13: How women’s bodies are used to reinforce caste hierarchy

"I still remember my dad telling me that it was fine for you to love but I just wished you loved a person from the same caste. And I guess that is when I saw that they are so deeply invested in caste. Before it was happening but it was implicit - it was not clear, there were actions and things that they were saying but now these are people that are telling me that I should marry a person from the same caste," says Priya from API Chaya, who we are in conversation with for this episode of the podcast 'Caste in the USA'. 

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse from an upper-caste neighbour she considered a grandfather, Priya is not unfamiliar to the perversions of trusted relationships. The policing of lower caste communities comes naturally as part of the systemic oppression set up from back home, but takes on more complex tones in the context of dealing with gender violence.

For the South Asian community in the US, caste-specific dynamics have a huge part to play in how gender-based violence occurs and is dealt with. Pressure cooker relationships, as host Thenmozhi Soundarajan calls them, have maintained complicit silence around gender-based violence across caste.

From coercion to remain silent, threats of deportation exemplified in cases of abusive partner dependent visas, to outright dismissal of reported assault to preserve caste honour - Priya has seen it all get worse in family circles, from both personal experiences as well as her work with API Chaya.

Even as they continue to work towards opening up large conversations within the survivor power building space, it is hard to explain the connections of gender-based violence and caste to authorities in the US. Primarily accustomed to a nuclear family structure, they fail to understand the abusive power held especially in intercaste relationships. For women looking to seek financial independence, there is a need to engage with the partner as well as the state in order to attain a visa as a survivor of domestic violence. However, the threats to 'harm your family back home', coupled with a silence cultivated through the years make it nearly impossible.

"We have to re-work the entire ways in which we love each other as we move towards caste abolition, and this is only one of the ways in which we will be doing it but it is such a promising way of seeing survivors building power all around the world as we shed the violence of the Brahmanical patriarchy," concludes Thenmozhi.