1983
He had a dream. A dream wherein he saw the wonders that could he performed for the dispised, forsaken, shunned lepers of the country. If nobody would lend a helping hand to these fingerless ones, if everybody hated to see these eyeless ones, he, Murlidhar Devidas Amte, would show the way. And he did. With just faith. A faith that moved mountains.
I sought my soul, but my soul I failed to see,
I sought my God, but my God eluded me,
I sought my brother, and I found all three.
—An anonymous poem inscribed on Anandwan hospital wall.
Murlidhar Devidas Amte found his brother on a rainy night while carrying a can of nightsoil on his head. He saw a leper utterly ravaged by the disease, lying in a muddy gutter and writhing in pain. He saw two gaping holes in place of the nose, and the rotted stumps of fingers. Shaking with revulsion, the man who would later receive the noble Damien-Dutton award threw a piece of cloth on the 'thing' and fled with a retching stomach.
The moment of epiphany came later, when that gruesome sight was recollected in tranquillity. At first there was a selfish fear. What if my wife or son contracts this disease? The prosperous young lawyer dreaded the thought. Then he overcame, as all great minds do in moments of poignant soul-searching, and grapsed the truth in a flash. He told himself, 'Where there is fear, there is no love; where there is no love, there is no God, I must banish this fear from my mind'. Amte had found his brother, and his soul, and his God.
Amte had already banished other fears from his mind. As a boy he had defied his Brahmin jagirdar father, Devidas Harbaji Amte, and used to eat with Harijan servants in his hometown of Hinganghat of Wardha district, Maharashtra. He had gone to jail during the Quit India movement and had fought a company of British soldiers single-handedly for which Mahatma Gandhi called him abhay sadhak (seeker of fearlessness). And in 1948 he tore up his lawyer's licence and gave up his claim to the family property. He then had told lndu Ghule, whom he had married within weeks of meeting her at a friend's wedding at Nagpur, and who is now known as Sadhanatai: 'I feel guilty of collecting fees from the poor; and as a landlord I am exploiting them.' He started living with the scavengers of Warora, sharing the joys and sorrows of the scum of the earth carrying nightsoil on his head like any of them. Then came the rainy night's sight in the gutter.
To conquer the fear of leprosy, Amte knew, he had to have the right weapon—scientific knowledge about the disease. He joined the School of Tropical Diseases, Calcutta, but did not wait to take a medical degree. For he knew he was fully equipped and ready when he subjected himself as a guinea pig to test whether leprosy germs could be cultured in human body. With just fourteen rupees in cash, 25 acres of arid land, a cow and six leprosy patients, Amte established the Maharogi Sewa Samiti at Warora in June 1951. But there was an inexhaustible resource: his dreams, his vision, his enterprise. Thus was born Anandwan, Amte's garden of joy, and with it Baba Amte himself.
From that modest beginning Baba Amte has grown into a mammoth institution over the years. Apart from Anandwan which is the headquarters of the Maharogi Sewa Samiti, there is the Somnath Project, a community farm organization, and Ashokwan near Nagpur, a farming-cum-treatment centre. But the most challenging of his projects is at Hemalkasa, located amidst the dense forests of Ghadchiroli district, aimed at tribal development with a difference.
Anandwan's is a story of sweat, blood and tears, a story of 'an outcast people on an outcast land'. When Baba started work 33 years ago, part of the land was thick forest and the remaining was arid land with huge rocks buried under the soil. It was all rock, and no water. But Baba and his handful of leprosy patients were not to be put off. They started work.
Today, in that barren and dusty region of central India, no traveller would miss the green patch near Chandrapur from where the forests have receded a hundred miles. There is no trace of the starved and listless people in rags, a common sight everywhere else in the region. Instead, the men and women look healthy, their faces shining with contentment as they immerse themselves in work or relax for a while under the cool shade of a benevolent tree. You have to look again to notice that many of them are without fingers or toes. And if the saying 'he is what he does' is true, then there is no leprosy patient in Anandwan: there are only carpenters, masons, tailors, farmers, mechanics and technicians. They are all experts, too, in agriculture and water management, construction and electrical jobs. The idea behind it is that when one goes back to the village, one should be jack of all trades and master of one.
