Contemporary Authors

• Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India ( memoir) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2017

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052857 Gidla, Sujatha, 1963- author. Ants among elephants : an untouchable family and the making of modern India / Sujatha Gidla. First edition. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2017] 306 pages ; 24 cm DS422.C3 G54 2017 ISBN: 9780865478114 (hardback)

• MacMillan - https://us.macmillan.com/author/sujathagidla/

  Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable in Andhra Pradesh, India. She studied physics at the Regional Engineering College, Warangal. The author of Ants Among the Elephants, her writing has appeared in The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. She lives in New York and works as a conductor on the subway.

Ants Among Elephants
Sujatha Gidla and Priscilla Kipp
BookPage.
(Aug. 2017): p26. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
The sheer immensity of India--its history, geography, politics and peoples--would be hard to condense under any circumstances, but author Sujatha Gidla, niece of the communist revolutionary hero and poet Satyamurthy, brilliantly narrows the scope by explaining the tumultuous events of 20th-century India through her own family's strife-ridden lives. The result is Ants Among Elephants, an intense exploration of India's caste system in all of its complexities, and the impact it continues to have in modern India.
Born an untouchable in a slum of Andhra Pradesh, Gidla explains that the role of her caste is "to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy." Mingling with those not in her caste is forbidden, and doing so can result in punishment. Untouchables live highly restricted lives, and their caste status affects nearly every aspect of their existence. When, at the age of 26, Gidla moves to America, "where people know only skin color," she realizes that her caste is now invisible and "my stories, my family's stories, are not stories of shame."
The lives of Gidla's uncles and parents convulsed as their country heaved with the changing times. Sweeping through it all with a broad but enlightening brush, Gidla pauses her tale to explore moments in time with vivid, grim details about the cruelties and injustices inflicted on her caste. Her father was forced to leave his starving children in order to support them, while her mother overcame prejudices to earn advanced degrees, only to become a teacher unable to hold a job. Satyamurthy inspired Gidla's own activism before barely escaping with his life. Today Gidla works as a subway conductor in New York, telling these stories to ensure they will continue to matter.
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$28, 320 pages
ISBN 9780865478114 eBook available MEMOIR
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gidla, Sujatha, and Priscilla Kipp. "Ants Among Elephants." BookPage, Aug. 2017, p. 26.
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The lowest caste; Dalits in India
The Economist.
424.9051 (July 29, 2017): p72(US). From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. By Sujatha Gidla. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages.
ONE in six Indians is a Dalit, which means "oppressed" in Sanskrit. That is to say, 200m Indians belong to a community deemed so impure by the scriptures that they are placed outside the hierarchical Hindu caste system and are commonly called "untouchable". Upper-caste Hindus traditionally treated untouchables as agents of pollution. To come into contact with them was to be defiled, they believed. Indian villages depended on untouchables to provide field labour and clear away human waste. Yet untouchables were excluded from village life. They could not--and often still cannot--enter Hindu temples, draw water from common wells, touch caste Hindus or even live inside the village. Punishments for breaching caste boundaries are severe.
Many untouchables, lured by Western missionaries, embraced Christianity. But they remained poor and socially ostracised. Caste, far from being purged, became a characteristic of Indian Christianity and Buddhism. Indeed, no religion in India was able fully to transcend the social divisions entrenched by Hinduism. Consequently, almost every religion in India cultivated its own caste system. Dalits, regardless of their religion, were expected at all times to appease caste Hindus by acting out their lowly status. Every aspect of their demeanour, from posture to speech, had to be modulated to convey unstinting subservience to the upper castes.
As a young girl, in Andhra Pradesh, Sujatha Gidla remembers adult members of her educated Christian untouchable family "scrambling to their feet" whenever a Hindu materialised before them. India's constitution, drafted in 1947 by B.R. Ambedkar, a formidably educated Dalit lawyer, outlawed caste-based discrimination and made provisions for the advancement of untouchables through affirmative action. "Ants Among Elephants", Ms Gidla's stirring memoir, chronicles her family's experience of the contest between modern India's civilising aspirations and the savagery of a decaying but persistent old India.
Ms Gidla's grandfather had been educated by Canadian missionaries. But when driven from his village on account of his untouchability, he enlisted in the British Indian Army and in the early 1940s was dispatched to Iraq. The author vividly reconstructs the early lives of the children her grandfather left behind. They grew up against the backdrop of the nationalist clamour for freedom. Satyamurthy, the eldest son, welcomed India's independence from Britain. But his belief in democracy was short-lived. Satyamurthy was a brilliant but restless man. In his college library he discovered Telugu poetry, which was known for its rousing and romantic qualities. He became a propagandist for communists, venerated Chairman Mao and yearned for revolution.
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In telling Satyamurthy's story, Ms Gidla recounts the history of India from the viewpoint of the very bottom of society. Satyamurthy, fully radicalised by middle age, disappeared into the dense jungles of central India. From there he co-directed an armed insurgency aimed at overthrowing the Indian state. Eventually he learned that his upper-caste Maoist comrades had all along been uncomfortable at being led by an untouchable. He was expelled when he raised the issue.
Ms Gidla at times devotes pages to domestic squabbles, but she is also capable of hauntingly evocative images. Consider her description of the final parting of Satyamurthy and his wife Maniamma: "She came to see him off at the station. As the train pulled away, she stood under a lamp in a blue sari with the flowers he'd bought her in her hair. Under the dim light she waved to him with a smile on her lips".
Satyamurthy is the main subject of this book. But it is Ms Gidla's mother (and Satyamurthy's younger sister), Manjula, who is the true heroine of the story. She faced discrimination on two counts: caste and sex. Yet she put herself through university, put up with a repressive husband, became a lecturer and brought up three children. Satyamurthy, having retreated into the jungle, returned with little to show for his years of violent campaigns. The family he left behind, enduring hardships but nonetheless engaging with the world around them, inched forward. The Gidla family now includes professionals trained at India's finest public institutions (the author was a research associate at the acclaimed Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the Indian equivalent of Caltech; her sister was a medical student.)
Ms Gidla herself, having once been arrested and tortured by the Indian police for taking part in student politics, disavows her uncle's methods in the book's epilogue. She spent years at the Bank of New York, but was laid off during the financial crisis and now works as a conductor on the New York subway. "Ants Among Elephants" is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir. It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new writer.
Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. By Sujatha Gidla.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The lowest caste; Dalits in India." The Economist, 29 July 2017, p. 72(US). PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499366897/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3c111323. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018.
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Gidla, Sujatha: ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gidla, Sujatha ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 7, 18 ISBN: 978-0-86547-811-4
Firsthand account of the lives of people categorized as the lowest of the low in India's caste system.Trained as a physicist, the daughter of teachers, Gidla is nonetheless an untouchable, which she describes as something like the racism African-Americans are forced to endure; though it is not built on identifiable markers such as skin color, it is nonetheless a pervasive indignity. "Because your life is your caste," she writes, "your caste is your life." Yet, as her narrative demonstrates, it is possible to slip around the caste system by becoming something even more untouchable than an untouchable: namely, an outlaw, and in the case of Gidla's uncle Satyamurthy, the founder of "a Maoist guerrilla group recently declared by the government to be the single greatest threat to India's security." Charming and clever, SM, as he is known, is still committed to revolution even in old age, given to disappearing in the jungle to fight and organize. Another uncle, who also figures in the author's account, escaped from the weight of untouchability with the help of alcohol, which felled him before he could fully contribute his memories to her narrative. That searching family history reaches back into a past in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where, even in the 1800s, her ancestors were living as nomads who "worshipped their own tribal goddesses and had little to do with society outside the forest where they lived." When enfolded by caste society, though without caste themselves, they became untouchable, meaning, literally, that any contact would defile even the lowest-caste Hindu. That system of belief, writes Gidla, affected every aspect of their lives, determining where they could live and how they could work, so much so that even in his revolutionary movement, SM had to field questions of caste at every turn. Students of civil rights activism and South Asian societies will find much of value in Gidla's far-ranging narrative, dense with detail and anecdote.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gidla, Sujatha: ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934084/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=9c510028. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018.
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Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable
Family and the Making of Modern India
Diego Baez
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p42. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. By Sujatha Gidla. July 2017.320p. Farrar, $28 (9780865478114). 954.
In this compelling, immersive portrait of India, beginning just before independence in 1947, the author shares her family's personal stories, focusing closely on her uncle Satyam, who became a famous poet, political agitator, and influential Communist Party member. Gidla explores the explosive nexus of ethnic, religious, and nationalist energies that converged across the country, from her small village community of converted Christians to the large rallies of Communist supporters, 10,000 strong. The fast-paced, often-intense action takes place in captivating, fluid prose that retains an evocative vocabulary from Gidla's native Telugu language, such as when "the dora sent his goondas to round up the sangbam leaders and drag them to his gadi, where they were tortured." Just as fascinating as the stories she tells of her family members is the life of the storyteller herself: born into the untouchable social class, Gidla obtained a college education and moved to New York City, where she now works as a subway conductor. At once intimate and ambitious, Gidla's book succeeds in placing the nuances of memoir within a grand historical context.--Diego Baez
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baez, Diego. "Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India."
Booklist, June 2017, p. 42. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582654 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=76421d8d. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018.
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Ants Among Elephants: An
Untouchable Family and the Making of
Modern India
Publishers Weekly.
264.21 (May 22, 2017): p86. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India Sujatha Gidla. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-0-86547-811-4
In this brilliant debut, Gidla documents the story of her resilient family and India's modern political history. Gidla grew up in India as an untouchable, the lowest category in India's caste system, and now works as a subway conductor in New York City. In this epic, she shares intimate stories of her uncle Satyam, a revolutionary poet and steadfast communist; her uncle Carey, a hapless yet ardent supporter of Satyam; and her mother Manjula, the core of the family's strength. Her uncle Satyam was a political organizer within the movement that won its demand for statehood for Andhra Pradesh from former president Nehru. Gidla eloquently weaves together her family narratives with Indian politics, specifically focusing on the practices and consequences of caste inequality. The book is also a fascinating chronicle of the corruption within and political battles between India's Congress Party and its Communist Party. Gidla is a smart and deeply sympathetic narrator who tells the lesser known history of India's modern communist movement. The book never flags, whether covering Satyam's political awakening as a young and poor bohemian or Manjula's rocky marriage to a mercurial and violent man. Gidla writes about the heavy topics of poverty, caste and gender inequality, and political corruption with grace and wit. Gidla's work is an essential contribution to contemporary Indian literature. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India." Publishers
Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 86. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099099 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=12b45d4e. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018.
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Briefly Noted
Andrea Denhoed
The New Yorker.
93.38 (Nov. 27, 2017): p73. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
Ants Among Elephants, by Sujatha Gidla (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). "Your life is your caste, your caste is your life," Gidla writes, in this memoir of her family's existence as untouchables in India. Her narrative centers on her uncle Satyam, a poet and a Maoist revolutionary, who leads a life of unwavering resistance, acting in political theatre productions, facilitating intercaste marriages, and organizing armed insurrections. Despite being elderly when Gidla tries to record his stories, Satyam often vanishes to join guerrilla fighters. His feats of activism and sacrifice run parallel to blind selfishness: he has always depended on others, particularly women, to do everything for him, even clipping his nails. Gidla examines how oppression drives the oppressed to exploit those who are even more vulnerable.
Oriana Fallaci, by Cristina De Stefano, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss (Other Press). Fallaci, one of Italy's most famous and feared journalists, died in 2006, leaving an adventurous body of work. This engrossing biography portrays a writer who, in her hunger for action and in her autobiographical style of reportage, always thrust herself into a story. Fallaci lived many lives: an adolescent anti-Fascist partisan; an intrepid correspondent, who was gravely injured during Mexico's Dirty War; and, late in life, a vehement Islamophobic and anti-immigrant voice. She drew on inexhaustible reserves of boldness and intensity to establish herself in the boys' club of international journalism. "Subservience is a mortal sin," she once said.
Smile, by Roddy Doyle (Viking). Victor Forde was once a Dublin music journalist, but, as this novel opens, his life has emptied. He spends his time alone in the pub, scrolling through his estranged wife's Facebook page. When a stranger approaches him and says that he knows exactly who Victor is, a slow, menacing memory game begins. Victor recalls his childhood, including abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers; his romance with a celebrity chef; the book he has failed, repeatedly, to write. His attempts to reckon with his history leave him both enlightened and permanently damaged. In contrast to the manic colloquial energy of Doyle's early work, this novel, his eleventh, feels moody and spare-a meditation on how wisdom wounds.
The Ruined House, by Ruby Namdar, translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin (Harper). Andrew Cohen, the protagonist of this dAaAaAeA@but nove is a star professor at N.Y.U. with a home life enriched by saintly women-clever daughters, a generous ex-wife, a charming young girlfriend. In chapters dated according to both the Gregorian and the Hebrew calendars, he begins
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to experience frequent, graphic visions of ruin and carnage. The narrative, which culminates in the September 11th attacks, oscillates violently between first person and third, past and present tense, New York's daily rhythms and the destruction of Jerusalem's Holy Temple. Namdar aims to show a complacent, secular life rocked by the apocalyptic burden of historical trauma, yet the extent of Andrew's transformation is ultimately unclear.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Denhoed, Andrea. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 73. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518289074/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=289de8f7. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018.
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'Ants Among Elephants' offers a
window into the complexities of India
James Norton
The Christian Science Monitor.
(July 24, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: James Norton
It should go without saying that India is a complicated place, a churning cauldron of languages, ethnicities, castes, and religions bubbling atop and throughout one another in a perplexing mass that we call, for the sake of convenience, a "nation." But to many Western readers, the story of India begins and ends with Gandhi's campaign against the British, followed (for those who were paying attention) by the bloody events of Partition in 1947.
The gift given to us by the new memoir/history book Ants Among Elephants is the opportunity to see post-independence India through the eyes of its untouchables, Christian converts, and the Maoist rebels known as Naxalites. It's difficult to fully conceive of the privilege and power of the caste system from a foreigner's perspective; from the viewpoint of people so low on the system that they stand outside of its levels, it's a mesmerizing horror to behold, and author Sujatha Gidla spares no detail.
The book revolves around two poles: Gidla's mother, Manjula, who struggles to raise children amid conditions of utmost poverty and political chaos, and her uncle, Satyam, who dedicates his life to class struggle on behalf of the untouchables and common laborers of Andhra Pradesh, a coastal state in southeastern India.
Manjula's life is marked by intense professional struggle to find work as a teacher, magnified by her non-caste status, and tremendous personal struggle against her husband and his sometimes cruel family. Satyam willingly sacrifices what could have been a comfortable career as a lecturer and poet in order to fight an idealistic war against the landlords and police who enforce some of India's cruelest inequalities.
With her luminous command of fine details, Gidla manages a difficult and admirable task: she takes a tremendously personal memoir and renders it with such clarity that it tells the broader story of a place and an era. In her anecdotes of discrimination, malnourishment, and extra- judicial executions, she brings readers into a world of discrimination and upheaval.
This is a story that could have easily collapsed under its own weight. "Ants Among Elephants" is a narrative swimming in revolutionary groups that splinter and splinter again, and suffused with arguments about ideology and caste that will seem arcane to many Western readers.
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But the humanity that Gidla gives to her subjects - many of whom are her own flesh and blood - keeps the book from sinking into a mire. Instead, the reader is given sharply observed fragments taken from life, observed and rendered with a gimlet eye.
Here is Gidla recounting how the lowest of low caste workers, the pakis (manual scavengers of human waste), viewed the presence of a loud movie theater in their run-down neighborhood:
The Gudivada pakis loved having a noisy cinema hall right beside their homes. From outside its walls they could enjoy the music and dialogue all day and all night. And they befriended the usher, who when the hall was not full would let them in to sit for free in the floor class (that is, on the bare floor - the cheapest class of seating in Indian theaters.) By the first or second week of a movie's run, every paki in Gudivada could recite all its dialogue word for word, with every nuance in tone, and sing all the songs.
And her account of the conclusion of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's 1951 visit to Guntur in Andhra Pradesh:
As the train pulled out, Nehru made a show of waving goodbye to his supporters from an open door. Waiting at the side of the track as the prime minister's car was passing, Satyam saw his chance. He darted forward to grab Nehru's arm and pull him down. The old man withdrew his hands with a look of utter terror and disappeared into the car.
"Ants Among Elephants" has a loose, sometimes rambling feel to it and there are moments where the author's clarity of memory and command of long-gone conversations taxes belief. But suffused within its folds are many thrilling and heartbreaking moments, and the book as a whole is a window into not just the heart of India, but also the elemental nature of prejudice and class struggle anywhere in the world.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Norton, James. "'Ants Among Elephants' offers a window into the complexities of India."
Christian Science Monitor, 24 July 2017. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A499167017/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c4dfa6de. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018.
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Gidla, Sujatha, and Priscilla Kipp. "Ants Among Elephants." BookPage, Aug. 2017, p. 26. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499345401/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=988edfa6. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018. "The lowest caste; Dalits in India." The Economist, 29 July 2017, p. 72(US). Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499366897/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3c111323. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018. "Gidla, Sujatha: ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934084/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=9c510028. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018. Baez, Diego. "Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India." Booklist, June 2017, p. 42. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582654/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=76421d8d. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018. "Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India." Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 86. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099099/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=12b45d4e. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018. Denhoed, Andrea. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 73. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518289074/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=289de8f7. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018. Norton, James. "'Ants Among Elephants' offers a window into the complexities of India." Christian Science Monitor, 24 July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499167017/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c4dfa6de. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018.

• BBC News
  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40702242
  Word count: 1229

  The defiance of an 'untouchable' New York subway worker

  25 July 2017

  Image caption Gidla was the first Indian woman to be employed as a conductor on the New York City Subway

  The memoir of an Indian woman who was born a so-called untouchable and now works as a conductor on the New York City Subway has been hailed by critics for its unflinching account of caste and family in India. Journalist Sudha G Tilak spoke to Sujatha Gidla about her life story and how it became Ants Among Elephants.

  In Sanskrit, the main language used by scholars in ancient India and sometimes referred to as the language of gods, her first name means one of noble birth.

  The irony is laid bare by Sujatha Gidla whose recent memoir speaks of her life and her family and the plight of 300 million Dalits ("oppressed" in Sanskrit), formerly known as untouchables in India.

  An expressive personal examination of her life, her parents, especially her mother, grandparents and Satyamurthy, a Maoist uncle who hoped revolution would help improve the caste discrimination his people suffered, Ants Among Elephants has quickly become the toast of critics and readers in America.

  What is India's caste system?

  Why are Dalits in Narendra Modi's India angry?
  India's Dalits still fighting untouchability

  The New York Times said the "unsentimental, deeply poignant book" gives "readers an unsettling and visceral understanding of how discrimination, segregation and stereotypes have endured throughout the second half of the 20th Century and today".

  Reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that Gidla's family stories reveal how "ancient prejudices persist in contemporary India, and how those prejudices are being challenged by the disenfranchised".

  The Minneapolis Star Tribune described the book as the "boisterous life of an Indian family that fought the caste system".

  "Gidla is our Virgil into the world of the untouchables and their acts of defiance; not just as an observer, but as a participant," wrote reviewer Peter Lewis.

  "She is bitten by the revolutionary bug, and bitten hard: arrested by the Indian authorities, tortured, left to rot, released. She has been party to the heights and the depths of living a revolution."
  Image caption Sujatha Gidla with her brother, Abraham

  Michael D Langan, a culture critic for NBC-2.com, wrote that Gidla breaks away her "indomitable soul" and tells her family stories, adding: "They are not stories of shame, but of grace."

  Gidla's story is one of personal struggle and a certain freedom she has found in America today.

  She writes that caste is an accursed state in India, especially for Dalits: "Your life is your caste, your caste is your life."

  With her memoir, Gidla joins the ranks of India's many Dalit women who are telling stories to be heard and counted in a system that seeks to keep them down.

  Gidla hails from the Dalit community of Kazipet, a small town in southern Telangana state.
  Unflinching look

  The 53-year-old subway conductor has been luckier than most Dalits back home, women especially, who suffer unspeakable cruelty, are employed in menial jobs including cleaning of human excreta and are segregated by their communities.

  Unlike most of her lot, her family was "middle class", thanks to the help of Canadian missionaries in her region who aided in education and offered them religion. Her family was thus Christian and benefited with education. Her parents held jobs as college teachers.

  Gidla says that proselytization didn't help her lot. "Christians, untouchables - it came to the same thing. All Christians in India were untouchable. I knew no Christian who did not turn servile in the presence of a Hindu."

  The book chronicles unflinchingly the caste slurs and segregation Gidla and Dalits like her have to endure in India.

  Gidla lists how she and other Dalits are humiliated in India by other castes.

  They are forced to eat from separate plates and glasses in eateries; barred from the community's main source of drinking water; allowed to ride a bicycle or wear footwear only in segregated areas; rejected in love and denied opportunities. She recalls her hurt when a junior school classmate refused to touch the sweet she offered. Things like this are constant reminders to Dalits of their status as social outcastes.

  Since her teens Gidla was spurred to rebel with her uncle, the rebel Telugu language poet Shivasagar, setting an example. His call to join the Communists and later the guerrilla movement of the region demanding social justice held appeal for the young Gidla.
  'Culture of protest'

  Gidla admits that she has had it better than many Dalit students who are "driven to suicide" despite securing education under affirmative practices She was able to study physics in an engineering college in south India. She also joined India's top and most sought-after engineering school, the Indian Institute of technology (IIT), as a researcher in applied physics.

  In Madras (now Chennai) she found most of her classmates clearing the tests to study further abroad.

  "For me, what was appealing was the idea of America, especially Bob Dylan's music, the culture of protest, and the draw of joining a society where debates on rights and equality could be articulated," she told the BBC.

  She moved to America when she was 26.
  Image copyright AFP
  Image caption There are some 300 million Dalits in India

  There, she says, she faced racism. And caste was right here too. She says she found "petty caste discrimination" among the Indian community.

  Yet life was much more liberating. As she says: "If you are educated like me, if you don't seem like a typical untouchable, then you have a choice."

  Her siblings, too, have left their life behind in India to find livelihoods and build families. Her sister is a physician in America and her brother is an engineer in Canada.

  Writing the book has almost been a family affair as well, with her mother who was "involved in this book as it is her story too" and her young niece Anagha who wanted to design the book.
  'Hindu conductor'

  After she was laid off from her bank job in 2009, Gidla took up the job at the New York subway. She was the first Indian woman to be employed as a conductor on one of the busiest mass transit systems in the world.

  In her job she is often identified as "that Hindu conductor", she says.

  She is "a novelty", she says, to fellow Indian commuters. And if she hears an Indian language she is familiar with, especially the south Indian language Telugu, she calls out a greeting and watches them in glee "as they do a double take" and smile back.

  In America, writes Gilda, "people know only my skin colour, not birth status".

  "One time in a bar in Atlanta I told a guy I was untouchable, and he said, 'Oh, but you're so touchable'."

  Sudha G Tilak is a Delhi-based journalist

• Financial Times
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  Word count: 898

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  Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla — ‘your caste is your life’
  A vivid family memoir that catalogues the injustices endured by India’s Dalits

  Save to myFT

  Nilanjana Roy
  September 15, 2017
  0

  It was only when Sujatha Gidla left India at age 26 and moved to the US that she realised her family’s stories were not sources of shame. Lives such as theirs were branded “untouchable”, the derogatory term for Dalits that Gidla reclaims. In her gripping, often wrenching memoir Ants Among Elephants, she redeems the value of these memories as she explores the unforgettable histories of her mother, her uncles and other members of her family against the broader backdrop of modern India.

  Gidla grew up in the untouchable slum of Elwin Peta in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh. “When you are surrounded by so much misery, you don’t see it as anything extraordinary,” she writes. It took extreme poverty to shock her, but being untouchable was part of life: “In your own town or village, everyone already knows your caste; there is no escaping it.”

  Caste cannot be told from skin colour, but it can be discerned from family names, from where you live and a thousand other clues. To tell the truth about her caste would invite ostracism, ridicule, harassment. To lie was to risk constant exposure. “You cannot tell them your stories, your family’s stories. You cannot tell them about your life. It would reveal your caste. Because your caste is your life, your life is your caste.”

  It was like this for her across India, from Andhra Pradesh to Punjab, Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur, Kolkata. Discrimination, exclusion and shaming are normalised, even today, by ritual practices that massage caste distinctions into every aspect of living. These rules governed what Gidla’s family and other untouchables could eat, where and how they could live, what work they would do, whom they could marry, befriend or speak to. They had access to education — Canadian missionaries ran a school, and Gidla became an engineering student — but degrees provide no escape from the prisons of caste.

  In India, Gidla was influenced by tales of her uncle, the Dalit revolutionary, poet and Naxalite leader KG Satyamurthy, who was like a cinema hero to her. At 14, she was a radical; by the age of 16, she had joined the People’s War Group, which pledged to wage armed struggle; and as a college student, she was imprisoned and tortured for some months. She finished her physics degree at Warangal with tuberculosis, under police surveillance, and then studied at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. There she learnt that even high-minded revolutionaries struggle with caste and gender equality, haunted by ancient prejudices.

  In the US, Gidla crafted another life, working as a subway conductor, taking back her life story and her family’s histories until she could write them with authority and agency. Ants Among Elephants follows the braided lives of Gidla’s mother and uncles, the three siblings so inseparable that they are simply “Satyam-Carey-Manjula”. The sweep and ambition of Gidla’s writing is astonishing — this is a stunning deep dive into pre-and-post independence India.

  “A different world / A different world is calling us,” her uncle Satyam sings with others before 1947. But when independence is granted, another boy asks him: “Do you think this independence is for people like you and me?” Gidla deftly guides readers through the maze of communist struggles and bloody rebellions against oppressive landholding practices, though the detail might occasionally feel overwhelming for those unfamiliar with India.

  Satyam is a towering character. A poet who survives the stab delivered by an early love affair with Flora, who rejects him because she comes from a higher caste; an accomplished revolutionary who was so pampered by his family that he cannot fetch himself a glass of water and must be shaved by others; a man legendary for his conscience, and also his flaws.

  Her other uncle, Carey, has a more painful life. The life of her mother, Manjula, is brutal in the deprivations and neglect she suffers, uplifting in the spirit that she demonstrates. The honesty with which Gidla shines the light on her own family is rare in Indian writing.

  Gidla spent years on her research and interviews. Recovering the lives of her ancestors was hardly easy: obsession drove her. Ants Among Elephants is resonant with “stories worth telling, stories worth writing down” — one of the most significant, and haunting, books about India you’ll read.

  Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, by Sujatha Gidla, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, RRP$28, 320 pages

  Nilanjana Roy is author of ‘The Wildings’ and ‘The Hundred Names of Darkness’ (Pushkin Press)

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/books/ants-among-elephants-a-memoir-about-the-persistence-of-caste.html
  Word count: 1041

  ‘Ants Among Elephants,’ a Memoir About the Persistence of Caste

  Books of The Times

  By MICHIKO KAKUTANI JULY 17, 2017
  Photo
  Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

  ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS
  An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
  By Sujatha Gidla
  306 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $28.

  In this unsentimental, deeply poignant book, Sujatha Gidla gives us stories of her family and friends in India — stories she had thought of as “just life,” until she moved to America at the age of 26 and realized that the “terrible reality of caste” did not determine one’s identity in other countries, that being born “an untouchable” did not entail the sort of ritualized restrictions and indignities she took for granted at home.

