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

'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

'Unsentimental, deeply poignant... Gidla writes with quiet, fierce conviction, zooming in to give us sharply drawn, Dickensian portraits of relatives, friends and acquaintances, and zooming out to give us snapshots of entire villages, towns and cities... In these pages, she has told those family stories and, in doing so, the story of how ancient prejudices persist in contemporary India, and how those prejudices are being challenged by the disenfranchised.' --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review

'An astonishing account, fired by compassion and lit up with a fierce sense of justice, filled with unforgettable characters raging against the violence and oppression that lurks under the surface glitter of modern India.' --Siddhartha Deb, author of The Beautiful and the Damned

Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable in Andhra Pradesh, India. She studied physics at the Regional Engineering College, Warangal and at twenty-six moved to New York, where she now works as a subway conductor. Her writing has appeared in The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. Ants Among Elephants is her first book.