The knock on the door has the sharp sense of ownership. L* walks in, a cheeky grin on her face and an assured sense of belonging.

She plonks herself down and makes herself at home as I talk to Shweta Tara Vandana director of education at Kranti, India’s first residential school for the daughters of sex workers, run by the daughters of sex workers.

Set in a pine forest in the higher reaches of Himachal Pradesh, puddles of snow glistening in the April sun, Kranti—the word means revolution—is deliberately small with a capacity of 30 students at any given time.

Right now there are 26, with four spaces kept vacant for emergencies—like the seven-and-a-half-year-old who told one of the aunties in Kamathipura that her father was raping her. The aunties gave the father a good beating before bringing the child to Kranti, where her extracurriculars include tabla lessons and karate.

Like almost all the girls here, L too has a hard backstory that includes a mother who tried to sell her. Today, what you see is a confident girl who clearly belongs at what is likely the first home she has known.

There is nothing small about Kranti’s scale of ambition. The girls come from the red-light areas of Kamathipura, Sangli, Bangalore and Delhi. Many are already 10 years behind in formal education. Almost all are first-generation learners. Most have experienced trauma, including sexual abuse.

Nearly 80% of the girls have gone on to higher education and many study abroad on scholarship, says Robin Chaurasiya, the co-founder along with Bani Das, a single mother, who set up Kranti in 2011. Five years later, Robin was a top 10 finalist for the million-dollar Global Teacher Prize awarded by the Varkey Foundation in partnership with UNESCO.

More than rescuing girls, Kranti is training future leaders and change agents. “In development spaces, survivors are often welcomed as storytellers, but rarely trusted as decision-makers,” Shweta Tara said in an address to the United Nations Commission for Women in March this year. “Yet the girls I grew up with are not stories waiting to be told. They are leaders waiting to be trusted.”

Shweta Tara knows what she is talking about. The daughter of a sex worker, she grew up in Kamathipura and at 16 joined Kranti as part of its first batch of students. It wasn’t easy. She struggled academically, having only studied at a Marathi-medium government school. The teachers, she remembers, were “sweet and kind, but most of the time didn’t show up.” There was bullying too, because of the colour of her skin. “There was a lot of a sense of smallness in my mind.”

Kranti banished that smallness, but it took time. After winning a full tuition scholarship to study at Bard University, New York, Shweta Tara says she had to drop out without completing her degree because she simply couldn’t cope.

Back in India in her early 20s, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and nearly died. “In that moment, the answer became clear,” she says. “I did not want a life defined by telling my story. I wanted every girl from my community to have the chance to create her own. So I returned to the place I had once tried so hard to escape.”

All she wanted was a better life for herself and her mother. “I never wanted to leave the community. Yes, there was violence and abuse but the community of aunties was there for you, looking out for you, feeding you when your mom was working,” she says. “The women always, always showed up for each other.”

Every kid understands the work their mothers do to keep the family going. “I knew this work was looked down upon but I never felt this was bad,” says Shweta Tara.

From the time they set up Kranti, Robin and Bani knew they would not be following the usual papad-pickle-tailoring route for the girls. “People talk about success stories saying ‘oh, the girls are making papad’ or skilled in domestic work, maybe computers. But when people look at our organisation, they realise what the girls are really capable of. That’s the transformative power of our work,” says Robin.

The krantikaris, as they are called, attend regular schools in order to get their certificates and complete their formal learning. But education doesn’t end when they return home at Kranti—there are private tutors and a social justice curriculum that covers caste, environment, women’s rights with workshops, guest speakers and field trips. Every girl goes for therapy. Travel and theatre are both integral to how Kranti teaches the girls to become confident leaders.

[*As a minor, L’s name of minors cannot be revealed.]

Twelve years after it was started in 2023, Kranti was kicked out for the eighth time from rented premises in Mumbai.

Outside, the organisation was being recognised for its ground-breaking work. Robin was giving TED talks. Others were being invited to give speeches. The girls, or at least many of them, were flourishing in India and abroad. But nobody wanted them as neighbours.

