Ants Among Elephants: A Digital Project

Published in 2017, this family memoir by Sujatha Gidla overlaps family stories and national history to narrate the lived realities of caste-based oppression in postcolonial India. This digital project provides timelines, character biographies, key political terms, and thematic essays to help readers explore the book further.

This project was created collaboratively by a graduate postcolonial studies class at Mississippi State University. Drawing on the community-based pedagogies of educators like Savitribai Phule, bell hooks, and Paolo Freire, we sought to create a digital humanities project that would be accessible to a broader public. As educators ourselves, we recognize that literary discourse on India and the Indian diaspora in American academia (our location) is dominated by savarna writers who have become canonized in the undergraduate and graduate literature curriculum. By reading this project, we hope our readers will not only consider the systemic inequities in education and publishing that enable this status quo but also become interested in exploring the rich diversity of Dalit literature.

Citing this project

This project has been licensed as CC BY-NC. This license lets others share, remix, adapt, and build upon this work non-commercially, with citation. Although new works must acknowledge the original project and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

To cite individual pages: Contributor names are included at the end of each page where appropriate. Some students have chosen to contribute anonymously to the project.

To cite the full website:

Ants Among Elephants: A Digital Project. Edited by Dhanashree Thorat, 2023, https://antsamongelephants.wordpress.com/.

Some Notes

We follow Gidla’s writing convention in naming her uncle as “Satyam.” In the public, he is known as K. G. Satyamurthy or Comrade SM. Likewise, some of the essays use the term “caste Hindus” (as noted in the memoir) to refer to savarna characters.

To share feedback, please email Dr. Dhanashree Thorat at dt1349@msstate.edu.