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The prestigious Vaikom Award for Social Justice will be presented this year to Thenmozhi Soundararajan, co-founder and executive director of Equality Labs, the Tamil Nadu government announced on Thursday, October 23.
Established in 2023 to honour Tamil social reformer Periyar EV Ramasamy, the Vaikom Award recognises individuals and organisations for “noteworthy devotion to causes of equality and justice,” with emphasis on anti-caste contributions. The award takes its name from the historic Vaikom Satyagraha, the landmark civil resistance for temple access for lowered castes in Kerala.
A transmedia artist, theorist, futurist, Dalit author, artist, and technologist, Thenmozhi leads one of the largest Dalit civil rights organisations, Equality Labs, advancing the power and dignity of caste-oppressed people in the United States of America and worldwide.
For over two decades, she has mobilised South Asian communities and allies to dismantle systems that were “centuries in the making,” working towards ending caste apartheid, gender-based violence, racial injustice, and religious intolerance.
She also co-founded Dalit History Month, now one of the largest participatory history initiatives globally, and co-authored the landmark report ‘Caste in the United States,’ the first document on caste discrimination in America. Its findings helped catalyse an international caste equity movement and prompted a diaspora-wide reckoning as caste-oppressed communities demanded protections from governments, corporations, and educational institutions in their new homelands.
That momentum culminated in California’s pivotal battle over SB 403, a statewide bill to add caste as a protected category. Although the bill was vetoed, the governor affirmed that caste discrimination is already prohibited under existing law, enabling caste-oppressed Californians to pursue claims without ambiguity.
As a technologist, Thenmozhi has been a leading force for tech justice, helping to found the media justice network and advancing conversations about caste bias across supply chains, algorithms, and employment practices. Through Equality Labs, she has pushed major social platforms to explicitly protect caste and has partnered with tech workers worldwide to advocate for better conditions for caste-oppressed workers. She also leads an award-winning digital security programme that has protected thousands of civil society activists globally.
On striving for caste equity
In a detailed interview to TNM, Soundararajan expanded on the trauma-informed lens of her book The Trauma of Caste, and why healing must be central to anti-caste work, especially for women and gender minorities.
“Caste is trauma, a soul wound that must be healed,” she said. Describing it as the pain of historical violence under caste apartheid, she said that we rarely view caste through a “lens of healing”.
“We rarely imagine an ‘after-caste’ scenario, where caste is not presumed to be an eternal constant. Without this horizon, the privileged are seldom asked to confront their roles in sustaining caste, or how their nervous systems have been conditioned into fragility, shame, and dysregulation that reinforce harmful policies and practices,” she explained.
Thenmozhi added that a trauma-informed lens reveals how caste binds both the oppressed and the privileged in a cycle of harm. Breaking that cycle, she explained, requires self-examination, truthful communication, and “retraining our nervous systems so we do not carry the burden of caste into the next generation”.
She stressed that this approach is particularly liberating for women and gender minorities, as it “rejects the idea that those oppressed by Brahminical patriarchy must shoulder the responsibility for ending violence and exclusion.” Instead, it calls for collective accountability and embodied awareness to release bias and discrimination.
“Brahmanism, fused with patriarchy, polices the body, what is beautiful, what it may eat, who it may love, who it may marry.” Healing, she said, begins when caste-oppressed communities “reclaim pleasure and presence in our bodies,” living as “sensuous, loving beings” free to self-determine. “These are the pathways of healing from the violence of Brahminical patriarchy—reclaiming dignity, autonomy, joy, and the right to be fully human.”
Asked about concrete pathways for holding tech companies accountable to caste-informed justice frameworks in India and beyond, Thenmozhi emphasised reforms across governance, product, data, and supply chains. “Caste equity is critical,” she said. “Many of the next billion internet users across South Asia are caste-oppressed, which makes equity not only a moral imperative but a strong business case as diverse teams build better products for diverse user bases.” She added that because caste operates “across the tech stack, supply chains, workforce, datasets, and product bias, responses must be holistic.”
She urged companies to explicitly include caste as a protected category in all anti-discrimination, harassment, vendor, and content policies. She also called for caste-aware recruiting pipelines and apprenticeships for Dalit students, stronger representation at leadership levels, and efforts to normalise inclusion by celebrating Dalit History Month as well as Ambedkar and Periyar jayanti.
She insisted that tech companies address caste bias across products, data, and governance. She urged firms to audit datasets and algorithms “in collaboration with Dalit researchers and linguists,” publish transparency reports on caste-related harms, and ensure that supply chains include “anti-caste compliance, safe grievance channels, and independent audits.”
Accountability, she added, should be built into governance by aligning corporate practices with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
“Just as caste-oppressed communities fought to de-Brahminise access to roads, water, and public spaces, we must now lead the work to de-Brahminise technology by eliminating algorithmic discrimination and preventing a new frontier of digital caste apartheid,” she said.
On why movements must interrogate themselves, she centred embodiment and somatic transformation alongside legal frameworks.
“When the body is not centred, even the strongest legal frameworks, Ambedkar’s included, cannot do their full work. Centuries of dehumanisation has trained belief and nervous systems to resist parity. Unless we transform that embodied foundation–shifting patterns of fragility, denial, and fear–those conditioned systems will continue to subvert the rule of law.”
She added that despite India’s reverence for dharmic and yogic traditions, this embodied self-reflection rarely extends to dismantling caste domination.
“It is Dalit voices, healers, and organisers who are leading the way, calling us toward healing, accountability, and repair. When we centre the body, we reclaim dignity, retrain our nervous systems for solidarity, and make equality a truth we breathe, practice, and live together.”
Thenmozhi’s book The Trauma of Caste also introduces a trauma-informed lens to transnational Dalit feminism. It was the first book by a Dalit author to win the Adult Non-Fiction Honor at the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature, given by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, as well as the South Asian Literary Association Award for Distinguished Achievement in Scholarship to the Field of South Asian Studies.
Her creative work spans music, painting, and installations. She also hosts the podcast Caste in the USA, convening diverse guests to talk about caste bias and privilege within and beyond American institutions. The next season will focus on global communities impacted by caste.
A long-time practitioner of Buddhist meditation in the lineages of Iyothee Thass and Dr BR Ambedkar, she is currently training to become one of the first Dalit women Buddhist chaplains in the United States.
‘Will continue working for self-respect’
In an extended statement, Thenmozhi placed the honour of receiving the Vaikom award on the Dravidian movement: “I am deeply honoured to receive this award from the government of Tamil Nadu, in the name and spirit of Periyar. His legacy calls us to a simple, urgent truth: it is our duty to end discrimination, whether based on caste, gender, sexual orientation, or religion, wherever we encounter it. Today, I accept this award because of the courage, power, and vision of the Dravidian movement, which has long fought to uphold the promise of our Constitution. We will continue this work until self-respect is not merely an ideal, but a lived reality for every person.”
She further said, “Whether we traveled across the kala pani or stood here in Tamil Nadu, [my parents] taught me that no one could take away our dignity. They raised me in the teachings of Periyar, Ambedkar, Jyotibai and Savitribai Phule, and so many other anti-caste reformers, reminding us that our legacy is ultimately rooted in freedom and dignity. I also accept this award on behalf of all Dalit women survivors, and on behalf of my team at Equality Labs, who have worked tirelessly to bring global attention to the injustices of caste, gender, and religious discrimination. We look forward to the day when each of us is free, because none of us is free until all of us are free from the violence of caste. Self-respect to all and let us all be thozars [comrades] in justice.”
