Father May Be an Elephant, and Mother only a Small Basket, but…

Dalit feminist stories of a south Indian village that dissolve the borders of realism, allegory and political fable.A young girl is sent away to school to save her from being declared the sexual property of the village’s upper-caste men. The village water tank laments to a passing child. A Brahmin boy is considered ‘polluted’ by the touch of a Dalit girl – the same action that saved his life. Rendered with idiomatic vitality, humour and lightness, these stories revel in rural childhood without n