US-based Sujatha Gidla to pen memoir on life as a Dalit

New Delhi :  Sujatha Gidla, who works as a conductor in the New York Subway, will come out with her memoir which will talk about her life as a Dalit in India including living in desperate poverty, amid violence and discrimination based on caste and gender. “Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India” will be published in December by HarperCollins India.

The book will take readers through four generations of Sujatha Gidla’s family, at the centre of which is her uncle, K G Satyamurthy (‘Comrade SM’), Maoist and poet, co-founder of the People’s War Group, who wrote under the pseudonym Sivasagar. Gidla also looks at the struggles of women like her mother, who have pursued careers in the face of extreme obstacles.

“My book ‘Ants Among Elephants’ is not just set in India. It’s the story of what an independent India meant for people like my family. So, I am very excited to have it reach Indian readers,” she says. Gidla was born into a family of the ‘untouchable’ Mala caste, in Kazipet, Andhra Pradesh, and grew up in the Dalit slum of Elwin Peta in Kakinada. Her parents were college lecturers.

She studied physics at the Regional Engineering College, Warangal, and went on to work as a research associate in the department of applied physics in IIT, Madras, working on a project funded by the Indian Space Research Organisation. She moved to America when she was 26, worked as an applications developer in software design and, in 2009, was laid off from her bank job.

Gidla was always drawn to things that are “supposed to be only men’s territory”. Diya Kar Hazra, the publisher who acquired the book, says “We are extremely proud to be publishing Sujatha Gidla in India, where caste is, tragically, a reality. ‘Ants Among Elephants’ is a brutally honest, deeply moving and painful story of a family and of modern India. Sujatha is hugely inspiring and we look forward to making her brave, powerful book widely read.