The Body Remembers Caste

When caste privilege is still not enough, what does that say about the system?

This is for those who call themselves trauma-informed therapists.

Being trauma-informed is not just about using the right language in the therapy room. It’s not a certification or a label you put on your bio. It’s about how deeply you’re willing to reckon with the forces that shape trauma—inside the body, inside families, and across generations.

And caste is one of those forces.

A few weeks ago, my supervisor and friend wrote a post about caste entitlement in professional spaces, and the comments that followed were disturbing. I didn’t write that post, but I saw myself in it. I responded to some of those comments because I know how caste shows up in my life, too, as someone from a dominant caste. A Nair woman. Someone who has benefited from caste and still carries the pain of how deeply it shaped me. 

Let me tell you a story about how I got into school. Actually, let me rewind seven years before that—when my parents were trying to get my sister admitted to PSBB, one of Chennai’s most “aspirational” schools. They wanted her to go there because it had the best English education, co-curriculars, structure—all the things middle-class parents dream of for their daughters. We met all the criteria:

• Lived within 2 km of the school

• Belonged to an educated, socio-economically stable family

• Were fully willing to pay the fees

But she didn’t get in. Why?

Because she wasn’t Brahmin.

My parents had to pull strings for a pre-KG admission. They had to find people to recommend her, vouch for her. Only then did she get through. Seven years later, I got admission not because I was brilliant, not because I applied and got lucky, but because I was her sibling, and the school had a sibling policy.

Even with all our caste privilege as Nairs, even with everything else going for us, it wasn’t enough. Because we weren’t Brahmin enough. Because in certain parts of Chennai, you’re either Brahmin or "non-Brahmin."

That was my first taste of how caste doesn’t just operate at the margins.

It shapes aspiration. Access. Ease.

And it follows you.

I grew up in Ashok Nagar, a Brahmin-majority neighbourhood. I studied at PSBB. I spoke Tamil and Malayalam at home, but that wasn’t enough to make me feel cultured. Not in the ways the school defined it. The fair-skinned girls with the surnames that fit got picked for singing. For classical dance. For compèring. For everything. I watched from the sidelines.

In college, things changed. I made friends across caste lines. The warmth felt more accessible. But even then, something inside me still craved proximity to Brahmin groups. There was something about how they moved, listening to English music, socialising in certain clubs, speaking with a confidence that felt natural to them and aspirational to me.

The funniest part? I didn’t even like English music.

I didn’t fake it. I openly said I preferred Tamil or Malayalam songs. But I still wanted their friendship. Not for shared interests, but because they seemed to belong to a world I didn’t fully have access to. A world I was taught to admire.

And caste didn’t stop shaping my experience in school or college.

It followed me into my marriage, too.

I married a Nampoothiry Brahmin man. Love marriage. Equal, kind, conscious. His family never made me feel different for my caste. I never felt discriminated against. There was mutual respect from day one.

But one year into our relationship, he said something that shook me:

“I’m not so sure about marriage and why people even want to do it.”

He was going through an existential phase, trying to understand the institution itself. I knew that. But something in me snapped. I spiralled. It felt deeply personal, like he didn’t want to marry me. Even though I knew better intellectually, emotionally, it hit something raw.

It took me years to understand what that was.

You see, historically, Nampoothiry men and Nair women were in Sambandham relationships, unofficial unions where the man could come and go. These weren’t recognised as legal marriages. The children would belong to the woman’s family, and the relationship was legitimised only to the extent that it suited the man and his lineage. Over time, marriage frameworks absorbed these structures to “protect” women, but the power imbalance remained.

An archival image said to depict a Nair woman from Kerala. I don’t know her name or the year this was taken, but her presence feels like an echo of what my body still remembers.

source: oldindianphotographs.in

So when my partner expressed doubt not about me, but the institution, my body remembered. My lineage remembered. It was a visceral, ancestral fear.

Will I be left?

Will I be chosen only in private, not in the world?

Will I ever be fully claimed?

Of course, we worked through it. We did get married, two years later. But I carry that moment with tenderness now as a reminder of how ancestral memory doesn’t always speak in logic. It speaks in the body. In grief. In spirals.

And still, let me say this again;

I am caste-privileged.

I have never been asked to hide my surname.

I’ve never been told I’m “not clean enough” or “not cultured enough” to enter a space.

I’ve never been excluded from temple rituals.

I’ve never been questioned for dreaming big.

I’ve never been denied an opportunity because of my caste.

If I, with all that privilege, had to fight so hard to belong

If I had to ache for visibility even in dominant caste spaces

If my ancestral grief got activated despite centuries of upward mobility

Then what about those who are much, much more oppressed than I am?

This is why caste is not a binary. It’s not simply “privileged” vs “oppressed.”

Think of caste as a charmed circle.

• People in the very centre hold the most power.

• Then there are those in layers moving outward, closer to the margins.

• Even within dominance, there are gradations of abuse, aspiration, and exclusion.

This complexity often makes people from dominant castes say,

“But I was middle-class; I didn’t benefit from my caste.”

Here’s what’s true:

• It was despite your privilege, not the absence of it. You may not have maximised it, but unlike someone caste-oppressed, you didn’t have to fight against a system rigged to keep you out. You were swimming with the tide; others were swimming against it.

• Caste isn’t about comfort alone; it’s about proximity to power. Even when you’re struggling economically, you’re not fighting the same systemic violence that caste-oppressed folks endure.

It reminds me of early feminism, when women’s rights movements often said;

“We need to fight for our rights first; we can’t fight for LGBTQ+ rights right now.”

They didn’t yet see that true feminism isn’t just about straight women’s rights it’s about all rights.

Similarly, when dominant caste people deny the struggles of those below them on the social ladder, it’s like feminism saying queer people can wait their turn. It misses the point.

And finally, if this is how caste impacts me an upper caste woman from a fairly stable socio-economic background.

Imagine how it impacts those further away from the circle’s centre.

My body remembers ancestral wounds despite privilege.

Imagine the body of someone whose caste oppression was not just quiet exclusion, but open, generational abuse.

Even if they’ve “made it” today, their body still remembers.

Caste isn’t just history. It’s a living system of graded inequality — woven into memory, belonging, access, safety.

And if we call ourselves trauma-informed therapists, we have to understand this:

Trauma doesn’t only come from what happened to someone.

It also lives in what they’ve had to anticipate for generations, and in what others never had to think twice about.

So instead of asking whether reservation is “fair,”or whether you’ve “benefited” from your caste privilege, pause and sit with this:

• How has your body been held by invisible safety you never had to earn?

• Which ancestral advantages—education, networks, lineage—quietly travelled with you into your practice?

• Where have you felt excluded within dominance, and how does that shape your empathy for those pushed even further to the margins?

• Where in your story has the tide moved with you while others had to swim against it?

• If trauma lives in the body across generations, how might caste privilege or caste violence still be living in yours—and how does that shape the space you hold for clients?

Being trauma-informed isn’t about language or certificates. It’s about letting these questions rearrange you. Because we cannot hold space for trauma we refuse to see. And we cannot dismantle a system we’re still busy defending.

This reflection is a personal take on how caste has lived in my body and lineage—written with full awareness of the privilege I hold as a dominant-caste woman. My intention is not to universalise this experience, but to stay accountable to it, and to invite others to reflect on their own stories with the same honesty.

Caste moves through all of us, differently.Wherever you find yourself in this charmed circle—at the centre or closer to the margins—I invite you to speak, listen, and share responsibly. Because it’s only when each of us reckons with our own location that collective healing can begin.