The Trauma of Caste

Poorva Paksha

Strange Fruit is a song most associated with Billie Holiday and is the song Billie Holiday is most associated with. It’s chilling and macabre, telling of the lynching of black Americans, hanged by their necks from trees across the American South – their murdered, mutilated bodies hanging like ‘strange fruit’. Lady Day began singing it in 1939, and her rendition helped elevate the song to its current status, what Time magazine has anointed ‘the greatest song of the 20th century’. In her autobiography, Billie Holiday wrote that Strange Fruit reminded her of her father, who died at only 39, after being denied medical treatment at a ‘whites only’ hospital in the South.

‘Southern trees bear a strange fruit/

Blood on the leaves and blood at
the root/

Black bodies swinging in the
southern breeze/

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.’

Nina Simone’s 1965 version, unlike Holiday’s jazzy rendition, is minimalistic but emotes deep grief. Released in the throes of the Civil Rights movement, Simone’s gut-wrenching interpretation helped further elevate the song’s status. As with her other songs of the era, Simone drew attention to the horrors of systemic racial discrimination, exposing its victims to arbitrary but inevitable violence from every direction.

‘Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck/

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck/

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop/

Here is a strange and bitter crop.’

There is a book about to be published by Penguin India, with moments every bit as bone-chilling as hearing Strange Fruit sung by the likes of Billie Holiday or Nina Simone. It is Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s 'The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition'.

Soundararajan might be known to you through her organisation Equality Labs, run by Dalit Americans such as herself, with the goal of ending caste -and gender-based violence, by means of community research, public education, power building, art, technology and social media. I first encountered her through her popular twitter handle @DalitDiva, and then again when the news broke out internationally in April 2022 about Google rescinding her invitation to speak about caste during Dalit History Month. Soundararajan has convincingly exposed the heady presence of Brahminism in American big-tech companies, and in retaliation gets dubbed as ‘Hindu-phobic’ or ‘anti-Hindu’ by savarna Indian Americans and NRIs there.

But her book is about none of this per se. It is far more sweeping. Its accessible but graceful narrative travels seamlessly from macro issues – such as the presence and practice of caste in the world’s great religions; or, the United Nations or other global initiatives recognising caste discrimination – to meso-issues -- such as discussions of caste data, and atrocities, on the Indian subcontinent and across South Asia – to micro issues, including riveting accounts of her own personal experiences of caste-caused violence, psychological and physical.

But this is not exclusively a book about violence, discrimination, exclusion, and injustice. It is also just as focused upon hope, and even more so, healing.

Toward the goal of healing, or the end of suffering, Soundararajan, a practicing Buddhist, models her book on the four noble truths. The truth about the existence of suffering (her first chapter, or ‘Meditation I: The Existence of Caste’); the truth about the cause of suffering (her second chapter, ‘Meditation II: The Source of Caste’); the truth about the end of suffering (her third chapter, ‘Meditation III: From Wounds to Liberation’); and, the truth about the path to end suffering (her fourth chapter, ‘Meditation IV: The End of Caste’). Though attuned to healing, the author is not overly optimistic or glib. Her own personal experiences testify to the seemingly insuperable difficulties on the path forward.

Opening her third Meditation, Soundararajan writes: “In 2015, I travelled to the Indian countryside as part of a fact-finding mission in the wake of an atrocity where members of a Dalit family had been cut into pieces and scattered in the fields. Looking out over the landscape…Billie Holiday’s song ‘Strange Fruit’ came to mind…The same thing happens in India. There is as much Dalit blood and flesh fertilizing those fields as anything else”.

Like Strange Fruit, Soundararajan’s The Trauma of Caste is art that evokes compassion and understanding through the pain. Read it. Hear it. You will be moved.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South/

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth/

Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh/

Then the sudden smell of
burning flesh.