In this context I will take up examples of the three most desperate communities in India—first, a socially ostracized one such as the Devadasis of south India; second, the Adivasis; and third, the Muslims. The evolution of a nation is not just about the growth of its gross domestic product (GDP)—progress must be measured in terms of how opportunities for individuals in society have expanded. I would further argue that there is a need to look at what progress has meant specifically for the most socio-economically disadvantaged communities, such as the ones I examine in this essay.
At the outset, I should clarify one more point. I have read that there are two Indias—one that is primarily rural and dominated by caste, superstition and traditional beliefs; the second, an urban, elite culture, more national in its outlook, for whom caste and other social hierarchies do not matter. The economist Amit Bhaduri has called this a politically correct cliché. He writes:
(one is) the India that shines with its rich neighbourhoods, corporate houses of breathtaking size, glittering shopping malls and high-tech flyovers over which flow a procession of new-model cars. These are the images from a globalized India on the verge of entering the first world. And then there is the other India. The India of helpless peasants committing suicide, Dalits regularly lynched in not-so-distant villages, tribals dispossessed of forest land and livelihood, and children too small to walk properly yet begging on the streets of shining cities.13
Author Aravind Adiga also calls the ‘two Indias’ the ‘India of light’ and the ‘India of darkness’.14 However, my intimate association with both, the metropolis and rural India, has taught me that this concept of the ‘two Indias’ cannot be further from the truth. The underlying issue of inequality plagues cities as well as small towns and villages. Urban poverty is rampant, as is poverty in the villages. Discrimination based on caste and class is as prevalent in the cities and the ‘high society’ of metropolises as it is in smaller towns; this is further amplified in the villages. Discrimination against women and the girl child is prevalent across all societal classes, in varying degrees and in different ways. There is only one India, because despite the exterior differences between cities and villages, our social ailments flow through all strata.
It was the year 2011, and it had been two years since I quit my job as a hedge fund manager in Paris to create my not-for-profit organization that worked on improving the education and health of women in the Middle East and India. This step had been a choice I made to live a more useful life. I wanted to help alleviate some of India’s social challenges rather than make the European ultra-rich even richer via the hedge fund, a job I had gradually realized was rather pointless and not worth my precious life.
At that time, I was living in the sleepy little Swiss town of Geneva, where I also worked at the World Economic Forum, an organization that brought together world leaders from all fields to solve critical global problems. I was the only employee in the history of the World Economic Forum to own and run, in parallel, a private not-for-profit organization.
My fledgling organization was running a project located in another continent, thousands of miles away from Geneva. The aim of the project was to improve the education and health of women and children in Nizamabad, a small district in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh (now in Telangana) in India with a population of just over 300,000. It is four hours away by road from the city of Hyderabad, where the nearest airport is. In this unusual arrangement I had crafted for myself, I would fly out from Geneva at least one weekend every month on a twenty-hour journey, by air and by road, to arrive at Nizamabad. Then, with my six-member team, I would work towards renovating and improving the facilities of dilapidated anganwadis—rooms with a courtyard built by the government of India four decades ago for providing education and nutrition to preschoolers and expecting mothers. I had partnered with a global technology company to provide the children with learning tools and games on electronic tablets. I had also brought on board a Chennai-based pharmaceutical company which had agreed to supply to me, at cost price, prenatal multivitamin tablets, which I distributed to women at the anganwadis.
I had a team in place to carry out this work, but I was also on the lookout for a local from Nizamabad to give a boost to our work. For this, I established a master’s degree scholarship at King’s College in London for one underprivileged girl who displayed extraordinary leadership skills in community service. I had negotiated with King’s College to waive the tuition fee for this candidate. I had naively thought I would find such a candidate in Nizamabad in the hope that she would continue overseeing the development work after my organization left.
This was why Rajvi Naidu,15 the vice principal of the local college in Nizamabad, introduced me to Swapna.
‘Swapna is exactly whom you are looking for,’ Rajvi told me.
‘Who is she?’ I asked.
‘An eighteen-year-old girl in her final year of a Bachelor of Arts degree in our college,’ she said. ‘She belongs to the Devadasi community here.’
Devadasi is not a caste, but an occupational community that sprung up because of the caste system. The tradition of the Devadasi community, found mostly in the south and west of India, dates back several hundred years, with its popularity reaching a peak in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.16 The basic premise of the Devadasi tradition was to make girls who reached puberty dedicate their lives to the service of God. They took care of temple rites, danced and sang in their rites of worship.
However, during British rule, the kings who were the patrons of temples and temple arts became powerless. As a result, the Devadasis were left without their traditional means of support and patronage
