Daniel Swamidoss (1919)

This lantern slide, “Daniel Swamidoss (1922),” shows Daniel Swamidoss crouched by a row of crops on a farm in India. Two buildings mark the edge of the farm, and beyond them are tall trees.Swamidoss attended the University of Madras and graduated in 1914. The following August, he started working for the Association village banks. The changes he made in bank policy (denying loans to alcoholics and eliminating the exorbitant interest charges) supposedly doubled the income of everyone in the village. Furthermore, he increased access to education by allowing parents to borrow more money if they sent their children to school. In 1922, he served as the National Secretary for Rural Work of India. The Y.M.C.A.’s work in India began in 1889, when they sent a young American named David McConaughy to Madras to serve as the first foreign secretary in India. McConaughy encouraged the development of pre-existing Associations and held the first National Convention in 1891, resulting in the formation of the National Council of India, Burma, and Ceylon. The Association’s most notable contribution in India was its rural development work, first begun by K. T. Paul in 1913. Paul established microloan programs that freed the rural poor from the grips of moneylenders and won many converts among India's lower classes. Joseph Hawkes, the slide’s creator, spent much of his life producing and coloring lantern slides from his home in New York. This slide is part of Springfield College’s lantern slide series depicting Y.M.C.A. work in India, Ceylon, and Burma in the early twentieth century. The series was prepared by the Foreign Division of the American and Canadian Y.M.C.A, which established self-sustaining associations staffed by trained secretaries in foreign lands.Text on border reads, "Made by Joseph Hawkes; India; 37; Daniel Swamidoss.