  Although foreigners may assume that the momentous changes sweeping across India — education, economic growth and a technological boom — have blunted, if not erased, ancient caste prejudices, “Ants Among Elephants” gives readers an unsettling and visceral understanding of how discrimination, segregation and stereotypes have endured throughout the second half of the 20th century and today.

  “In Indian villages and towns,” Gidla writes, “everyone knows everyone else. Each caste has its own special role and its own place to live. The Brahmins (who perform priestly functions), the potters, the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the washer people and so on — they each have their own separate place to live within the village. The untouchables, whose special role — whose hereditary duty — is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils.”
  Continue reading the main story

  Gidla’s family was educated by Canadian missionaries. Her parents were college lecturers, and she attended the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, where she became a research associate in the department of applied physics, working on a project funded by the Indian Space Research Organization. Despite their education, she and her family were daily subjected to reminders of their caste status, and the author found herself thinking, incessantly, about the relation between religion and caste, between caste and social status, social status and wealth.
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  Her precocious mother, Manjula, struggled in school with the poor grades she received from one professor, who realized that “she was poor and untouchable” and reacted with disgust. She was also rejected from — or harassed at — teaching posts for similar reasons. Gidla’s uncle Satyamurthy (also known as Satyam) felt himself “an ant among elephants” in college, and was cruelly dumped by a well-to-do young woman named Flora, who had started a flirtation with him, only to announce: “We are brahmins. You are have-nots, we are haves. You are a Communist. My father is for Congress. How in the world can there be anything between us?” He realized that life was not like the movies so popular after Independence, in which “the rebellious daughters of rich, evil men” fall “in love with a champion of the poor.”

  An accomplished poet, Satyam did, in fact, become a champion of the poor, though an oddly spoiled one, who had followers do those things he “wouldn’t do for himself: shaving his chin, clipping his nails,” carrying his things. In the 1970s, he organized a Maoist guerrilla group, aiming, Gidla writes, “to liberate the countryside village by village, driving off the landlords and gathering forces to ultimately encircle the cities and capture state power.”

  Although Gidla’s account of her uncle’s political activities — from his student days through his life in the Communist underground — can grow tangled for the reader unfamiliar with Indian politics, she writes with quiet, fierce conviction, zooming in to give us sharply drawn, Dickensian portraits of relatives, friends and acquaintances, and zooming out to give us snapshots of entire villages, towns and cities.
  Photo
  Sujatha Gidla Credit Nancy Crampton

  Gidla, who now works as a conductor on the New York City subway, conveys the strain of living in the sort of abject poverty she knew as a child, where some neighbors were skeletal from hunger, and an apple was a precious Christmas treat. She chronicles the horrifying violence that could break out between the police and Maoist rebels, and among local hooligans, hired at election time to intimidate voters. And she captures the struggles of women like her mother to pursue careers in the face of caste and misogynist bias, while raising children and helping to support, in her case, as many as two dozen relatives.

  When asked about caste — and in India, she says, “you cannot avoid this question” — Gidla writes that an “untouchable” like herself has a choice: “You can tell the truth and be ostracized, ridiculed, harassed,” or “you can lie.” If people believe your lie, she goes on, “you cannot tell them your stories, your family’s stories. You cannot tell them about your life. It would reveal your caste. Because your life is your caste, your caste is your life.”

  In these pages, she has told those family stories and, in doing so, the story of how ancient prejudices persist in contemporary India, and how those prejudices are being challenged by the disenfranchised.

  Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

  A version of this review appears in print on July 18, 2017, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Everyone Knows Your Caste. Today's Paper|Subscribe

• Medium- Conversations with Tyler
  https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/sujatha-gidla-ants-among-elephants-tyler-cowen-bd11b423ba91
  Word count: 11074

  Ep. 30: Sujatha Gidla on being an Ant amongst the Elephants
  Subscribe: Apple Podcasts / SoundCloud / RSS

  Sujatha Gidla was an untouchable in India, but moved to the United States at the age of 26 and is now the first Indian woman to be employed as a conductor on the New York City Subway. In her memoir Ants Among Elephants, she explores the antiquities of her mother, her uncles, and other members of her family against modern India’s landscape. Through this book she redeemed the value of her family’s memories, understanding her family’s stories were not those of shame, but did reveal to the world the truth of India and its caste system.

  During her conversation with Tyler, they discuss the nature and persistence of caste, gender issues in India, her New York City lifestyle, religion, living in America versus living in India, Bob Dylan and Dalit music, American identity politics, the nature of Marxism, and why she left her job at the Bank of New York to become a New York City Subway conductor.

  Listen to the full conversation

  Read the full transcript

  TYLER COWEN: I’m honored here to be chatting with Sujatha. In my view, her book, Ants Among Elephants, is one of the most important of this year.

  Let me start with a simple question of definition. Define for us all just very quickly, Dalits, untouchables, and Scheduled Caste.

  SUJATHA GIDLA: And Harijan. All these words are words for untouchable, depending on the political era. Dalit is the latest politically correct term for untouchable, which is also accepted by untouchables.

  COWEN: Is it correct to say that about one-sixth of India is Dalit?

  GIDLA: Uh-huh.

  COWEN: Give us an example of segregation to the caste system as it would affect Dalits.

  GIDLA: The word is untouchables. That is the neutral, matter-of-fact, politically neutral word. It is all in the word. They’re not to be touched. If you touch them, you’re polluted, and you have to cleanse yourself.

  Segregation is the most prominent issue for untouchables. They’re not allowed to live inside the village. Actually all castes, they have their own colonies. They don’t mingle, but all of these colonies are inside the village whereas untouchables are outside of the village. They come into the village only to work.

  COWEN: In terms of marrying or what job you might have or what job you might be allowed to have, those would all be cases where there’s significant segregation in Indian society today.

  GIDLA: Yeah. Untouchables are . . . the main features are segregation and the inheritance of caste. Caste is by birth. You cannot acquire caste. You’re untouchable if you’re born to untouchable family.

  This is maintained by endogamy, that is, marriage within one’s own caste. Marriage outside of the caste is very, very stigmatized and not allowed. It’s not allowed to the extent that parents themselves can kill the girl for marrying outside of the caste.
  On outsider views of Indian castes

  COWEN: If I think back in time a bit, people in the United States, they’re very familiar with the apartheid system of South Africa. There was here a very strong protest movement against that. There were boycotts. People talked about it quite frequently.

  With respect to the caste system in India, you have many millions of people existing in a segregated existence, segregated setup, and hardly anyone here talks about it at all. Hardly anyone complains. Why is there this difference? Why do we as outsiders have such an apparently indifferent attitude toward Indian caste?

  GIDLA: First of all, America is a big country, the most influential country in the world, militarily and industrially, the most advanced country. Whatever happens here, it’s telecast and broadcast everywhere in the world. So we come to know what happens in America, not so much the other way around. What happens in India doesn’t get necessarily around.

  “America is a big country, the most influential country in the world, militarily and industrially, the most advanced country. Whatever happens here, it’s telecast and broadcast everywhere in the world. So we come to know what happens in America, not so much the other way around. What happens in India doesn’t get necessarily around.”

  The second thing is, while practicing caste, Indian castes and rulers are very secretive, very, very secretive about caste. They’d like to tell people that there is no such thing as caste. One of the reactions to my book is “Why is she washing the dirty linen in the public? Why is she telling everybody there is caste system?”

  COWEN: What would the Dalit critique of Gandhi be? Often westerners think of Gandhi who was someone almost saintly, yet a lot of the Dalits—Dr. Ambedkar would be the most obvious example—had a very strong debate with Gandhi. Over what?

  GIDLA: Ambedkar was the leader of the untouchables. He devoted his life for the untouchables. The people, and he himself, saw him as the Moses of the untouchables. That he was going to lead them out of . . . emancipate them.

  Gandhi wanted to encroach on this leadership. He wanted to claim leadership of all of the people in India, including untouchables and Muslims. So there’s a tussle between Ambedkar and Gandhi. Who is the real representative of untouchables?
  On the problems of caste and the segregated Indian system

  COWEN: In your view, to what extent are the sexual harassment and rape problems in India in some way actually problems of caste?

  GIDLA: Caste, as I said, endogamy, marrying within one’s own caste, and not allowed to marry outside the caste is really one of the features that you can say is the crux of caste system. Because of this, there is a lot of restrictions on women’s freedom because they don’t want her to marry someone outside of the caste.

  Although women’s suppression is everywhere in the world, even in America as you know, but the particular intensity of women’s oppression stems out of caste restrictions, they are not allowed to marry from outside.

  Because of how much value you put on the girl’s chastity, that becomes a very valuable thing for them. Women’s chastity’s a valuable thing for their community and for the family. So if you want to insult someone and if you want to hurt someone, the cruelest way is to rape somebody.

  It’s the other side of the coin that you put so much stress on the chastity of the woman. I think it is the worst hurt you can inflict on somebody.

  It all comes from caste, if you want to insult somebody. For example, in partition of India into Pakistan, the rape of women is a major, major feature.

  COWEN: Now I came at this very much as an outsider, but I tend to think of Indian caste as intersecting with at least a few different things. Let me mention them, and maybe you can give us a framework for thinking about it.

  Caste and vegetarianism: so Dalits are less likely to be vegetarian. Caste and one’s philosophy of interaction with dead bodies, and also caste and notions of defecation—open defecation, and cleaning up of open defecation. What’s your take on how all of that intersects with caste and the segregated Indian system?

  GIDLA: Actually, as people might mistakenly think, not all Indians are vegetarians. It’s only the Brahmins who are not allowed to eat meat or fish. Even that is not true of all the places in India. For Bihar, they eat beef (Brahmins). In Kolkata, they eat fish.

  In our areas, they don’t eat meat or eggs or anything like that. Beef is taboo for all of Hindus except Dalits. Dalits survived on carcass, the dead animals. What else did you want . . . ?

  COWEN: Handling of dead bodies and handling of defecation and sanitary issues. How does that intersect with caste and jobs of different caste members?

  GIDLA: Caste is also about occupation. It’s an imposed occupation. Each caste has its own occupation. The occupations that are given or forced on untouchables are what Hindu society deems unclean and menial.

  All of these things—handling of the dead bodies, tannery, removing dead animals, and cleaning latrines—of course, nobody else wants to do; so it’s occupations imposed on untouchables.

  COWEN: You’re a critic of this form of segregation, but let’s say you had a very intelligent Indian here who is in some way a defender or apologist for the system, or a critic of you. What is it they would say in response to you?

  GIDLA: First of all, somewhat timid people will say there is no such thing as caste. Some people will say caste is by your merit. It’s not discriminatory based on your caste. Whoever is intelligent can become Brahmins. That is pure nonsense because caste is by birth.

  Some people—actually, like the person in your blog—says that “Caste gives color to society. Different castes make it interesting.” So why doesn’t he want to be an untouchable for a change, if that’s what he wants?

  COWEN: One person said to me—tell me if you agree or not—“Caste mostly disappears when you move to an Indian city.”

  GIDLA: That is not true. Caste is basically a village-based institution. That’s where it is most rigorously practiced. But even when you come to towns, like my family did, we lived in a segregated area. We were not allowed to rent houses in other areas.

  At one time, my father’s friend agreed to take us in, but when we went there with all our things, the wife said, “No, you can’t have them here.”

  COWEN: Let’s say you belong to one of the lower castes, and you and/or your family, you decided to convert to Christianity, to Buddhism—as Dr. Ambedkar did—to Islam, to Sikhism. What then happens? Does caste go away?

  GIDLA: No, it doesn’t. There is confusion introduced in the caste system because people think Hinduism is casteism.

  It’s in a way right because Hinduism is a tailor-made religion. As one anthropologist said, it’s mysticism, but basically it’s a system to prop up caste system. It tells you the rules for untouchables and for women. That is all Hinduism is about. Shorn of mysticism, it’s a prop for caste system.

  Caste system is a social issue, but the religion coincides with the social. That’s why it looks like it’s a religious issue. It’s not actually a religious issue. Therefore, when people convert to other religions, hoping that they will not be untouchables anymore, they will be disappointed because there is casteism in Christians and Dalits and Sikhs and any other religion in India. It’s a social issue.

  COWEN: Does Facebook make the caste system worse because, maybe, it’s harder to move to another village and pretend you don’t know anyone from your old caste?

  GIDLA: I can’t comment on that very much, but I don’t think it makes it any more difficult. It’s already difficult enough, you know.

  COWEN: How would you think, analytically, about the forces that keep the caste system in place? As you know, Article 17 of the Indian Constitution, it at least nominally outlaws caste. The Indian president—not the most important office, as here—but there’s been a Dalit as president.

  Legally, there’s a system of reservations that’s in some ways similar to our affirmative action to give Dalits preferential treatment for some kinds of government jobs or posts in schools. Given those forces pushing against caste, what is keeping caste segregation in place?

  GIDLA: Caste is basically . . . it stems out of economic system. It stems out of occupation. It stems out of what job you do in the society.

  As long as the production is organized in such a way that you want a certain group of people always be available to do menial work and do the hard work if the economic system requires that, then the forces will try to keep untouchables in their place so that they can be used as laborers. It does not go away unless the economic system and system of production are radically changed.
  On caste and identity politics in the US

  COWEN: Let’s say you come to the United States, as you did at age 26, and there are a large number of Indians in the United States, including of course in New York, New Jersey. How much does the caste system persist here in this country amongst Indians?

  GIDLA: Very much. I had bad experiences when I first came here because I knew nobody else but Indians. Once I was able to make friends with Americans, I never, never went back to Indian networks, it’s a very rabid system.

  All these immigrant associations—ostensibly, they are there to celebrate Indian culture and festivals, but they’re actually the caste groups. Some hide behind culture, but some others openly say that this is Brahmin American Association, and if you want to join the Facebook page, you have to tell their shibboleths like what’s your gotra, what’s your this, what’s your horoscope, this, that. We’re not able to tell them because we don’t know what . . .

  COWEN: Those are indicators of caste?

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: In your view, should caste-based discrimination amongst Indians be recognized as a form of discrimination in American law?

  GIDLA: With regard to race, what’s going to happen if you recognize this as a legally objectionable thing? Nothing happens. I don’t think any such thing can happen with caste. These people, the Brahmins, are formally entrenched in all high places in America.

  If you look at TV anchors, they’re all Brahmins. If you look at people who work in New York Times, they’re all Brahmins. If you look at people who are in Trump’s administration, they’re all upper caste. And they’re never, ever going to allow this thing to be recognized as a discrimination.

  COWEN: Here in America, we have this thing—people call it identity politics. They mean many different things with that term. I would say it’s more prominent in the Democratic Party than Republican, though the Republican Party has its own unnamed brand of white identity politics often.

  When you see the ways in which people are informally grouped into different categories here, whether it be ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation, coming at this from Andhra Pradesh as a Dalit, how do you perceive this institution of ours?

  GIDLA: Institution of?

  COWEN: Our identity politics. Do you think all the Americans have done it right? Do you think the Americans are crazy? How do you feel about how we do identity politics?

  GIDLA: I’m against identity politics.

  COWEN: Altogether?

  GIDLA: For sure, yeah. I have seen bad things happen with identity politics, with untouchables as well. All they fight for is reservations. Reservations is based on your suffering, or suffering of untouchables in the villages. If you want reservations, then you’re indirectly asking for discrimination to be continued, on the basis of which you can gain a few seats in universities and political places.

  COWEN: The system of reservation in India, which is a form of affirmative action for lower castes, you think that’s a bad idea?

  GIDLA: If I were there in the circumstances where that’s being implemented or written into constitution, I wouldn’t have been fighting actively for reservations because reservations is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. So I would not be fighting for that. What I would be fighting for is equal access in all spheres of life.

  “I wouldn’t have been fighting actively for reservations because reservations is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. So I would not be fighting for that. What I would be fighting for is equal access in all spheres of life.”

  Reservations are here whether I fought for it or not, and attack on them is definitely a reactionary thing to do. I would defend reservations from being attacked by upper-caste people. But reservations have done nothing much at all for untouchables, and there are a lot of downsides for reservations.

  COWEN: I had some Indians write me emails—I found this somewhat unusual—and they asked, “You need to find out about how she got a master’s from a very good school starting off as a Dalit from a village.” And they were very intent on knowing to what extent you had used reservations. You don’t have to tell us. Feel free to tell us what you want, but how should we even frame this question?

  GIDLA: I will say this: Everybody is dying to know whether I got into university because of reservations. My answer to them is, “Go ahead and die.”

  [laughter]

  GIDLA: Because this is going to be out in the public, I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of knowing whether I got in because of reservations or not, but I can tell you in private how I got into engineering and big institutes.
  On her life in India and moving to America

  COWEN: Now, I’d like to ask you some questions about your life, but I would just stress, please, if you don’t want to answer anything, feel free to just leave it aside, and we’ll move on. In India, how and why were you arrested and at what age?

  GIDLA: I was 19 years old. I lived in a very poor neighborhood, and it affected me a lot. Also, I must say that Christianity had an effect on us in our family.

  COWEN: Your family is Christian.

  GIDLA: Yeah, we view Christianity as a religion of kindness and compassion. That is how we started. Then we moved into communism.

  I thought Christian brotherly love is the way to emancipation of all oppression in the world. But when I grew up and I saw in churches people being discriminated—rich people and poor people in church—I thought, I don’t know what Jesus is going to do in the other world, but nothing is happening now.

  To me, what my uncle was doing seemed appealing at that time. It was very highly romantic movement. Young people from high caste and very wealthy young people, people who had great futures sacrificed that, and they were fed into the mouth of state repression, and I was one of them. I wanted to do something for the people.

  COWEN: What was it like being in prison after you were arrested?

  GIDLA: I really went blank. After I got arrested, I really went blank. Things were happening to me. Things were being done to me, but I really, really went blank.

  I accepted torture also in the same manner. I was in the jail for three months, and then I was released. My fervor had certainly calmed down in the sense that I don’t want to be romantic by getting arrested and killed or something like that. But I still held the views of equality and justice, social justice.

  COWEN: This experience made you more of a Christian, less of a Christian?

  GIDLA: No, I ditched Christianity when I was 12 years old. I never went back to it.

  COWEN: Your views evolved into . . . ?

  GIDLA: I consider still myself a Marxist.

  COWEN: Do you think of yourself as a Marxist in the sense of being a radical egalitarian or a Marxist in the sense of wanting the government to own all of the means of production?

  GIDLA: No, it’s a worldview. I would say Marxism is a worldview, and Marxism looks at the world in terms of class, like feminists looks at the world as men and women, and religious people look at the world as Christians and non-Christians, and Marxists look at people as workers and capitalists.

  That is the worldview I hold, and I look at problems arising out of class difference, and I look at solutions that could arise out of class action.

  COWEN: At age 26, you left India, you come to the United States. How was it that happened? Obviously, there may have been things you wanted to leave, but we all know migration is often shaped by social networks.

  There were, especially at that time, a relatively small number of Dalits here in the United States. So you didn’t have that network so much to connect to. You’re from a village in India. What mentally, emotionally brought you to coming to this country?

  GIDLA: Everybody loves to be in America. There are people who go—

  COWEN: Do they? [laughs]

  GIDLA: —like mental about wanting to go to America, so I’m not an exception. My idea of coming here is to be more free. Women are very, very, very repressed in India compared to here.

  People call me the first woman to be riding a bicycle in my town, but I’m really not the first one. There are two other girls, but they closed their legs like this, and pedal like that. I used to pedal like a man.

  There is not much scope for people like me to be in India. If you want to be free and nonchalant and carefree like guys, there is no scope there. My main thing is to be free and intellectually free and free to pursue culture. Even reading books is like, “Why is a woman reading books?” So for me, coming to America means a lot of social freedom.

  COWEN: When you came here expecting some kind of freedom, what was your biggest surprise?

  GIDLA: Biggest surprise?

  COWEN: You hadn’t visited before, right? You just came. It was a huge decision with your life. You’re just taking this huge move on a notion of freedom. You come here. This is, of course, not in every way a free country—it’s far from perfect. I fear we may have disappointed you in some ways. What was your biggest surprise?

  GIDLA: I can’t think of anything, but I used to think all old people that are by themselves, going around by themselves, are like beggars because old women don’t go out by themselves. So I used to give money to these rich old women.

  [laughter]

  GIDLA: Despite their brooches.
  On Marxism

  COWEN: You mentioned a moment ago you had, broadly speaking, a Marxist view. As I’m sure you know, there’s a whole intellectual movement of pro-capitalist Dalits. Chandra Bhan Prasad would be one of them.

  GIDLA: Ahhh, God! [snorts]

  COWEN: What do you think of them and where do you differ?

  GIDLA: That particular person, Chandra Bhan Prasad, he makes me puke.

  COWEN: Tell us why.

  GIDLA: He was in the same Radical Students Union as I was, even though much older than me. He went to JNU , which is the highest university in India for humanities. He studied something or other, sociology or something. The knowledge that he gained from being in RSU, Radical Students Union, and what he studied made him a good person to defect and become a mouthpiece for Dalit entrepreneurship and Dalit capitalism.

  Dalit capitalists, yeah, there are a few. There were none before. There are a few. I think that they were given some kind of, I don’t know, perk to become capitalists so that people won’t say, “Oh, how come you’re so casteist? You don’t have any Dalit capitalists?” But Dalit capitalists are very, very much lower compared to other capitalists from other castes.

  COWEN: If you think of yourself as a Marxist, and you came to one of the most capitalist societies for freedom, is that in some way a contradiction in your worldview or you think it all makes sense?

  GIDLA: No, it’s not. As I said, Marxism means class versus class, not nation versus nation. In India, there are poor people and rich people. And in America, there are poor people and rich people. Why is it some sort of defection if I came here? I came here not to become a capitalist.
  On writing and not writing

  COWEN: You’ve had two jobs here, at least two jobs. One, you worked in the financial sector for the Bank of New York for a while, I believe until 2009. Now you’re a conductor of subway trains for the MTA in New York City. Which of those two jobs have you enjoyed more?

  GIDLA: I would say MTA job. In Bank of New York, I was making much more money. Even in 2009, I was making almost three times what I make in MTA. Then I have unlimited sick leave and personal days and five weeks’ vacation and stock options and things like that.

  But the people are really so boring and uncosmopolitan. They are such narrow-minded people. I had this figurine of Darwin on my desk, and this guy was glaring at me because he’s a Catholic.

  COWEN: Charles Darwin?

  GIDLA: Yeah. We’re not like that in MTA. We are very open and very passionate. We are much more cosmopolitan. We discuss things openly and uninhibitedly, and yet at the same time, we don’t hurt each other.

  COWEN: You wrote your book, Ants among Elephants, while you had this full-time job as a subway conductor for the MTA. You wrote it during the evening? Or what kind of hours did you have? When did you write?

  How did you do it?

  GIDLA: Actually, I didn’t do it; that’s why it took 10 years. Then, I grew up in a family where there are always 25 people milling around in the house. We were like sitting on the steps of the house trying to concentrate. I never sat at a desk.

  Now, it is how I work. I cannot work at a desk in silence and in my privacy. I work while commuting on the train, and I used to work during breaks at work, like that.

  COWEN: And the break, you’re literally on the train, right? You’re not in an office.

  GIDLA: No, no, no. In the beginning . . . the beginners are called extra-extra, meaning that they’re sitting there, and if somebody got sick or they have to go home, they will jump in and take their job.

  So half the time, we’re just sitting around for eight hours and going home, and half the time, we’re taking over for somebody else. I always used to carry a computer with me, and one of the names I have is Computer Girl, apart from Hindu Conductor.

  COWEN: What is it about the MTA that attracts so many interesting people?

  GIDLA: It’s very multiracial workforce. Not so much from Western Europe, but all the other colored countries and Eastern Europe people, they are there. They bring in their own experience, and they talk about it in crew rooms. It’s just more entertaining.

  For me, the thing is that I was working in Bank of New York writing programs, and I had no idea what it was I was writing programs for. I should have known, but I didn’t really care.

  Now, I know what I’m doing is how it’s affecting. We’re taking people from point A to point B, where they want to go. I know for sure that what I’m doing is very useful, and that makes me feel self-confident.

  COWEN: What are the personal qualities you feel you have that make you a good MTA conductor?

  GIDLA: It’s a very strict job. It’s run on military kind of lines. If you have to be there at 20:32, then you have to be there at 20:32. It’s all very difficult for me, but I really like the . . . I don’t know. I’m pleasant when I’m helping people. I’m conscientious to help people that say “Get away from me.” I don’t know. I like to be a good coworker rather than a good conductor.

  COWEN: OK.
  On things under- and overrated

  Now, in these interviews, there’s always a segment in the middle called “Overrated versus Underrated.”

  GIDLA: Oh, yeah, I know. [laughs]

  COWEN: I’m going to toss out some mentions. Again, you’re free to pass if you don’t want to comment on them. I’ll say a few things, and you tell us if it’s overrated or underrated.

  In Manhattan, the cluster of Indian restaurants at about Lexington and 28th Street—overrated or underrated?

  GIDLA: Normally rated.

  COWEN: Normally rated.

  [laughter]

  GIDLA: I would say that all the restaurants on Sixth Avenue, like at St. Mark’s, they are all trash.

  COWEN: I agree. There’s not one I would want to eat at.

  GIDLA: Yeah, I know.

  COWEN: In Jackson Heights, in Queens, for Indian food, overrated or underrated?

  GIDLA: Underrated.

  COWEN: Still, you think?

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: Bob Dylan?

  GIDLA: No, underrated.

  COWEN: Why?

  GIDLA: I like Bob Dylan. I like him a lot.

  COWEN: Why do you like him?

  GIDLA: I don’t know. That’s what I grew up with. We got all the music and movies 10 years after you have them. Even though I wasn’t from the Beatles and Bob Dylan times, that’s what we got when I was growing up. It really fascinated me that someone who’s singing nasally can be a popular singer-writer.

  [laughter]

  “We got all the music and movies 10 years after you have them. Even though I wasn’t from the Beatles and Bob Dylan times, that’s what we got when I was growing up. It really fascinated me that someone who’s singing nasally can be a popular singer-writer.”

  COWEN: What is it from Bob Dylan, what song, what album, what something had the most impact on you?

  GIDLA: My memory fails me. Actually, in his Christian era, he has that “Man Gave Names to All the Animals.” I love that song.

  COWEN: Now, in Dalit music, there’s something called Dappu music. Some of it uses leather; it has a lot of percussion. Overrated or underrated?

  GIDLA: Underrated.

  COWEN: Yes?

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: What’s special about it?

  GIDLA: The drum is used for calling people to a village meeting. It’s the job of a particular untouchable caste, and they play very well. It’s amazing. I don’t know.

  COWEN: You did, of course, leave India, but what, for you, about India is most underrated?

  GIDLA: Organic vegetables grown naturally and fruits grown naturally. They’re all disappearing now.

  COWEN: The A Train—I don’t mean the song “Take the ‘A’ Train”—I mean the A Train. It cuts through such an amazing swath of history of New York: Manhattan, Brooklyn, different social classes, different economic classes.

  The A Train: overrated or underrated?

  GIDLA: Underrated.

  COWEN: Underrated, I agree.

  The Indian scheme of biometric identification?

  GIDLA: That is a totally antipeople measure.

