Ants Among Elephants

by Sujatha Gidla

  When Satyam and his siblings first arrived, Nathaniel’s children hid behind straw heaps, too shy to meet their cousins from the city. By and by, they came out to play. One cousin, Kamili, followed Satyam day and night. She was fascinated by this boy who wore knickers and a shirt, who knew how to read and write. She took him to the meadow where she grazed the family buffalo. Full of pride, she introduced him to her friends, the other girls who brought their families’ buffaloes there.

  The children, left to their own devices, left the buffaloes to theirs. The girls surrounded Satyam and asked him about the city. He told them the story of the Ramayana, which he had learned in school, and together they acted it out. The girls all adored him. They climbed date trees to pluck fruit for him; they made up little rhymes fondly poking fun at him. Kamili was in love with Satyam, but he loved one of her friends.

  Satyam would always notice an older boy glaring at him from across the meadow. “Why is he not grazing with you?” Satyam asked the girls. They explained that the boy was golla. Gollas are a cattle-herding caste—a low caste, but even the lowest of caste Hindus are superior to untouchables. Satyam learned that untouchable buffaloes were not allowed to graze in the same meadows as the caste buffaloes.

  One day the golla boy came charging into the untouchable meadow like a ram and lunged at Satyam. Satyam, born with high-arched feet, was never able to run. The boy threw him down and kicked him in his ribs while the terrified girls looked on helplessly. “You untouchable son of a bitch! Who told you that you could wear knickers?”

  In the evening when Nathaniel returned home from work and heard what had happened, he scolded his nephew. “You want to go to the meadow? Then wear a loincloth. You want to wear your knickers? Then stay home!” That’s how things were in a village.

  Because he could not go to the meadows with his friends, Satyam started visiting a young couple who lived out on their own, even farther from the village than the other untouchables. When his aunt found out, she asked him to stop. “They are madigas,” she told him. “Those people are filthy.”

  There are many untouchable castes. They all have to toil on the fields of caste Hindus, but they are distinguished by the tasks they are called on to perform in addition. Malas such as Satyam and his family were village servants made to do whatever menial work was needed. Madigas haul away dead animals from the village and use the hide to make leather. Malas see themselves as superior to other untouchable communities such as the madigas. To the caste Hindus, though, they’re all untouchable, all despicable.

  Satyam stayed away from the golla boy. But despite his aunt’s admonition, he continued to go to see the young madiga couple and soon became their only friend. Their isolation, their beauty, their fascinating work, and the parental attitude they showed toward him all drew him to their hut.

  At the end of the summer, the family had to decide what to do with Maryamma’s children. Marthamma was summoned to Parnasa to discuss the matter with Nathaniel and his eldest son. Marthamma was determined to honor her daughter’s dying wish: “Educate my children.” Since Parnasa had no school, Marthamma offered to take the children to a place that did and look after them there. She enrolled them in a government school in Gudivada.

  When Kamili heard that Satyam was going away, she threw herself in the dirt and cried. Marthamma scolded her granddaughter: “Get up, get up! It’s not like your husband is leaving you!”

  Kamili never went to school. Her father married her off to a fellow track coolie at the age of thirteen.

  In Gudivada, Marthamma rented a single bare room for the four of them in a hut in Mandapadu, the mala colony of that town.

  Satyam brooded ceaselessly. His mother was dead, his father was gone. First his aunt took him and his siblings in, then his uncle, and now his grandmother. Would they settle here? Or would there be another move? Another guardian? What would happen to him and his brother? To his little sister, who had barely known her mother? Who is going to teach her how to comb her hair? They were living in a one-room hut with holes in the roof, sleeping on the floor.

  He looked around for answers. The Mandapadu malas he lived among were all poor like his family, most of them being landless agricultural laborers. But they did not all suffer passively. Many were attracted to the independence movement—some supporting Gandhi and his Congress Party, others the Communist Party. Both parties wanted to drive out the British colonial rulers; the Communists wanted to go further and overturn the whole social system. Then there were God-fearing Christians who looked only heavenward for salvation.

