Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
by Sujatha Gidla (Daunt Books, £14.99)
As a graduate student newly arrived in the United States in 1990, Sujatha Gidla told a man at a bar that she was untouchable. His flirtatious response—”Oh, but you’re so touchable”—captures the steep contrast between life as a Dalit in India and life as a South Asian woman in the US. (Dalit, which means “ground down” or “oppressed,” has replaced untouchable as the term for a lower-caste person.)
Early in her remarkable family memoir, Ants Among Elephants, Gidla executes a shift in perspective just as sharp as her move from oppression in India to desirability in America. She begins by using the first person, with immediacy and warmth, but soon switches to the distancing third person to describe the sufferings of her family, caste and community in India. She swaps “I” for “Sujatha” or “Suja”—a change which speaks eloquently to the divided sense of self that persistent discrimination produces.