Thenmozhi Soundararajan's parents are from a village in rural India and experienced inter-caste violence there. Her father is a doctor and her mother was the first woman from her family to get a college education. She learned from her mother that she was a Dalit while at school. She had been reading about how the Bhopal disaster affected Untouchables, asked her mother some questions and was told that she, too, came from the community. Soundararajan publicly revealed that she is a Dalit when she made a documentary film on caste and violence against women as a part of her college thesis at University of California, Berkeley. She says the decision had many consequences: while fellow Dalits secretly confided in her about their identity, she says that she also faced discrimination from almost all of the Indian professors in her campus, who refused to advise her on projects.
Professional life
Soundararajan is a filmmaker, transmedia artist and storyteller. Currently, she is the Executive Director of Equality Labs, an Ambedkarite South Asian progressive power-building organization that uses community research, cultural and political organizing, popular education and digital security to fight the oppressions of caste apartheid, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. She was also the executive director of Third World Majority, a women of color media and technology justice training and organizing institution based in Oakland, California. She is also a co-founder of the MediaJustice Network, and Third World Majority is one of the network’s national anchor organizations. In that context she has worked with over 300 community organizations across the United States. Soundararajan has used storytelling to speak about casteism within the Indian diaspora. She has worked with bassist Marvin Etizioni on her debut blues album, Broken People, which was a collection of liberation songs about people belonging to the Black and Dalit community. Her essay and a photo series about her Dalit experience in the United States was published in Outlook magazine. In 2015, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation included her in their first group of Artist as Activist fellows. She has used this fellowship to work on #DalitWomenFight, a transmedia project and activist movement. Soundararajan has been involved in the curation and creation of Dalit History Month, a radical history project. Its goal is to share Dalit historians' research, which is a deviation from many scholarly projects which have studied Dalit history without leadership or collaboration from Dalits.