  COWEN: Tell us why.

  GIDLA: Because it’s like if somebody says, “Oh, this chair I’m sitting in is uncomfortable.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll solve the problem and kick this chair out from under the person who’s sitting and complaining.”

  People have very low literacy rates, and how are they able to do these things? People are just dying because they have to have minimum balance in the bank, and they don’t know how to open bank accounts, and their money is taken away. I’m sorry, I think I’m digressing, but this whole technology—

  COWEN: No, digressing is fine.

  GIDLA: This whole technology thing is under the thing of, ostensibly, it’s to streamline the system and to curb corruption and to bring everybody into the mainstream. That is nonsense. Exploitation used to be giving people low wages, but now the exploitation is taking back what they already have.

  COWEN: Let’s say I’m a technocrat. I look at Indian aid to the poor. A lot of it is in kind, in the form of food. A high percentage of the food rots. And I say, “We’re going to scan everyone’s identity biometrically and just send them cash.” What will go wrong from doing that?

  GIDLA: Give cash to people instead of—

  COWEN: To their bank accounts, electronically, rather than giving them in-kind food aid. Is that more efficient, or are you worried about the loss of privacy? Are you worried about some kind of autocratic control from having information, very exact, about everyone’s identity?

  GIDLA: Privacy and all this thing is a big concern, but the concern really is that all these measures are now . . .

  There was one measure, I think it’s called demonetization. They scrapped 500 rupee bills and 1,000 bills. So all these small-time business people, tea vendors—just overnight, they lost all their money. They keep their money in their houses.

  There’s a woman in our neighborhood. She sold her house and she’s going to live on her money, and she kept all the money in $500 bills in the house. As soon as this thing was announced and she was told that “Your money is nothing but paper,” she died of heart attack. It’s not an isolated incident. Hundreds of people died of this demonetization.

  COWEN: So you’re critical of the current regime in India.

  GIDLA: Yes. They stripped the farmers of their lands and let them die. So far, 450,000 farmers killed themselves, suicides. Now, they turn their focus on small-business people, and now they’re pauperized.

  COWEN: Williamsburg, Brooklyn: overrated or underrated?

  GIDLA: Overrated.

  COWEN: Why?

  GIDLA: Because I don’t really identify with the crowd there. I think hipsters is just in clothes and stuff, but not in attitude.

  COWEN: So they’re conformists, ultimately.

  GIDLA: Yeah, yeah.

  COWEN: What’s a special cherished, treasured part of New York for you that maybe not everyone knows about?

  GIDLA: Where I live, Bay Ridge.

  COWEN: Bay Ridge?

  GIDLA: Yes.

  COWEN: What makes that special?

  GIDLA: There are different kinds of immigrant groups, Arabs and Bangladeshis and Spanish people. It used to be Greek and Irish, and now Indians. It’s very safe place. We have restaurants from different parts of the world. Everything is close by, things like that.

  COWEN: What is the hardest part about your job as an MTA conductor?

  GIDLA: The hardest part is you cannot take days off. You have to apply 20 days before to get a day off.

  COWEN: There’s limited sick leave, presumably?

  GIDLA: Yes, yeah.

  COWEN: What’s the strangest use you’ve ever heard of or seen for a New York subway car?

  GIDLA: Strangest use? [laughs] No, I can’t think of anything right now.

  COWEN: Is the L Line the best subway for getting to Brooklyn from Midtown?

  GIDLA: Uh-huh, yes. From where to Midtown?

  COWEN: The L Line, say Canarsie to 8th Avenue, would you take the L Line?

  GIDLA: Yes, definitely.

  COWEN: Absolutely. It used to be called the LL Line when I was a kid. I was shocked to learn it’s now the L Line. I don’t know why they did that. For me, that’s very confusing.

  [laughter]

  COWEN: But I don’t actually take the subway much at all.
  On Modi and reforms in India

  If you were to describe to us your take, what’s going on in India now?

  If I were to ask a neoliberal, they would say something like, “Well, Modi, he’s trying to be a reformer. Maybe he doesn’t have the will. Maybe the special interest groups are interfering. He’s not getting much reform done. Things are progressing in fits and starts. There’s no great wonderful turnaround, but India’s still growing. This is a country we should be positive about.”

  That would be a normal neoliberal take I would hear from a lot of people, say in the investment community. But your overall take on where India is now and where it’s headed, how would you put your alternate version of what’s going on?

  GIDLA: India, it’s not under Modi that these bad things are happening. They have been started by Congress, the so-called liberal party, which I would compare to probably the Democratic Party here. They have started all these measures themselves in 1991 after the market liberalization. And Modi is shoving them down our throats. Congress probably had some kind of hesitation in imposing these measures, but that’s why India, I guess, needed somebody like Modi, who can just terrorize people into accepting these things.

  In India, I don’t know for whom it’s developing, but for the majority of people, it’s going down. I can say, from my point of view, there may be some Ambanis and Adanis that are profiting from it, but everybody else is losing.

  COWEN: If you think of the Bengali intellectual class from India, do you think of that itself as yet another caste creation, like a caste club?

  GIDLA: Yeah. Bengali is like the renaissance of India. They consider themselves culturally superior, like the French think of themselves in Europe, and they’re very proud about that.

  By the way, I think that the French are still lying on the laurels of French Revolution. It’s long gone and they have nothing else to show for it now.

  COWEN: [laughs] If you think of the Indian Communist Party, would you consider that to also be, in some sense, fundamentally a caste creation?

  GIDLA: Yeah. It’s not in the program of Communist Party to be casteist, but all these leaders, they came from Gandhi’s party, and all they wanted is for the nationalism to be militant. Gandhi says, “Don’t be violent,” and yet his idea is that we should get independence.

  Whereas Communists are like, “We want independence, but we’ll be breaking chairs and benches for getting it.” That’s the only difference. There’s no programmatic difference. These are the people who came from nationalist Indian Congress and joined the Communists. They bring along with them their caste attitudes.

  COWEN: Why do you think the caste system has been and remains so strong in India compared to other countries? What accounts for that?

  GIDLA: What other countries have untouchability? I know that Japan and Yemen have it.

  COWEN: But groups that are a much smaller percentage of the population. If Dalits were about a sixth of India, even though there’s no census, it’s going to be a very large number of people. As a country, it would be one of the larger countries in the world. To have untouchability on such a scale persisting for so long—what is it about India that you think has led to that?

  GIDLA: I’m not a social scientist, but I can only guess from what I read. I think that there’s some special geological, geographical, climatic conditions that necessitated for some caste system to be there, to division of labor because if land is . . .

  Actually, there’s an example in Australia, when people went from England to colonize. People went there, and some people were taken as the servants there. Servants soon found land of their own, and they were no longer servants. That’s the case in India. People had to be forced into a caste system.

  COWEN: Some Indians have claimed to me that very often, the intermediate classes oppress the lower classes more than the Brahmins do. Would you agree?

  GIDLA: Yeah, I do.

  COWEN: There’s also a series of claims made, even within untouchability, that there are significant distinctions. Many Indians will say, “Well, the Malas oppress the Madigas” and that’s as bad an oppression problem as the problems across caste. Would you agree with that?

  GIDLA: No, I don’t, because these divisions were created, but we were not aware. There are caste divisions, but we all consider ourselves as untouchables. We didn’t think that we have to steal from them or deprive from them.

  Reservations is there to give chances for untouchables, but there’s so many things that undermine this. One of the things that they do is divide untouchables and make them fight over the common reserve seats.
  On her family stories

  COWEN: Now, we’ve been talking a lot about some fairly general issues, but most of your book, actually, is a very particular tale, tale of your family, tale of your uncle, tale of your mother, tale of other relatives. You appear in the story toward the end, as a young girl.

  Let me just ask you a few questions about that story. It’s not possible to recount the entire story here, but if you think back on your uncle, who’s a famous and very influential revolutionary, what is your most touching memory of your uncle that you have?

  GIDLA: Actually, I didn’t see my uncle until just before I came here. I never saw him before. Touching moment, I can’t say that but . . .

  COWEN: Because he was in hiding, right?

  GIDLA: Yeah, he was in hiding.

  COWEN: So you were uncovering, ex post, this long history of his, and you barely knew him.

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: Your most touching memory of your mother?

  GIDLA: I don’t know. When I was arrested, she was very worried. She said, “I wish I could take you back into my womb.”

  COWEN: You have siblings, right?

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: Are they in India? Do they live here?

  GIDLA: My sister lives here in Long Island. She is a physician. My brother is in Canada. He’s a chemical engineer. He works as a technology consultant for oil companies.

  COWEN: The children in your family, they’ve been very successful. What is it in your upbringing that you would attribute that to, that there’s three of you doing great in different ways? What’s the ultimate source of that success?

  GIDLA: I think that India provided narrow windows of opportunity for untouchables. It’s like we were driving in a car and all the lights were turning green just in time.

  The missionaries were one such opportunities. They came in my great grandmother’s time, so she was able to get educated because of missionaries.

  My parents’ generation, they got educated because it’s the whole fervor of just got independence; people are more liberal towards others. In my generation, I had the benefit of two generations behind me in the tradition of education.

  COWEN: I like the story very much in the book where your mother is trying to feed you cornflakes and you’re rebelling. How did she bring you all up? What was her philosophy of parenting?

  GIDLA: I don’t know. She wanted us to go to school and get educated. They’re against humanities. They think that, if one day there will be a revolution, you are required to teach something else other than what is a fact, like in history. But if it’s science, it’s going to stay irrespective of what society you’re in.

  COWEN: As the years pass, do you view your own thought as becoming more radical or more conservative, and why?

  GIDLA: More radical, but I refrain from talking about Obama or feminism, Black Lives Matter. There are certain things that I don’t want to talk about because they sound like conservative views, but I am radical.

  COWEN: You think that what we here consider radical is actually conservative, and this is like a grand American illusion of some kind?

  GIDLA: I’m sorry, what was that?

  COWEN: You said there were things you don’t want to talk about because you . . .

  GIDLA: Yeah, because I will alienate people. People read this book and they think that “Oh, she’s automatically going to be a feminist. She’s automatically going to be a supporter of Democratic Party, she’s automatically an admirer of Obama,” which I’m not.

  COWEN: What is that . . . ?

  GIDLA: And this will alienate people. That’s why I’m afraid of saying these things outside.
  On current American politics

  COWEN: If you think about these aspects in American society that you’re unhappy about, what would your critique consist of? If you don’t like Obama or you’re unhappy with some parts of feminism or Black Lives Matter, how would you articulate your critique?

  GIDLA: The Democrats and the Republicans, by and large, they have the same interests. The Democrats act like they’re liberal. They act like they are for women’s rights, they’re for gay rights and things like that, but on the whole, they are the same. Obama here comes and he’s pretending to be such a great guy.

  This guy [Ta-Nehisi Coates] wrote a book called We Were Eight Years in Power. Who is in power for eight years? I don’t understand that. All these policies that the Democrats have, those are the same things that Trump is doing. Obamacare is his biggest thing. What is it? Without preexisting condition insurance, apart from that, I don’t see any benefit from it.

  COWEN: Final question before I let all of you ask questions. After all the years now you’ve lived here, are you optimistic about this country? If so, why or why not?

  GIDLA: When Trump came to power, people were all saying that, “Oh, my God, we are doomed,” and stuff like that. I thought maybe it’s a chance for people to really see what’s going on here and no longer be silent about things. I was optimistic about that in that sense. I think that, yeah, things can happen to make this country better.

  COWEN: Sujatha, thank you very much. I’m a huge fan of you and your book. Thank you.

  GIDLA: Thank you.

  [applause]
  Q&A

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you, as a thought experiment, were the prime minister of India or had a large political influence all over India, what is it that you would do to fight the caste system or to fight against segregation?

  GIDLA: Governments, they preside over certain society. Even if I become the prime minister of India, I can’t do anything about caste system, being in a government that rules the same kind of society. The society has to be changed, not the government.

  COWEN: Yes, Kate?

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Have you been to Washington, DC?

  GIDLA: No, not really.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Would you like to go to Washington, DC?

  GIDLA: Yeah, I suppose, yeah.

  COWEN: We’d be happy to host you if you ever come down.

  GIDLA: OK.

  COWEN: Yes?

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: I suppose just as a follow-up to the question of if it isn’t a government that can change the society, what would you do if you had a societal influence? Do you think it’s through charitable organizations or education or . . .

  GIDLA: Charitable organization and education, they’re all within the same framework. I would have to say things that I may be hesitant to say, but the social structure has to be basically smashed and rebuilt on a collectivized basis.

  Everything should be run on . . . Agriculture should be collectivized. Industry should be under the state. Foreign policy should be a monopoly of the state.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: When people ask you where you’re from, how do you respond to that question?

  GIDLA: If foreigners ask me, I will say I’m from India. But if Indians ask me, I have to say which state and what caste.

  COWEN: Would an Indian you would meet, say, in Manhattan, would that person know right away that you’re an untouchable?

  GIDLA: One thing is that most of the Christians except Syrian Christians and some Catholic Christians in Goa, Christians are untouchables, so immediately, the lack of forehead dot tells them that I’m an untouchable.

  Also, there’s a study. Indians are genetically same, but apparently, you could tell when the endogamy began. It’s 1,500 years ago people are different. There is some extra genetic thing that we inherit from castes. I think that people’s body language can easily tell which caste you are.

  When I came here, people would always constantly ask me, if I’m walking on the street like, “Why are you sad? Smile. Life is not that bad.” Things like that. I didn’t think that I was sad, but everybody was saying that, and other people used to say, “Why are you so anxious? Just calm down.”

  As far as untouchables are concerned and Brahmins are concerned, you can tell from the body language itself who you are.

  COWEN: There’s a Russian philosophy that if you walk around smiling, you must be a fool.

  [laughter]

  COWEN: Next question. Yes?

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m wondering if you think that your perception of caste system might be affected by which cast you’re from. Like, if you’re Brahmin, maybe you don’t feel the effects of the system that much and would not be . . .

  GIDLA: Yeah, that’s true. Brahmins like the caste system. This guy on your blog was saying casteism is very good and probably they should adopt it for American society. Wasn’t he saying that?

  COWEN: I think he was implying it at least.

  Next question. Yes?

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: So you don’t think very highly of Obama. Are there any American politicians who you admire or at least think are doing something useful?

  GIDLA: No.

  [laughter]

  COWEN: If you had in the room an American who had never been to India, but was planning a trip to India just to learn, discover, also enjoy, what advice would you give them for how they should do that trip?

  GIDLA: I can go with the mundane things . . . don’t eat anything that’s not cooked. Don’t drink—

  COWEN: Intellectual advice for understanding it or what they should try to experience or where they should go or what they should see.

  GIDLA: Depends on the person’s interest, right? People who really want to see what 80 percent of India is like, they should go to the villages. If people want to see the beauty of India and nature and all that kind of stuff, they should go to Kerala. If people want to see the splendor of the rajas, they should go to Jaipur. If they want to see the squalor and all that stuff, they should go to Kolkata to see.

  Banaras is like the Mecca of India because it’s on the banks of Ganges. You can look at it in two different ways. Brahmins will have such ecstatic experience when they go there, but at the same time, other people go there, they will see the filth and how polluted the river is. That’s there.

  And Goa is a place for beaches and fun and drugs and things like that.

  [laughter]

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: What country do you think is doing things to your most ideal state right now?

  GIDLA: I’m not a supporter of the regime in China or in Cuba, but from all developmental indexes, they’re doing well. There is more literacy in China and more literacy in Cuba and less infant mortalities, better. Even women’s equality’s better. I know it’s not perfect, but they’re better in these two countries. I don’t know much about North Korea.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: You mentioned that you are not a feminist. What are your differences . . .

  GIDLA: I mean feminists basically look at the world as divided between men and women, and I don’t think that. Feminists lately have become such a force for backwardness in a sense.

  Like, for example, the burka and the Muslim women in Europe, they want to rip the burka off because burka is a symbol of men’s oppression. But they don’t see you can’t just do like that. The point is you give the choice to the people to wear the burka or not wear the burka, but not like you forcibly take the burka off. That’s one of the feminist things that I don’t like.

  And then this Nordic model that they have in Sweden and they’re appropriating it in Germany.

  COWEN: When you say Nordic model, what do you mean?

  GIDLA: The prostitution—they are now arresting the people who seek prostitutes.

  COWEN: The male customers.

  GIDLA: That I think is draconian. Not all prostitutes are forced into it. What do men do if they don’t have any partner? It’s livelihood for many women. I think that in the guise of feminism, people are really putting restrictions on individual liberty.

  COWEN: Yes, in the back.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: What can America learn from India in terms of how some of these social problems India has dealt with that you mentioned and problems that we’re dealing with now in America?

  GIDLA: Not much. I think India is one of the countries where communism is still a popular thing, not something that people will shirk from, but Indian communism is not that great. So from that point of view, there is nothing to learn from. Modi and Trump are seen as birds of the same feather. If they want to learn how to do bad things, they can learn from each other.

  [laughter]

  COWEN: Yes.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: What is your opinion of Mother Teresa?

  GIDLA: The whole Christian missionary thing, it is part of white man’s burden, a prop for colonization.

  The white people who join those missionaries—not all of them are aware that we’re going there to get people’s support for our colonizers. There are people who are sincerely there to help people. Mother Teresa—I don’t know what her grand scheme was, but she really did a lot of good things in India.

  She’s now a big target for Hindutva people. They say that she’s an agent of imperialism, agent of colonialism. She’s someone who’s spoiling Indian culture, trying to convert people into Christianity. She’s a devil, and she doesn’t deserve to be canonized and things like that. Mother Teresa is a big target for Hindutva people.

  She did good things for us. She may have some other ideas, but they are not perceived by us. What we perceived is, she did a lot of good things.

  COWEN: Next question, yes.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: You mentioned that one of the things that led you and your family to successfully move out of where your caste was trying to place you was education. What role do you think education has in refiguring the social system, the caste system, on a larger scale? Or is it a thing that could only be possible for a few people?

  GIDLA: Ambedkar’s slogan is “Educate, organize, and agitate.” This is a big thing for untouchables. They think that their emancipation lies in getting educated. It may be true, but after education, they’re not getting jobs. What can they do with education if there are no jobs?

  COWEN: A question over here.
  On caste in the Indian film industry

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you see caste in the Indian film industry at all? Do you see any films being made that talk about these issues?

  GIDLA: In the beginning—when we were all filled with the fervor of Indians are all equal brothers, sisters—at that time, there were a lot of movies talking about caste system, where the hero who’s a Brahmin marries an untouchable woman, and things like that.

  The politics and society has changed now. They no longer talk about social issues anymore. There used to be films about dowry system. There used to be films about laborers. There used to be films about untouchability. Now, it’s not that.

  Actually, the film Bahubali, which probably you heard of, it’s like highest-grossing Indian film. It’s through and through caste film. It talks as if, like they say that there are certain people born to rule and certain people who are born to be ruled. It’s just outright casteist film.

  COWEN: Are there major Bollywood actors and actresses who are Dalits?

  GIDLA: No.

  COWEN: Next question. Yes.
  On her family’s political views

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question. Do your family members share your political views at this point, your family who are in the United States and Canada?

  GIDLA: Actually, the only relation I have with my family members is political views.

  [laughter]

  GIDLA: If we have to connect on familial links, we will always be fighting and killing each other. All that we talk about with my mother is politics and untouchability and caste and Modi and things like that.

  It’s the same thing with my sister also. This is where we connect. Otherwise, we are like enemies. My brother, we’re completely alienated from each other, firstly because he goes to church now. We never used to go to church before. He’s into this Iacocca. Is there a name . . . ?

  COWEN: Iacocca?

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: Lee Iacocca?

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: The former Chrysler chairman?

  GIDLA: Yeah. He reads that kind of books.

  COWEN: Management books.

  GIDLA: He’s into that kind of stuff.

  COWEN: You don’t?

  GIDLA: No.

  [laughter]

  GIDLA: He read Freakonomics and he liked it. I don’t relate to that stuff.
  On influential books and what she’s planning to write next

  COWEN: What would you say is the book in fiction that’s influenced you most?

  GIDLA: I liked certain books like Independent People by Halldor Laxness. He’s an Icelandic writer. I liked that book a lot. It’s a really huge book. I think that they categorize it as social realism. I liked it a lot.

  Then, as for nonfiction, I read this book, Hindoo Holiday by J. R. Ackerley. He went to India in 1920s and spent some time there. That’s really hilarious and well-written book. I liked that.

  As for comedy, there is Amanda Filipacchi. She wrote a book called Love Creeps. It’s really, really hilarious book where the protagonist, a woman. She has everything that she wants, and now she desires desiring. Because there’s nothing else to desire for her, she’s depressed now. She goes around looking for things that she can desire and not get. That was a funny book. I liked it.

  Then, what else did I like? Chester Himes is a black writer.

  COWEN: Oh sure, yes.

  GIDLA: He wrote black detectives, and that stuff is funny. Actually, I’m reading one right now, Blind Man with a Pistol.

  I don’t know, a lot of books I like. Ferrante, I couldn’t finish that book.

  COWEN: Elena Ferrante, yeah.

  GIDLA: Somebody else’s, like her book is supposed to be fictional realism. I don’t really know what magical realism, social realism, fictional realism is. If everything has to be categorized in this sense, I’ll call my book “real realism.”

  COWEN: For the future, is there anything you could tell us about what you’re thinking or what you’re planning in terms of further writing or expressing your ideas more?

  GIDLA: People with my kind of views, they don’t get published in New York Times and things like that. That’s out for me. I don’t like writing fiction.

  I like writing nonfiction but only the kind of issues that I have, which involves enthusiastic storytellers like my family and centered around an issue—for example, the farmers’ suicide in India. If we get some storytellers like that who are involved with that issue, then I’d like to write. Otherwise, I don’t see any point to write.

  COWEN: Do you think there’ll ever be a time where you write about life in the United States?

  GIDLA: Maybe, yeah. Possible.

  COWEN: Time for one more question. Yes?

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Have you traveled much in other countries and do you have thoughts about life there?

  GIDLA: I went to Mexico, to a place called Puerto Vallarta. Actually, a friend had a medical conference; I tagged along and they were having this huge conference. I was sitting in the middle and typing away, writing my book. I went to Mexico; I didn’t see much of it. It’s a beach place.

  Recently, I went to Czech Republic. People are really not that very interesting to talk to and interact with. For them, Americans are really a huge deal. It’s like some movie stars.

  People are still missing things from the socialist days, how things were better. I think that beggars there, it’s a new thing for people to beg, so they don’t really know how to beg. They just supplicate entirely on the ground. They don’t look up. They just do like this. I found it very strange.

  I went to Barcelona also.

  COWEN: What did you think of that?

  GIDLA: It’s good.

  COWEN: It’s good, yeah.

  [laughter]

  COWEN: On that note, Sujatha Gidla, thank you very much.

  IndiaSujatha GidlaTyler CowenPodcastNYC

• Scroll.in
  https://scroll.in/article/849340/an-indian-familys-encounter-with-caste-and-untouchability-that-no-one-should-ignore-even-in-2017
  Word count: 2171

  An Indian family’s encounter with caste and untouchability that no one should ignore even in 2017
  Sujatha Gidla’s ‘Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India’ should make all of us squirm.
  An Indian family’s encounter with caste and untouchability that no one should ignore even in 2017
  Courtesy FSG
  Sep 03, 2017 · 08:30 am
  Anu Kumar

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  When Sujatha Gidla was a student at the Regional Engineering College (REC) Warangal, she heard about a professor who was deliberately failing students from the lower castes. It led to several students, including Gidla, calling for a strike – one that ended badly. Though she wasn’t on the strike committee (she was, however, a member of a radical left students’ union), Gidla and other students were detained by the police. She was the only woman.

  As she recounts, they were taken to destinations undisclosed to their parents and tortured. “Beat her until I can see welts on her” – she overhears the police deputy superintendent tell two policewomen

  Warangal was where her uncle, KG Satyamurthy, the Left leader and a founder of the People’s War Group had been especially active. He had worked with textile mill and railway workers, and reached out to Dalits (the “untouchables” in Gidla’s title), and other marginalised communities. In the early 1960s and earlier, Satyam, as he is referred to by Gidla, had been part of the “Visalandhra” movement and the Andhra-Telengana riots that followed a few years later.

  The experience of being in police custody, and the worry it caused her parents, turned Gidla off the rebel cause, despite attempts by the far Left to recruit her. She moved to the US, where after a stint as an engineer she now works as a subway conductor. A radical, even iconoclastic choice of career, but of a piece with what her uncle, Satyam and then her mother, Manjula, did with their lives. Both were unconventional and progressive in their own ways; both equally heroic in the struggles they waged.
  The modernity of caste

  It is particularly opportune that Gidla’s memoir of her mother and uncle appears on the 70th anniversary of India’s independence. This fact itself is coincidental. Much of the remembering has been, and quite rightly too, of the Partition – the sundering of regions and communities that came with independence. But the old injustices remained alongside, only perpetuating and entrenching themselves – as with caste, a system indelibly associated with far too many Indian stories.

  Gidla’s account of her untouchable family begins from the pre-independence India in coastal Andhra, then a part of the Madras Presidency. Converted to Christianity by Canadian Baptist missionaries, her grandfather Prasanna Rao became a teacher, adept at the English he learnt in missionary schools. It was his dying wife’s wish that her children – Satyam, Carey (named after the British Baptist missionary at Serampore in Bengal) and Manjula – be educated. A wish her husband did his best to fulfil despite his abandonment of his young children – an abandonment that would have lingering consequences on his children, especially Manjula, who grew into adulthood and later living in one temporary home after another.

  Gidla tells this story almost 70 years later, from conversations with her uncle that she began recording only a few years ago (he died in 2012) and her own mother. It is her family’s story of seeking education and employment in post-independent India – lives spent in determined pursuit of self-respect and fulfilment. It’s a wider story of caste, its tentacles hooked into every sphere of Indian life, the oppressive burden of untouchability, and the insidious ways in which caste manipulates and adapts itself to “change”, to ideologies and political systems.

  “If you are educated like me, if you don’t seem like a typical untouchable, then you have a choice. You can tell the truth and be ostracized, ridiculed, harassed – even driven to suicide, as happens regularly in universities.

  Or you can lie. If they don’t believe you, they will try to find out your true caste some other way. They may ask you certain questions: “Did your brother ride a horse at his wedding? Did his wife wear a red sari or a white sari? How does she wear her sari? Do you eat beef? Who is your family deity?” They may even seek the opinion of someone from your region.

  If you get them to believe your lie, then of course you cannot tell them your stories, your family’s stories. You cannot tell them about your life. It would reveal your caste. Because your life is your caste, your caste is your life.

  Whether they know the truth or not, your untouchable life is never something you can talk about.

  It was like this for me in Punjab, in Delhi, in Bombay, in Bangalore, in Madras, in Warangal, in Kanpur, in Calcutta.

  At twenty-six, I came to America, where people know only skin color, not birth status. Some here love Indians and some hate them, but their feelings are not affected by caste. One time in a bar in Atlanta I told a guy I was untouchable, and he said, “Oh, but you’re so touchable.”

  Only in talking to some friends I met here did I realise that my stories, my family’s stories, are not stories of shame.”