  Satyam’s own uncles disagreed about independence. Uncle Nathaniel was skeptical: “If we drive the white devil out, the Hindu devils will massacre us.” Uncle John, who had earlier supported British rule, switched his allegiance to Congress: “Independence is the solution.”

  Under Marthamma’s influence, Satyam decided to leave everything in the hands of “our Lord savior.” That summer he read the Bible cover to cover. Piously he washed his hands each time before touching the Holy Book.

  But in August 1942 Gandhi called on the British to “quit India.” Gandhi had been a principal leader of the nationalist agitation for more than two decades. Never in all that time had he taken such a militant tone.

  Now that it seemed as if something was finally going to come of all the talk Satyam had been hearing, he embraced the nationalist cause. For over two hundred years, the British had ruled his country and stolen its vast wealth. Freedom from that rule would naturally change everything, including his family’s situation. He’d heard that the white lords lived in bungalows, ate bread they sliced with knives, and wiped their mouths with cloth. When they left, surely all Indians could live like that.

  Gandhi called for “open rebellion” to back up his demand. The Indian people had been waiting for such a call. But they did not heed Gandhi’s strictures to keep the struggle nonviolent. When British troops fired on protesters, they fought back. Young activists attacked police stations, cut telegraph lines, burned post offices, derailed trains carrying war supplies.

  Satyam, eleven years old, longed to take part in these acts of rebellion. He searched high and low for those daring heroes. But alas, within twenty-four hours of Gandhi’s speech, all known Congress supporters had been locked up.

  Gandhi, in prison himself, deplored the destruction. He relied on the threat of mass resistance to weaken the British hold on power and persuade them to hand it over to native elites. But the last thing he wanted was for the masses to arm themselves and take power in their own hands.

  When Gandhi called off the Quit India Movement, Satyam lost respect for him. Satyam dreamed of contributing his own blows against the empire. At times he felt his body had been taken over by the ghost of Bhagat Singh, a revolutionary anti-imperialist martyr hanged by the British. Satyam scrawled Quit India! inside abandoned buildings and defiantly walked on railway tracks, which was forbidden in those days out of fear of sabotage.

  Despite his disillusionment with Gandhi, Satyam was not drawn to Congress’s main rivals, the Communists, because they did not join the Quit India Movement. Satyam asked his Communist neighbor why not. The boy explained, “We must support the British in the war. They are allies with U.S.S.R.”

  “But why should we care about U.S.S.R.?”

  “Because it is the country for all poor people in the world.”

  Satyam wasn’t convinced. His family was poor and so were all his neighbors. Because of this poverty his mother had died, and his father had gone away. Everyone said it was the white lords who were looting India of its wealth and impoverishing the country.

  Satyam supported Congress because Congress opposed the British. But his hero wasn’t Gandhi; it was Subhas Chandra Bose, who had led a militant faction in Congress. Unlike Gandhi, Bose held that the British could not be pressured to leave India willingly but had to be forced out. To this end, he sought help from Britain’s imperialist rivals: Nazi Germany and Japan. He raised an army in Singapore—the Ind
ian National Army—to liberate the subcontinent. He would later die in a plane crash before his plans could be realized. But he remained an idol to the restive Indian masses.

  Satyam bought a cheap, mass-produced portrait of Bose in the bazaar. One night he and Carey snuck into Satyam’s classroom and tacked it on the blackboard. This was Satyam’s act of sedition.

  The next morning, the teacher demanded to know who was responsible. Satyam kept quiet. “Whoever it was,” the teacher announced, “I salute you! I am proud to be your teacher.” In those times, even some teachers in government schools were brave enough to express nationalist sympathies.

  But the repression of the Quit India Movement meant Congress activists were lying low. It took Satyam a long time to find any. When he finally met them, it was by sheer chance.

