Plain Speaking: A Sudra's Story

A.N. Sattanathan

The memoirs and lectures of a.N. Sattanathan, presented here in a fully annotated edition, with a critical Introduction, constitute a key literary-historical document of the caste struggle.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 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 ‘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.