  The Left in the 1950s Andhra

  In college, Satyam, a bright student and the hope of his family, had no money to pay his fees. Lodged among better off, upper caste classmates, Satyam was the “ant among elephants”. In the early 1940s, he was drawn to the Congress’s Quit India Movement, but its quiet fading away – following the imprisonment of Congress leaders and their later negotiations with the British – disillusioned him. It was around this time that, having no money to formally attend classes, he was drawn to Telugu literature, its old classics and avant-garde poetry.

  The Telengana agitation that began in 1946 was waged by the peasants (a broad spectrum which included the landless, the wage-labourers and some rich peasants too) against the Nizam (who at that time was waging his own battle for independence) and the rich landlords. There were many grievances against the “dora system”, which institutionalised a framework of feudal obligations and services on servitors and other economic and social dependents. The Left, inspired by movements in China and the Soviet Union, championed the causes of the tiller and the toiler.

  Gidla details the oppression unleashed on the protestors, the rebels and the oppressed by the Nizam and his infamous Razakars and, later, by the Indian state under Jawaharlal Nehru, who unleashed the army against the Communists and their supporters. Nehru, as Gidla recounts her uncle’s words, was a letdown in every sense. For instance, in a tragicomic scene (and this book has several of these), Nehru’s oratory – at the peak of the Visalandhra campaign for a separate state – is felled by a poorly functioning mike (the Communist workers, at Satyam’s behest, were responsible).
  An incomplete transition

  But Satyam’s differences with the leaders of the Communist Party were apparent from the very beginning. It began from his opposition – not vociferously aired – to the Left’s contesting independent India’s first elections in 1952, when they became the largest opposition party in Madras Presidency and then agreed to support the Congress government.

  Satyam believed the movement was incomplete, that the tillers had not been emancipated yet, nor been granted land. The Communists were irrevocably divided – and caste as a factor was never acknowledged. There were the rich reddys, kammas and kapus who dominated the party in the Andhra region, and with the Dalits making up castes such as the malas, the madigas were simply disregarded.

  Satyam’s disillusionment with the party continued with the split following the war with China in 1962. But the call for true revolution was never sounded, frustrating the likes of Satyam and his colleague, Kondapalli Seethramaya. Inspired by Charu Mazumdar and the Naxalbari uprising, the two would later be involved in forming the CPI(ML) (the People’s War group in the late 1960s).

  In the intervening period (1962-1967), Satyam immersed himself in leading, and then calming, the Andhra-Telengana disturbance in Warangal, and winning smaller, yet vitally important, struggles: standing up for lepers whose colonies were being razed by the municipality, aiding the unorganised railway and textile mill workers, and even reaching out to students at the St Gabriel school in Warangal after they complained of sexual abuse at the hands of priests.
  A sister’s struggle

  Satyam’s story is intertwined with that of his (and Carey’s) sister Manjula, the youngest sibling, and Gidla’s mother. For all his compassion and empathy for the marginalised and lost, Satyam and his brother Carey dominated and regulated every aspect of their sister’s life – a stranglehold on her habits, routine and dress that became more rigid once Manjula went to college.

  The divisions that Satyam came up against in the public spheres of education and politics were ones that Manjula encountered at every turn, at home and away. All too often, her struggle appeared bleak. Yet the will to seek a better life was powerful and consistent, despite being hemmed in by the forces of privilege. Privilege in the Indian context was clearly identifiable, also exercising its hold in undefined but well-entrenched ways, such as decisions over who and how one married, the friendships one formed, the jobs one could do.

  Satyam’s and Manjula’s journeys were different, but there was always the insidious presence of caste as a decider. While Satyam did recognise discrimination for what it was, his idealism and faith in communism made him, especially in his younger years, blind and oblivious to the clear divide in the Communist leadership. He always had his eyes fixed on the revolution, breaking away every time the old guard made a revisionist turn. The inspiration of Naxalbari was followed by his meeting Charu Mazumdar, a man he would remain in awe of, and Naxalbari would lead to the Srikakulam peasant uprising (1967-70).

  For Manjula the struggle was against something almost hydra-headed. She faced not only the punishing impositions of caste, but also strictures of religion and family. Her inclination to befriend the higher kamma and kapu girls, for instance, made her caste peers turn against her. And when her beloved older brother went underground, was tormented by her inability to secure a permanent job as a teacher.

  At every temporary job that came Manjula’s way, it wasn’t so much her own ability as the benign intervention from well-meaning upper caste superiors that made the difference. There were always sadistic superiors to contend with, and Satyam’s absence in these crucial years of her life meant Manjula had no one to turn to.
  Darkness visible

  To slip into pathos would have been the easiest thing for a book of this kind. But Gidla has a clear-eyed view of the past, her own past, and a restraint in how she writes of it. The darkness is tinged in places with quiet comedy. In the hospital, for instance, the time her third child was due, Manjula had a close shave with death, while her sister-in-law and the janitor actually resorted to fisticuffs to resolve a misunderstanding.

  But there is no comedy when Gidla writes of her own childhood, the time she was left alone with her two younger siblings with her mother at work. Instead, a stark dry-eyed practicality prevails. Desperate to have someone look after her young children (her husband worked in another town), Manjula accepted everything – a tyrant of a mother-in-law and even a chronically ill distant relative who sexually abused Gidla, an incident the writer graphically recounts.

  This is a clear-eyed, unflinching look at caste, and the systems that conspire to institutionalise discrimination in every system. As Satyam realised later in his revelation to his niece long after he is “expelled” – the Left had always refused to countenance the presence of caste in all their plans and interventions.

  For some, like Satyam, the response was clear and apparent, leading to his expulsion. For others, to ask questions was to invite opprobrium. Gidla doesn’t make as political a statement as this. Yet her book is personal and also, assuredly, political. Read it and despair, but read it you must.

  Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, Sujatha Gidla, Farrar Straus Giroux.
  We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

• The Hindu
  http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/an-area-of-darkness/article19777287.ece
  Word count: 956

  Reviews
  An area of darkness: review of 'Ants among Elephants...'
  Geeta Doctor
  September 30, 2017 19:25 IST
  Updated: September 30, 2017 22:16 IST
  [Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India Sujatha Gidla Farrar, Straus and Giroux ₹1,262]

  Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India Sujatha Gidla Farrar, Straus and Giroux ₹1,262
  A Dalit Christian’s memoir takes on the Indian state for failing to stop the inhumanity endured by the wretched of our hearth

  It’s a comparison that Sujatha Gidla will hate.

  In her landmark dismantling of the Indian state that has failed to live up to the idealism of its preceptors, Gidla appears like a modern day Mahishasuramardini — the goddess who rides a tiger and destroys the buffalo-headed demon of ignorance with a trident aimed at the heart. The modern India that she targets is the humongous buffalo-headed demon that lies bloated with its betrayals and failures. The tiger or the lion she mounts is her memory and that of her immediate family.

  Since the age of 26, Gidla has lived in the U.S. After a long stint at a bank job in the banking capital of the world, Gidla, now 53 years old, works as a conductor in a New York subway. Gidla had studied at IIT (Madras), now Chennai.

  Or as we are repeatedly reminded she belongs to the third generation of a Christian Dalit family who grew up in a remote region of Andhra, as it was known in the pre-partition era where she begins her story.

  The way it was

  They were discriminated on three counts. They were Dalits belonging to the Mala caste, forced to live outside the village proper, but within its perimeter by virtue of being educated. They were converts, but one whose family having turned to the Communist theocracy, did not go to church. They were poor.

  It would appear that both the distance and absence have given her the luxury to recognise, and even in a tangential way celebrate, the one feature that sets her apart. Gidla insists that she must be recognised as an Untouchable as defined by the Indian caste system. It empowers her. In the land of the free that is America, Gidla discovers her need to be not just a Dalit, or a Mala, but an Untouchable. The knowledge is what sets her free.

  Gidla uses the capital form of the word, for as most of us will know, and she describes it in minute detail, there are degrees of untouchability based on occupational differences.

  When she describes the exact nature of the work expected of the ‘shit collectors’, the ‘carrion eaters’, each one living in their prescribed-by-custom ghettos, we may feel that we are back in what Gandhi called the drain inspector’s report with Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Or more recently with Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi (1986) where he describes his grandmother washing the undigested grain from the cow dung to make the rotis that she swallows as if stoking an unforgiving fire within her belly — we are not without reminders of the inhumanity endured by the wretched of our hearth.

  Against this background Gidla’s recollection of her family’s history appears like the images of the Andhra shadow puppets against the stirring events of the country’s history as projected on the canvas of the cloth screen in lurid colours and drumbeats. One of the interesting anecdotes Gidla tells us is how the Dalits living just outside the space of the rural cinema theatres were so adept at learning the songs, the dance sequences and dialogues from the films of that early era, that they were inducted as performers by Marxist cadres once they started organising themselves. Many of them joined the film industry of the South.

  Like the shadow puppets, some characters loom over the others. In Gidla’s case it is that of her maternal uncle, K.G. Satyamurthy, a prominent poet writing under the name of Sivasagar, a lifelong dissident, whose first hero was Subhas Chandra Bose and who was one of the founder members of the Naxalite movement in Andhra Pradesh.

  ‘Forrest Gump’ figure

  As a legendary folk hero, Satyamurthy appears like a Forrest Gump figure in Gidla’s narrative and gives it a luminous intensity beyond the darkness.

  It may sound almost absurd to compare Gidla’s story to that of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. There is, however, the same ferocious intimacy in dragging out every bit of the family history within a deadening culture, set against the failed promise of Marxism that makes both riveting.

  We are living in an age of anger as Pankaj Mishra reminds us; in the prologue to his eponymous book, Mishra examines the current cult of individualism: “An existential resentment of the other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.”

  Gidla’s anger is that of a rebel holding a kerosene-soaked torch that she flings into the face of her reader: These are my experiments with Truth! Whether we grab the burning brand, or duck, it’s hard not to be seared by it.

  Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India; Sujatha Gidla, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ₹1,262.
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• Slate
  http://www.slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/is-there-such-a-thing-as-too-much-freedom.html
  Word count: 2763

  “Why Were We Untouchables?”
  An Indian author’s quest to understand her country’s entrenched and debilitating caste system—and her family’s place in it.
  By Isaac Chotiner
  SAHK990819627710
  An overcrowded street in Calcutta, India.

  Arko Datta/AFP/Getty Images

  Sujatha Gidla’s new book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, is the author’s story of discovering—and wrestling with—her family’s fraught and wrenching history. Gidla comes from a line of Christian “untouchables” in southern India who are at the bottom of India’s caste-defined social system; by recounting the experiences of her mother and uncles, she explains how the country has stayed mired in discrimination, even after gaining independence in 1947, and the barriers that still exist to social change.
  Isaac Chotiner Isaac Chotiner

  Isaac Chotiner is a Slate staff writer.

  “The untouchables, whose special role—whose hereditary duty—is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all,” Gidla writes. “They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils.”

  Gidla tells numerous stories of the ways in which her parents were discriminated against, isolated, and humiliated, even though they managed to become college teachers and lead more of a middle-class existence. One of her uncles became a guerilla fighter and activist. This all led to Gidla’s own activism, which landed her in jail for a short time. But after studying physics in school, she came to America at age 26 in 1990. She worked in tech and eventually found her way to the New York subway system, where she is now a conductor—the first Indian woman to hold the job.

  I wanted to interview Gidla after reading Ants Among Elephants because it is the best book I have read about India in many years. When we finally spoke by phone recently, she was in New York and seemed excited about the reception her book was getting, even though talking about the subjects it covers is still painful for her. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed why caste is so hard to hide from, how her family reacted to the book, and what it has been like for her trying to build a life in America.

  Isaac Chotiner: You have more of a science and technical background, so what made you want to write this story about your family?

  The first question is about being a scientist and writing a book. The second is about what inspired the book. I’ll talk about what inspired the book.

  In India, we experience casteism. We experience this as victims, and others experience it as either perpetrators or neutral people. We really don’t know the mechanisms of caste—why it’s like that, why we have this. As a young girl, I really wanted a reason, a concrete reason why we were untouchable. I thought that it was because we were Christians because Christianity is a minority religion, and probably that’s why we were being treated like this.

  But that notion was changed when I saw a movie in which there was a Christian family that was very well-off and also socially superior to even Brahmins. That’s when I started thinking: If it’s not Christianity, why were we untouchables? I was exploring that question for a long time, and finally, when I did, it was like going to your drawing board like a detective would do and placing suspects and victims.

  I was trying to do that, only on a computer in a Word document. That’s how it started. When I started talking to people about why we became Christians and how we became untouchable, the stories they told, they went far beyond just this question. That’s when I started writing about it.

  As for the ability to write a book—

  I didn’t mean to imply you wouldn’t have the ability, but maybe my bias as a journalist who knows nothing about science and can’t understand it is that I was impressed that someone with such a science and technical background could write a book like this.

  [Laughs.] My family are really good storytellers. We like telling stories about what we saw. My mother is very articulate, and my uncle is even more articulate, and also, they knew a lot of things. They’re able to see things from the point of view of “why is this society like this?” and the psychological and social aspects. I inherited that from my mother and uncle, and my father was an English lecturer. I would listen to him teach English to his students. He never taught me directly. Years of listening to him teach his students made me good at English.

  Can you explain why someone’s caste in India is so hard to hide? I think a common American response could be, why do you tell people what your caste is?

  Oh, caste is a village social institution. The village social institution persisted for a very long time, and it still does because 80 percent of Indians still live in villages. In villages, castes are very distinct by their occupation, for one thing, and second where they live. Each caste has its own colony. That is where they live. All castes don’t live together mingled. Each has separate colonies.

  Because of that, everybody knows who you are and also because of what job you do. When it comes to cities, people who came from villages, they still carry those, “Oh, you are such and such person’s relative,” this and that, so they would know. Apart from that, the way you dress, your surname, what you eat, what gods you’re worshiping, and whether you can wear jewelry or not and how you cut your hair. All of these things show your caste. And because the system is 3,000 years old, even if it scientifically does not have a genetic imprint, it has something very close to it. People’s body language—the way they carry themselves—shows what caste they are.

  I’m sure their physical health, too.

  Oh yeah, of course.

  Why are even left-wing political parties in India so casteist?

  The Communist Party of India was dominated by the land-owning Kamma caste, and it’s indistinguishable from a caste-based party. That’s why Communists are all upper-caste. … They bring in their own ideology, instead of leading the people away from casteism.

  The book has bits where you talk about how emotionally draining it was for you to write. Why was that?

  It was emotional in the sense that it’s a family story and people are very close to me. They had undergone these kinds of hardships. I didn’t see their real hardships that they faced when they were young, and all these stories came out when I was talking to them. How poor they were was pretty shocking to me. Then, my father and my mother, I loved my father. To portray him in that way was very hard for me.

  “Indians definitely have brought along the caste system to America.”
  —Sujatha Gidla

  In what way?

  He was a great guy, but the story I’m telling was my mother’s story, and so I had to show the audience how he was toward my mother. Because the story stopped at where it stopped, I didn’t have a chance to show his good side, and that made me feel bad. The fact that they were all dying was the biggest problem, that they were not going to see this story in print, that was the biggest sadness for me.

  Some of them have seen this in print though, right? Some of your family?

  My mother. Both my uncles were dead before that. My father was dead even before that. It’s kind of very hard that they weren’t there to see, and especially my uncle, because he was kicked out of the party, and he tried to get together an organization, but he didn’t succeed, and in the end he was telling a journalist that “my life is just a joke.” That really felt very bad to me. If he had seen this book, he would have known that his life was not just a joke.

  What has your mom’s reaction been to both reading the book and seeing the response it has gotten?

  She has been involved in the process of writing this book, so she almost feels as if she wrote the book. The fact that it is her story is very important to her. She’s extremely, extremely proud. But one sad thing is that there’s nobody for her to share it with in India. She lives in India, she reads all these newspapers, but there’s nobody to share it with in India.

  The upper-caste neighbors, they shut their doors and they haven’t said a word since the New York Times article came out. Not one word. They haven’t recognized it. A colleague of hers, she came to visit my mother when the BBC interview was coming, and when she saw the interview, she just got up and left the house. It’s another upper-caste colleague. Two of her colleagues actually woke her up in sleep and berated her, “How dare your daughter write this stuff, haven’t we treated you well enough? What’s your complaints? Why are you still talking about untouchables?” It’s very sad that even though she’s very proud, there’s nobody in India that she can share her happiness with.

  There’s no other family there?

  The untouchable family and friends, they like the fact that I wrote a successful book, but they don’t want to share it in social media because it will expose them as being untouchables to their friends and co-workers. In both ways, it’s tragic that they cannot openly celebrate my book.

  How often do you go back to India?

  At least once a year, if not twice.

  You came to America when you were 26, 27?

  Uh-huh.

  Now you’ve been in America about the same amount of time you were in India, right?

  Yes.

  I am doing detective work because I don’t want to ask you your age.

  OK.

  I was obviously very taken when I read that you’ve become a subway conductor, which is a job that everyone’s interested in now because everyone loves complaining about New York City subways.

  I’m a conductor. Conductor in India means an entirely different thing: It’s the employee, the worker who sells tickets and things like that. Conductor in the subway, in New York City’s subway, is very different. We don’t sell tickets. We are more like what they call a railway guard in India. We make sure that everybody got in the train and nobody’s stuck between the train doors, nobody’s getting dragged on the platform or falling off on the train tracks. We open and close doors and make announcements. The conductor is in charge of the train while the train is in the station. He/she’s the one who tells the train operators what to do next.

  Do you like the job?

  It’s interesting because I like my co-workers very, very, very much. They’re really the best. They’re very witty people, have a sense of humor, and are kind and compassionate, and people with varied interests. The best thing is that it’s a very multiracial workforce, and we get to share our stories and culture.

  Are there a lot of other Indian Americans?

  There are lots and lots of Indians. It’s just that I’m the first Indian woman. There are Indian men as train operators, conductors, and even supervisors.

  You talk in the book and you’ve talked today about the way in which caste has an effect on every aspect of life in India. How true is that with Indian Americans?

  Indians definitely have brought along the caste system to America. There are some who are more refined than the others. The refined, they identify with the liberals here in America. They vote Democratic Party, and they talk about women’s issues and gay issues. But when it comes to caste, they’re still casteist. In India, you can be as progressive as you want, and you can even be a very dedicated anti-caste activist, but caste still is present even in those people. It’s like that. In every American Indian organization, there is caste. There’s one caste that dominates those associations.

  I heard you say in an interview that you were drawn to things that are seen as men’s roles. Why do you think that is?

  I think that I actually like the way men carry themselves: nonchalantly. They can fit somewhere and swing their legs and whistle and things like that. That carefreeness, I love that carefreeness. I didn’t like being shy and demure and things like that.

  I always wanted to do what they could do. I was the first girl to ride a bicycle in my town. I always used to run and catch the bus after the bus had already started.

  Intentionally?

  Yes. Yeah, I did that. [Laughs.]

  Have your two siblings—who live in America and Canada, respectively—read the book?

  I’m not sure. I think that they were very blocked, psychologically blocked, by what I have revealed, what I have said in the book, and if I said it correctly or something. They never talked about the book until now. Now, they’re enjoying the success.

  Top Comment

  I actually read Ms Gidla's book and was little disappointed. I expected the author who was a Dalit from Christian background, to talk about the experience of Dalit discrimination in Indian Christianity and the Church. More...

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  As Slate’s resident interrogator, Isaac Chotiner has tangled with Newt Gingrich and gotten personal with novelist Jonathan Franzen. Now he’s bringing his pointed, incisive interview style to a weekly podcast in which he talks one-on-one with newsmakers, celebrities, and cultural icons.

  Do you feel happy and settled here, in America, now?

  I have made an American family here. I have very few friends, but they’re very, very, very close to me. Actually, they’re closer to me than even my own family members. They make me very comfortable.

  They don’t ask about my caste. Even if they do ask, it’s in the same vein that I’m investigating caste and my outrage, they share that. I feel very comfortable with them. My personality has changed 180 degrees since I came to America because people like the way I talk, the fact that I can speak English and write English fluently, and I know a lot about American history and culture. I know more than average Indians here. That’s a plus with me as far as Americans are concerned.

  They look at me with a positive view, and it makes me feel self-confident to the point of being arrogant. I love that very much here. But, I do miss home because there are a lot of things that I grew up with, I miss that. But my life is here now.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/08/05/541844695/ants-among-elephants-examines-family-and-caste-in-india
  Word count: 1290

  'Ants Among Elephants' Examines Family And Caste In India
  6:39

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  Transcript

  August 5, 20176:42 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered

  "Ants Among Elephants" is the memoir of an Indian woman, born a so-called untouchable, who is a New York City subway conductor. NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith speaks with author Sujatha Gidla.

  STACEY VANEK SMITH, HOST:

  In the caste system of India, the family you're born into can determine a lot - where you live, who you marry, the jobs you'll have. Sujatha Gidla was born in untouchable - the lowest caste in Indian society.

  SUJATHA GIDLA: The untouchables, whose special role, whose hereditary duty is to labor in the fields of others, to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They are not allowed to enter temples, not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by the other castes, not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils.

  SMITH: In her new book. "Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family And The Making Of Modern India," Gidla takes us through four generations of her family. Many of them were educated, but the untouchable label always followed their lives. And that was despite the fact they worked as teachers, poets, revolutionaries. And Gidla herself graduated from one of the top engineering schools in India and worked in banking in New York City. Gidla has since changed careers and works for the New York City subway. Still, she says she could never escape her caste, even in America. She says when she meets a fellow Indian, it's often one of the first questions they ask.

  GIDLA: What caste are you? You cannot avoid this question. And you cannot refuse to answer. By tradition, everyone has the right to know.

  SMITH: India's caste system is more than 3,000 years old. It's one of the oldest social hierarchies in the world. The system was officially banned in 1950. It's illegal to discriminate based on caste, but Gidla says the caste system is still very real. As a young girl, nobody told her she was untouchable, but she says she felt it.

  GIDLA: Caste names are also disparaging names, like a negro and the N-word are blended into one. So saying the caste name is very difficult for families like mine after they came to the cities and became educated. So now we're told is that this is what we are. But from their behavior, I could know that we're inferior.

  SMITH: Things crystallized for Gidla when she was 9 years old and saw a Bollywood movie, where a poor man from a high caste marries a rich woman from a lower caste. Their relationship shocked her.

  GIDLA: That's when I started thinking about relation between caste and route and social status.

  SMITH: When I spoke with Sujatha Gidla about her life as an untouchable, she described how the caste system in India compares to the social structures in this country.

  GIDLA: For some reason, untouchables, they instinctively know that their situation and the situation of blacks in America is very similar, blacks probably because they don't know about untouchability. But we do know about racism because we watch American news and read American news, so we instinctively relate to black people in America. But I have to think about it. Why do we identify with them? I think it's because both are dependent on their birth status. Caste is hereditary. I am the same cast as my forefathers.

  And in a way, racism is a caste system in the sense that there is this one drop rule that however light skin you are, you're still considered black. And so the kind of discrimination they are subjected to has similar kind of things. For example, a black man, if he married or fell in love with a white woman, it was a very dangerous situation in the South in Jim Crow. Only recently, a upper-caste girl fell in love with this untouchable boy. The boy was tortured and killed.

  SMITH: Do you feel more liberated from your caste here in the U.S.?

  GIDLA: When I'm not interacting with Indians, yes, I feel completely liberated. But once you meet an Indian person, even in America, the caste comes into picture immediately. People who are here, who went to school here and came as professionals, if we go to parties in their homes, they won't ask you what caste you are. But if their parents or their grandparents are there, they will simply accost you and demand to know your caste. It was only in 2005 I was able to say, I am an untouchable to somebody who asked me that question.

  SMITH: Why was it difficult?

  GIDLA: Because it's simply how their attitude changes. For example, my sister - one time, she needed somebody to help her with cooking. And this woman responded to the ad. And she came by train. My brother-in-law picked her up in the car. And she immediately asked him, what caste are you? And he avoided saying this, but she continually, continually asked him. And when she came to the house, she did the same thing with my sister. And when they refused to say, she even said that I will give you multiple choice. You can say yes to one of those answers.

  SMITH: She really wanted to know.

  GIDLA: Yes.

  SMITH: You live in New York, and you work as a subway conductor. And I feel like the subway's often talked about in New York as this great equalizer of rich people, poor people ride the subway. I wonder if that is why you chose that job?

  GIDLA: I was always drawn to things that are supposed to be only men's territory. All the girls who were studying medicine are trying to get into medical school. I wanted to be an engineer. And then when I came here, I was riding subway. I saw a female driver. I wanted to be like that. Also, railways was one of the venues through which untouchables escape their caste occupation.

  When the British were laying railroads, it was a very hard job because they were clearing forests. And there were animals that could attack you and snakes. And only untouchables came forward to do that stuff because their condition was so bad that this is an escape for them. And in my grandfather's generation, there were track workers and people who clean the trains and stations. So I kind of felt like, you know, it's my family. This is in my blood.

  SMITH: That was Sujatha Gidla. Her book, "Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family And The Making Of Modern India," is out now. Sujatha, this was such a pleasure. Thank you.

  GIDLA: Thank you very much.

  (SOUNDBITE OF ELEPHANT REVIVAL'S "THE PASTURE")

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• The New York Review of Books
  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/dalits-gods-oppressed-children/
  Word count: 3678

  God’s Oppressed Children
  Pankaj Mishra
  December 21, 2017 Issue
  Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
  by Sujatha Gidla
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., $28.00
  Sujatha Gidla
  Sujatha Gidla, far left, with her family, Andhra Pradesh, India, 1966. Her mother, Manjula, is at right.

  Many Indian houses still have a simple pit toilet, which consists of a large hole in the floor. The feces are collected at night by “manual scavengers,” who, Sujatha Gidla writes in Ants Among Elephants, “carry away human shit” and whose “tools are nothing but a small broom and a tin plate.” Most are women. In the past, they would “fill their palm-leaf baskets with excrement and carry it off on their heads five, six miles to some place on the outskirts of town where they’re allowed to dispose of it.” In many places today, baskets have been replaced with buckets and carts, but the disease-ridden job of cleaning toilets, septic tanks, gutters, and sewers still falls on Dalits, formerly “untouchable” Hindus.1

  One out of six Indians is a Dalit, but for years I neither witnessed nor imagined the life of one, although almost every week small columns in the newspapers reported the murder, rape, and torture of them. If any of the students at my schools were Dalits, I did not know—such obliviousness about a hierarchy that benefited me was part of my upper-caste privilege. I did hear much whispered malevolence among relatives against the “Scheduled Castes” (the official name of Dalits) and the affirmative action program designed to bring them equal citizenship. It was only at my provincial university, in a left-wing student group, that I first came into regular contact with Dalits; and it was while reading Ralph Ellison in my late teens that I began to reflect on the historical injustices and social and psychological pathologies that had conspired to make tens of millions of people invisible.

  India, the world’s largest democracy, also happens to be the world’s most hierarchical society; its most powerful and wealthy citizens, who are overwhelmingly upper-caste, are very far from checking their privilege or understanding the cruel disadvantages of birth among the low castes. Dalits remain largely invisible in popular cinema, sitcoms, television commercials, and soap operas. No major museums commemorate their long suffering. Unlike racism in the United States, which provokes general condemnation, there are no social taboos—as distinct from legal provisions—against hatred or loathing of low-caste Hindus. Many Dalits are still treated as “untouchables,” despite the equal rights granted to them by India’s democratic constitution.