Every year a thousand leprosy patients are cured and resettled by Anandwan. A few hundreds of them go back to their villages, others stay on to work and serve. The training for rehabilitation starts at Anandwan's general hospital where Baba's eldest son, Dr Vikas Amte, is the medical director. The hospital also treats the blind, the deaf and dumb and other handicapped, and prepares them for a new life. Training for the cured patients is continued at Shanti Niketan, started with the copyright proceeds from a book which Count Arthur Tarnovski of England's Take Heart organization wrote after visiting selfless souls like Amte all over the world. Conferring the copywright of the book, The Unbeaten Track, on Baba, the Count, himself a polio victim wanted the money to be used for rehabilitating the handicapped.
Now, Anandwan is a small village in itself with all the joys of rural life and the minimum comforts of urban life. There is a bank and a post office—the postman is a cured leprosy patient. The school for the blind, named Prakasachi Sala (school of light), was started in 1966 with aid from the Netherlands. All the teachers are blind, except the headmaster who is a cured leprosy patient. The education is craft and music oriented and whatever is taught is rural-based. According to Dr Vikas Amte the products of Shanti Niketan inmates are different from those of the khadi emporia, whose consumers are urbanities. In Shanti Niketan the products are for the rural people, and designed for them.
Gokul, the home of orphans, started with Dharati, a baby girl found abandoned at Warora railway station. She had been left there at the mercy of death, her mouth gagged. An old woman took her to Sadhanatai who brought up Dharati as her grandchild. Soon Amte conceived the idea of an orphanage and the schoolchildren of Maharashtra, moved by Amte's impassioned appeal, fasted for a day and donated Rs 3.5 lakh for the orphanage. Dharati was later adopted by a cured leprosy couple, Madhusudan and Anjana Dharav.
Anandwan symbolizes a better alternative to Indian rural life. No project for rural community development can afford to ignore irrigation and agriculture, the mainstay of Indian economy. What Anandwan, Asholcwan and Somnath offer is not only leprosy rehabilitation, but integrated rural development through intensive and scientifically pursued agriculture.
In the 300 acres of farmland in Anandwan the inmates grow wheat, paddy, jowar, fruits and vegetables of every kind. Right from the start these enterprising farmers have been digging one well each year. Now there are 35 wells and four borewells in Anandwan. The water management techniques used in Anandwan and Somnath, especially in the latter, are examples for the rest of rural India to learn from. Baba realized that no irrigation technique ignoring the native wisdom of the rural folk would be successful. At Anandwan, Somnath and Ashokwan, not a drop of water is wasted. Even the drainage water from the kitchens and washing places flows into either the pocket farms or kitchen farms of the commune members or the large community farms. Every individual household in Anandwan has a private kitchen farm. Water pouring down the roof in rainy season is also made use of in the yard where small crops are cultivated.
Since almost all members of the various communes are either leprosy patients or physically handicapped, they have been provided with modified tools which can be held in thumbless palms. Baba Amte believes that intermediate technology can play a great role in devising better tools and techniques for the rural trades, thereby improving the quality of rural life.
The showpieces of Anandwan are its buildings. Nothing to boast of: just brick-walls plastered with cement, tiled or asbestos-roofed. But then, all those structures have been built without help from any engineer or even professional carpenters. Count Tarnovski describes them thus: 'Simple, even primitive, to a westerner, yet with their electric light and tap water, they represent a Hilton style of living to an Indian villager.'
In a curious reversal of roles, the leprosy patients now offer advanced education to the healthy world outside. There is an agricultural college and an arts, science and commerce college affiliated to Nagpur University in Anandwan. All the college buildings were built by leprosy patients. Students from various parts of Maharashtra study here. The purpose of these institutions is two-fold: one to show the outside world what the most handicapped and the most untouchable people can do, and two to relate the life of the leprosy patients to the joy of youth life around them. They have helped to end the isolation of Anandwan and its leprosy patients from the outside world.
Anandwan produces everything required by its members to lead a normal life except sugar and salt. Life is in commune fashion. The members have common kitchens and dining halls. Says Dr Vikas Amte: 'Those who prefer to stay alone can do that. They can cook their own food. But all cannot do that because of their physical disabilities. Hence the commune kitchens. We have five commune kitchens at Anandwan.' One such kitchen is shared by about 700 people.
Mere community living, community work and community eating do not make a complete man. It was Sadhanatai who realized that gap in the life of these people—individual family life. And so in 1961 a few cured patients were married. The brides and grooms were members of Anandwan, all cured leprosy patients. Since then such marriages have been a regular feature of the annual Friends Meet, often attended by prominent personalities.
