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(The author is a subway conductor in NY.)
NY Times, July 18 2017
‘Ants Among Elephants,’ a Memoir About the Persistence of Caste
Books of The Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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