  This constitution was drafted in the late 1940s with the help of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit leader, whose reputation as a bold and iconoclastic thinker has been eclipsed by the cults of his upper-caste rivals Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi. The founding principles of India’s democracy that Ambedkar helped enshrine are even more far-reaching than America’s in their guarantee of equal rights and absolute prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. But high-minded legislation in India is rarely accompanied by a necessary change in hearts and minds. The institution of caste, the social group to which Indians belong by birth, remains the most formidable obstacle to an egalitarian ethos.

  In the hierarchical order, a Brahmin ranked highest due to his “pure” occupations of priest and scholar, and the Dalit was degraded to the lowest rung because of his proximity to human excreta and other polluting bodily substances. Ambedkar, for instance, belonged to a subcaste whose members were forced to walk with brooms tied to their waists, sweeping away their evidently contaminating footprints. Among many activists he was deeply frustrated by how Dalits, denied access to education and property, had been “completely disabled,” as he wrote in Annihilation of Caste (1936):

  They could not bear arms, and without arms they could not rebel. They were all ploughmen—or rather, condemned to be ploughmen—and they never were allowed to convert their ploughshares into swords. They had no bayonets, and therefore everyone who chose, could and did sit upon them. On account of the Caste System, they could receive no education. They could not think out or know the way to their salvation. They were condemned to be lowly; and not knowing the way of escape, and not having the means of escape, they became reconciled to eternal servitude, which they accepted as their inescapable fate.2

  This terrible destiny has been justified over time by all kinds of religious and philosophical rationalizations. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi claims that manual scavengers realized ages ago that it is their “duty to work for the happiness of the entire society and the Gods” and “that this job of cleaning up should continue as an internal spiritual activity for centuries.” Such opinions are encouraged by the fact that the values, beliefs, prejudices, phobias, and taboos of the caste system were deeply internalized by its victims, including Indian Christians and Muslims, whose ancestors tried to escape the stigma of untouchability by renouncing Hinduism: the family of Sujatha Gidla converted to Christianity.

  This implicit surrender to the hierarchical norms of deference and obligation has long prevented solidarity among the oppressed castes, forestalling any concerted challenge from below to the entire iniquitous system. Indeed, India’s multilayered social order seems more fiendishly organized than the simple hierarchy that placed whites over blacks in the United States. The advent of Donald Trump and the mainstreaming of white supremacism has refocused attention on how the degradation of African-Americans in the nineteenth century served to affirm the rights and dignity of poor white men. “White men,” the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis wrote, “have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race.”

  But in the Hindu caste system defined by “graded inequality,” as Ambedkar brilliantly defined it, “there is no such class as a completely unprivileged class except the one which is at the base of the social pyramid”; “every class is interested in maintaining the system” and indeed does so by dominating or degrading the one just below it. The Marathi poet Govindaraj put it more bluntly: Hindu society consists of men “who bow their heads to the kicks from above and who simultaneously give a kick below, never thinking to resist the one or refrain from the other.”

  Govindaraj offered this generalization in the late nineteenth century; it remains largely valid in the twenty-first. In rural areas, which many upper-caste Hindus have migrated from, members of India’s formerly subordinate middle castes, for instance, are often responsible for some of the worst atrocities against Dalits today. It is also true that a growing number of people at the very bottom of the hierarchy are vigorously resisting the kicks from above. Political parties and social movements organized around Dalit identity have emerged in recent decades.3 Such is the electoral potency of this Dalit political awakening that India’s present Hindu nationalist regime, though dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has had to position itself as the benefactor of Dalits. The liberalization of the Indian economy since 1991 has helped some Dalit entrepreneurs, provoking ambitious claims by some commentators that global capitalism is finally bringing about a long-delayed emancipation from the inequities of caste.4

  The range and intricacy of Dalit experience can be grasped by English-language readers through the works of scholars and critics such as Anand Teltumbde, Gopal Guru, and D.R. Nagaraj.5 Daya Pawar’s pioneering Dalit autobiography, Baluta, which describes caste violence in Mumbai in the 1940s and 1950s, appeared in a fine English translation in 2015. Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan and Vasant Moon’s Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography are eye-opening memoirs of impoverished Dalit childhoods in the mid-twentieth century, while Ajay Navaria’s stories in Unclaimed Terrain turn an ironic gaze on the recent emergence of a Dalit middle class through affirmative action and economic liberalization.

  Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants, which records the life of a Dalit family in the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and spans nearly a century, significantly enriches the new Dalit literature in English. Gidla grew up in India and now works as a conductor on the New York City subway. She knew firsthand the poverty and discrimination that several generations of her family had suffered. Defiant in the face of endless cruelty and misery, and tender with its victims, she seems determined to render the truth of a historical experience in all its dimensions, complexity, and nuance. The result is a book that combines many different genres—memoir, history, ethnography, and literature—and is outstanding in the intensity and scale of its revelations.

  Gidla is fully aware of the sanction the caste system receives in Hindu scripture. She seems more interested, however, in how the twin shocks of colonialism and capitalism in nineteenth-century India turned the caste system into a more exploitative force. A brisk account of her ancestors describes how

  they worshipped their own tribal goddesses and had little to do with society outside the forest where they lived.

  When the British cleared the forests for teak plantations, my great-grandparents’ clan was driven out onto the plains, where the civilized people, the settled ones, the ones who owned land and knew how to cultivate it—in a word, the Hindus—lived. The little clan, wandering outside the forest, found a great lake and settled around it. There was no sign of human life for miles and miles. They took up farming. The land around the lake was fertile and gave them more than they needed. They called their new settlement Sankarapadu, after one of their gods.

  But soon the civilized people took notice of them. They were discovered by an agent of the local zamindar—the great landlord appointed by the British to collect revenue in that area—who saw the rice growing in their fields and levied taxes, keeping the bulk of what he extracted for himself.

  But that was not enough for this agent. He and his family and his caste people moved nearby and set about stealing the land by force and by cunning. They loaned the clansmen trivial sums at usurious rates to buy small necessities such as salt, seeds, or new clothes for a wedding. Unable to pay off these debts, the villagers gave up their land acre by acre. My ancestors, who had cleared and settled the area, were reduced to working on their old fields as laborers.

  In a few simply phrased sentences, a great movement of Indian and world history is compressed: the corralling of peoples in subsistence economies into the world made by feudalists, colonialists, capitalists, and other “civilized” peoples. Gidla is acutely aware of how modern much of what we call tradition is. Take her account of the “vetti system” in central India, in which “every untouchable family in every village had to give up their first male child as soon as he learned to talk and walk” to the local landlord. The system had its origins, she writes, in “British demands to maximize revenues” and land reforms that created a class of oppressive landlords while turning low-caste peasants and artisans into slave labor. “Although based on traditional caste hierarchies,” Gidla writes, “the vetti system was not a traditional system. However antiquated it appeared, it was unknown before the end of the nineteenth century. Like chattel slavery in the Americas, it was a modern product of the capitalist world market.”

  But Gidla’s characters are not two-dimensional victims, poor and weak, waiting to be liberated from their primitive existence by some modern ideology or institution such as secular democracy, Hindu nationalism, or global capitalism. Rather, she commemorates their ingenuity and creativity, their repertoire of cultures and memories. A tireless interviewer, she displays an ethnographic fidelity to the stories, images, gods, taboos, and fears of her community—her account of its tradition of pig-hunting and wedding feasts is particularly vivid. And the emotional current is always strong. People fall in love, and are cruelly thwarted, by both fate and man-made prohibitions.

  The book’s most memorable character is the author’s mother, Manjula. This gifted woman’s struggles with entrenched caste prejudice and misogyny form the emotional core of the narrative. But the largest place in it is reserved for Gidla’s maternal uncle, K.G. Satyamurthy, a famous poet and revolutionary who in the 1970s organized a guerrilla group that aimed “to liberate the countryside village by village, driving off the landlords and gathering forces to ultimately encircle the cities and capture state power.”

  This was a doomed project, given the superior military strength of the Indian state. But it would be too easy to judge its advocates as deluded losers who failed to grasp the emancipatory potential of liberal democracy and free markets. Many Dalits were not enraptured by freedom from British rule or what they saw as the substitution of a white ruling class by high-born Hindus. In the midst of India’s independence day festivities in August 1947, a “boy Satyam had never before seen” asks him: “Do you think this independence is for people like you and me?” Nehru, India’s first prime minister, soon clarified this issue by unleashing his British-trained military on rebellious landless peasants in Satyam’s region.
  Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos
  A member of the Ramnami sect of untouchables whose tattoos represent a protest against the caste system, Chhattisgarh, India, 2005

  While revealing Nehru, a hero to middle-class and upper-caste Indians, as another tormentor of Indian’s most wretched, Gidla’s book also clarifies why Dalits were not much attracted by the upper-caste paternalism of Gandhi, who narrowed the manifold cruelties of India’s social system to the issue of manual scavenging, claiming that the institution of caste needed to be reformed rather than abolished. Gidla may disconcert more of her readers when she writes that “everything exciting and progressive” in the 1950s and 1960s was “associated with communism.” But this is true not only for India or Dalits, but also for many other postcolonial peoples in Asia and Africa. Much seemingly disparate activity—writing plays and novels, making films, reciting poetry, organizing reading clubs, libraries, labor, and protest movements—was indissolubly linked to the promise of a more extensive liberation than the first generation of anticolonial leaders had achieved.

  It is arguable that the delegitimation since 1989 of Communist ideals of justice and dignity and social-democratic notions of collective welfare created a great vacuum—one that various ethnic and racial fundamentalisms eagerly fill today. Gidla’s account of Satyam’s life as a radical valuably illuminates the moral energy and purpose the pursuit of these ideals brought (and continue to bring) to the lives of the oppressed, long after the revolutions made in their name in Russia and China mutated into tyrannies. It is also true that communism appeared irresistible to Satyam and fellow Dalits because no other ideology on offer—whether liberalism, nationalism, or Gandhism—could match its combined promise of intellectual growth, political fraternity, and redemptive action. Saytam, Gidla writes, “was amazed by this way of thinking—that one can look at society, the people in it, the things they do, in the same manner as a natural process that can be studied in a science lab” and how “the struggle between classes in society is reflected in something called ideology—in ideas and culture. Under the right conditions, the spread of certain ideas could in turn spur social change.”

  Social change was what India needed above all, with or without communism. For as Ambedkar warned in 1951 in resigning from Nehru’s cabinet, “to leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.” Gidla expands these insights into a devastating critique of not only India’s iconic leaders but also its Communist bosses, who were mostly Brahmin men parasitic on the Soviet Union and China for ideological guidance. “When Stalin was alive,” she writes caustically, “everyone took his sayings as verses from the Vedas.” These camp followers neglected the central problem of caste and gender discrimination, assuming that it would disappear with the reordering of socioeconomic structures. Such mechanical application of Marxist dogma to uniquely Indian situations explains the historic failure of the mainstream left in India to build support among the country’s numerous trampled-upon peoples.

  Many disenchanted Dalits chose to organize themselves into guerrilla groups rather than be represented by upper-caste Communists-by-rote in local and national legislatures. Political activism for them became a way of life and a source of meaning; and this in itself represented a triumph over adversity and misfortune. Gidla writes on the occasion of her grandmother’s death:

  Who could have imagined that the body of this diminutive black-skinned untouchable woman, a gleaner of fields, a singer of songs of toil, a pounder of rice, a Bible woman, the widow of a railway coolie, the mother of a plantation slave, a woman who’d never spent a single moment of her life on herself, would be carried to her grave in a procession of hundreds of men and women carrying red flags and singing “The Internationale”?

  In the life of the fugitive activist, the personal was always and inescapably political. Here is Manjula leaving her home to enter a dubiously arranged marriage:

  The moment Manjula stepped out of the house, Satyam broke down, fell to his knees, and wept. No one could console him. They all thought that he wept because he couldn’t attend his sister’s wedding. But it wasn’t that. He was thinking of their common struggles, growing up motherless and abandoned by their father, their efforts to get educated, the shameful way in which her match had been arranged. What was to become of Satyam-Carey-Manjula?

  At such moments, Gidla’s book achieves the emotional power of V.S. Naipaul’s great novel A House for Mr. Biswas, which describes the solitary struggles of a descendant of indentured laborers. The contrast between the two books is instructive. Mr. Biswas, modeled on Naipaul’s father, is an educated Brahmin in a small colony, dreaming of individual redemption through writing and affiliation with the imperial metropolis—an ambition that his son eventually realizes. For a Dalit woman in India who confronts centuries of structural and legitimated injustice, salvation lies in a broader social and political revolution at home.

  The signs lately are both promising and discouraging. The first generation of Dalit political parties has been undermined by their own self-serving leaders, who sought in politics easy access to wealth and power. Everyday violence against Dalits has spiked in recent years, largely as a result of their greater political assertiveness. Dalits face discrimination in employment and housing even in the urban and globalized sectors of the economy; they are still exposed in rural areas to murder, rape, and torture; recourse to the police can invite more violence.6 Last year in the state of Gujarat, a mob of cow vigilantes—one of the many unleashed by Modi’s regime—assaulted several Dalits whose traditional occupation is to retrieve and skin dead cattle. The Dalits were tied to the rear of a car and dragged to a police station where they were beaten again; their persecutors also felt emboldened enough to post a video of the flogging on social media.

  Today, however, a major agitation in Gujarat is being led by those same Dalit victims of mob violence. They have renounced their occupation in an attempt to undermine the very basis of a society in which degrading work is reserved for low-castes. Their protests have been strong enough to help force the state’s chief minister out of office and provoke Modi into publicly admonishing his cow vigilantes: “If you feel like attacking someone, attack me, not my Dalit brothers.” Certainly Ambedkar would have approved of a movement that aims at a profound transformation of Indian society instead of expanding the palace built on a dung heap. As he put it, the struggle of the Dalits is “not for wealth or for power.” Rather, “it is a battle for freedom…for the reclamation of the human personality”—an arduous, never-ending battle in which Gidla’s book represents an all too rare victory.

  1

  Nearly a million Dalits still work in this dangerous and debasing profession, though manual scavenging, as it is called in India, was banned in 2013. A new documentary titled Kakkoos, directed by Divya Bharathi, gives a searing account of their working conditions. ↩
  2

  Ambedkar’s major work is available in a new edition, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy: Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (Verso, 2016). ↩
  3

  For a broad account of these developments, see Christophe Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India (London: Hurst, 2011). ↩
  4

  See, for instance, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, “Capitalism’s Assault on the Indian Caste System: How Economic Liberalization Spawned Low-Caste Dalit Millionaires,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 776, July 21, 2015. ↩
  5

  There are some stimulating essays on contemporary Dalit writing in Namit Arora, The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities (Gurgaon, India: Three Essays Collective, 2017). ↩
  6

  For a probing account of one such atrocity and how it was reported in the upper-caste-dominated media, see Anand Teltumbde, Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (New Delhi: Navayana, 2008). ↩

• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-ants-among-elephants-an-untouchable-family-and-the-making-of-modern-india-by-sujatha-gidla/434356133/
  Word count: 825

  Review: 'Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India,' by Sujatha Gidla
  NONFICTION: The boisterous life of an Indian family that fought the caste system.
  By PETER LEWIS Special to the Star Tribune
  July 14, 2017 — 11:09am
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  I mean no disrespect, and I count myself in their number, but I’m wagering that most Americans have a half-baked understanding of the Indian caste system. It is complicated. Unless we are students of the Indian subcontinent, we simplify caste into a gradation of wealth and power, which slowly diminishes until we arrive at those who have little of either, unforgettably referred to as untouchables. Could this system still exist is this modern age? Why, yes, it could, and it does.

  By the time you finish reading Sujatha Gidla’s “Ants Among Elephants” — and again I’ll offer a wager: If you start her book, you will finish her book — your appreciation of the Indian caste system will have become finely tuned. Via the march of history and dint of circumstance, and for a good time now, the Hindus have brokered power and wealth in India, formalizing and institutionalizing the caste system, a subatomic delineation of entitlement and bigotry, in operation everywhere and all the time.

  To the manor born, then, or the hovel. Gidla drew the short straw. “I was born in south India, in a town called Khazipet in the state of Andhra Pradesh. I was born into a middle-class family. My parents were college lecturers. I was born an untouchable.” By what contingency? Her family was Christian. “Christians, untouchables — it came to the same thing. All Christians in India were untouchable … I knew no Christian who did not turn servile in the presence of a Hindu. I knew no Hindu who did not look right through a Christian man. I accepted this. No questions asked.”

  Until Uncle Satyamurthy, her mother’s older brother — a principal architect in the leftist, armed movement to overthrow the Indian government in the 1970s — hove into her view.

  Gidla’s writing starts out clipped and dark. Uncle Satyamurthy is the hub of her tale, but the bigger story is about her family — mother, father, uncles, aunts, grandparents — and their navigating the waters of late colonial and then early independent India. This is a real story, ringing true, told with wide-eyed wonder, and it invites you right into the family, to be a familiar, to understand.

  At times, Gidla works in broad strokes; the stages upon which the chapters play out are fully set. Each chapter resembles a step in the making of the Indian bread puri: an assembly of the basic ingredients, kneading them together to create the general picture, pulling pieces from the dough and rounding them into distinct characters, squashing them flat as if by the hand of experience, then transformed by heat into something unrecognizable: bread lighter than air, a self-possessed untouchable. Revolutionary.
  “Ants Among Elephants,” by Sujatha Gidla
  “Ants Among Elephants,” by Sujatha Gidla

  There is also a fine-grained history of the subcontinent taking shape in the book as Gidla gathers her family’s, and in particular her uncle’s, story. Satyamurthy is a rich character. He can be a dreadful prig, but on the other hand he knows how to laugh, how to take the rough with the smooth. He leads a fascinating life, and the highs and lows of it make for a good investigation into the roil of post-independence. Satyamurthy is true to himself — he is a revolutionary fighting iniquity, a poet and once, to make ends meet, a professional writer of love letters — and doomed.

  Whether you buy into his Maoism — which is not the full-blown, Little Red Book-waving variety, but the “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” stripe — that brand of guerrilla warfare continues to be in motion today via the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army.

  Gidla is our Virgil into the world of the untouchables and their acts of defiance; not just as an observer, but as a participant. She is bitten by the revolutionary bug, and bitten hard: arrested by the Indian authorities, tortured, left to rot, released. She has been party to the heights and the depths of living a revolution. Today she resides in New York City, and after a period of working in software applications, she decided to become a train conductor in the city subway system, the first Indian woman to so serve. Still a revolutionary.

  Peter Lewis is the book review editor at the Geographical Review.

  Ants Among Elephants
  By: Sujatha Gidla.
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 306 pages, $28.

• Christian Science Monitor
  https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0724/Ants-Among-Elephants-offers-a-window-into-the-complexities-of-India
  Word count: 819

  'Ants Among Elephants' offers a window into the complexities of India

  Sujatha Gidla's memoir of her mother and uncle is a moving, fascinating story of class struggle in India.
  By James Norton July 24, 2017

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  It should go without saying that India is a complicated place, a churning cauldron of languages, ethnicities, castes, and religions bubbling atop and throughout one another in a perplexing mass that we call, for the sake of convenience, a "nation." But to many Western readers, the story of India begins and ends with Gandhi's campaign against the British, followed (for those who were paying attention) by the bloody events of Partition in 1947.

  The gift given to us by the new memoir/history book Ants Among Elephants is the opportunity to see post-independence India through the eyes of its untouchables, Christian converts, and the Maoist rebels known as Naxalites. It's difficult to fully conceive of the privilege and power of the caste system from a foreigner's perspective; from the viewpoint of people so low on the system that they stand outside of its levels, it's a mesmerizing horror to behold, and author Sujatha Gidla spares no detail.

  The book revolves around two poles: Gidla's mother, Manjula, who struggles to raise children amid conditions of utmost poverty and political chaos, and her uncle, Satyam, who dedicates his life to class struggle on behalf of the untouchables and common laborers of Andhra Pradesh, a coastal state in southeastern India.
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  Manjula's life is marked by intense professional struggle to find work as a teacher, magnified by her non-caste status, and tremendous personal struggle against her husband and his sometimes cruel family. Satyam willingly sacrifices what could have been a comfortable career as a lecturer and poet in order to fight an idealistic war against the landlords and police who enforce some of India's cruelest inequalities.
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  With her luminous command of fine details, Gidla manages a difficult and admirable task: she takes a tremendously personal memoir and renders it with such clarity that it tells the broader story of a place and an era. In her anecdotes of discrimination, malnourishment, and extra-judicial executions, she brings readers into a world of discrimination and upheaval.

  This is a story that could have easily collapsed under its own weight. "Ants Among Elephants" is a narrative swimming in revolutionary groups that splinter and splinter again, and suffused with arguments about ideology and caste that will seem arcane to many Western readers.

  But the humanity that Gidla gives to her subjects – many of whom are her own flesh and blood – keeps the book from sinking into a mire. Instead, the reader is given sharply observed fragments taken from life, observed and rendered with a gimlet eye.

  Here is Gidla recounting how the lowest of low caste workers, the pakis (manual scavengers of human waste), viewed the presence of a loud movie theater in their run-down neighborhood:

  The Gudivada pakis loved having a noisy cinema hall right beside their homes. From outside its walls they could enjoy the music and dialogue all day and all night. And they befriended the usher, who when the hall was not full would let them in to sit for free in the floor class (that is, on the bare floor – the cheapest class of seating in Indian theaters.) By the first or second week of a movie's run, every paki in Gudivada could recite all its dialogue word for word, with every nuance in tone, and sing all the songs.

  And her account of the conclusion of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's 1951 visit to Guntur in Andhra Pradesh:

  As the train pulled out, Nehru made a show of waving goodbye to his supporters from an open door. Waiting at the side of the track as the prime minister's car was passing, Satyam saw his chance. He darted forward to grab Nehru's arm and pull him down. The old man withdrew his hands with a look of utter terror and disappeared into the car.

  "Ants Among Elephants" has a loose, sometimes rambling feel to it and there are moments where the author's clarity of memory and command of long-gone conversations taxes belief. But suffused within its folds are many thrilling and heartbreaking moments, and the book as a whole is a window into not just the heart of India, but also the elemental nature of prejudice and class struggle anywhere in the world.

• FSG Work in Progress
  https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2017/08/ants-among-elephants/
  Word count: 1063

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  I grew up in the untouchable slum of Elwin Peta in Kakinada. All around me was abject poverty. When you are surrounded by so much misery, you don’t see it as anything extraordinary. I remember when one of my friends in the neighborhood told me she’d had roast venison for dinner three days in a row. I laughed along with her, knowing that was her ironic way of saying she’d gone without eating. I was thinking of the joke she was making and not that some people don’t have anything to eat.

  Yet two things I witnessed when I was seven or eight years old especially horrified me. Whenever I think of Elwin Peta, these moments come back to me. They will haunt me until I die.

  A woman named Santoshamma with her two gaunt teenage sons lived across the street from our house under a thatch supported by four posts. She was only in her late thirties or early forties, but her body was so ravaged by starvation that she couldn’t walk anymore. She lay on rags under the thatch, moaning day and night, hungry and in pain. One day she just wanted something to eat. She sat up. But she couldn’t stand up. She put her hands on the ground behind her. Propping herself up on the heels of her palms, she lifted her ass up and propelled herself forward. Then she lowered herself to the ground again and stretched out her legs. Repeating these steps, she crawled all the way across the street and through our front gate.

  I was skipping rope in front of our house. When I saw her come through the gate, I stopped and stared wide-eyed at the sight of her in her rags, her wrinkled skin hanging from her skeletal frame, her hair wild and dry like straw, with tears pooling in the folds around her eyes, desperate, crawling like some crushed and oozing creature.

  She continued around the side of the house toward the kitchen in back to beg for some food from my grandmother. My grandmother, catching sight of her, was shocked and started weeping with helpless compassion and yelling at her in a trembling voice, abusing the poor woman for presenting us with such a bizarre and pitiful spectacle.

  My mother would hire another woman, named Ruthamma, to do chores in our house. She was washing dishes in a bucket on the kitchen floor when I walked in, eating a piece of apple. It was the day after Christmas. We could afford apples only at Christmas. A couple of apples for the whole family. Ruthamma looked at the piece of apple in my hand with such a stupid, lustful grin, salivating openly, that I could not eat it anymore. I knew that she had never in her life tasted an apple. I can’t remember if I gave it to her.

  Experiences like this made me wish there were no poor people in the world. But how could that be achieved?

  Growing up, I heard about my uncle through my mother. She told us he had sacrificed everything, left his family, and gone off to help the poor. How did he help them? He had a gun. He would threaten rich people, take their money, and give it to those who had nothing. My uncle was like a cinema hero to me. I wanted so much to be like him. But we were never going to see him, my mother said, because the police were secretly watching our house. If he tried to visit us, he would be arrested and put in jail. All this made my uncle seem like a mysterious star shining in the sky high above.

  My mother also told us that he never kept any of the money that he took for himself. He lived a hard life in the jungles. I practiced sleeping on the bare cement floor to prepare myself for the future when I’d have to sleep on the hard ground. I told my friends that I was going to be a Naxalite when I grew up.

  One summer afternoon when I was fourteen years old, I was riding my bicycle home from my maths tutor’s house when I spotted a group of teenagers singing to a small crowd gathered on a street corner. Fascinated, I got off my bicycle. They were singing about poor peasants and workers, how unjust it is that they suffer from want because they are the ones producing the wealth, not the owners of the land and the factories. Never had I heard a song like this before. “Come on, peasant brothers,” they sang, “come on, all you exploited and impoverished, join the party of the peasants and the poor and let us all stand up to the landlords.”

  Never had I heard a song like this before. “Come on, peasant brothers,” they sang, “come on, all you exploited and impoverished, join the party of the peasants and the poor and let us all stand up to the landlords.”

  I walked through the crowd right into the midst of the singers and declared, “I want to join.”

  They were delighted to have won a recruit. I invited them home with me. My family was surprised but also curious. Sitting on our bed, they sang for us, filling the small, asbestos-ceilinged room with revolutionary passion. We were enthralled. When my mother started talking to them and asking them questions, we learned they belonged to a party founded by none other than my uncle.

  That day I became a Radical—a member of the Radical Students Union (RSU), the student wing of the People’s War Group (PWG).

  Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable in Andhra Pradesh, India. She studied physics at the Regional Engineering College, Warangal. Her writing has appeared in The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. She lives in New York and works as a conductor on the subway.

• Labor Notes
  http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2017/11/book-review-ants-among-elephants
  Word count: 663

  Book Review: Ants among Elephants
  November 02, 2017 / Steve Downs Enlarge or shrink text login or register to comment
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  Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, by Sujatha Gidla. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp.

  Ants among Elephants is an absorbing and moving history of modern India from the perspective of a family of Christian “untouchables.”

  Author Sujatha Gidla, now a New York City subway conductor and member of Transport Workers Local 100, traces three generations of her family to describe life at the bottom rungs of caste society, the changes that came about—or didn’t—following Indian independence from Great Britain, and the country’s development in the second half of the 20th century.

