New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 306 pages. $28.00.
An engineer by training, fifty-three-year-old Sujatha Gidla works as a conductor on the New York City Subway. She was born in India—a society mired in casteism from the past 3,000 years. The authoritative Dharmaśāstra (Hindu law book) Manusmriti acknowledges and justifies the caste divisions based on karma (work) and dharma (duty). The sense of hierarchy stems from the belief that each division emanated from Bramha, the god of creation: brahmins (priests and teachers) emanated from the head, kshatriyas (warriors and rulers) from the arms, vaishyas (traders and merchants) from the thighs, and shudras (laborers) from the feet. Untouchables like Gidla are simply non-existent in this scheme of creation.
At the beginning of her memoir Ants Among Elephants, Gidla addresses her American readers who only know discrimination based on skin color:
The untouchables, whose special role—whose hereditary duty—is to labor in the fields of others or 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 recounts the indignities that, across generations, her family members have had to suffer. On a Christmas eve, her grandmother was humiliated for wearing a sari she was gifted by the Canadian missionaries. The sight of a Dalit wearing such decent apparel roused the Hindus; they claim beauty and decency to be exclusively theirs. As a young boy, Gidla’s uncle K.G. Satyamurthy was kicked in the ribs for wearing knickers. Gidla’s mother Manjula was repeatedly fired by her brahmin bosses until she developed neurosis. Yet in narrating her stories, Gidla shows an extraordinary resilience. Against the unabating waves of violence, she remains steadfast and poised.
Humiliation does not diminish her ability to be humorous. One time in a bar in Atlanta, she tells a man that she is an untouchable. “Oh, but you are so touchable,” he replies.
Humor helps. Otherwise, an experiential journey like Ants into the lives of Dalits will be akin to walking through a horror chamber. Dalit neighborhoods are routinely rampaged; their men are beaten to death, and their women are raped; out of desperation and pain of exclusion and poverty, Dalit students are driven to suicide. But while dealing with such an enormous magnitude of institutionalized violence inflicted sporadically, Gidla does not become maudlin or wayward. Her voice is clear, unwavering:
All around me was abject poverty . . . I remember when one of my friends in the neighborhood told me she’d had roast venison for dinner three days in a row. I laughed along with her, knowing that was her ironic way of saying she’d gone without eating.
Ants Among Elephants is a compelling, truthful account; besides being a spare, lyrical recital of the writer’s personal history, the book is informed with an ethnographer’s habits of seeing. Early on, Gidla reveals the pervasiveness of casteism among the untouchable communities. During the Second World War, as the Japanese begin to drop bombs on the port city of Vizag in Andhra Pradesh, Satyamurthy vacates to stay with his uncle in the countryside. Satyamurthy’s father is missing—later we come to know that he was sent to Iraq by the British—and his mother is recently dead because of tuberculosis. He is lonely and lost; he befriends a couple in the neighborhood and starts spending time with them. But his uncle—a mala—advises him not to. “They are madigas,” he admonished him. “Those people are filthy.”
Growing up in such an asphyxiating atmosphere, Satyamurthy develops a radical attitude toward politics. Rejecting Gandhi, he idolizes Subash Chandra Bose for his militant ways to fight against the British colonialism. For Gidla, Satyamurthy’s preference assumes a larger meaning in the narrative. It informs the way she interrogates Gandhi’s portraiture as the untouchable-friendly saint—Gandhi called untouchables harijans, or children of god—who stood for the justice and inclusion of all. Her stance is like that of the Dalit leader Ambedkar, who as the scholar Nicholas Dirks notes in his brilliantly argued Castes of Mind, “quarreled with Gandhi for the separate representation for untouchables.” To thwart Ambedkar’s proposition, Gandhi announced a fast unto death and Ambedkar was pressured to yield. Gandhi thought that the caste system—in opposition to the ideas that lead to the development of Universal Declaration of Human Rights much touted in the imperial West—was an organic, unifying, and inclusive system that could divest itself from hierarchical violence.
Gidla disagrees. To her such politics are insidious, the consequences catastrophic. Ants Among Elephants is a departure from the official history textbooks that read like glorified hymns to Gandhi. The real hero to emerge is Satyamurthy. At school, he is a poet and a stage actor. At home, he is a loving brother. He is cunning and loots trains to snatch food for the hungry. He stands in front of a bulldozer, saving the shacks of the poor from destruction. As a revolutionary Maoist leader, he is an inspiration for his comrades.
Because the bulk of the book is written from a third-person omniscient point of view, it allows Gidla to realize the interiority of her characters fully. This plunging in and kindling of the firestorm that rages enlightens the writer treading through the dark, unexplored paths in the realm of her reimagined past. The result is propulsion and long sections of spectral prose. The charged drama of chasing a pig stands out, subtly pointing at the sexual awakening of Gidla’s mother:
[T]he agile young men, armed with long thick sticks and clenching cigars between their molars, running through the village, loincloths pulled tight over their crotches and between their buttocks, their bodies shiny with sweat. . . . The children of the village, twenty, thirty of them, naked, dust coated, wild haired, runny nosed—the girls among them also all naked but for their snail-shell anklets and the little silver or copper disks strung around their waists to preserve their modesty—ran alongside the hunters.
What terrifies, afterwards, is Manjula’s fear and shame of being a Dalit girl who thinks she might be left out and not accepted by a man because of who she is, and because of the poverty of her parents who cannot afford dowry. Gidla is tolerant and accepting of her mother’s situation as it is. She witnesses the banality of the suffering her mother’s life entails and records the rhythms of violence with a feeling of unmitigated rebellion.
Months have passed since I read this book. In my mind, I still hear the slow persistent thud of Manjula’s strife. I see her moving in the shadows of hope; in the background I hear Gidla turning her cogs quietly, transforming her mother’s fragility and frustration into a dogged will to survive.
Ants Among Elephants enhances our understanding of how hierarchy functions in India, and the role of the monstrosity of the religious myth in legitimizing structural violence.
