Ants Among Elephants By Sujatha Gidla
This book revolves around the age-old casteism culture prevalent in India, explains its effects to the growth of a society as a country in terms of advancement. Specifically, the nuisance of considering a certain community as ‘’Untouchables’’ and the drawbacks they face in their daily lives. Poverty, dark skin, blunt facial features etc. led to certain communities being named as untouchables in ancient India and continues to the present day. Sujatha talks about the anticipation in untouchable communities, about the independence of India in 1947, of the radical changes it would have brought into their lives, but as Bhagat Singh once predicted ‘’If not paid attention, independence will become a transfer of power from White Elites to Brown Elites’’, and that is exactly what happened after India got its independence on 15th August 1947.
Sujatha sheds light on the consequences of the British razing the forests for teak plantations in India, during their rule and leading the tribal population to relocate, getting discriminated by locals for being lower caste people, thus being converted to Christianity by missionaries from Canada. This conversion as they believed, never brought relief. Still being treated in inhumane ways by the rich landlords and upper caste people, these converts took to revolting against the barbaric treatment of their families and children. This mutiny reached the city of Telangana, a city so fed up with the oppressors treating fellow humans such that, the ancient Roman torture would be put to shame. There existed a ‘’Vetti’’ system which forced the lower caste families to give up their first male child at the tender age of 3 to the local landlords as slaves, only to never see their children again. The women were being raped, men killed, and children abused consistently since centuries under the Nizam rule in Hyderabad. Independence, instead of bringing relief spiralled the number of atrocities by the rich upper class, as they brought in ‘’Razakars’’, a pro Nizam militia which specialized in barbarous methodology against the dissenters, such as stabbing men in their rectums, wrapping people in dry heap and burning them alive, raping, and torturing women and spread-eagling toddlers before nailing them onto the walls of city.
The monstrosities did not end with imperialistic rule in the southern India, even after independence as the dissenters turned communists involved in guerrilla warfare, were being hunted by then Nehru government and buried alive under the name of ‘’Pacification Program’’. Astonishing as it is, all this was happening in mid-20th century, one thing led to another and the ‘’Communism’’ rose by lengths in India. Sujatha talks about the early hassles the communism and its sympathizers faced in India; a nation so diverse that in the beginning believed communism to be another form of dictatorship, such was the intellectual level of rural people in those times. The book revolves around some of the key movements led by communists in the rural parts of India and how they expanded their sympathizers. These communists were avid readers of Marxism and Lenin but eventually fell out to form CPI (Communist Party of India) and CPI-M (Communist Party of India- Marxism) as arguments among the principles of party leaders broke out. There also came a time when Marxism followers too divided into CPI-M-CM a party led by a revolutionist Chandu Majumdar, an avid supporter of armed struggle.
The reader is presented with the outcome of all the oppressions resulting in rise of ‘’Naxalism’’ in India. A nuisance in eyes of government, but a way of showing dissent to the discrimination against a certain community. Readers take a dive into personal, professional, and political lives of key people of rising Communism in India, Seetha Ramayya the hero of Telangana guerrilla warfare. K.G. Sathyamurthy, the secret activist who worked in the dark for most of his life for the upliftment of untouchables and seeing to the communism’s acceptance in modern India. Although presently in America, Sujatha still remembers the challenges of being born into an untouchable family in India, growing up as a child with like ambitions as other children but being treated unlike. Read this book to understand the issues, converted Christian minorities face in India at the hands of casteism system prevalent in India to date.
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