  Gidla has written a moving and powerful book about oppression, struggle, and social change—or the lack thereof. This is not an academic book. She writes in a straightforward, almost conversational style. It’s easy to picture her swapping stories about families in the crew room between subway runs.
  FAMILY HISTORY

  Her mother’s generation dominates the narrative. Gidla shows us the staggering poverty of untouchables in the Indian countryside, the absolute subjection of women in traditional society, and the political and social struggles that sought to change conditions for workers and peasants (if not for women).

  Gidla’s Christian family was outside of Hindu caste society. Where she grew up, that meant they were untouchables—although she came to learn that in other parts of India, there were high-caste Christians. Unlike most other untouchables in rural India, they were able to receive educations at missionary schools. Her grandfather became a teacher. However, because of their caste status, this did not provide his family with a path out of extreme poverty.

  The person who figures largest in this story is the author’s uncle Satyam. He became politically active at an early age, organizing students, workers, and poor farmers in the 1950s and early 1960s. He eventually became a leader of a Maoist-inspired guerilla army. He was a forceful organizer and talented political strategist. And as Gidla tells it, he was totally incapable of taking care of himself—to the point where others washed his clothes and trimmed his toenails!

  Satyam’s younger sister Manjula, Gidla’s mother, also figures prominently. She was probably as politically committed as her brother, though she was limited by her status as a woman in a deeply conservative and traditional society. She received an education and became a teacher, but could not find secure employment. She was married off to someone she didn’t know (also a teacher) and continued to live a hand-to-mouth existence. As the mother of three children and often the primary breadwinner for an extended family, she had no time or energy for the political engagement that shaped the life of her brother, who simply left his children with his wife when he decided to join a guerilla force.
  UNION JOB

  We meet the author first as a young child; late in the book she reappears as an adult. She receives an education through college in India and comes to the U.S. in her mid-20s for graduate school. She doesn’t tell us much about her years here or the transition that was required of her, but when the financial sector collapsed in 2008, she lost her job. After passing a civil service exam she became a subway conductor.

  With the publication of Ants among Elephants, she may no longer need the security provided by a union job. But for me as a retired subway train operator and former union officer, it’s nice to think that her job played a small part in helping her to produce this book.

  Steve Downs was a member of Transport Workers Union Local 100 for 35 years.
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• The Economist
  https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21725548-how-indias-untouchables-are-fighting-overcome-grinding-poverty-and-social
  Word count: 998

  A memoir of the lowest caste

  How India’s untouchables are fighting to overcome grinding poverty and social ostracisation
  Print edition | Books and arts
  Jul 27th 2017

  Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. By Sujatha Gidla. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages; $28.

  ONE in six Indians is a Dalit, which means “oppressed” in Sanskrit. That is to say, 200m Indians belong to a community deemed so impure by the scriptures that they are placed outside the hierarchical Hindu caste system and are commonly called “untouchable”. Upper-caste Hindus traditionally treated untouchables as agents of pollution. To come into contact with them was to be defiled, they believed. Indian villages depended on untouchables to provide field labour and clear away human waste. Yet untouchables were excluded from village life. They could not—and often still cannot—enter Hindu temples, draw water from common wells, touch caste Hindus or even live inside the village. Punishments for breaching caste boundaries are severe.
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  Many untouchables, lured by Western missionaries, embraced Christianity. But they remained poor and socially ostracised. Caste, far from being purged, became a characteristic of Indian Christianity and Buddhism. Indeed, no religion in India was able fully to transcend the social divisions entrenched by Hinduism. Consequently, almost every religion in India cultivated its own caste system. Dalits, regardless of their religion, were expected at all times to appease caste Hindus by acting out their lowly status. Every aspect of their demeanour, from posture to speech, had to be modulated to convey unstinting subservience to the upper castes.

  As a young girl, in Andhra Pradesh, Sujatha Gidla remembers adult members of her educated Christian untouchable family “scrambling to their feet” whenever a Hindu materialised before them. India’s constitution, drafted in 1947 by B.R. Ambedkar, a formidably educated Dalit lawyer, outlawed caste-based discrimination and made provisions for the advancement of untouchables through affirmative action. “Ants Among Elephants”, Ms Gidla’s stirring memoir, chronicles her family’s experience of the contest between modern India’s civilising aspirations and the savagery of a decaying but persistent old India.

  Ms Gidla’s grandfather had been educated by Canadian missionaries. But when driven from his village on account of his untouchability, he enlisted in the British Indian Army and in the early 1940s was dispatched to Iraq. The author vividly reconstructs the early lives of the children her grandfather left behind. They grew up against the backdrop of the nationalist clamour for freedom. Satyamurthy, the eldest son, welcomed India’s independence from Britain. But his belief in democracy was short-lived. Satyamurthy was a brilliant but restless man. In his college library he discovered Telugu poetry, which was known for its rousing and romantic qualities. He became a propagandist for communists, venerated Chairman Mao and yearned for revolution.

  In telling Satyamurthy’s story, Ms Gidla recounts the history of India from the viewpoint of the very bottom of society. Satyamurthy, fully radicalised by middle age, disappeared into the dense jungles of central India. From there he co-directed an armed insurgency aimed at overthrowing the Indian state. Eventually he learned that his upper-caste Maoist comrades had all along been uncomfortable at being led by an untouchable. He was expelled when he raised the issue.

  Ms Gidla at times devotes pages to domestic squabbles, but she is also capable of hauntingly evocative images. Consider her description of the final parting of Satyamurthy and his wife Maniamma: “She came to see him off at the station. As the train pulled away, she stood under a lamp in a blue sari with the flowers he’d bought her in her hair. Under the dim light she waved to him with a smile on her lips”.

  Satyamurthy is the main subject of this book. But it is Ms Gidla’s mother (and Satyamurthy’s younger sister), Manjula, who is the true heroine of the story. She faced discrimination on two counts: caste and sex. Yet she put herself through university, put up with a repressive husband, became a lecturer and brought up three children. Satyamurthy, having retreated into the jungle, returned with little to show for his years of violent campaigns. The family he left behind, enduring hardships but nonetheless engaging with the world around them, inched forward. The Gidla family now includes professionals trained at India’s finest public institutions (the author was a research associate at the acclaimed Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the Indian equivalent of Caltech; her sister was a medical student.)

  Ms Gidla herself, having once been arrested and tortured by the Indian police for taking part in student politics, disavows her uncle’s methods in the book’s epilogue. She spent years at the Bank of New York, but was laid off during the financial crisis and now works as a conductor on the New York subway. “Ants Among Elephants” is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir. It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new writer.
  This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "The lowest caste"
  Print edition | Books and arts
  Jul 27th 2017

• First Post
  http://www.firstpost.com/living/sujatha-gidlas-ants-among-elephants-is-a-searing-indictment-of-caste-untouchability-in-india-4270863.html
  Word count: 1322

  Sujatha Gidla's 'Ants Among Elephants' is a searing indictment of caste, untouchability in India
  Living Shikha Kumar Dec 22, 2017 12:49:27 IST

  When Sujatha Gidla was growing up in a Dalit slum in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, she witnessed the grown-ups in her family adopting a deferential, servile stance whenever an upper-caste Hindu passed them by. Gidla was born an untouchable, but was never explicitly told so – she was a Christian, her grandfather having been converted and educated by Canadian missionaries before Independence. And thus, she learned to equate Hindus with superiority and power, while Christians were “lowly” and “weak”.

  When she was 15, she watched a movie where a rich girl and a poor boy fall in love. The boy is forced by the girl’s family to stop seeing her, and after failed attempts to track him down, the girl agrees to marry a well-educated wealthy man. Gidla’s brain went numb when she saw the wedding scene — the girl was dressed in a Western-style white gown, complete with a veil. The girl was a Christian, while the poor boy was actually a Brahmin. “This sheer defiance of the laws of nature portrayed Christians as rich and powerful and – most amazing of all – scornful of Brahmins, the highest caste of all,” writes Gidla, in Ants Among Elephants (Harper Collins).
  Sujatha Gidla. Photo courtesy: Nancy Crampton/Harper Collins

  Sujatha Gidla. Photo courtesy: Nancy Crampton/Harper Collins

  In the recently released book, the New York-based subway conductor draws up a poignant portrait of the centuries-old caste system in India with her own family’s story at its heart, in particular her uncle KG Satyamurthy and her mother Manjula. Wherever she travelled in India, her untouchability accompanied her like a dark secret, something she could never discuss with anybody. It was only after moving to America in the early ’90s that she realised that her identity wasn’t confined by her caste, and that her family’s stories were “not stories of shame”.

  “It was too shameful to bring up the subject of untouchability, even with your own folks. I was trying to figure out how it came about. I don’t think having a caste system is a traditional custom. There’s an economic reason for why a 3,000-year-old system still exists. I started thinking on the lines of ‘why caste’ instead of saying this is how it is. That’s how I started writing the book,” says Gidla, on the sidelines of the Times Lit Fest in Mumbai.

  In 1999, she began speaking to Satyamurthy on the phone from New York, recording their conversations. When this proved to be challenging, she made two trips to India in the following years. “He was an amazing person and had participated in all kinds of struggles since Independence. His stories were incredible. But by that time, he was old and frail and it was exhausting for him to talk,” she recalls. Satyamurthy was a Maoist revolutionary and had co-founded the People’s War Group (PWG). He was also a noted poet who wrote under the pseudonym Sivasankar.

  Gidla admits that much of her politics was shaped by her uncle’s. While she initially viewed liberation through the prism of Christianity, she soon crossed over to the side of the revolution and at 14, joined the Radical Student Union, a student body of the PWG. “Circumstances shape people’s personalities and his were shaped by what was going on at the time, whether it was the Independence movement or Telangana. He moved further and further left — from Congress to communism to more militant communism to caste politics,” says the Regional Engineering College Warangal graduate, who was arrested and tortured by the police in her second year after striking against a professor who was failing low-caste students.
  Cover for Sujatha Gidla's Ants Among Elephants. Image courtesy: Harper Collins

  Cover for Sujatha Gidla's Ants Among Elephants. Image courtesy: Harper Collins

  Despite growing up hearing stories of Satyamurthy through her mother, Gidla did not meet him until she was in her early 20s, by which time he had been expelled from the PWG. “Even after I became a radical student, I would keep hearing stories about him from other people in the party and it only intensified the mystique. When I met him after the expulsion, he was at a very low point. He was on the run, both from the police and his ex-comrades. He didn’t have food to eat and clothes to wear and was seeking my assistance, which was very sad."

  Gidla faced various challenges while putting the book together, the biggest of which was the race against death. Some voices passed away before she was finished hearing their stories while others were afflicted by poor health — her other uncle Carey’s high school friend lost his ability to speak after a stroke, her father’s aunt lost her memory after a fall. “There was a part of my uncle’s (Satyamurthy) story I couldn’t bring out — he was a very lively person. One of his friends, who had been very loyal to him, would have remembered all the witty things but he had an early death.”

  While she left India over two decades ago, Gidla believes not much has changed and casteism has only got worse. Her mother was berated by her upper-caste colleagues, women who had been her closest friends, after the book was published. “They said things like why is she in America if she’s so concerned about your caste fellows? Why isn’t she here helping them out?”

  While the reception to Ants Among Elephants has been mostly heartening, Gidla is amused by hyperbolic reactions to it in the West. “In America, people wrote ‘defiance of New York conductor’ or ‘against all odds’. This gives the wrong message — that if you are tenacious enough, you can be successful.” She doesn’t see it defiance, but her life story, narrated in plain words. “I'm .001 per cent of the untouchables, and what I said is nothing compared to what happens to real untouchables in the country. If you are shocked by what I had to say, imagine how much worse it is for those people.”

  She’s not a fan of reservations, as they're akin to putting a band-aid on a bullet wound and only help a minuscule percentage of untouchables. “In competitive exams, you can clear the written test but once you get to the oral interview and they see you’re an untouchable, they fail you. All the untouchables who score enough to be in the merit quota are put into the reservation quota to limit them to that percentage. It’s helped very few people to begin with, and even if they did get through, they were failed at every stage. Look at what happened to Rohith (Vemula), he went all the way to a PhD and killed himself, she says, adding, “My sister and I were failed because of our caste. But it’s worse for Rohith, he died because of the discrimination.”

  Gidla was recently invited to be part of We The Women, a women’s only festival curated by Barkha Dutt that had influencers from sports, politics and entertainment — but she refused. “There were two reasons," says Gidla. "First, it was sponsored by the UN, which in my political view is a fig leaf of American imperialism. Secondly, Smriti Irani was part of the festival. She was instrumental in Rohith’s death. His blood is on her hands. I couldn’t possibly have participated alongside her.”

  Published Date: Dec 22, 2017 12:49 PM | Updated Date: Dec 22, 2017 12:49 PM
  Tags : #Activism #Ants Among Elephants #Books #Caste System #Dalit #Fineprint #Harper Collins #QnA #Rohith Vemula #Smriti Irani #Sujatha Gidla #Untouchability #Untouchables

• New Books Network
  http://newbooksnetwork.com/sujatha-gidla-ants-among-elephants-an-untouchable-family-and-the-making-of-modern-india-farrar-straus-and-giroux-2017/
  Word count: 262

  Sujatha Gidla

  Ants among Elephants

  An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India

  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2017

  November 26, 2017 Madhuri Karak

  In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. From their conversion into Christianity by Canadian missionaries and her grandfather’s stint in the British army; her uncle Satyamurthy’s rise as a revolutionary poet, labor organizer and eventual founder of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) and her mother Manjula’s struggles raising three children in the face of everyday caste discrimination, to her own involvement with the PWG’s radical student wing that ended with brief imprisonment, it is the impossibility of transcending caste even in “modern” India that she circles back to. She writes, “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.” Her book has been reviewed to critical acclaim in the New York Times, BBC, and Slate among others. Gidla lives in New York City and works as a subway conductor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

  Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation, titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier,” explores processes of statemaking in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of work can be found here.

• PRI
  https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-08-10/india-she-was-untouchable-new-york-city-she-became-author
  Word count: 1165

  In India, she was 'untouchable.' In New York City, she became an author.
  Global Nation

  PRI's The World

  August 10, 2017 · 7:30 AM EDT
  By Shirin Jaafari
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  Sujatha Gidla, author of 'Ants Among Elephants. An Untouchable Family And The Making Of Modern India.'
  Credit:

  Shirin Jaafari/PRI

  Sujatha Gidla was only 2 years old when she first realized she’s different.

  One day, her parents had a fight. Her mother stormed out of the house and headed for the railway station. There, she bumped into a colleague, who was also with her daughter.

  "My mother was carrying me and she was carrying her [daughter] ... My mother was talking to her with deference and she was talking nicely, but condescendingly," Gidla recalls. "And even though I was young I could realize that she was wearing nicer clothes than my mother and all the concentration of all these people around was on her kid and nothing on me. So, I thought that these people are some people special."

  According to Indian society, they were special because of the family they were born in to. They belonged to an upper caste.

  But Gidla and her mother were born Dalits and were considered impure or untouchable. In other words: social outcasts.

  Gidla says the best way to explain castes is to relate it to racism, "because racism is also based on birth. So caste is like racism except that we’re not differentiated by skin color."

  One way untouchables are differentiated is through the jobs they hold. Historically, they worked in the fields, cleaned human waste and did the work nobody else wanted.

  Cover of 'Ants Among Elephants.'
  Credit:

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  This discrimination was outlawed in India in 1955. But the prejudice continues today. And Gidla’s life story is full of memories of bigotry and shame.

  Each caste in India is divided into various sub-castes and the one Gidla comes from is called Mala.

  "For us, our caste name itself [Mala] is the N-word. You can’t say it in a good way," she explains. "When people ask us [what caste we are] we won’t say because it’s too shameful."

  But Gidla was one of the luckier untouchables. Her parents were middle class, educated in schools set up by Canadian missionaries. She also went to one of these schools and saw the divisions between students at a young age.

  "That school had untouchables from the villages. They were made to sit on the floor. They were made to not interact with anybody. They were made to sweep the grounds and clean the dishes in the compound."

  Gidla was lucky, and as a result of her parent's education, was sheltered from mistreatment. But when she left her small town to study physics at college, her parent's education no longer protected her.

  After all, she says, “In India, your life is your caste. Your caste is your life.”

  "There was one girl in my class and she just hated me. She said, ‘You’re sneezing on me. You’re sitting next to me. Just keep yourself away from me.’ And the woman said finally that 'I can’t sit with that untouchable in the same class.' So she quit and left."

  One in six Indians is a Dalit or untouchable. And sometimes, Gidla says, the mistreatment and discrimination gets so bad, some of them resort to suicide.

  Last year, a Ph.D student hanged himself in his dorm room. He left a note that read, “My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness.”

  In the past decade, at least 22 other Dalit students from top universities have reportedly committed suicide.

  Gidla's break from life as an untouchable came in the 1990s, when she moved to New York City.

  At first, it took some adjusting to life in the US. Gidla says years of humiliation and discrimination has left its mark on her. She had to get used to the idea that, in the US, her caste doesn’t define her.

  She says that sometimes, she found herself unconsciously turning to old, submissive habits.

  "I came here, I had white boyfriends and you know, I was intimate with them and yet when he wanted to share my food I was very uncomfortable because I’m going to contaminate him. I said ‘No. No. No. Don’t eat this food because I touched it.' And he was very sad and horrified."

  When she told her American friends that she wasn’t allowed to drink from the same water fountain as her upper-caste classmates, they were shocked.

  "Not just Americans, all non-Indians in America treat me as an Indian. Just plain Indian," she says. "I mean it doesn’t mean that America is a great place that is free of prejudices, bigotry and hate. But they don’t have caste prejudice so I am subjected to one less prejudice."

  One less prejudice meant she could thrive — and she has. Besides helping New Yorkers move through the city every day, Gidla is now an author.

  Her memoir, "Ants Among Elephants,” was published last month, to strong reviews.

  It took Gidla 15 years to gather the material for it — to verify family stories with her mom and uncle, both in India.

  For now, she says she's excited to see her book come to life, but doesn't expect it to put an end to the plight of untouchables in India.

  "People will read about it. ‘Oh there’s such a bad thing in India,' they will realize. Maybe one or two of them possibly [will think] ‘Oh what should I do? Who should I join to fight this kind of injustice?' But in general this whole thing is not going to help change the condition of untouchables."

  Nor, she says, will the election of an untouchable president in July.

  Still, that doesn't stop her from sharing her story with the world. Because in the US, Gidla is not ashamed of who she is.

  She’s no longer untouchable.

  One more thing…

  PRI takes a global approach to the news of the day. We help you understand how what happens around the world matters in Washington and in your neighborhood. Today more than ever, we need conversations, perspectives and diverse voices.
  Support PRI with a monthly donation TODAY! >

• South China Morning Post
  http://www.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2105293/review-castes-and-revolution-india-untouchables-viewpoint-ants-among
  Word count: 965

  Review: castes and revolution in India from an untouchable’s viewpoint in Ants Among Elephants

  Sujatha Gidla shows what it was like to grow up the lowest of the low in a country dictated by entitlement and bigotry, and how that led to her joining a movement promoting armed revolution
  PUBLISHED : Friday, 04 August, 2017, 9:00am
  UPDATED : Friday, 04 August, 2017, 9:00am

  Comments: 2
  Tribune News Service
  Tribune News Service

  Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
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  by Sujatha Gidla

  Farrar, Straus & Giroux

  3.5 stars

  Most people outside India have only a half-baked understanding of the country’s caste system. It is complicated. For non-students of the Indian subcontinent, it can be simplified into a gradation of wealth and power, which slowly diminishes until we arrive at those who have little of either. Such people are often referred to as untouchables.

  Could this system still exist is this modern age? Why, yes, it could, and it does.
  Review: Once We Were There – debut novel breaks every taboo in the book for Malaysians

  By the time you finish reading Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants, your appreciation of the Indian caste system will have become finely tuned. Via the march of history and dint of circumstance, the Hindus have brokered power and wealth in India. It was they who formalised and institutionalised the caste system, a delineation of entitlement and bigotry that is in operation everywhere, all the time.

  [Gidla’s guide to the Indian caste system.]

  Gidla was born in south India, in a town called Khazipet in the state of Andhra Pradesh, the daughter of two college lecturers. However, she was still an untouchable. Why? Because her family was Christian.

  “Christians, untouchables – it came to the same thing. All Christians in India were untouchable … I knew no Christian who did not turn servile in the presence of a Hindu. I knew no Hindu who did not look right through a Christian man. I accepted this. No questions asked.”

  That was until Uncle Satyamurthy, her mother’s older brother – a principal architect in the leftist, armed movement to overthrow the Indian government in the 1970s – came into view.
  A mind-bending exploration of identity and the problems of contemporary Japan

  Gidla’s writing starts out clipped and dark. Uncle Satyamurthy is the hub of her tale, but the bigger story is about her family – mother, father, uncles, aunts, grandparents – and how they navigated the waters of late colonial and then early independent India. This is a real story, told with wide-eyed wonder, and it invites you right into the family.

  A fine-grained history of the subcontinent also takes shape in the book as Gidla gathers her family’s story, particularly her uncle’s. Satyamurthy is a rich character – he can be a dreadful prig, but on the other hand he knows how to laugh, how to take the rough with the smooth. He leads a fascinating life, and the highs and lows of it make for a good investigation into the murk of post-independence.

  Satyamurthy is true to himself – he is a revolutionary fighting iniquity, a poet and once, to make ends meet, a professional writer of love letters – but he is also doomed.

  [Author Sujatha Gidla. Photo: Nancy Crampton]

  Whether you buy into his Maoism – not the full-blown, Little Red Book-waving variety, but the belief that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” – or not, that brand of guerilla warfare continues today via the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

  Gidla is our window into the world of the untouchables and their acts of defiance. She is bitten by the revolutionary bug, and bitten hard: arrested by the Indian authorities, tortured, left to rot, released. She has been party to the heights and the depths of living a revolution.
  Eka Kurniawan’s brutal novel on Indonesian masculinity is not for the faint-hearted

  Today she lives in New York. After a period of working in software applications, she decided to become a train conductor in the city subway system, the first Indian woman to so serve. It’s good to see her revolutionary spirit still burning strong.

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• Marginal Revolution
  http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/11/conversation-sujatha-gidla.html
  Word count: 6502

  My Conversation with Sujatha Gidla

  by Tyler Cowen on November 15, 2017 at 9:36 am in Books, Current Affairs, Economics, Education, Food and Drink, History, Law, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, The Arts, Travel | Permalink

  Here is the transcript and podcast, I enjoyed this chat very much. Here is part of the opening summary:

  Sujatha Gidla was an untouchable in India, but moved to the United States at the age of 26 and is now the first Indian woman to be employed as a conductor on the New York City Subway. In her memoir Ants Among Elephants, she explores the antiquities of her mother, her uncles, and other members of her family against modern India’s landscape.

  Our conversation considered the nature and persistence of caste, gender issues in India, her time as a revolutionary, New York City lifestyle and neighborhoods and dining, religion, living in America versus living in India, Bob Dylan and Dalit music, American identity politics, the nature of Marxism, Halldor Laxness, and why she left her job at the Bank of New York to become a New York City subway conductor, among other topics.

  Here is one sequence:

  GIDLA: Actually, the only relation I have with my family members is political views.

  [laughter]

  GIDLA: If we have to connect on familial links, we will always be fighting and killing each other. All that we talk about with my mother is politics and untouchability and caste and Modi and things like that.

  It’s the same thing with my sister also. This is where we connect. Otherwise, we are like enemies. My brother, we’re completely alienated from each other, firstly because he goes to church now. We never used to go to church before. He’s into this Iacocca. Is there a name . . . ?

  COWEN: Iacocca?

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: Lee Iacocca?

  GIDLA: Yeah.

  COWEN: The former Chrysler chairman?

  GIDLA: Yeah. He reads that kind of books.

  COWEN: Management books.

  GIDLA: He’s into that kind of stuff.

  COWEN: You don’t?

  GIDLA: No.

  GIDLA: He read Freakonomics and he liked it. I don’t relate to that stuff.

  And this toward the end:

  COWEN: Your most touching memory of your mother?

  GIDLA: I don’t know. When I was arrested, she was very worried. She said, “I wish I could take you back into my womb.”

  Strongly recommended. I was pleased to see that Publisher’s Weekly named Sujatha Gidla’s book as one of the ten best of 2017, you can order it here.

  1 RPLong November 15, 2017 at 9:41 am

  “the first Indian woman to be employed as a conductor on the New York City Subway.”

  I’m all for historic firsts, but come on.

  2 Dick the Butcher November 15, 2017 at 10:57 am

  I’m waiting for the podcast covering the first Indian woman to be employed as a Walmart greeter and career-wise “rubbed elbows” with indigenous, US untouchables. .

  3 amartya sen November 15, 2017 at 12:34 pm

  The period’s inception. The comma’s resting place. Yadayadayada

  4 Tanturn November 15, 2017 at 1:17 pm

  Tyler’s trolling us.

  5 peri November 16, 2017 at 11:23 am

  When CNN trumpeted amid the national election news the other night that Seattle had elected its first openly gay school board member, I realized once and for all that the supply of undistinguished firsts will not run out in my lifetime.

  6 Menglu November 15, 2017 at 9:52 am

  With respect, I found this Conversation to be a good deal less enlightening than the others. It might have helped if you had an academic on as well, or if you cut the length and stuck solely to her area of expertise (caste).

  7 Ray Lopez November 15, 2017 at 3:34 pm

  Yeah, read the transcript and she, Gidla, seems (1) ill-informed, (2) dangerous* (3) self-promoting her book, (4) doesn’t like the prominent Dalit academic despite his on paper credentials, (5) took advantage of affirmative action in India, (6) comes from a rich American family (siblings are doctors, engineers) but seems to knock the American way. All in all, she’s pretty misguided. I did look at TC’s original post where she criticizes the commentator who said castes give color to Indian society–it sounded like something I would have said–but found the comment had been deleted. Actually I would not mind being in a caste, only for a day or week, just for fun (as long as I had the option of leaving the caste, as she did)

  * GIDLA: “Charitable organization and education, they’re all within the same framework. I would have to say things that I may be hesitant to say, but the social structure has to be basically smashed and rebuilt on a collectivized basis.” (what an idiot, I guess she doesn’t know much history about the USSR, wartime Germany, Cambodia or Mao’s China, not to mention the Qin dynasty).

  Bonus trivia: some Brahmins feel polluted by just looking at untouchables, not just touching them. And Jains drink through straws with filters so they don’t harm any nearly microscopic life forms in the water that might be ingested. Food for thought: would they willingly however ingest Ascaris lumbricoides eggs so as not to deny the worms chance to multiply inside their human host? They can reach a foot and a half–no symptoms–one-sixth of India has them (I had one too) and they look like giant earthworms when you pass them in your feces.

  8 charlie November 15, 2017 at 10:04 am

  “GIDLA: For sure, yeah. I have seen bad things happen with identity politics, with untouchables as well. All they fight for is reservations. Reservations is based on your suffering, or suffering of untouchables in the villages. If you want reservations, then you’re indirectly asking for discrimination to be continued, on the basis of which you can gain a few seats in universities and political places.”

  So she hits the nail on the head there.

  “GIDLA: My sister lives here in Long Island. She is a physician. My brother is in Canada. He’s a chemical engineer. He works as a technology consultant for oil companies.

  The concept of caste is incredibly useful. If you look at African Americans, clearly they are all low caste people who primarily dealt with sanitation or cleaning toilets (pullman) 50 or 60 years ago.