When the landlords found out the ‘orphans’ on their premises were the daughters of sex workers, they would serve eviction notices. After their eighth eviction, the girls had nowhere to go and had to return to the red-light districts where their mothers worked.

It was time to find a new home. The Himachal property on which Kranti has a 99-year lease is a failed hotel project with large, open spaces for the girls to live, play, study, do yoga and meditate.

On the top floor, construction is underway for a sleeping area with bunk beds and adjoining showers. There’s an open kitchen where Poonam didi, a local cook, prepares the hot evening snack of cooked kala channa for the hungry girls when they come back from school. All of the girls have designated chores—wiping down the counters, doing the dishes, loading the industrial-sized washing machine and dryer that came from a donor.

Who funds this, I ask. There are individual donors and a great deal of crowd-funding. Individual philanthropists like author Aparna Piramal Raje have been supporters for over a decade. “I went with my gut,” says Raje. “Kranti is the Harvard University of social change.”

As someone familiar with mental health issues including bipolar disorder, Raje knew the women didn’t stand a chance without therapy. She funds the therapy bill for the girls, roughly ₹20 lakhs a year. She also contributed towards the Himachal Pradesh property.

The success stories are many, depending on how you define success. Sheetal came to Kranti at the age of 17, with sporadic education. No matter how much she tried, she just couldn’t pass the 10th Board exams. Eventually, says Robin, “We let her put academics aside and pursue her passion, which was drumming.”

It was a smart move, Sheetal eventually ended up with a full scholarship to study drumming and music in Washington for a year. Today she runs her own organisation, Canvas of Healing to bring drum circles and music therapy to marginalised communities.

Kamathipura to Columbia

“My first classroom was not in a school. It was a brothel.”

The opening lines of Mahek Krantikari’s application to the master’s programme at Columbia University’s Teachers College could well be a love letter to Kranti. After the death of her mother, she and her elder sister were left alone with a step-father who was sexually abusing the elder sister. When she arrived at Kranti as a gawky 10-year-old, it felt like entering the only place that felt like family.

“I was welcomed and treated like a younger sister,” she says. But there was a large age gap between her and the other girls. The struggle to adjust was real. A year later, Robin took her to Mussoorie by bus and convinced the headmaster to admit her to his private boarding school with a fee waiver. Kranti remained home, the centre to which she would return for holidays and for events, for instance, each time the theatre group went off to travel with a production, Mahek would take the bus to Mumbai and participate.

Mahek had stepped onto the stage for the first time with Lal Batti Express, a play written by the girls about growing up in brothels. The play has been performed everywhere, in juvenile jails, sex worker collectives and, eventually, on the international stage.

In 2017, it was invited to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Mahek went too. “It was our big media moment,” she said. But by the time she returned to Mussoorie, word had gotten around. Some kids came up to her and told her she was brave, but there was a lot of finger-pointing and whispering behind her back. Even now, all those years later, she says: “There is no right way to tell people my mother was a sex worker.”

Currently in her final semester at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, Mahek is majoring in theatre arts. She has an offer of admission from Columbia University, New York, for a master’s degree. So far, she tells me on the phone, there is no offer of financial aid or a scholarship. But, she says, she’s going, confident it will somehow work out. “Robin has a way of making things work,” she says.

This find-a-way-and-the-funds-will-come attitude has sustained Kranti all these years.

In 2015, an invitation for Kranti’s theatre group to tour the US was happily accepted even though there was no money for airfares—that came through at the last minute from a sympathetic donor. Determined to push ahead with other travels, the girls have lived in churches for free and busked for food and subway tickets.

In the end, it is the pull of Kranti. Through her undergraduate years, says Mahek, she would return home, to Kranti, and teach the newer girls or lead theatre-based learning sessions. “Whatever I have gone through, has empowered me,” she says. “Kranti didn’t ‘rescue’ me. It is my family. It made sure I’m fed, educated and cared for. It is the home that healed me.”

There’s a fundraiser to support Mahek’s education at Columbia University. If you’d like to contribute or know more click here.

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