  Since barber-caste people will not touch untouchable hair, Marthamma used to take Satyam and Carey to a “Christ barber”: a Christian trained in haircutting by the missionaries to serve their fellow untouchables. But the Christ barbers were not professionals. They cut hair in their spare time, working for free and without proper equipment. Satyam was tired of being ridiculed by his classmates for his poorly cut hair.

  A caste friend from school insisted on taking him to his own barber, Veeraswami. Veeraswami, a fervent nationalist, believed all Indians, caste and outcaste, must come together to fight the British. Satyam had finally met a bona fide activist. Veeraswami not only cut Satyam’s hair, he gave him political lessons and kept him supplied with seditious reading material. As young as Satyam was, Veeraswami talked with him seriously and introduced him to the like-minded people who congregated in Veeraswami’s shop.

  One day a tall, fine-looking man appeared at Satyam’s family’s doorstep. Dressed in a trench coat and boots, the man was a strange sight in that slum. Among the children, only Satyam recognized him. It had been four years since the family had seen or heard from him. Their father had come back.

  When Prasanna Rao had run away to escape his debts after Maryamma died, he’d joined the military. The British sent him to Iraq.

  Sitting on his father’s lap, Carey lit up. “Nanna, Nanna, did you have a rifle? Did you fight in the war?” No, his father told him. Because he could read and write, they made him a clerk. He kept accounts.

  It never occurred to the children to resent their father for abandoning them. They were proud that he had traveled abroad and seen the lands of the Bible, and proud that he returned looking like a movie star in his stylish clothes with a suitcase full of treats they had never seen: butter and jam and biscuits. Prasanna Rao and his children spent a joyful month together before he had to return from leave.

  When he went away this time, he promised never to desert them again. He didn’t even have to leave the country: the war was over. From then on he wrote a letter home every week, and every month he sent a money order for forty rupees in the name of his wise son. His salary in the military was seven times what he’d made as a teacher in Vizag.

  After the war ended in 1945, the Labour Party came to power in Britain. The new government recognized that it was no longer possible to maintain direct colonial rule over the subcontinent. The best hope for protecting British interests there lay in transferring power to the Congress Party. The political prisoners rounded up during the Quit India agitation were released (except for Communists), and elections to form native governments in the provinces were announced. The British viceroy would stay in power in the center for the time being.

  In preparation for these elections, Congress held their own elections for party leadership. Satyam, now fourteen years old, was voted treasurer of the Gudivada Youth Congress. He was the only mala to hold office on the town committee.

  When his Congress friends came to see him in the home his grandmother had recently purchased in the new untouchable colony of Slatter Peta, she proudly referred to him as “ma Jawallalu” (our Nehru). Carey and Papa idolized their brother, bragged about him to their friends, and made all his ideas their own.

  In his final year of high school, Satyam led a student strike. The strike demanded an end to the “detention system” that required graduating students to pass an exam at their own school before they’d be allowed to sit for statewide final exams some two months later. The policy was seen by students and parents alike as unfair and oppressive. When agitation against it broke out across Andhra, Satyam led the struggle in Gudivada. He gave the strike a political character, turning it into a protest against British rule. He stole his father’s military shirt to dress up a straw effigy of imperialism that the students set on fire in the center of town.

  The strike lasted a month before the government gave in and abolished the detention system. It was a sign that the old colonial structure was giving way.

  Satyam’s friends all intended to go to Hindu College in Machilipatnam, forty-two kilometers from Gudivada. Because it was a government college, the fees were nominal. Satyam would have been able to stay in the harijan hostel, a free hostel set up for untouchable students who could not afford rent and food in towns where they went to school, away from their homes in villages. He could have had meals, books, soap, oil, and tooth powder, even a small stipend to spend on such things as magazines or cinema tickets, all provided by the government.

