"My stories, my family’s stories, were not stories in India. They were just life," writes 53-year old Sujatha Gidla in her debut book, "Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India."

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In her stirring memoir, Gidla, also the first woman conductor of the New York subway, chronicles how her family challenged the repressive social system through education, largely through converting to Christianity and her move to the United States. 

Sujatha who identifies with the communist ideals also reflected in her bygone activism days and her communist uncle's role in her life. 

"When I left and made new friends in a new country, only then did the things that happened to my family, the things we had done, become stories. Stories worth telling, stories worth writing down, " she adds. 

Born in a small town of Khazipet in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to a lower-middle class family of college lecturers, Gidla's parents emphasized getting an education early on, she told teleSUR.   

"I am an outcaste," she said, pausing for a moment.

"Outcastes, a lot of times think that education is the only way out. That's how we got educated," she said.  

She attributes her family's ascent to the Canadian Christian missionaries in India who educated her grandfather and set the family on a path of literacy.

For those belonging to the lower caste in India, converting to another religion is seen as the only way out from the dungeons of the Indian caste system, at least on paper.  

Her voice lights up when she talks about how the book's name, "Ants Among Elephants," came to be. Gidla said she started writing the book to unearth her family's history and trace when her forefathers converted from Hinduism to Christianity. However, the more she spoke to her communist uncle while researching for the book, the more the matter evolved until and he became the book's central figure. 

"I set out to write the book only to find my family's origins in Christianity. But I ended up writing a lot about my uncle and what he did like confronting police, hiding comrades. This could make a very good Hollywood movie, except they were communists," Gidla said. 

Her uncle, K. G. Satyamurthy, also known as SM or Satyam, was one of the founders of the Maoist guerrilla group in the 1970s, that later came to be known as Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist), People's War, also known as the People's War Group.

Gidla was 14 years old when she joined the leftist students' union, Radical Students Union at the Regional Engineering College in Warangal, Telangana. Later she went to study at the esteemed Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Madras as a researcher in applied physics.

Talking about her college activism days while she was still studying in India, she said, "Those were really breathless days in Andhra (Pradesh), restless with all these romantic ideas, that we are going to liberate people, establish equality on earth, emancipate elite people."

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Gidla was arrested in 1985 for taking part in a student strike when her parents had to rescue her by filing a habeas corpus petition to get her back after three months.

"The seed was already there in me, in the way I was brought up," Gidla said, talking about her little adventure. 

As a member, she tagged along with her fellow comrades to go to "village camps, where we would stay with untouchable colonies, we would spend time with them and note their daily problems. And tell them that it wasn't your 'karm' (fate) that God gave you this life, but there are concrete reasons behind your poverty." 

In conversations with lower caste landless farmers, "We would talk about exploitation and tell them that look even though you're the one who is doing all the work, how come, he's (the land owner) the one who's getting richer?" 

"The party was very active in the Telangana area (a tribal area in the south of India), they organized the tribals and the landless peasants. They made them stand up and ask for minimum wage." and also protected their lands and held the land owners accountable for beating up or treating the tribals harshly, she said. 

In 1992, 26-year-old Gidla moved to New York on the "excuse" of further education, she said. She wanted to explore the United States and engage in the global activism scene in the United States.  

"When I first came, there were anti-Iraq war protests going on," she said.  

"For me, what was appealing was the idea of America, especially Bob Dylan's music, the culture of protest, and the draw of joining a society where debates on rights and equality could be articulated," she told the BBC.

Gidla worked in the software industry for 13 years but was laid off in 2009 during the economic crisis in the country. She then found work in the New York subway system.  

While living in the United States, Gidla feels somewhat liberated from the shackles of the caste system but the residue of the horrid practice remains with the Indian communities living in the U.S. 

She writes, that it is a place "where people know only skin color, not birth status. Some here love Indians and some hate them, but their feelings are not affected by caste."   

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Reflecting on why the caste-based hierarchy persists along with the divisions within the working class, she said, "There are material reasons for caste's existence, they (upper caste members) are using the system in the modern economy for their ends." 

"Some one has to work hard, someone has to do the dirty work. In the west, workers come from all races, but in India, in order to not to have to pay even the minimum, they are using the caste system."

"It serves two purposes," she adds, "by making them feel inferior, discriminating against them, they will keep them down, so that they won't demand even minimum wages. And in urban areas, this system also helps to divide the working class."

Gidla's thought provoking memoir of her trials and tribulations leaves an aftertaste of a resounding fight. A fight against societal oppression.

Speaking of her truth, she writes, "If you get them to believe your lie, then, of course, you cannot tell them your stories, your family’s stories. You cannot tell them about your life. It would reveal your caste. Because your life is your caste, your caste is your life."