  Of course race is a useful concept as well; clearly there is something called the talent tenth which has a lot of white genes. She seems to fall into that category.

  So is caste underrated or overrated?

  9 A Truth Seeker November 15, 2017 at 10:31 am

  Yet, America supports India’s savage regime. Oppose India, rehabilitate Lin Biao, uphold President Temer’s ideas, sdefeat Trump!

  10 Dick the Butcher November 15, 2017 at 11:06 am

  Regarding America supports: football players, ruggers, et al don’t need cups and athletic supporters when they wear compression shorts.

  11 Dick the Butcher November 15, 2017 at 11:17 am

  Not so much. America takes in their best and brightest.

  12 A Truth Seeker November 15, 2017 at 11:21 am

  And helps to crush the innocent populace.

  13 A Truth Seeker November 15, 2017 at 2:36 pm

  America should not support tyrants.

  14 Mistah Kurtz He Dead November 15, 2017 at 10:59 am

  This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a train conducting Marxist.

  15 Dick the Butcher November 15, 2017 at 11:10 am

  The horror! The horror!

  Written in the margin, “Exterminate all the brutes!”

  16 chuck martel November 15, 2017 at 11:08 am

  As with her late exposure to Bob Dylan, Gidla entered the “beautiful people” era when its time had already passed. Just as a large portion of the enlightened post-60s neo-Marxist crowd had a goal of entering public employment, each morning changing their tie-dyed T-shirts for US Post Office uniforms, she moved from the predictable but regimented life of the financial world to an even more predictable one riding in a train on never-varying tracks. So she’s the Laura Ingalls Wilder of the Indian diaspora.

  17 Millian November 15, 2017 at 11:33 am

  Well, relative to other interviews, this involves a lot more (a) nicely stepping around questions like, why were you arrested? without explaining to the audience why (b) conspiracy theories about people being “given some kind of, I don’t know, perk to become capitalists” (c) use of free labour by blog commenters – was Prof. Cowen not that motivated, ‘cos I could understand why?

  18 Benny Lava November 15, 2017 at 11:39 am

  A lot of talk about India and caste but very little substance in both the questions and answers. What is her book about? I have no idea but I get the feeling neither does Tyler.

  19 Millian November 15, 2017 at 11:42 am

  I think there’s plenty of substance in saying: “the social structure has to be basically smashed and rebuilt on a collectivized basis. Everything should be run on . . . Agriculture should be collectivized. Industry should be under the state. Foreign policy should be a monopoly of the state.”

  Now we might argue that this usually leads to famine and tens of millions of people being killed by the state, but whatever, radical chic, right?

  20 Ankur November 15, 2017 at 1:09 pm

  +1

  21 Benny Lava November 15, 2017 at 1:22 pm

  The fact that you think it a substantial answer means you are a shallow thinker.

  22 Bernard Guerrero November 15, 2017 at 4:59 pm

  The fact that the sarcasm passed about a mile over your head means that your sense of humor was surgically removed.

  23 Tim November 15, 2017 at 12:16 pm

  “Publisher’s Weekly named Sujatha Gidla’s book as one of the ten best of 2017”

  A pretty… predictable list. Books on climate change, racism, gentrification, “austerity,” wrongful imprisonment, immigrants, redlining, all with the expected stance. I mostly agree with most of these stances, but at some point it gets a little dull having lists so dominated by political orthodoxy.

  24 Milo Minderbinder November 15, 2017 at 12:51 pm

  So MTA conductor is now another job that Americans won’t do?

  25 Bernard Guerrero November 15, 2017 at 5:00 pm

  Hell, I’m barely willing to get on the trains as a passenger.

  26 Ram Seshadri November 15, 2017 at 4:14 pm

  As a brahmin in a western country, it was pretty depressing to see her view everything through the lens of caste. I will whatever I do, she would only see me as a castist pig.

  I honestly think people who left India are stuck in a time warp. India has moved on, it’s not the same.

  27 Brad_sk November 15, 2017 at 7:42 pm

  Well said. Heard the same from some of my Indian friends. Its like you are completely sucker punched if you are born into poor “upper caste” family – No reservation, no money, viewed as horrible pig because of rigid caste system some 50 – 100 years ago.

  28 Ben November 18, 2017 at 3:29 am

  Your upper caste friend is right. They have nothin, poor, and begging. Denying education, wealth, dignity, human rights for centuries to 85% of Indians your friends and their caste fellows occupied every position in every field, not due to merit, but due to caste affinity. Even today they occupy majority of dignified positions. Reservations gave a small windows of opportunities to those who suffered for centuries. your cleve friends nullified that too by denying them proper education after Independence. What do they get without education? Scavenging jobs or someother menial jobs. Ask them if they want them too when you meet next tine.

  Caste is complected social issue. You msy understand rocket science, but not caste, if you are a westerner. Study it before forming opinion. Dont go by these so called upper caste hindus. Since you only see them and hear them, its not your fault.

  If you have genuine interest, do some serious reading and follow Indian news. You understand what it is and how cruel it is and is it different from other such discriminations.

  29 Ben November 17, 2017 at 7:11 pm

  Can you enlighten me what is India without caste? Be happy some think about its oppression even after breaking those chains unlike your types who glorify everything to whitewash crimes in its name. Atleast you identified yourself as brahmin and we know what your say on caste.

  30 shrikanthk November 15, 2017 at 4:57 pm

  Disappointing interview.

  A hell of a lot of nonsense there. Makes sad reading. Expected more nuance.

  “Hinduism is nothing but a prop for caste system” – Huh? What sort of nonsense is that…Has she bothered to engage with any aspect of Hinduism, besides her own experience as a Christian Dalit? And it’s convenient how many Dalits conveniently lose their “Christian” religion at right times, so as to avail of affirmative action.

  And she has no clue when she talks of brahmin dominance in US. Less than 30% of Indian Americans are Brahmins. In fact a very large chunk of them are shudras (backward castes) from states like Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh.

  31 potax November 15, 2017 at 5:15 pm

  I wonder why so many Indian marxists emigrate to the US. The place seems to be teeming with them. I also don’t understand the opposition to market reform. Sujatha’s postures on why she emigrated sound very forced to me. Her employment in a US bank as a programmer seems to suggest that she came over on an H1B. The liberalization of the economy is what allowed a lot of these jobs to be created in the first place. The amount of government largesse that Sujatha received after being arrested for plotting the violent overthrow of the Indian state, I think speaks well of the Indian state. (This is not in terms of affirmative action). Anybody who goes to the colleges that Sujatha went to recieves a ton of government largess.

  32 shrikanthk November 15, 2017 at 7:36 pm

  Tyler – By the way while the interview was disappointing, you weren’t. You asked a decent number of hard questions, more than I thought you would.

  Now the factual corrections –

  “For Bihar, they eat beef (Brahmins)”

  No. They don’t. Some of them eat meat. But none eat beef.

  “It’s only the Brahmins who are not allowed to eat meat or fish.”

  Not true again. First of all, there is no legal diktat (old or new) banning meat for anyone. At best you have injunctions in the traditional texts. 30-40% of Indian population is vegetarian or eggetarian. While the brahmin population is barely 5%. So clearly a very very vast majority of vegetarians in India are not brahmins. Many low castes in North west India are strictly vegetarian. Vegetarianism is not unheard of even among some dalit families. I have even met Muslim vegetarians (not individuals but families) in India.

  “So all these small-time business people, tea vendors—just overnight, they lost all their money. They keep their money in their houses.”

  This is the most egregious comment. People were given two months to exchange their money at the bank for new notes. 2 months. I repeat 2 months.

  ““Why is a woman reading books?” ”

  That comment would be directed at both women and men in small intellectually sterile villages / towns. I am not sure why she wants to bring in gender.

  “So for me, coming to America means a lot of social freedom.”

  Ha! Ofcourse it does. How can you possibly compare a country with a per-capita income of $5K with a country with a per-capita income of $50K? Do you expect the former to have more “social freedom” than the latter?

  This is just so puerile..

  33 freethinker November 17, 2017 at 7:08 pm

  All those who point out errors in Sujata’s interview: don’t you know dalits can never be in error in what they say or do? It is your casteist mind-set which finds errors in what a dalit says!

  I know institutions here in India where dalits indulge in the worst kind of caste politics. But few dare to question them. Those who do are harassed under a law which was intended for protecting dalits but more often than not abused by them to harass whomever they want. Incidentally, I belong to a “lower” caste myself but my family is considered traitors to the caste since my mother insisted my sisters and I should come up without using the reservation policy as we are economically comfortable and my parents well-educated. .. However, I am afraid shrikanthk makes some questionable observations: Demonetisation may or may not have been needed but many went through hell because of the way it was implemented , Even the right-wing thinker S Gurumurthy now admits that.

  As recently as 1990s I was witness to rural women reading books being frowned upon, not their husbands.

  “How can you possibly compare a country with a per-capita income of $5K with a country with a per-capita income of $50K? Do you expect the former to have more “social freedom” than the latter?” So Kuwait and Saudi Arabia with their high per capita income also have lot of social freedom? As my American friends would say c’mon !

  34 shrikanthk November 17, 2017 at 10:34 pm

  “Demonetisation may or may not have been needed but many went through hell because of the way it was implemented”

  We are NOT discussing the merits of demonetization here. I am merely responding to Ms Gidla’s plain lie that people lost all their money “overnight”. That’s the word she used! Overnight. I repeat…overnight!

  “So Kuwait and Saudi Arabia with their high per capita income also have lot of social freedom?”

  Kuwait and Saudi are exceptional cases with high PCI mainly driven by Oil. I am talking of “regular” countries here. As countries get richer, social norms also relax. We have seen this ourselves in India over the past 30 years. You’d be lying if you say that you haven’t. 🙂

  “As recently as 1990s I was witness to rural women reading books being frowned upon, not their husbands”

  Well anecdotal evidence doesn’t carry us too far I am afraid. I was a bookworm growing up. And I can recall N number of instances where many of my relatives made fun of me and said – “Go out…breathe the air…don’t be stuck with your books”. I wouldn’t be commenting here had I paid heed to them.

  I can also recall many instances of many working class men speaking proudly of how studious their daughters are.

  So let’s stay away from anecdotal evidence.

  35 shrikanthk November 15, 2017 at 7:52 pm

  “This guy on your blog was saying casteism is very good and probably they should adopt it for American society. Wasn’t he saying that?”

  I dont think anybody on any of the blogs ever said that or ever implied that.

  36 vkk November 16, 2017 at 12:14 am

  i don’t know what about that. but this: “Caste gives color to society. Different castes make it interesting.”

  is definitely YOU!

  37 shrikanthk November 16, 2017 at 6:04 am

  There are comprehension issues. What was said was – “Castes are a consequence of human and cultural heterogeneity”. Castes are not designed to create heterogeneity. It is the other way around.

  38 Ben November 16, 2017 at 11:57 pm

  Readers, (Sorry, if you thlnk i am personally attacking someone. Pl read all his posts from the previous thread on the same topic. For these guys csste is the Iife system and without it they wither away from indian society in no time. So, they defend it and we have to expose them.)

  I read your comments in the previous thread and exposed you. You are again here with your lame and stupid support for caste, directly or indirectly.

  On interview: I found the host is one of the best. He asked many questions, gave lot of scope to answer in detail, and covered lot of ground. Only problem i found was that the questions were too long and each sentencd is a questions on its own. To me, she didnt use the opportinity effectively to expose caste and tell about the reality. At times, i found that she was incorrect, inadequate in her answers, and did unnecessary talk leaving the real issue. She lost a great opportunity to tell the audience about caste, dalits, brahmins, intermediate castes, ambedkar, gandhi etc. I am really disappointed. Interview was not as good as the book and its understandable.

  Having said that, let me tell you this: Your defencse of csste tells how much you (or your csste) benefited by it for centuries. Ofcourse, its your csste interest to preseve csste. i salute you for the amount of time you spend here to dissect each sentence from the interview. May be getting good renumegation. Keep it up.

  39 vkk November 17, 2017 at 3:17 am

  their defense of caste is deplorable. but don’t mistake people like shrikanthk for some jobless guy paid to write this sort of drivel. they are well-educated (as in degree, piece of paper) and studied in institutes like IIM and working in reputed institutions.

  40 shrikanthk November 17, 2017 at 6:47 am

  It’s amazing how you want to make personal remarks, without taking on specific arguments.

  In none of my posts have I condoned restriction of personal liberties or discrimination by the state. My posts were an effort to understand caste, not glorify or disparage it.

  Sure, I have offered a conservative take on certain aspects of caste. But that is only to provide a necessary corrective. Else those voices dont get heard.

  And sorry. No identity can absolve you from the obligation to be intellectually honest. Which is why it behooves all of us, regardless of our caste, to fact check and be objective, notwithstanding our personal biases.

  41 Ben November 17, 2017 at 12:24 pm

  I know many who troll like this for a payment. Read “i am a troll” by swati chaturvedi. Fascist govt in india spending lot of money on these.

  Dont know about this guy. Academic education alone cant make people civil. These are socially igonarant persons with priveleges derived from the caste they born into, not by their worth. They dont know the outside world, dont try to understand how others live in inhuman castiest society. And unfortunately they are everywhere dolling out their ill- gotten knowledge to the world that knows nothing about this system. Convent education (though they hate Christians who educated them a lot) and english are their weapons for most of their targets (dalits) cant communicate in it.

  In this case, if it may not for money. It could be to preserve his caste privileges and to whitewash their crimes in the name of caste. Recent CA textbook issue is an example.

  Otherwise, who has that much time and energy to criticize a woman who came from humble background crisdecting evevy word she spoke and every word she wrote?

  As i already said, i dont subscribe to her ideology or agree with evegything she said. But, she is talking caste in her own understanding and i welcome it.

  42 shrikanthk November 15, 2017 at 8:52 pm

  “Are there major Bollywood actors and actresses who are Dalits?”

  No But you’d be surprised to know there are very few Baniyas in Bollywood. Baniyas are a very very dominant merchant caste group in Northern India. Hardly any of them in Bollywood. Even Northern Brahmins were hardly to be found in Bollywood until the past 10-15 years.

  So the absence of Dalits isn’t something particularly striking.

  Also Bahubali is a fantasy film set in a distant monarchical past. Ridiculous to read it through the modern lenses of “social justice”. It’s a bit like saying that King Arthur and his Knights should never be shown on the movie screen as their values are antithetical to modern British culture. Huh.

  43 shrikanthk November 15, 2017 at 9:53 pm

  “One thing is that most of the Christians except Syrian Christians and some Catholic Christians in Goa, Christians are untouchables”

  This is such a lie. Here are some numbers from the NSSO (govt body) : Indian Christians (Caste composition): Forward caste : 33% Other Backward caste (more accurately middle castes) : 25% Dalits : 9% Scheduled Tribes : 33% (STs are not “untouchable”)

  Hindus (Caste composition): Forward caste : 26% Other Backward castes : 43% Dalits : 22% Scheduled Tribes : 9%

  So just 9% of Indian Christians are “untouchables” as opposed to 22% of Hindus

  44 Jesudasan Perumal November 17, 2017 at 7:29 pm

  Mr. Shrikanth, you are quoting wrong statistic. Only small minority of S.C Christian identify as such because of denial of affirmative action. Indeed, they are the one using Hindu name like Sujatha. I would think an erudite person like you would know these facts.

  You people very much like Catholic and Anglican and Lutheran Church which provide education for your sons and daughters. You don’t know how these people persecute Pentecostal and Seventh Day and J.V sects which do not have your Caste system.

  I am not identicated by any sect. In America, I see that only ‘episcopalian’ resist this ‘ecumenical’ approach. My nephew married Korean. Both well educated and living with her family while completing. In India, my younger sister’s family has taken a bride from Punjab. They are running logistics business and it was like ‘arranged marriage’ because all same Religion.

  BTW many Bollywood personalites are of Domni ancestry. You may be thinking all Dalit is darker skin and short. Such is not the case.

  45 blah November 15, 2017 at 10:38 pm

  I enjoyed this chat very much.

  A very curious remark to make for a purportedly depressing chat, I should say.

  “All these immigrant associations—ostensibly, they are there to celebrate Indian culture and festivals, but they’re actually the caste groups.”

  This bit about *all these* Indian American organizations purporting to celebrate Indian culture being caste groups is perhaps the best hint in the whole conversation as to how much liberty she takes with truth. I have been to many Indian organizations in the US, including Hindu groups, and the number of meetings where there was any remark about caste, or where I got to know even one other person’s caste, is exactly zero.

  Seems quite fitting though that this should appear just now, for Megan McArdle has just written a nice article debunking the idea that one should not scrutinize claims closely if they are made to address genuine issues.

  46 shrikanthk November 15, 2017 at 10:59 pm

  “how much liberty she takes with truth”

  She is not even a subtle skilful liar. I have done some fact checks in prior comments. Feel free to add.

  47 blah November 15, 2017 at 11:05 pm

  I noticed that. The reason I am not even trying to add is that most people here won’t have the incentive to read the fact-checks. For most of them, it is simply not an issue that concerns them so much; for the rest, their main concern is virtue-signalling or (in the case of some Indians) personal catharsis.

  48 blah November 15, 2017 at 11:03 pm

  But I should say that people like these make one appreciate the greatness of Ambedkar even better.

  Ambedkar was born into a far more casteist society than this person was, arguably suffered much more, wrote understandably bitter tirades against Hinduism, but at the end of the day, he was not one to feel free to get one’s facts egregiously wrong, and his focus was on solving problems, and not on making the correct signals.

  49 shrikanthk November 15, 2017 at 11:28 pm

  I am not sure about Ambedkar’s suffering. He was born into a lower-middle / middle class family of his time, possibly richer than the median Indian family of late 19th century India. His mentor and teacher in childhood was a Brahmin.

  And he got several facts wrong. A lot of his writing is propagandist, particularly his history of Buddhism and Hinduism. For eg – his puerile claim that the modern Dalits are former buddhists. His total denial of the interplay of race and caste is also not something that holds up.

  50 blah November 16, 2017 at 12:10 am

  You don’t need to agree with all his views or believe that he should share the same notion of what is a reasonable supposition, even after accounting for what was the state of the art historical knowledge those days. Like all of us, he, being human, wasn’t free of biases either. That is not what I am talking about – I think we can’t accuse him of wilful distortion, of the kind I just quoted about Indian American organizations. His family income was not low but there are several personal hardships he had to go through – not being allowed to use public goods, people refusing to share water when he traveled etc.

  51 shrikanthk November 16, 2017 at 6:57 am

  The problem with anecdotal evidence is precisely that. It is anecdotal.

  Sure, some idiot would have refused to pour water. But I am sure even in early 20th century Maharashtra, a good chunk of people would have shared water. The exceptions stick. They make an imprint in the mind of a child. And he recounts it ad nauseum for the rest of his life.

  This is human nature.

  52 shrikanthk November 16, 2017 at 7:38 am

  If I really do want to understand caste, I’d probably refer to scholars like PV Kane, whose monumental history of Dharmasastras still holds up. Now Kane was a liberal, albeit a brahmin. But nevertheless a stickler for academic rigor.

  53 freethinker November 17, 2017 at 7:41 pm

  shrikanthk, how come when Ambedkar vehemently attacked Hinduism, he is now an icon of the fanatical Hindu organisation, the RSS, to which the present government is beholden?

  I agree Ambedkar’s critique of Hinduism can be faulted at times but he does give us a lot to think about.

  54 shrikanthk November 17, 2017 at 10:19 pm

  Ambedkar was a second rate thinker. And RSS is a second rate organization. While I do regard myself as a conservative, I am no fan of the RSS. I don’t regard it as “fanatic” but merely low-brow and puerile.

  Why does RSS like Ambedkar? Because he shared the RSS penchant for uniformity and a deep seated dislike of both Islam and Gandhi – the two hate objects of the RSS

  55 Dmitri Helios November 15, 2017 at 11:45 pm

  “purportedly depressing chat” – What are you talking about? It was enlightening, interesting and informative!

  56 blah November 16, 2017 at 12:11 am

  May be you are a savarna-type who is obvious to the terrible suffering that was being discussed?

  57 blah November 16, 2017 at 2:09 am

  Perhaps the most noxious part of the interview is when she disparages the contributions of the Dalit Enterpreneur Chandrabhan Prasad, saying “That particular person, Chandra Bhan Prasad, he makes me puke.”

  Chandra Bhan Prasad’s capitalistic, market-based contributions to dalit cause – which are genuinely empowering, both socially and economically – make a far more natural candidate for an enlightened American economics blog to celebrate more than the heat produced by marxist activists:

  http://www.livemint.com/Companies/YbUASVvd6m8mbffOFNW2uM/With-Dalit-Foods-entrepreneur-looks-to-conquer-caste-prejud.html

  58 shrikanthk November 16, 2017 at 6:54 am

  I think the part I found most noxious is when she regards her co-workers at Bank of New York to be “boring” while the MTA crowd is deemed “interesting”.

  59 Dmitri Helios November 16, 2017 at 11:07 am

  Shrikanth, are subway workers not allowed to be interesting ? And God knows boring bankers never happen!

  60 ConfusedNeoliberal November 16, 2017 at 10:59 am

  I know Tyler researches about her guests, but, do they research Tyler? She claimed to be a Marxist that wants to build society from the ground up and all the agriculture and industry should be collectivized by the state. Does she know that Tyler Cowen is the director of a think-tank that is completely the opposite of what she wants? That he probably regards that as one of the most dangerous ideas ever? That his co-blogger is a hard anti-communist?

  61 Ñembo Tavy November 16, 2017 at 11:32 am

  Phenomenal interview! I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater just because of logical inconsistencies or economic illiteracy on her part. She had some great points, and as a former Christian missionary/Marxist sympathizer, I understand just how easy it is to develop Marxist views if you haven’t been privileged enough to regularly encounter compassionate people who befriend you and turn you on to Hayek. Unless we have some sort of personality disorder, most of us humans are only open to new worldviews (economic/religious) when they’re shared by someone who (we perceive) genuinely cares about us.

  If anything, this interview showcases the importance of MR Uni’s work in dispelling ignorance. Easily digestible lessons that can be shared with friends. “Hey man, I saw this cool video that helps explain…”

  62 rec1man November 16, 2017 at 12:30 pm

  She is a crook, plain and simple Only Dalits belonging to Indian religions – Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism are eligible to get Dalit Reservation seats / jobs

  She is from a caste Mala, entirely converted to Christianity, yet to get Dalit reservations, claim to be Hindu

  63 rec1man November 16, 2017 at 2:55 pm

  Bollywood is almost entirely made up of upper castes with sizeable % of Aryan dna

  Even South Indian regional movies import Aryan women

  http://www.indicine.com/images/gallery/bollywood/actress/gauri-pandit/48400-14-large.jpg

  This is Gauri Pandit, a Kashmiri Brahmin, Aryan Upper Caste, She is very popular actress in Telugu ( dravidian ) movies

  Most Telugu dalit women look like Sujatha and the Telugu dravidian audience wants only to watch Aryan actresses

  64 that happened November 16, 2017 at 7:42 pm

  She claimed that while working in New York City in financial services, a man glared at her disapprovingly because she had a statue of Darwin on her desk and “he was a Catholic.”

  /r/thathappened

  She makes one great point, but she talks like a high-schooler.

  65 Ben November 17, 2017 at 12:10 am

  Shrikanthk displays his ignorance on his comments on Dr Ambedkar. He better read him before giving discources here. He also displays his arrogance in his numerous posts on the this thread.

  66 Ben November 17, 2017 at 11:07 am

  On the other hand, she may be an expert in marxism and communist ideology, but i found that her knowledge on Ambedkarism or real dalit life is not so. She may be against capitalism, but her comments on Chandrabhan Prasad is uncalled for. To understand a dalit life, there are other books.

  For those who are genuinely interested, a few of them: Outcaste by dr narendra jadav Joothan by omprakash valmiki Untouchable spring by g kalyana rao We also made history by urmila pawar Broken voices by valerie mason-john My father balaiah by yb satyanarayana Untouchable (forgot the author, not by mulk raj anand) And many books with first hand accounts of dalit life in addition to Dr Ambedkar’s works.

  67 Tom G November 17, 2017 at 2:52 pm

  Very disappointing – she’s a Marxist, which is stupid, but Tyler fails to mention Venezuela. She argues with her family, but no followup on who makes what points.

  She comes to America … for Freedom (yes! yay!). Yet fails to understand Marxism is, everywhere it’s tried, against freedom. So yes, she’s a total hypocrite.

  She leaves her high paying banking job — because she’s bored with the other workers who are working for money. OK. That’s interesting. The big criticism of capitalism, as lived by Gidla, is that capitalism is too boring. So she has the freedom, here in capitalist America, to get a more interesting, lower paying job, with other folks who have different life experiences. And she wants to tear all the differences down, and rebuild everything with nationalized, meaning standard, all-the-same, jobs and results.

  Terrible views, but not very strongly expressed.

  68 Jesudan Perumal November 17, 2017 at 7:11 pm

  The dog that did not bark is the failure to ask the question ‘What did you think of Mayawati’?

  After all, Mayawati became C.M of U.P and was once considered a possible P.M.

  There is a younger generation of female politicians from lower middle class backgrounds. They are not asserting Caste identity- as Sujatha does- because they have learned the lesson of Mayawati- viz it is the better off older men who benefit and the poorest, labouring, female who gets raped and killed.

  New York subway has a long tradition of nurturing sociopathic chauvinistic ex- terrorists and nutjobs. The reason they aren’t running businesses and getting rich is because their own people recoil from them- for good reason.

  Sujatha did well because her family was close to the Administration. High Caste Hindus on this forum think she benefited from ‘affirmative action’. This is nonsense. She and her family did well because of politics- nothing else.

  If her mother had converted to Pentecostal Religion they would be high and dry. Still, if you see how Prentecostal are improving standard of living and education in A.P & Telengana despite boycott and persecution by Church and State, your eyes will get opened.

  69

• Live Mint
  http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/aaIAEmHZFUZO3Det7Um9BP/How-to-tell-the-Dalit-story.html
  Word count: 1660

  How to tell the Dalit story
  Sujatha Gidla, author of a book on untouchability, on the pervading caste discrimination in the country
  Last Published: Sat, Nov 25 2017. 12 35 AM IST
  Ashwaq Masoodi
  Sujatha Gidla.
  Sujatha Gidla.
  Latest News »

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  Moving beyond the narratives of victimhood and survival, Sujatha Gidla’s book on caste, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family And The Making Of Modern India, has come out at a time when more Dalits in India are asserting their rights, and more non-Dalits are speaking up against the discrimination towards the community. Gidla’s book, published in the US in July and in India this month, is the story of the country through the eyes of the “untouchables”. India has completed 70 years of its independence, but caste still exists and discrimination based on it manifests itself in different forms. At 26, Gidla, a Dalit from Andhra Pradesh, moved to the US, where she worked as an app designer at the Bank of New York. She was laid off during the recession in 2009, and has since been working as a conductor with the New York City Subway.

  In a phone interview, Gidla, 54, speaks about her book, writing, her raw anger, and caste in India. Edited excerpts:

  How do you describe yourself? Which identity precedes the other?

