Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India - Tapa blanda

Críticas

'This is a vital and illuminating book. Sujatha Gidla tells it like it is. She rips the pious mask off a society that institutionalises injustice and inhumanity in the name of ancient culture and religious practice. We need libraries full of books like hers.' --Arundhati Roy

'The most striking work of non-fiction set in India since Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.' --Economist

'Outstanding in the intensity and scale of its revelations... Gidla's book achieves the emotional power of V.S. Naipaul's great novel A House for Mr Biswas.' --Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books

Reseña del editor

My stories, my family's stories, were not stories in India. They were just life.

When I left and made new friends in a new country, only then did the things that happened to my family, the things we had done, become stories. Stories worth telling, stories worth writing down.

Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. Her mother and uncles were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political allegiance. Rallies, agitations and arrests were commonplace. The independence movement promised freedom but for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. In rich, novelistic prose, Ants Among Elephants tells Gidla's remarkable family story, detailing her uncle's emergence as a poet and revolutionary and her mother's struggle for emancipation through education.

A moving portrait of love, hardship and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is a personal history of modern India, told from the bottom up.

'The story Gidla recounts is so urgent and affecting that it is easy to overlook the extraordinary literary skill with which she tells it.' Literary Review

'Unsentimental, deeply poignant... Gidla writes with quiet, fierce conviction.' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Review