Book Report: Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla

I read an excerpt of Ants Among Elephants on Longform or something similar a few months ago, and my interest was piqued enough to request it from the library. The book follows the story of the previous two generations of Gidla's family, leaving off when she is in elementary school. It is, like several books I've read lately, extremely bleak, with the procession of disappointment and near-starvation only occasionally interrupted by brief rays of hope.

Gidla's family are untouchable (or "outcaste") Christians in Andhra state of southeastern India, meaning they cannot live in the primary village and are socially and economically oppressed by the Brahmin, reddy, and other castes, as well as generally by Hindus and Muslims, who are held in higher esteem in Indian culture. Many untouchables were converted to Christianity by western missionaries because they were excluded from other religions. It was very enlightening to read an account of the caste system from an Indian national, and while the philosophy behind it doesn't make any more sense (but, hey, neither does racism), I understand the structure a lot better than I did.

There's no attempt to sugar-coat anything involving Gidla's family (or any other families connected to them, really) as the joyous poor, freed from the encumbrances of their material possessions, or anything like that. The closest thing I can compare it to is if an entire country was made up of the Joad family in Grapes of Wrath, except with way less food available. Even when Gidla's mother, Manjula, is able to hold down a university teaching job, she barely has enough money to keep her three children fed. Her husband is able to nearly bankrupt the family by the profligate habits of brewing two cups of tea per day and smoking cigarettes. And these are well-educated people! Who are presumably several rungs above the least fortunate! There are plenty of decisions made with which one could quibble, but when you're running on such a knife's edge your entire life, it's hard to see how things were going to work out well even if you do everything perfectly.

Patriarchy is a strong overarching theme of the book. The women often have just as strong employment prospects as the men, but they are expected to hand over their paychecks to their husbands. Gidla's uncle, Satyam, is probably the most sympathetic character in the book, and he leaves his wife and children alone without income for months and years at a time while he travels underground as a Communist revolutionary, returning only to impregnate his wife another time. I guess that's another way to say there really aren't any sympathetic characters in this book. Mother-in-laws conspire against daughter-in-laws, caste people lord their tiny amount of power over outcastes, etc., etc. They are all worthy of pathos, but it's difficult to like any of them.