The couple settle down in a colony called Sukh Sadan. But family life was incomplete with marriage. Baba Amte, therefore, innovated a new programme in which each married couple would adopt a father or mother or, say, in-laws to live with them. This is a mutually beneficial system in which the old ones find parental joy and the young couples get a family atmosphere with parents and in-laws.
The traditional Indian milieu is kept with the old having a say in community affairs. The senior citizens of a village sitting under a tree and discussing and finding solutions to community problems is a common sight in rural India and this is seen in effect in Uttarayan, the organization of elders of Anandwan. Uttarayan is a 'wisdom bank' consisting of 60 senior citizens.
Modern medicine and the healthy life at Anandwan have reduced the effects of the disease. Yet, they remain relics of a bygone age.
Says Baba: 'They have lost the battle against the disease, but have won the war. Earlier, they used to ask me, "What is the use of all this, Baba? We will die." But now look at them. They've fallen in love with life. And the smile on those faces is my reward.'
In 1960 the Swiss ambassador who visited Anandwan asked in wonder: 'How is it possible? I see only smiling faces here.' Baba's reply was, Your Excellency, didn't they tell you that the joy in Anandwan is far more contagious than the disease in Anandwan?'
The Swiss have been particularly benevolent to this institution. Before the ambassador's visit, people in six cantons in Switzerland donated Rs 50,000 to Shanti Niketan. The Baba has a term to describe such donations—pain friendship. However, our own countrymen have not been so kind. Dr Vikas Amte points out that many of the would-be donors insist on their names being publicised. For them it is a sort of populist philanthropy.
Apart from this, the stigma of leprosy has not gone, though it is much less now. When the institution was started, the neigbouring villagers used to shun Anandwan like the plague.
The occasional visits of Europeans, however, served as an eye-opener to the villagers. They saw the white men working, eating and staying with the leprosy patients. Today, at the tailoring shops in Anandwan, many neighbouring villagers get their clothes stitched at half the rates they would normally pay.
The lessons of Somnath have a great significance in developing rural India. It is the backbone of the entire project, providing food and capital for the rest of the projects. It encompasses 1,200 acres of land, presented by the government in the interior of Chandrapur forests. Out of this 800 acres are cultivated. The man in charge of Somnath is a cured leprosy patient, Shankardada, who has done wonders there.
At Somnath one finds the best water management experts in the country—all illiterate or semi-literate. This arid land is irrigated by an innovative indigenous technique. Four tanks constructed at descending levels provide water to the entire land. And as a memento of the potential of indigenous wisdom and enterprise, there stands a 100-foot-long dam. This was constructed in 1981, without the help of any engineering expert or contractor.
Somnath is organized into various communes, located in different corners of the project. This is a method of geographical decentralization, which is again a product of sheer necessity—the handicapped and ailing cannot walk long distances.
How did the leprosy patients, most of who had never seen a dam or, for that matter, a rich farmland, achieve this? Says Baba: 'Through love, co-operation, and discussion. They learn it themselves. Not like the great experts who attend big conferences and seminars. After all, hasn't indigenous agriculture in India survived all these centuries like this?'
Baba Amte admits that in the early stages of Somnath, a lot of money had to be spent on reclaiming the arid land. But with good results. Today, Somnath is the most successful of all the projects in economic terms. Last year it sold hundreds of quintals of seeds to the State Seed Corporation.
Another example of what indigenous wisdom can achieve is seen in the planning of the godowns. Baba and his workers found a simple method to prevent rats from entering the godowns. They constructed sunshade-like horizontal slabs about one foot above the ground around the walls. As rats cannot move like lizards on the underside of the slabs, Somnath's godowns are quite safe now. It does not mean the rats are starving. On the contrary, they are in the godowns of the adjoining agriculture university farms!
Right from his young days when he used to hunt or wander in the forests of Chandrapur, Baba Amte was fascinated by the Madia-Gond tribals and their life and culture, their honesty and simplicity. In them he found a people worse off than his leprosy patients. They led a stone-age life in the Dandakaranya forests, clad in next to nothing and eating anything that moves, including ants and reptiles. But their culture was being slowly annihilated by the modern world. Amte felt that something should be done to stop this. In 1974, he established the Lok Biradari Prakalpa, or people's brotherhood project.
