This could be, without any changes, a scene in any major Indian city today. The nature of the debate among Victorian intellectuals over what could be done to lift millions out of poverty, too, is echoed in the current noise in India. Should the poor be subsidized by the taxpayer, and how heavily? Would that make them less productive? What is the greater evil — the greedy corporation or the workers’ union? What is the government’s role?

In all unequal societies, without exception, there are abundant servants. The modern Briton may not know the pleasures of employing domestic help, but in the Victorian Age, every decent home had a few. In Bill Bryson’s book, “At Home: A Short History of Private Life ,” he writes, “As the Victorian era progressed, servants increasingly were required to be not just honest, clean, hardworking, sober, dutiful, and circumspect but also, as near as possible, invisible.”

This is exactly what is expected of the servant in modern India, especially the invisible part.

Economists and historians tell compelling stories of their times, but it is left to artists to tell the most powerful tales. And artists love contrasts. Almost every Indian photojournalist in the business today has, at least once in his career, shot the image of the parched poor against the backdrop of a giant advertisement of a luxury brand.

As it happens, some artists love contrasts so much that they tend to exaggerate to make it all the more stirring. The great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens milked his age to show the clash of two distinct types of humanity. His works were not devoid of a bit of artistic fraud. The hard times of the Victorian era were not exactly as hard as he portrayed, the free meals in the workhouses not so meager, and the factory workers not quite so hopeless.

If Dickens was the lament of the Victorian age, the conscience of modern India is the sentimental writer Arundhati Roy. Having secured her fame through the widely acclaimed novel “The God of Small Things ,” she has turned to journalism and speeches to question India’s political and economic policies. Ms. Roy, who is from what Indians call “a good family,” loathes capitalism and appears to believe that it is a conspiracy.