Before we turn to a remarkable family history, it may be worth highlighting a fact that the author chooses not to touch upon. Nowhere in “Ants Among Elephants,” the story of an Untouchable family in India that spans most of the 20th century, does Sujatha Gidla explain that her first name means “woman of good caste” in Sanskrit. The omission is a tease, since she and her family are mala, among the lowliest in the caste system of Andhra Pradesh, a southern Indian state.
One suspects that Ms. Gidla’s parents—her irrepressible mother in particular—called their daughter Sujatha as an act of defiance and subversion. How could it have been otherwise, given that the family’s story is one of almost nonstop struggle against oppression by the “good castes”? Readers unfamiliar with the name’s meaning might have found it enlightening to be told about this gesture of rebellion.
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