Arun Dohle: Founder's search story
14 Years Old
The first time I seriously desired to go to India was when I was 14 years old, but it wasn’t until I left school in 1993 that I came to India for three months to search for my parents.
I went to my orphanage, Mahila Seva Gram, where I was told there are no records. The sole information available to me was sourced from the hospital records that contained my birth registration details, as well as my mother's name. However, the address listed was the orphanage!What could I do? India was a new country to me and I didn’t know the culture or language.First Journey to India
In 1996 I travelled again to India, with my then partner, however it was a restless experience trying to search and being on holiday at the same time. I just couldn’t do it.
I went Online
In 1999 I got my first computer with internet access and started searching for everything I could find about adoption. Eventually I discovered Peter F. Dodds and Bastard Nation. This helped me to reconstruct the adoption process enough to figure out that my relinquishment document must be somewhere in the Bombay High Court.
However I was still based in Germany and had no way of accessing records in India. As an adult adoptee I was at first warmly welcomed by the adoption community, or what would better be termed the “adoptive-parent dominated groups”.I quickly realised something was wrong. They said searching in India is impossible; that I would hurt my mother; that she’s happily married now. I was told there would be no records in India, that there was no rule of law and that I could never succeed in overcoming these obstacles.This made me even more determined, until it reached the point that I got thrown out of these support groups for my persistence in continuing my search regardless.I went Online
In 2001, the urge to discover my original family roots became unbearable. At this time I was a self-employed financial consultant working in sales and was used to working long hours, sometimes not getting home until after midnight. However, the frustration of being unable to make any headway began to affect my mental and physical health which took its toll on my working life.I started seeing a therapist and quickly realised I had been burying my feelings for the last seven years. It was when she said to me, “Maybe you should search for your mother” that I knew that I needed to change direction.I understood that my mother was likely to have been unmarried at the time of my birth, with the associated social stigma, and that she was now likely to be married. Surely it would be possible for the orphanage to discreetly contact her? If she didn’t want to have anything to do with me, I would accept it.While I was happy to be adopted and I’d had a great childhood with the best adoptive parents I could ever have hoped for, there was that nagging feeling that something was wrong. I started to find out about child trafficking and the scandals around the buying and selling of children in the adoption sector.One German adoptive mother told me how her eldest adopted child had heard that her mother was still alive and had promised to pick her up, but the paperwork stated that the mother was dead! And this was from Mother Theresa’s organisation, the Missionaries of Charity, who as a child I’d proudly boasted had rescued me.At the same time I was debating with adoptive parents on e-groups and Yahoo groups such as the German “Adoptionsforum” of ICHILD, as well as the US adoption community, who had heritage camps and honoured the roots of adoptees’ nationalities.This was in complete contrast to how I’d grown up as, despite my adopted parents’ well meaning attempts to induct me into my origin culture, I rejected it wanting instead to be a German white child, damning this brown face in the mirror.Becoming An Adoptee Activist
Later that year, in 2001, I set out for India with the intention of cracking the case in 6 weeks. No problem, I thought, for a successful businessman like me. And now, nearly a couple of decades later, here we are with many questions remaining unanswered. The impetus to look beyond my own adoption actually came from the resistance of the adoptive parents and adoption agency staff who became defensive, even aggressive, when I started to ask too many questions.While I was seeking help to get answers, I was confronted with a wall of resistance from adoptive parents who denied that there was any problem in adoption. Even my own orphanage, although they were kind to me in person, claimed they couldn't assist. Later I realised they had purposefully given me false information during my search.It was only when I encountered the children’s rights activist, Gita Ramaswamy - a leader in the ongoing campaign to stop the sale of children from the Lambada Community in Andhra Pradesh - that I understood how I was being denied my rights. She told me, “Arun, after trying so hard to find the law, this is the ‘law’, and in the law it’s stated that your adoptive parents have a RIGHT to know who your mother is.”I had been running from pillar to post for years without realising that all the established authorities I had sought help from in the adoption world were giving me a completely false picture. Gita Ranaswamy had inspired me to believe that the law was in fact on my side and that it would be possible to discover my Indian family roots after all. Not only that but she was determined to help me!Aligning myself with the activists in Andhra Pradesh didn’t bring me friends in the adoption community. In their campaign to expose institutional child trafficking and going up against the Supreme Court of India, we were making a lot of enemies. But Gita was the one who opened up my own country for me. She connected me to the right people and, ultimately, I was able to file a criminal case against my orphanage for the suppression of my adoption records.