Ayya's Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India

Ayya's Accounts explores the life of an ordinary man—orphan, refugee, shopkeeper, and grandfather—during a century of tremendous hope and upheaval. Born in colonial India into a despised caste of former tree climbers, Ayya lost his mother as a child and came of age in a small town in lowland Burma. Forced to flee at the outbreak of World War II, he made a treacherous 1,700-mile journey by foot, boat, bullock cart, and rail back to southern India. Becoming a successful fruit merchant, Ayya educated and eventually settled many of his descendants in the United States. Luck, nerve, subterfuge, and sorrow all have their place along the precarious route of his advancement. Emerging out of tales told to his American grandson, Ayya's Accounts embodies a simple faith—that the story of a place as large and complex as modern India can be told through the life of a single individual.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1. A Century of Experience 2. In Some Village, Somewhere 3. Taj Malabar Hotel, 2005 4. Things I Didn't Know I'd Lost 5. Pudur, 2012 6. A Decade in Burma 7. Okpo, 1940 8. When the War Came 9. Kovilpatti, 1946 10. A New Life at Home 11. Victoria Studio, 1949 12. Dealing Cloth in a Time of War 13. Dindigul, 1951 14. A Foothold in Madurai 15. Gopal Studio, 1953 16. A Shop of My Own 17. Madurai Fruit Merchants Association, 1960 18. Branches in Many Directions 19. Norwalk, 1974 20. Between Madurai and America 21. Madurai, 1992 22. What Comes Will Come 23. Oakland, 1997 24. Burma, Once Again 25. Okpo, 2002 26. Giving and Taking 27. Listening to My Grandfather Afterword \ Veena Das Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography

About the Author :
Anand Pandian is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India, co-editor of Ethical Life in South Asia (IUP, 2011) and Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, and a contributor to Everyday Life in South Asia (IUP, 2010). M. P. Mariappan (1919-2014) was a retired fruit merchant living in the south Indian city of Madurai at the time he co-authored Ayya's Accounts. Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her many books include Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.

Review :
"One senses here something quite rare: the clearly delineated emergence of a person's life, thoughts, and relations through the course of a lifetime. And it surely helps that the author is a gifted writer. By the time I came to the end of the text, I felt like I had come to know Ayya in an intimate way, and I was grateful for that span of related knowing." - Robert Desjarlais, author of Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists