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 ... 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 ... 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.
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 ... 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 ... 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.
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 ... 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 ... Gidla is our Virgil into the world of the untouchables and their acts of defiance; not just as an observer, but as a participant.
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 … The honesty with which Gidla shines the light on her own family is rare in Indian writing … 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.
Two narratives run through her tale. One, the more arresting—and frequently so painful that a reader has to pause for breath—is the account of her own kin, in which her grandfather, maternal uncle and mother are the main characters. The other is Ms. Gidla’s version of political and historical events. This part of her narrative, it must be said, is often colored by her family’s ideology, which spans the communist gamut from Leninist and Stalinist to Maoist and Naxalite ... This is where Ms. Gidla’s story is so precious—in its descriptions of how her family, and people like them, guarded their own humanity even as others denied it. The dignified Untouchable is a staple of progressive Indian literature, but in this book of nonfiction one reads of real people fighting real cruelty with real courage and grace.
Ms. Gidla’s unemotional account of her family opens a window into the lives of India’s most oppressed people. It is not a story told by an outsider, but a tale recounted by one who has experienced what it means to be an untouchable in India’s complicated caste structure … Ms. Gidla’s family history is in many ways a history of India that few know of. The upheavals her family faces is in tandem with the turbulence experienced by the country.
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.
Gidla’s beautiful book, parts of which are as deeply absorbing as anything I’ve read, comes to this question of self-consciousness and how we think of and express ourselves from different directions. Ants Among Elephants is an account of Gidla’s family, from the life of her grandparents to her own ... Gidla’s language and imagination are disjunctive and estranging. This makes the writing, at its best, more absorbing than any event described by it.
...[a] brilliant debut ... 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 ... Gidla’s work is an essential contribution to contemporary Indian literature.
