Plain Speaking: A Sudra’s Story

The memoirs and lectures of A.N. Sattanathan (1905-1991), presented here in a fully annotated edition, with a critical introduction, constitute a key literary-historical document of the caste struggle.  Sattanathan’s autobiographical fragment is a unique record of non-Brahmin low-caste life in rural South India, where the presence of poverty and caste prejudice is the more powerful for being understated. As the experience-sparsely and beautifully rendered-of the low-caste but not stereotypically ‘untouchable’ villager, it is, quite simply, revelatory, and will make an impact as such on the English-educated reader, to whom that experience has been so far unavailable.  In a complementary narrative, Sattanathan’s lectures-on ‘The Rise and Spread of the Non-Brahmin Movement’ as ‘the most outstanding event in South Indian History in the twentieth century’-offer a lucid summary of the cultural and historical conditions that find more personal and immediate expression in the memoirs.