Ants Among Elephants - An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Sujatha Gidla, 2017)

(306 pages)

This very recent book received lots of attention; it was billed as a valuable resource to learn something about "caste" in India.  I'm interested in the topic, haven't read much about it; "caste" wasn't evident during our two weeks in India, for what little that vanishingly small sample size is worth.

Not clear to me how much the caste system differs from societal sorting elsewhere (whether based on race or income or whatever).  Perhaps the system runs deeper given the longer history and because there is a religious aspect?  Don't know.

Anyway, this book ends up not helping very much on what I think of as traditional "case" issues, at least for me.  It is an interesting story of a family - Christian - where the lead figure (the author's uncle) becomes a Communist agitator.  All this is taking place in the turmoil of the 1940s and following.  Many difficulties for the family are attributed to caste and I don't doubt that it mattered for them - but I think it's difficult or impossible to separate caste issues from difficulties arising from the family's Christian and Communist characteristics in India at that era.

The lead family figure (author's uncle) seemed to have the usual crusader personality - self-centered.

Helps explain why Subhas Chandra Bose would have had appeal - typically presented as some version of "evil" in Western histories due to his dalliance with Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, but desperation (probably too strong a word but you get the idea) to escape British domination was real in the 1940s.  Author's uncle supported him.

So all in all the book has value to me:  it gave a different look at 1947 and the surrounding years in an area of the country I seldom read about - Andra Pradesh, with some of the action in Telangana (adjacent in south/central India); describes trying to work up through the educational system for those starting out without any advantages; poverty as very real and difficult; earlier generations in this area as "forest people;" zamindars under British rule; etc.