  A Dalit, someone who is left-leaning, then I guess...a conductor. Caste is first because we are made aware of it all the time. If I go to India, I know it based on how we are treated. And since I wrote this book, caste has become my first identity here as well. In fact, my basic identity even now is that of a Dalit more than a writer. It is more like a conductor who became a writer rather than a writer who is also a conductor. I am more caste- and class-conscious than anything else. When I was young, I would say I am a Naxalite or a Communist first. I think I started becoming conscious of my Dalit identity in 1985, after the Karamchedu massacre in Andhra Pradesh, where an entire settlement of untouchables was attacked by a mob of high-castes. It really jolted me and many of us out of our oblivion.

  You started out trying to figure your story. At what point, on interviewing your family, did you realize you needed to write a book?

  Ants Among Elephants—An Untouchable Famlly And The Making Of Modern India: By Sujatha Gidla, HarperCollins, 312 pages, Rs599.
  Ants Among Elephants—An Untouchable Famlly And The Making Of Modern India: By Sujatha Gidla, HarperCollins, 312 pages, Rs599.

  Initially, the phone calls were about finding out where I came from, but very quickly it became clear to me that it constitutes a book. I was shocked to realize that very few generations ago we were actually living in the forests and living off of the forests, and how we came to settle to doing agriculture—which is basically the point of civilization. My family was a part of that huge transition—from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. Unlike, say, places like Germany, where it took several centuries, these huge transitions took place in a very small duration of time for my family—from forests to plains, from tribals to civilized people, from tribals to untouchables, from worshipping totems to practising Christianity. Also, I realized how one becomes an untouchable. It’s not like some people randomly got assigned untouchability, some Brahminism. There is a material basis for this segregation. That caste and its evolution can be explained was fascinating to me.

  You break down caste to its basics—was this book intended to be written for an international audience?

  I was writing for the Western audience. I didn’t expect Indians to be even interested. I probably underestimated how many people in India are—or at least they consider themselves—anti-caste. I probably believed everybody is mired in this casteism, so nobody would appreciate it. I was actually surprised to see the reaction. But when I think about it, I am sure no Indian publisher would have been the first to publish the book. I think it is only because it got so much praise from the West that people in India got to reading it.

  On Twitter, you started the hashtag #WhereIsCaste. Why?

  After the book, I did several radio interviews where people call and ask questions. And all these people calling from India would say, “Oooo, I live in Delhi and I never saw anybody practising casteism. Where is caste?” I heard those people and I also heard some untouchables who have moved up say things like caste is not prevalent any more. That’s when I decided to start this hashtag.

  Has caste discrimination changed its form?

  People think that only the concept of an untouchable’s touch defiling the upper caste characterizes caste discrimination. It isn’t just that. Caste discrimination is everywhere. There’s segregation in living areas, and in towns and cities too, people ask your caste. My family always lived in towns but we were never able to find houses in regular colonies. Either they don’t see it because of their own sensitivities or they deliberately don’t want to see it, or else they think only certain things define caste, and since those are not so visible, caste discrimination is not there. From my point of view, caste is there. Right from the most defining factor of untouchability that is touching, to someone saying look, we do let untouchables eat with us...there is a whole range of untouchability.

  Did you expect your book to achieve such critical acclaim?

  The more I wrote, the more I realized that the story was becoming interesting. I really wanted to write it in a very simple manner, and not give in to lyricism and poetic stuff, and I consciously used the Telugu idioms and expressions (rather than from the English language). The best compliment for my writing came from someone in India. He is a Brahmin but a very poor Brahmin. He couldn’t graduate from high school, so whatever English he knows is through reading news that interested him. He told my mother he read the book without looking at the dictionary even once, and that there were just three words he didn’t understand, but even for those, the context explained the meaning. I was very heartened by this.

  Do you have any favourite authors?

  I read a lot compared to people of my background, but much less compared to people I am put alongside with now. I don’t have favourite authors, I have favourite books. I liked Halldór Laxness’ Independent People. I also liked Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal, by J.R. Ackerley. I liked his style of writing. He doesn’t go into lyricism and nonsense like that.

  Do you think only Dalits can tell the stories of Dalits?

  I disagree that only Dalits can tell the stories of Dalits. On the other hand, people who are in those circumstances have to be extremely conscious, and extremely politically open and progressive, to be able to do that despite being upper castes. Yes, upper-caste people can champion Dalit rights and issues, but they all happen to harbour some kind of a patronizing attitude which we can see but they can’t.

  There are a lot of conversations happening around the assertion of Dalit rights. How do you view this?

  I think Dalit assertion really stands out of what is happening in rural India. What is happening in urban areas is only a reflection of what is happening in rural areas. Basically, even reservation and all of that really comes out of the oppression of untouchables in the countryside. They are the ones who are oppressed. And their fight in rural areas is what makes us conscious of our Dalit identity. The conflict in rural India is really sharp these days, because untouchables are fighting for land. The landed don’t want them to have land. Previously, the untouchables didn’t ask for land because they have been told for centuries that this is your position and you should accept it. When they saw all the other groups, which were originally landless—like the Yadavs, Kumbis, Reddys—owning land, the untouchables also realized that caste lines are not hardened and carved in stone. And if it can change for the others, why not for them? That’s where the assertion comes from. Not as much because of reservation. Reservation is actually dampening Dalit assertion.

  Is the situation better for Dalits now than it was two generations ago? How are the battles different?

  It is better only for those who benefited from reservations, and were able to move up. But for others, it is becoming worse. As we can see, people who made it to higher education, like (University of Hyderabad student) Rohit Vemula... He made it but that’s when he was hounded and pushed to kill himself. Everyday atrocities are more and more brutal. It started with just killing, now it’s the killing of pregnant women, parading women naked, forcing people to lick spit as punishment. There is no way you can be less conscious of being a Dalit with all this going on around you.
  First Pu

• 
  http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/read/interview-sujatha-gidla-author-of-ant-among-elephants/article9999078.ece
  Word count: 1904

  Vignettes from an unequal world
  Leena Gita Reghunath
  (0) · print · T+

  Divided by birth: Issues of caste and discrimination rocked campuses, particularly the University of Hyderabad, after the suicide of dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in early 2016. Photo: KVS Giri
  The Hindu Divided by birth: Issues of caste and discrimination rocked campuses, particularly the University of Hyderabad, after the suicide of dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in early 2016. Photo: KVS Giri
  Simple truth: “If my book got what it deserved, then I was sure it would be a success”. Photo credit: Nancy Crampton
  Simple truth: “If my book got what it deserved, then I was sure it would be a success”. Photo credit: Nancy Crampton
  Ants Among Elephants; Sujatha Gidla; Harper Collins; Non-fiction; ₹599
  Ants Among Elephants; Sujatha Gidla; Harper Collins; Non-fiction; ₹599

  A book that splits wide open the place of a dalit in India’s ostracising caste system goes full circle — from being the target of hatred at home to earning international acclaim

  It was during one of her several conversations with her family, that Sujatha Gidla heard what it was like for a Dalit to enter college in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, merely a generation ago — it felt like being “an ant among elephants”, squashed by a system always pitted against you. At once, Gidla knew she had found the title and the sentiment that encapsulated her book about caste. Having just released the book both in the US and in India, Gidla, a subway conductor in New York City, talks to BLink over a Skype interview, about how her book came about, the underbelly of caste she cannot unsee and the backlash from her community as well as Hindu nationalists for telling the truth.

  Ants Among Elephants received a great deal of attention in the US. How surprised/happy have you been about the reaction to your book?

  I thought that if people have the same taste as I do, in social views and interests and literature, they would like it. But because of the Left politics involved, I didn’t know how receptive people in the West would be. That was actually a big concern when I started writing.

  But as I began writing, I felt there is a human interest larger than one’s politics. My mother Manjula’s stories for example. So, I became more confident, even with the issue of politics. I kind of sensed the good reception, although I was not completely sure because some good books don’t make it. My publisher rejected (George Orwell’s) 1984, which went on to become a major hit.

  But yes, if my book got what it deserved, then I was sure it would be a success.

  How excited are you about bringing this book out in India?

  HarperCollins has released the book in India in December. I am quite excited. When I left India, it was very different. There is a sizeable liberal social layer in India now, so the kind of reception I am getting here was unexpected in the beginning to me. I was really surprised; but it’s welcome. Even when Wendy Doniger’s book (The Hindus: An Alternative History) was only exploring the complexities of Hinduism in a positive way, people did not like it. So I did expect somebody or the other to object to my book too.

  In my case, people associated with the Maoist party did not like certain things I said about them in the book. This is a new group who dislikes books now, different from the religious people.

  Are you worried about it?

  I am not here for the money, and I know by now how popular the book is. If you threaten me now, I am going to dig my heels in.

  I heard you mention at the Brooklyn Book Festival about the hate responses your mother, who lives in India, had received post publication. Could you please tell us more about it?

  These (people) were my mother’s colleagues for the last 50 years, from her days at the Government’s Women’s College in Kakinada. Sharing their personal stories and domestic problems, they had this great unity and bond. But now, when caste came into the picture, it dissipated. It really shows what is paramount in India. What takes precedence over what other kind of oppression. In the case of these women, they were no longer connected with my mom based on women’s solidarity; and so they stopped talking to her.

  The day an article appeared about my book in the Telugu daily Andhra Jyoti, it was 7.30 am and my mother was still asleep when the phone rang. It was her ex-colleague. And even before my mother could say “Hello” a barrage of abuses came in: “How dare your daughter write this book? Have we not treated you like one of us all these years? And you go ahead and have your daughter write this nonsense? You benefited from reservations and you are still crying? Where have you seen casteism?” She is a very frail woman and lives alone, and when the caller says these things, it physically impacts my mother. It’s scary and her colleague’s husband too chimes in, “Nothing is original in that book. Whatever history she has put in is all copied from (writer) Ramachandra Guha.” Now none of her ex-colleagues are talking to her and none of the neighbours acknowledge that they read this in the paper.

  They all were so close, and all this solidarity dissipated over one newspaper article.

  No one who attempts to write family history is said to be prepared for the hate that comes from within the family once the story is out. How true was it in your case?

  So yes, Philip Roth had to face this when he wrote about his family. Salman Rushdie went through something similar though what he wrote was fiction. But for me it is completely the opposite. My mother is very into it. My siblings didn’t hate the idea of this book, but they never expected acceptance, let alone success. They were all through worried and extremely anxious. When the book was released, they didn’t show much interest. And when The New York Times article came in, they were like, “Ah!”. They have slowly started expressing how glad they are, and none of them are complaining about anything I have revealed.

  Your book provides a different and better understanding of India and goes against everything that is popularly accepted and imagined about the country. It’s your lived experience. At a critical point in your life, you were able to distance yourself from all this and look back at it after a long exposure to the American culture. How did that experience help this book?

  It helped tremendously. This was all life for me, so I didn’t think of it as interesting. Because people in the US started seeing them as stories, I was able to think beyond feelings of shame. I realised the value of my experiences as events that stirred curiosity, that other people could sympathise with, and learnt to not see them as shameful stories.

  A recent caste survey pointed out that one in four Indians practise untouchability. But the State of Andhra Pradesh, where your story happens, ranks very low on that list. What do you think about that?

  Here I understand untouchability is just about physical touch. The survey doesn’t ask questions about casteist feelings.

  I never viewed this issue as just untouchability, instead as discrimination. If you look at untouchability as just a touching problem, then I can imagine why it’s high in north India, because it is a very Hindu-Hindi belt, much like the Bible belt in the US, hence more conservative.

  What is it to be revolutionary all your life and belong to a family of fighters? You also became the first Indian woman to be a New York subway conductor.

  It has been very difficult for my family. My uncle was the founding member of the People’s War Group, but he was kicked out and he died in ignominy. His ex-comrades buried him completely because of his caste. He lost his reputation even among dalits. When Mala and Madiga communities had issues with their claims for reservation, my uncle, though he belonged to the Mala community — the most dominant among the dalits in Andhra Pradesh — sided with Madigas. He was called a traitor by the Malas, and the Madigas didn’t like him as they felt he should have done more for them. He died without recognition, and that was because of his political principles which he stuck to come what may. That’s the kind of spirit my mother, me and my sister have. And we do suffer. People who generally admire dalit achievers or leaders don’t really care for us. We continue to suffer being principled through all of this.

  How concerned are you about how your Naxalite past would be seen back home?

  Economist Tyler Cowen interviewed me for his blog. He is a favourite among the upwardly-mobile Indian community in the US. Prior to the interview, he put out a post asking if anyone had questions that he should be asking me. And we got such hateful comments. One called me “a communist”, and said, “How did she get visa to get into the US? She should be immediately deported”. So that is the view of the Hindu nationalist in the US. Of course, the nationalists in India are going to be more rabid. I have my US citizenship, and I expect to be somewhat shielded from that kind of hatred in India because of it. If somebody kicks me out of India, I have at least a place to go.

  Tell me some more about the writing process.

  I worked at the Bank of New York as a programmer, and would work from 9 am-6 pm and then stay back and work from 6 pm-10 pm on the book. I completed a major part of my book while in that job before moving to work for the New York subway. The only reason that drove me — it was not discipline, not ambition — but the passion to tell these stories. It didn’t start as a book in the beginning; but as an investigation into caste and religion in 1999. The idea of a book didn’t come about until 2005.

  I would talk to my mother and uncle and be awed by what I heard, and felt the urge to write what they were telling me. Their stories were so strange, so exotic, so extreme, so passionate and so romantic; I wanted everyone to read it and feel the same way. Also, I had to extensively research into stories that unfolded outside of my own family so that people won’t challenge the veracity of what I said.

  Leena Gita Reghunath is a journalist based in the US
  (This article was published on December 22, 2017)

• The Ladies Finger
  http://theladiesfinger.com/ants-among-elephants-sujatha-gidla/
  Word count: 2702

  I Read Sujatha Gidla’s Memoir And I Understood My Father’s Dalit Boyhood a Little Better
  October 31, 2017
  By Vijeta Kumar
  Gidla’s curiosities about caste began when she was 15, when she was taken to watch a film.

  I have never been able to understand my father’s boundless love for fruits. We once purchased a kilo of sithaphal and put it in the back of the car. We forgot about it and when he discovered the rotting fruits days later, he beat his chest and wept bitterly.

  I remember how he’d also been very upset with me a few years ago when I told him I didn’t like eating idlis. Idli tinakke punya maadirbeku, he’d said. One should be fortunate enough to eat idlis.

  It’s only after I read Sujatha Gidla’s memoir Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family And The Making of Modern India that I understood my father a little better. Growing up as a Dalit boy, my father only ever saw fruits in books or when other people ate it. Idli must have been an annual treat. But the obligation to feel fortunate and blessed enough to eat fruits or idlis never left him, even after he could afford to buy them without hesitation.

  In her memoir, Gidla mentions how her ailing grandmother was once given a grapefruit and how the family had to sit the children down and make them understand that they couldn’t share the grapefruit like they shared everything else.

  There is medicine for her inside that grapefruit, and all of the medicine is in one single section of the fruit. From the outside we can’t tell which one has the medicine in it, so we have to let her eat the whole thing.

  The Kambham family lived within the limits of what they had. They never thought to want more. When they made egg curry, a man was served half an egg. They never thought of fruits unless they saw some on a tree, or unless someone was sick.

  It is extremely important for me that Gidla has written about this because these are things that I have always taken for granted and that my father never will.
  * * *

  Ever since I discovered my caste, I have been feverish with the worry that I must learn my family’s history before all the people who know it begin to die. It is a strange kind of worry because it is galling to suddenly establish intimacy with people only to learn their stories. But it is equally galling, maybe more, to let them die without learning their stories.

  The most remarkable thing about Sujatha Gidla’s memoir is the unabashed confession she makes in the introduction of her book.

  Getting everything I needed from them (her family and relatives) before it was too late became an obsession of mine.

  Sadly though, as if they’ve all woken up together from a Marquez novel, obstacles begin to land on her little project — an aunt falls down and loses her memory. An uncle has a stroke and loses his ability to speak.

  I thought of all the things for him to lose the use of, why should it be his tongue, the one part that mattered most for my purposes. I didn’t need him to dance; I didn’t need him to lift anything. As I saw it, I had been cursed most cruelly. My mother thinks I’ve developed an attachment to the people I am writing about. She thinks I am grieving their loss. But what I am really grieving is the material that is lost forever.
  * * *

  Gidla’s anguish is that the history of an entire community would be wiped out and this is what makes her tell us this story. She is 55 now and works as a conductor for the New York City Subway. She moved to America when she was 26.

  When she recollects the first time she was made aware of her caste, she is confused. “No one informed me that I was untouchable. It is not the kind of thing that your mother would need to tell you.”

  Years later in America, she is amused when at a bar in Atlanta, she told a guy she was an untouchable and he said, “Oh, but you’re so touchable.”

  Gidla’s curiosities about caste began when she was 15, when she was taken to watch a film. It was a love story about a couple who couldn’t marry because of caste differences. “My blood froze,” says Gidla when she realised that the rich girl was Christian and the poor boy was Hindu.

  “This movie, in sheer defiance of the laws of nature, portrayed Christians as rich and powerful, and most amazing of all — scornful of Brahmins, the highest caste of all,” she writes.

  Gidla was unable to believe that rich Christians existed. She wonders why she’d never seen them before. Because what she grew up seeing were the members of her family “scrambling to their feet, straightening their clothes, and wringing hands when a Hindu man passed by.”
  * * *

  The book follows the story of the Kambhams, a ‘lower caste’ community in Andhra Pradesh, who converted to Christianity. Prasanna Rao, Gidla’s grandfather, studied in an untouchable school set up by the Canadian missionaries. After his wife passed away, he had to leave his three children — Satyam, Manjula (Gidla’s mother) and Carey — under the care of his mother-in-law and look for a job in another town.
  Also Read: Leo Tolstoy, F Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain and William Wordsworth. What Do They All Have in Common?

  At 18, Sujatha Gidla enrolled in a Master’s program at the Regional Engineering College in Warangal. In her second year, she was part of a strike organised against an ‘upper caste’ professor in the engineering department, “who was passing all the students of his own caste with high marks and failing his ‘low-caste’ students.”
  What kept Sujatha Gidla alive ultimately was her invisibility. Photo via Sujatha Gidla’s Twitter

  The students who went on strike were all thrown into jail, with Gidla being the only girl. Her mother, Manjula had to go to Hyderabad and contact a civil rights lawyer to help them. Locked up for three months, she contracted tuberculosis. Upon release, she was allowed to come back to college only if she agreed not to talk to anybody and remain invisible.

  What kept her alive ultimately was her invisibility.

  So long as they are all invisible, they are allowed to live. Most Dalit memoirs are a testimony to what happens when they refuse to live invisibly. Gidla has set upon herself the very difficult task of narrating two vastly different yet similar stories — Satyam’s and Manjula’s.

  She tracks Satyam’s struggles as a young rebel who gathered the paki community together to perform, sing, and dance across villages to spread awareness about caste violence. He called this troupe ‘Toilers Cultural Forum’.

  In print, the pakis are called manual scavengers. In plain language, “they carry away human shit,” says Gidla. Satyam began to recruit them as performers after he discovered that they loved reciting movie dialogues, after watching every film that played at the nearby Gowri Shankar Cinema hall.

  From Ambedkar and Siddalingaiah to Gogu Shyamala, Manjula and Sujatha Gidla, the one thing that seems to bring together many Dalit writers and thinkers today is how they moved towards reading and writing, and learnt to be independent. Sometimes it’s because it’s the only way to be after everyone in the world has shut them out.

  In A.C. college, Guntur, where Satyam is sent for degree, his father is unable to afford the fee after the first two months and so Satyam begins to spend a lot of time in the library, teaching himself to read and write. He learns to hide between the shelves when the librarian came to lock up, leaving Satyam alone to spend the night with books.

  But even after reading about Satyam’s journey into co-founding the People’s War Group and his revolutions, the hero and the heroine of the memoir is Manjula.

  It was delightful to read Gidla’s narration of her mother’s journey to Banaras Hindu University where she is sent to study. With nothing but an old and rusting green trunk and an equally old water bottle, she boards a train from Gudivada. She goes to a place about which she knows nothing — neither its people nor its language. And in the middle of her journey, she gets down at a station to fill some water. When she looks up, the train is leaving- so she runs to catch it.

  In a book that is filled with struggle, hunger, fear, loss, resistance, Manjula running after the train, after her green trunk, while still clutching at her water bottle is the most powerful scene.

  I have watched many women running after trains — Geet and Simran from Bollywood films, my aunts and grandmother in real life. While they were all fascinating to watch, (especially my grandmother who beat the TC with a bottle of mineral water for yelling at her after she got on the train) — but no one has run quite like Manjula.

  With one hand clutching the bottle and the other gathering the folds of her sari to lift it off the ground so she wouldn’t trip over it, she sprinted frantically behind the moving train. She raced behind it, her braid lashing across her chest and the railway water sloshing in her belly. With one burst of effort, she caught hold of that bar and hoisted herself onto the second step leading up to the door. She was in.

  In BHU, she finds herself alone, much like Satyam did in A.C. College. She begins to spend more time in the library and learns not to need friends.

  When she is married off, I begin to worry. I worry that her runner’s spirit will die after marriage, the way so many women’s spirits die. But with Manjula it only becomes stronger. She teaches at a college where everybody already hates her — for being Dalit, for having the authority to teach and make money out of it. But she has other things to worry about.

  The marriage isn’t a healthy one. The absentee husband, when he returns, only fights and abuses her. And so she raises all of her three children single-handedly. She moves from house to house, never finding one that is suitable.
  Also Read: An Ohio Bookstore Shows Us What It'd Look Like if Only Books By Women Were Visible

  At one point, Gidla recollects a horrifying memory she has of her father beating her mother

  The scene that day is burned into into my memory. The terrified woman dishevelled, her hand wounded, utterly naked, running to save herself. The man – Sujatha’s father, her beloved father – chasing after her mother, who, desperate, ran out of the house. Her father went after her. Sujatha’s mother ran around to the other side of the well. Her father followed. He pretended to start chasing her mother in one direction, and when she tried to run away, he turned around and caught her from the other side.

  On one particularly stormy night, Manjula and her three children are huddled against one another. They can’t sleep and every time there was thunder, they’d all scream. That night they see the bloody head of a snake — just the head.

  They saw it crawl silently, purposely, relentlessly, making a drawing in blood on the floor. It crawled and crawled. They were scared to breathe.

  Next morning, their neighbours told them that when it rained, snakes come out of the swamps and fall prey to animals who eat most of the snake, leaving the head to crawl off and die.

  There are other such stories of survival.

  Once, Manjula brings a pack of cornflakes for her children. She had never dared to buy something like this before. The children hate it and never eat it after that. Manjula is very disappointed but decides to save the cornflakes box as a ‘souvenir and token of modernity.’

  While her brother Satyam is in the forests — organising the PWG to continue its war against the government — Manjula continues to fight a similar, if not, more sustained battle against the world in which she lives.

  Through unwanted pregnancies and operations to running back and forth between work and home, and making sure her children are well-fed, Manjula fights like a guerrilla warrior through her life.
  * * *

  Speaking of her mother’s response to the book in this interview, Sujatha Gidla says,

  She has been involved in the process of writing this book, so she almost feels as if she wrote the book. The fact that it is her story is very important to her. But one sad thing is that there’s nobody for her to share it with in India. She lives in India, she reads all these newspapers, but there’s nobody to share it with in India. A colleague of hers, she came to visit my mother when the BBC interview was coming, and when she saw the interview, she just got up and left the house. It’s another upper-caste colleague. Two of her colleagues actually woke her up in sleep and berated her, “How dare your daughter write this stuff, haven’t we treated you well enough? What’s your complaints? Why are you still talking about untouchables?” It’s very sad that even though she’s very proud, there’s nobody in India that she can share her happiness with.

  In the first half of the book, there is an elaborate section where Gidla writes about Satyam’s wedding preparations. It is a big affair because the entire community celebrates it. The only conflict is between Satyam and the rest of the community. He doesn’t want any meat served during the feast and they cannot understand how it is a feast without a ‘wedding pig’.

  Eventually, the bride’s family brings a pig and all is well. Gidla observes how a pig is never able to look up at the sky because of its fat neck. But a wedding pig, in the last moments of its life, gazes skyward at last.

  “Veedu pandi lanti vadandi. Chacchi poyye munduaka sanni choosedu” is a common Telugu saying among untouchable families. It means, “This fellow is like a pig. He saw the sky for the first time at the end of his life.” It applies to unfortunate men and women whose only shot at happiness arrives when their children can finally take care of them as they lie looking upwards on their death beds.

  Ants among Elephants is a story about many such people who dared to lift their heads up and look at the sky. And I am grateful for this because these are stories that must be written and told and shared — again and again — not just because soon, we will have lost all those who lived in these stories but also because these stories are what allow us to save them from being frozen like statues in history and government offices.

  Vijeta Kumar teaches English by day and binge-watches Gilmore Girls by night. She blogs at rumlolarum.wordpress.com.

  Tags: Ants Among Elephants, Dalits, Sujatha Gidla, Sujatha Gidla memoir
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• Financial Express
  http://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/meet-sujatha-gidla-new-york-subway-conductor-and-author-of-ants-among-elephants-an-untouchable-family-and-the-making-of-modern-india/807476/
  Word count: 596

  Meet Sujatha Gidla, New York subway conductor and author of Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
  Sujatha Gidla works as a conductor on the New York subway from Tuesday to Monday. She is a Dalit hailing from Andhra Pradesh and says she feels free from the burden of her caste "until I encounter Indians. Then it comes right back."
  By: FE Online | New Delhi | Updated: August 14, 2017 12:55 PM
  Sujatha Gidla, Sujatha Gidla author, Sujatha Gidla book, Sujatha Gidla new york, K G Satyamurthy, Sujatha Gidla subway conductor, Untouchable Family, Modern India, Ants Among Elephants An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, dalit, Andhra Pradesh, Communist, book The book by Sujatha Gidla, recounts the events of K G Satyamurthy’s life. (Photo: IE)
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  Sujatha Gidla works as a conductor on the New York subway from Tuesday to Monday. She is a Dalit hailing from Andhra Pradesh and says she feels free from the burden of her caste “until I encounter Indians. Then it comes right back.” She is now the author of a memoir ‘Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India,’ which describes her much-needed transformation given to her by America. published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an American imprint under Macmillan, the book is about Gidla’s family born into an ‘untouchable’ Mala caste and its struggles with a repressive social hierarchy. She said, “We lucked out. The reason that we escaped poverty is not because we were smarter. We were there when the opportunities came. It is like we were driving and all the traffic lights were turning green just in time,” she was quoted by Indian Express as saying.

  The Economist has termed Gidla’s book as the “most striking work of nonfiction set in India since Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers.” Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India is a book dedicated to Gidla’s uncle, K G Satyamurthy, co-founder of the People’s War Group, and a fiery poet who wrote under the pseudonym Sivasagar. According to the report, Satyamurthy went underground when she was just 3 years old and then he spent his life following his political beliefs. She remembers him as a man who “sought poetry in revolution and revolution in poetry.”

  The book by the 54-year author, recounts the events of Satyamurthy’s life, from his youth when he was a Congress leader in Gudivada at the dawn of Independence to a young college student tormented by loneliness and shame in the company of rich upper-caste students. From a Communist fighting for an Andhra state to a comrade inspired by the Naxalbari movement to join the Srikakulam uprising of 1969. With her words, Gilda describes the story of modern India through Satyamurthy’s eyes, according to IE.

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