Podcast appearances and mentions of sujatha gidla

In this episode, we turn to India's two-millennia-old caste system that has often been compared to our own structures of racial oppression. A recent book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, provides a sort of memoir of caste viewed through the experiences author Sujatha Gidla's Dalit family. Speaking with New Labor Forum Editor-at-Large Kafui Attoh, Gidla says she drew motivation and courage to write this personal account by witnessing individual and collective acts of resistance of African Americans. A resident of the U.S. since age 26, Gidla completed the writing of the book while working as a New York City train conductor and member of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union.

Sujatha Gidla, the author of Ants Among Elephants:An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, in conversation with Toral Gajarawala, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at NYU, about caste, class and race, and their relationship to rights, violence and writing. Speakers Sujatha Gidla, Author, "Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India" ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) In conversation with Toral Gajarawala, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, NYU

Dr. Suraj Yengde is one of India's leading scholars and public intellectuals. Named as one of the "25 Most Influential Young Indian" by GQ magazine. Suraj's recent appointment was Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Suraj is an author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. Caste Matters was recently featured in the prestigious "Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade" list by The Hindu. This podcast doesn't have any corporate funding or support so the contribution by listeners is very important for its survival. Please support it here: 1. Patreon (Most preferred medium) : https://www.patreon.com/anuragminusverma 2. BuyMeACoffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Anuragminus 3. InstaMojo:(UPI/Gpay/PayTm) : https://www.instamojo.com/@anuragminusverma/ 4. PayPal (ONLY People living outside India can pay through it) : https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/AnuragMinusVerma?locale.x=en_GB In this podcast we discussed Stories from growing up years of Suraj in Maharastra. Can the impact of casteism can be minimised when one migrates from a small town/Village to big cities ? The experience of writing a book. Experiences of Academia's attitude towards Bahujan scholars. His views on social media and trolling. His opinion about popular culture ? Can Dalits reshape it like the way blacks have done it in the US? Links: Caste Matters : https://amzn.to/3xYxfJI Ants Among Elephants Book by Sujatha Gidla: https://www.amazon.in/Ants-among-Elephants-Untouchable-Family/dp/935277423X Ideas of Dr Cornel West https://open.spotify.com/episode/1GLdDzLc2OXDTyKEhizaQk My Twitter: https://twitter.com/confusedvichar Credit for music :

Growing up, Sujatha Gidla didn’t think much about India’s centuries old caste system. But then in college something happened that forced Sujatha to reckon with the fact that she was Dalit, the lowest place in India’s caste hierarchy. Hind hosts as Sujatha tells the story of her life before and after this revelation and how it shaped the course of her life. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We’re bringing back one of our favorite events from 2018 called Breaking Caste, featuring Sujatha Gidla, Neel Mukherjee, and Gaiutra Bahadur. The episode features a wonderful conversation at the end about Dalit exclusion in the publishing industry, the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit solidarity with Black Americans, and much more. Neel Mukherjee's novel A State of Freedom follows the lives of five characters born to different circumstances in India navigating deeply entrenched class and caste divisions. Dalit-author Sujatha Gidla wrote the debut memoir Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. Link to the video of this event on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIgKFl8Dpf8 This event was cosponsored by Equality Labs.

How often do you think about other peoples' opinion of you? In many parts of the world status is something we can change through education, occupation and wealth but what if you come from a culture where the status you are born with is inescapable? We speak to author Sujatha Gidla about growing up as one of India's Untouchables: the outcasts of the country's rigid Caste system. Lifestyle and fashion blogger Sasha Wilson shows us how high the status stakes are in the completive online world of Instagram. And is the pursuit of status bad for our mental health? Professor Richard Wilkinson believes so and argues that the bigger the gap between rich and poor the greater our obsession becomes with it. Finally, is status something we can just buy? Brian Hamilton runs a business selling Scottish noble titles to the highest bidder and so presenter Priscilla Ngethe considers becoming Baroness of Pentland… (Field recordings of the Shuar Ecuadorian Indians thanks to Mike Woloszyn and freesound.org) Image: John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett in the Class Sketch from Frost Over England, 1967 (Credit: BBC)

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we host a reading on India and caste with writers Neel Mukherjee and Sujatha Gidla. Neel Mukherjee's latest novel, A State of Freedom, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, follows the lives of five characters born to different circumstances in India navigating deeply entrenched class and caste divisions. Dalit-author Sujatha Gidla wrote the critically-acclaimed debut memoir Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. The two authors read from their work, and afterwards have a conversation with Gaiutra Bahadur, the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. Together they discuss Dalit exclusion in the publishing industry, the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit solidarity with Black Americans, their love of Samuel Beckett, and much more. Link to the video of this event on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIgKFl8Dpf8 This event was cosponsored by Equality Labs.

