In "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" (Random House), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson digs beneath historic, systemic racism to examine social hierarchies that transcend ...

In the caste system of India, the family you're born into can determine a lot - where you live, who you marry, the jobs you'll have. Sujatha Gidla was born in untouchable - the lowest caste in Indian ...

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I mean no disrespect, and I count myself in their number, but I'm wagering that most Americans have a half-baked understanding of the Indian caste system. It is complicated. Unless we are students of ...

In the United States, inequality tends to be framed as an issue of either class, race or both. Consider, for example, criticism that Republicans’ new tax plan is a weapon of “class warfare,” or ...

Sujatha Gidla’s new book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, is the author’s story of discovering—and wrestling with—her family’s fraught and wrenching history ...

Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. By Sujatha Gidla. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages; $28. ONE in six Indians is a Dalit, which means “oppressed” in ...

"Ants Among Elephants" is the memoir of an Indian woman, born a so-called untouchable, who is a New York City subway conductor. NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith speaks with author Sujatha Gidla. In the caste ...