My stories, my family’s stories, were not stories in India. They were just life.
When I left and 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 and uncles 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 allegiance. Rallies, agitations and arrests were commonplace. The independence movement promised freedom but for untouchables and other poor and 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 and revolutionary and her mother’s struggle for emancipation through education.
A moving portrait of love, hardship and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is a personal history of modern India, told from the bottom up.