally, that is the purpose of all spiritual practice is for us to transcend the ego and return us to an interconnectedness with the planet and other species and each other.
So in one way, I would look at that pain as the pain of the discomfort.
But that discomfort is a door to greater awareness and unified consciousness.
So you could be sad about it, or you could just leap right into that door.
And look for that integration, because nirvana is not some blissed out place of disassociation.
It is actually a place of deep integration, where we actually are accountable and in an undivided, connective, loving place with each other.
And that's a little bit about what I was talking about with A dullet feminist metaverse.
You know, it is very unusual to have someone who's at the very bottom of this system issue a cry to say, let us be limitless.
Let us be limitless and endless in the way that we love each other, that we love each other enough to let go of these dominator systems and return back to each other.
That is a profound place to be.
And Maury, thank you so much for your time.
Oh, thank you.
And J.Beam and J. Savitri.
It's such an honor to be here.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
Your support and feedback are greatly appreciated.
