Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family And The Making Of Modern
India

Product Description

My stories, my family`s stories, were not stories in India. They were just life. When I left & made new friends in a new country, only then did the things that happened to my family, the things we had done, become stories. Stories worth telling, stories worth writing down. Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. Her mother & uncles were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty & injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political allegiance. Rallies, agitations & arrests were commonplace. The independence movement promised freedom but for untouchables & other poor & working people, little changed. In rich, novelistic prose, Ants Among Elephants tells Gidla`s remarkable family story, detailing her uncle`s emergence as a poet & revolutionary & her mother`s struggle for emancipation through education.A moving portrait of love, hardship & struggle, Ants Among Elephants is a personal history of modern India, told from the bottom up.` The story Gidla recounts is so urgent & affecting that it is easy to overlook the extraordinary literary skill with which she tells it.` Literary Review` Unsentimental, deeply poignant... Gidla writes with quiet, fierce conviction.` Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Review