Sujatha Gidla

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Gidla at the 2018 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. 2018-us-nationalbookfestival-sujatha-gidla.jpg
Gidla at the 2018 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Sujatha Gidla is an Indian-American activist. Gidla is known for her book Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India . She was born in Andhra Pradesh and moved to the United States in 1990, when she was 26 years old. [1] She lives in New York and works as a conductor on the New York City Subway.

Early life

Sujatha Gidla was raised in the Christian Dalit family, in Kakinada, a city in present-day Andhra Pradesh. Her great grandparents accepted Christianity during Colonial rule after they heard the Gospel propagated by Canadian Baptist missionaries in the town. With missionary institutions heralding development of the society in general through education, Sujatha's grandparents were also educated at one such institution run by the missionaries in Kakianda. [2] Prasanna Rao, Gidla's grandfather, studied in a school set up by the Canadian missionaries. [3] Gidla's parents were also college lecturers. [2] [4]

After getting her bachelor's degree from State-run Pithapuram Rajah Government College in Kakinada, Gidla enrolled in a Masters' program in Physics in Regional Engineering College, Warangal. During her second year there, in one of the earlier instances of her activism, Gidla participated in a strike against an upper-caste professor in the Engineering department, who was deliberately failing students from the lower castes. She was the only woman who had participated in the strike. The protestors were all jailed in an undisclosed location. Gidla was detained for three months, during which she was tortured and contracted tuberculosis. Her mother Manjula contacted a civil rights lawyer named K. G. Kannabiran to help them. [3] [5] This was one of the earlier instances of Gidla's activism.

Gidla then worked as a researcher associate in the Department of Applied Physics in Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where she worked on a project funded by Indian Space Research Organisation. [2] She moved to the United States when she was 26. Some of Gidla's family members also emigrated: her sister works as a physician in the United States, and her brother is an engineer in Canada. [4]

Work

Gidla previously worked as an software application designer at the Bank of New York, but was laid off in the global financial crisis and recession in 2009. She says that she then wanted to do a manual job. [6] She became the first Indian woman to be employed as a conductor on the New York City Subway – one of the busiest mass transit systems in the world. [1] In an interview, she said, "Because I am a Marxist and Communist, I also have romantic feelings about being a working class person. So this job attracted me. Secondly, I wanted to do something that men are supposed to be doing." [6]

Ants Among Elephants

Ants Among Elephants is Gidla's first book and was published in 2017. It is a family memoir that chronicles the life of her uncle, KG Satyamurty, a Maoist leader and the founder of a left-wing militant organization called the People's War Group (PWG). The book also described the personal history of her mother Manjula's life, both of which are juxtaposed against the peasant revolt and the formation of a new state in newly independent India. [5] [7] Gidla classifies the book under the genre of 'literary nonfiction'. [8]

Gidla has recalled her introduction to understanding casteism as being through a movie. The film was a love story fraught with conflict due to the girl being a wealthy Christian, whose family opposed her marriage to a Hindu boy who was less well-off. She had hitherto believed that the caste discrimination she faced as a Dalit, or "untouchable", was due to her status as a Christian, since the vast majority of Christians in Andhra Pradesh converted from a Dalit community. In an interview with Slate, she says, "That's when I started thinking: If it’s not Christianity, why were we untouchables?" [1]

According to Gidla, the creation of the book was a family affair. Her mother was closely involved in the process of writing the book as it was her story too, and her niece Anagha was involved in designing the book cover. [1] [4] Gidla conducted over 15 years of research and made three trips to India for the book. She reportedly wrote 50 to 60 versions of the book before publishing it [2] [4] [8] Gidla has spoken about publishing first a prequel, and then a sequel to Ants Among Elephants. The prequel will tell her own family's story before her uncle's generation, detailing the journey of her family being hunter-gatherers in the forests of Andhra Pradesh before moving to the villages and getting subsumed into the Hindu caste system's lowest rung. The sequel will be an autobiography, and discuss the contemporary generation. [6] [7]

Her writing has also appeared in Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. [9]

Reception and publicity

Ants Among Elephants has received the following accolades: [10]

A New York Times review called it "unsentimental, deeply poignant ... Ants Among Elephants gives readers an unsettling and visceral understanding of how discrimination, segregation and stereotypes have endured." [2]

Gidla declined an invitation to be the key note speaker in a festival called We The Women, a women-only festival curated by Barkha Dutt. Her refusal was a result of the conference being sponsored by the United Nations, which Gidla said was a "fig-leaf of US imperialism". She also objected to the participation of Smriti Irani, an Indian politician who was the Minister of Human Resource Development at the time that Dalit PhD scholar Rohith Vemula committed suicide. [11]

Gidla was invited to the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2018 as a speaker. She spoke at a session called "Narratives of Power, Songs of Resistance", where she criticised Jignesh Mevani, Mayawati, Bharatiya Janata Party, Indian National Congress and Mahatma Gandhi. [12]

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<i>Ants Among Elephants</i> 2017 book by Sujatha Gidla

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Chotiner, Isaac (August 30, 2017). "Why Were We Untouchables?". Slate. ISSN   1091-2339 . Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "'Ants Among Elephants,' a Memoir About the Persistence of Caste". The New York Times. July 17, 2017. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  3. 1 2 Kumar, Vijeta (October 31, 2017). "I Read Sujatha Gidla's Memoir And I Understood My Father's Dalit Boyhood a Little Better". The Ladies Finger. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "The defiance of an 'untouchable' New York subway worker". BBC News. July 25, 2017. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  5. 1 2 Kumar, Anu. "An Indian family's encounter with caste and untouchability that no one should ignore even in 2017". Scroll.in. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  6. 1 2 3 "Nobody notices caste operating in society, says author Sujatha Gidla". The Financial Express. February 11, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  7. 1 2 "Sujatha Gidla at JLF 2018: Hinduism is a religion tailor-made for caste". Hindustan Times. January 29, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  8. 1 2 "Sujatha Gidla, author of Ants Among Elephants: My book wouldn't stand a chance in India". The New Indian Express. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  9. ↑ "Sujatha Gidla | Authors | Macmillan". US Macmillan. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  10. ↑ "Ants Among Elephants | Sujatha Gidla | Macmillan". US Macmillan. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  11. ↑ "Sujatha Gidla's 'Ants Among Elephants' is a searing indictment of caste, untouchability in India – Firstpost". firstpost.com. December 22, 2017. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  12. ↑ "At Jaipur Literature Festival 2018, writer Sujatha Gidla says Mahatma Gandhi's anti-casteism was mere lip service – Firstpost". firstpost.com. January 30, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
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