Book Review
Ants Among Elephants
5/5 stars
"An exposition of that huge plane of weirdness known as 'India'"

Of the book:

1. No glossary (which was very needful);

2. No index;

3. No table of contents;

4. No references, nor bibliography (and this is forgivable because the book was told by the compilation of memories).

5. It's very hard to keep track of the events in this book, and that is as much because of the many subplots as well as the general unfamiliarity of Indian names. (We can all remember that "Chris" is "Bill's" uncle. But what do you do with somebody who is named Siddarthabhattacharyavenudivimohandas?)

Nonetheless book is chock full of information,  easy to read, and hard to put down.
*******
Heretofore, I've read very little about India; but, I have to say that it has a lot of parallels to another very old civilization about which I have read a lot more (China).

It's a good thought question: if you have a civilization that changes bit by bit (because the participants believe that change is possible), after enough time passes the civilization might bear no resemblance to its initial state.  (If the Founding Fathers of the United States could see the degeneration, they would be rolling in their graves.)

But, on the other hand: if you have very old civilizations such as China and India that are still recognizable in some form as what they were several thousand years ago, then the good ideas AND the bad ideas stay on for EXTREMELY long periods of time.

In this case, it is about casteism.... Somehow it managed to survive and supersede both Communism and modernity.

Because the scheduled castes in India are mostly illiterate, they don't have their own Men of Words to give their own perspective. And so even though there are tens of millions of them, it took all this time for one subway conductor who had immigrated to the United States to tell their story.

The impression that I come up with of India is: in spite of the fact that when they come to the United States they have the highest income of any ethnic group, they are generally from an extremely defiantly backward and impoverished society.

And it's going to be a long time before they figure out anything new, if ever. 

(China: US$12,556; USA: US$70,248; India: US$2,256. Ratios: 5.7:31:1. It's also lower than 35 out of 54 countries on the African continent. You have *really* to work to get a per capita income down to African levels.)

It's strange that they have something like 330 million different manifestations of the single Divine essence of Brahmin and yet...... Every single one of them seems to think that this caste situation has been a good idea for the last several millennia.
*******
Acquired knowledge points:

1. Christians in India are of two types: the ones that were converted nearly 20 centuries ago by Saint Thomas of Aquinas. Then ones that were converted a couple of centuries back and taken predominantly from scheduled castes/scheduled Indian tribes. (Islam in India also relied on recruiting from the same.)

2. Scheduled caste/tribal people have lived outside of the caste system in India from time immemorial. It was only after the British cleared the forests for teak plantations (p.15) that their habitat was destroyed and they had to switch from hunting and gathering to a rude sort of agriculture and start interacting with caste Indians.

3. Untouchables (17% of India) can't share meals with caste Hindus, nor marry them. And even to this day, untouchables will get killed for walking on paths that are reserved for caste Hindus or wearing pants instead of loincloths. It also appears that when they met Hindu caste people, they would have to take off their shoes and fold their hands and bend their waist (p.63).

4. Some of the untouchables threw their lot in with the Independence movement, and it turned out to be Fool's Gold: 15 minutes after the British had left, caste Hindus turned on them.

5. The (Muslim, Urdu speaking) Hyderabad Kingdom of Nizam was neither under British rule nor historically under Indian rule, but they were just as involved in the slave labor of untouchables. Urdu and English were the only official languages, and Telugu was suppressed.

6. One particular punishment that the Nissan shock troops liked to do was stab a man in the rectum with a long sword twist it around inside of him and pull it out with such force that his guts fell out in a heap. OR to wrap people and dry hay and set fire to them, watching them roast alive (p.50).

7. The Nehru government (that came after Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist) was not a fan of Communists. They would just bury peasants alive in trenches and force the survivors to build new roads over the mass graves.

8. (p.96). A girl's getting her period is a celebrated event and it requires a feast as well, as 10 days of absence from school and smearing turmeric on the girl's feet.

9. "Paki" is an epithet that is used in England against Indian people, but it is not calling them "Pakistani" (that would be a bad enough insult for Hindus). Pakis are actually VERY low caste porters of human nightsoil, and they carry it on their heads. (Predictably enough, caste status overrode Communist sympathy. p.115.)

10. The caste system is what seems to unite these heterogeneous (linguistically and otherwise) groups that make up the place called "India." In spite of that, the caste system is also intensely regional: there were several examples of the author telling us that this or that caste only existed in this or that place.

11. (p.189) "North Indians bullied South Indians and never mingled with them. They were separate messes for North and South. North Indians wouldn't go to the South Indian mess while South Indians wouldn't dare set foot in the North Indian one." 

12. (p.299): "An upper caste professor in the electronics engineering department was passing all the students of his own caste with high marks and failing his low caste students."

13. The maoist insurgency - - 55 years and counting - - got its start in Andhara Pradesh.

Second order thoughts:

1. If some colonial power encounters some impoverished people, it's very easy to use them against each other. In this case, Hindus policed themselves. And then when they can find somebody even lower to look down on (untouchables), they police them as well.

2. India was yet another one of these places that thought that paradise would come after decolonization -- and they were rudely disabused. (And this holds SO many lessons for black Americans.)

First, some of the untouchables were friends of the Colonial Government. And then that came and went and they were in the cold.

Second, a lot of them were friends of the Independence Movement, and once that battle was won they went right back to being untouchable.

Then, they were members of the Communist movement that opposed the Nizam, and once that battle was won (it only took 4 days for the Indian military to knock over Nizam), the the Indian military immediately turned them on the peasants. (p.60- "A popular uprising against landed property was intolerable.")

Later, they were members of the Communist Party in other contacts, and they were just as despised there as anywhere else.

3. Extremely quirky conceptual space: there is a shortage of women, and there has been for a long time. (Sex selective abortion will do that.) And yet, people talk about a woman over 25 being past her prime and unmarriageable (p.202). People also seem to be extremely colorstruck (ibid): people were half a shade darker than people that are already as black as shoe polish are thought / think themselves unmarriageable.

Verdict: India is surely a very interesting place and they have tasty food. But, after this book: you can keep all of it. Too strange and too dirty (!) for me to ever want to visit. Just one more example of some people that fall into something stupid and take several thousand years to come out of it (in this case, the caste system).

Vocabulary:

zamindar (absentee landlord)
harijan hostel
lalchi pajamas
mala people (a caste of untouchables that exists only in Andhara Pradesh).
puranas (Telugu poems in praise of the gods)
prabandhas (Telugu poems in praise of the rulers)
lathi (Indian version of the billy club)
dora (landlord)
vetti system (a slave system in Telangana)
Nizams (rulers of Hyderabad)
sangham (local chapter of a political party)
goonda (hired criminal)
simhadwaram
frieze
tiffin
jaggery
madiga (tanner)
stint
paki (night soil cleaner)
kamma (South Indian agricultural caste)
kapu (another South Indian caste)
hutment
pukka house 
gunintham
Dougla (mixed African, Indian)