The project has adopted the little hamlet of Heamlkasa near Bhamragarh in Ghadchiroli district as its nerve-centre. Heamlkasa is a dreary five-hour drive from Alapalli, the nearest town. It is cut off from the rest of the world by flooded rivers for seven months in the year and even in fair season it is difficult to drive through the kutcha road to Heamlkasa. During the early days of the project, Baba and Sadanatai used to sleep on the forest floor, braving wild beasts and cobras. Soon their younger son, Dr Prakash Amte, and his wife, Mandakini, took over the activities at Heamlkasa.
The first thing Baba Amte did for the ethnic preservation of the tribals was to provide medical assistance to the decreasing population. The tribals are prone to attacks of malaria, tuberculosis, filariasis, anaemea and even cerebral malaria which is quite uncommon in other parts of the country. Besides, there was danger from wild animals. A large number of cases that Dr Prakash Amte comes across are of bear bites and of burns during the winters when people sleep close to the fire. Then there is the problem of undernourishment. Women, before they reach 40, are wrinkled all over, appearing at least 30 years older.
The first hospital that Baba built for them was a thatched hut. It has grown into a complex of concrete buildings which house the hospital, a school and hostel and the residence of volunteers. Simple, and to some extent crude, surgery facilities are also offered. There is also a diesel-powered generator.
Baba's second revolutionary step was characteristic of him. He gave the Madia-Gonds the plough, something they had never seen before. Their method of farming was to scatter the seeds in the plot and wait for the crop. When the soil lost its fertility, they would move to another place. Now with the introduction of the plough and distribution of about 500 quintals of seeds free of cost every year, the tribals reap handsome returns.
At the school, children are given lessons in basic medicine, besides craft. Once they complete their training in medicine they go to the various primary health centres of the project spread over the tribal belt and attend to the immediate needs of the people, mostly providing first-aid. The hospital treats about one lakh patients every year, all of whom are tribals. Sometimes, they travel some 50 miles from the neighbouring states through forbidding forests for treatment. One of the health problems is caused by the high iron content in the water of the region. The government had constructed a few borewells there but did not bother to repair the faulty ones. 'Now the doctors and teachers at Hemalkasa are tubewell technicians, too,' said Phadnis, a volunteer teacher at the Hemalkasa school.
The school is not yet recognized by the government for a quixotic reason: 'The teachers are not trained,' while the truth is that most of them are post-graduates.
Hemalkasa is one of the primary attempts in the country to awaken the tribals without disturbing their cultural identity. There is no attempt by Baba or his fellow workers to impose their values on them. There is no cultural invasion. How is it possible, one may wonder, because when an advanced culture interacts with a comparatively backward one, the former's values percolate to the latter. The reason it does not happen here is because of the absence of a patronizing attitude. The recipient, as Baba Amte put it in another context, is an equal partner in charity. There is no question of coercion or domination, or for that matter, of donor-recipient difference.
The people of Anandwan, Somnath, Ashokwan and Hemalkasa are allowed to practise their own religion and follow their own customs. Though the commune kitchens are vegetarian, the members may take non-vegetarian food privately. In such matters Baba is guided by his objective reasoning. He is an atheist in his personal conviction, but he is often seen roaming the jungles collecting flowers for Sadhanatai's puja. He is personally against all dogmas of institutionalized religion.
Baba Amte seems to have assimilated the economic principles of Gandhiji and his Ramrajya. Ramrajya for the Mahatma meant a self-sufficient village system: gram swaraj. And that is what one finds in Anandwan and Somnath. But unlike Gandhiji's, Baba Amte's economic theories are not coated with asceticism. His theories are highly pragmatic, rational and empirical. Yet politics, like religion, has no place in his scheme of things.
Baba Amte is no sadhu who talks and acts on a spiritual wave length. At 70, afflicted by vertebral spondylitis, he is a powerhouse of energy. Perhaps the ailment has made him all the more active. Spondylitis patients like him cannot sit; they have to either stand or lie down. And Baba is constantly on the move around his various projects. He is no philanthropist in the ordinary sense of the term, but a pragmatic visionary of a new rural India, a prophet who is most rational in his thoughts and action, most human in his feelings and emotions, and above all an entrepreneur.
One cannot miss the messianic zeal in Baba. He is indeed a messiah to hundreds of leprosy patients whose darkened minds he had lit up, and an emancipator for 50,000 Madia-Gonds. What is he to himself? Says Baba Amte, who was born on the day after the birthday of Jesus Christ: 'I cannot carry the heavy load of that cross which Gandhiji, Martin Luther King and Damien have carried but can't I walk in the shadow of that cross?'