  But instead he chose Andhra Christian College in Guntur. Guntur was twenty-five kilometers farther from home, and being a private institution, it had higher fees and no harijan hostel. But to the Kambhams, A.C. College seemed the obvious choice. Satyam preferred it because it was much more fashionable and prestigious. Prasanna Rao and Marthamma preferred it because it was a Christian college in a Christian town. Guntur is where the missionaries found their first converts among Telugu people. The Christian community there is the oldest in the region and is therefore considered among Christians in the area to be purer in its beliefs and practices, as though the faith somehow gets diluted as it spreads. Called sampradaya kristavulu (old or traditional Christians), they are a prosperous and highly cultured community, the product of the mission schools and hospitals that have long both served them and afforded them employment. Among these venerable institutions, A.C. College has pride of place.

  The day Prasanna Rao brought his son to enroll in college, they went around the campus together, walking the hallways with fear and awe. When they entered the main lecture hall, Prasanna Rao, overcome with gratitude and humility, fell to his knees. He prayed out loud, right there in the empty lecture hall, with his hands clasped in front of him, his voice trembling, and tears wetting his face. He thanked the Lord Jesus for lifting his family out of filth to bring them to this noble institution that had such magnificent halls.

  Satyam began his college life in a small shared room in a hostel called the Higher Hall. He ate his meals in a mess attached to the hostel. Every morning as he walked across the campus to the lecture hall, the majestic clock tower seemed to be looking down at him as a father might look at his son with benevolent patronage. Whenever he strolled out of the campus to get a cup of tea, he would be amused to see the ancient watchman pacing back and forth furiously in front of the gate, barking out edicts, convinced that the responsibility for maintaining all this greatness rested on his own hunched shoulders. It was a beautiful campus full of clever-looking people. Satyam had never before seen even one person who looked so clever.

  Satyam did not know any of his classmates, but that did not worry him. Few of the arriving students, except those from Guntur, knew each other yet. Satyam expected to join the Student Congress here, as he did in high school, and looked forward to forming friendships there. He planned to run for office in the student union. He and his new friends would probably spend their summer holidays in nation-building activities, perhaps contributing labor to construct dams or to organize libraries in villages that did not have one.

  Shortly after he enrolled, students started preparations to celebrate the day India would become an independent country. For weeks Satyam worked side by side with the ot
her students, day and night. He felt a sense of camaraderie with his classmates even though he had still made no friends.

  At midnight on August 15, 1947, the day that Satyam had been dreaming of these last five years came at last. He could not sleep that night. In the morning he washed up carefully and put on his best clothes. He left his room early, not wanting to miss anything. Students from colleges all over the district, joined by thousands of municipal workers, thronged to take part in the celebration on his campus. The crowds swelled like a river in monsoon.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder, the students and workers sang in one voice:

  A different world,

  a different world is calling us.

  It will be the confluence of

  the sacrifice of Jesus,

  the compassion of the Buddha,

  the teachings of Muhammad the prophet,

  and above all the glorious dharma

  of the Aryan Upanishads.

  As one religion

  and one dharma,

  a different world is calling us.

  As he joined in the singing, Satyam’s eyes filled with tears. British rule was over, but the real work of independence still lay ahead. “They are leaving,” he thought. “But we will have to build this nation.”

  In their speeches the politicians, intellectuals, and trade-union leaders all talked of bhavi bharata pourulu—“future citizens of India.” Who were they? They were him. Young men such as himself.

  The celebrations went on all day. As he watched the dances and dramas and competitions, Satyam realized that in all those crowds of students, he knew no one well enough to talk to. They were all dressed in their best, and what a difference there was between his best and everyone else’s. The girls wore fine saris and the boys all had on nice Western shirts and trousers. Beside them, in his white cotton lalchi (a traditional men’s shirt) and pyjama, Satyam looked out of place.

  For weeks he had worked side by side with the other students, day and night, to help prepare these celebrations. But the solidarity he had felt was no more. Now that the common enemy was defeated, the differences between him and the other students came to the fore. He noticed he was not included in any of the performances.