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    Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
    Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
    Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
    Audiobook12 hours

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

    Written by Sujatha Gidla

    Narrated by Soneela Nankani

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary-and yet how typical-her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible transformation from student and labor organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother's battles with caste and women's oppression.

    A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 22, 2018
    ISBN9781541484849
    Author

    Sujatha Gidla

    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 City and works as a conductor on the subway.

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    Reviews for Ants Among Elephants

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Very interesting picture of the life of the untouchables and Christians in India.
    • 3/5
      3 ⭐️ Ants Among Elephants is a memoir of sorts. Sujata Gidla writes about her grandparents, uncle and aunt, all in the untouchable caste, who were part of the Communist party in India. The treatment of the untouchables is horrific and limits them for their lifetime in terms of education, jobs and blatant prejudice.As someone with very little understanding of India history, I was lost in a majority of the story, even after some google searches. Sujata's introduction said she didn't realize she had a story to tell until she moved to the US, but I think she still didn't understand how unknown the details of Indian revolutionaries are to Americans. I looked up reader reviews and found that most Americans and Brits had the same confusion, while Indians give it 5 stars and says it is an uncomfortable but important read.
    • 4/5
      What a perfect title for a book about the untouchables of India. At times the story was too detailed for me, but I came away with an appreciation of how communism was attractive to untouchables, the different levels of untouchables, and how hard it is for the caste system to end.