Books by Sujatha Gidla
“It’s an extraordinarily powerful memoir…with a force to disturb, describing a world I thought I knew, but from the perspective of somebody who felt degraded, who was exposed to the roughest edges of the progressive Indian state and the upper castes. There’s one instance where she talks about her family just automatically bending whenever an upper caste person passed them. It’s almost as if this deference was embedded in their genetic makeup. Generations of servitude had made them just kowtow reflexively whenever an upper caste person appeared before them…Anyone who wants to understand the horror show that is the Hindu caste system ought to read it.” Read more...
The best books on Contemporary India
Kapil Komireddi, Journalist
Interviews where books by Sujatha Gidla were recommended
The best books on Contemporary India, recommended by Kapil Komireddi
As the world’s biggest democracy, India could be an inspiring example of how a multiethnic, multilingual country with many different religions can come together to form a vibrant state with equality enshrined in its constitution. But all that is in danger of going down the drain, as the country transforms into a brutally exclusionary Hindu-supremacist state under the leadership of Narendra Modi, says Kapil Komireddi, essayist and author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India. Here, he talks us through how the country got to where it is now and recommends five books that present a “comprehensive picture” of contemporary India.
