Ants Among Elephants

Gidla is an untouchable — a Dalit — from Andhra Pradesh whose family converted to Christianity generations ago and found that conversion changed nothing about how they were treated. This memoir moves between her uncle's life as a Naxalite communist revolutionary and her own experience growing up Dalit, moving to Delhi, eventually emigrating to New York where she became a subway conductor. The most recent and most readable Dalit memoir in English. A dispatch about caste as something that follows you across continents and that no amount of education, conversion, or emigration fully removes.