In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. From their conversion into Christianity by Canadian missionaries and her grandfather’s stint in the British army; her uncle Satyamurthy’s rise as a revolutionary poet, labor organizer and eventual founder of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) and her mother Manjula’s struggles raising three children in the face of everyday caste discrimination, to her own involvement with the PWG’s radical student wing that ended with brief imprisonment, it is the impossibility of transcending caste even in “modern” India that she circles back to. She writes, “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.” Her book has been reviewed to critical acclaim in the New York Times, BBC, and Slate among others. Gidla lives in New York City and works as a subway conductor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation, titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier,” explores processes of statemaking in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. From their conversion into Christianity by Canadian missionaries and her grandfather’s stint in the British army; her uncle Satyamurthy’s rise as a revolutionary poet, labor organizer and eventual founder of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) and her mother Manjula’s struggles raising three children in the face of everyday caste discrimination, to her own involvement with the PWG’s radical student wing that ended with brief imprisonment, it is the impossibility of transcending caste even in “modern” India that she circles back to. She writes, “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.” Her book has been reviewed to critical acclaim in the New York Times, BBC, and Slate among others. Gidla lives in New York City and works as a subway conductor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation, titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier,” explores processes of statemaking in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. From their conversion into Christianity by Canadian missionaries and her grandfather’s stint in the British army; her uncle Satyamurthy’s rise as a revolutionary poet, labor organizer and eventual founder of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) and her mother Manjula’s struggles raising three children in the face of everyday caste discrimination, to her own involvement with the PWG’s radical student wing that ended with brief imprisonment, it is the impossibility of transcending caste even in “modern” India that she circles back to. She writes, “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.” Her book has been reviewed to critical acclaim in the New York Times, BBC, and Slate among others. Gidla lives in New York City and works as a subway conductor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation, titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier,” explores processes of statemaking in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. From their conversion into Christianity by Canadian missionaries and her grandfather’s stint in the British army; her uncle Satyamurthy’s rise as a revolutionary poet, labor organizer and eventual founder of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) and her mother Manjula’s struggles raising three children in the face of everyday caste discrimination, to her own involvement with the PWG’s radical student wing that ended with brief imprisonment, it is the impossibility of transcending caste even in “modern” India that she circles back to. She writes, “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.” Her book has been reviewed to critical acclaim in the New York Times, BBC, and Slate among others. Gidla lives in New York City and works as a subway conductor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation, titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier,” explores processes of statemaking in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. From their conversion into Christianity by Canadian missionaries and her grandfather’s stint in the British army; her uncle Satyamurthy’s rise as a revolutionary poet, labor organizer and eventual founder of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) and her mother Manjula’s struggles raising three children in the face of everyday caste discrimination, to her own involvement with the PWG’s radical student wing that ended with brief imprisonment, it is the impossibility of transcending caste even in “modern” India that she circles back to. She writes, “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.” Her book has been reviewed to critical acclaim in the New York Times, BBC, and Slate among others. Gidla lives in New York City and works as a subway conductor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation, titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier,” explores processes of statemaking in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sujatha Gidla was an untouchable in India, but moved to the United States at the age of 26 and is now the first Indian woman to be employed as a conductor on the New York City Subway. In her memoir Ants Among Elephants, she explores the antiquities of her mother, her uncles, and other members of her family against modern India’s landscape. Through this book she redeemed the value of her family’s memories, understanding her family’s stories were not those of shame, but did reveal to the world the truth of India and its caste system. During her conversation with Tyler, they discuss the nature and persistence of caste, gender issues in India, her New York City lifestyle, religion, living in America versus living in India, Bob Dylan and Dalit music, American identity politics, the nature of Marxism, and why she left her job at the Bank of New York to become a New York City Subway conductor. Transcript and links Follow Sujatha on Twitter Follow Tyler on Twitter More CWT goodness: Facebook Twitter Instagram Email