The Forest of Joy

It was raining hard, and the young lawyer was hurrying home.

At the side of the road, in the mud, something moved. It was a man. He was lying in the rain, too weak to get up, his body covered in sores. His fingers had almost gone. The disease was leprosy.

The lawyer stopped. He felt something he had never felt before in his life, he said later. He was afraid. He hurried on.

His name was Murlidhar Devidas Amte. The world would come to know him as Baba Amte. And that moment of fear, by his own account, changed the whole course of his life.

The rich man's son

He was born in December 1914 in Hinganghat, in the Wardha district of Maharashtra. His family were wealthy landowners. As a boy he had his own gun for hunting, and later a sports car. He loved films and wrote reviews of them.

He studied law and became a successful lawyer in the town of Warora. But he was restless. He joined India's struggle for freedom, and in 1942, during the Quit India movement, he defended leaders who had been arrested. He spent time at Gandhi's ashram at Sevagram. Gandhi is said to have called him Abhay Sadhak, a fearless seeker of truth.

So the fear he felt on that rainy road troubled him deeply. He had stood up to the British. Why was he afraid of a sick, helpless man?

Coming back

The man's name was Tulshiram. Amte went back to him. He brought him under shelter, fed him and looked after him, washing his sores himself. Tulshiram did not live long. But by the end, Amte's fear was gone.

In those days, people with leprosy were thrown out by their families and villages. Many people believed the disease was a curse and that a single touch could pass it on. Patients ended up begging by the roadside, with no medicine and no home.

Amte decided to give his life to them. He went to Calcutta to study the treatment of leprosy. He even let himself be injected with bacteria from a patient, as part of an experiment to see whether the disease could be passed on, to help the research.

His wife, Sadhana, was with him all the way. She too had been born into comfort, and she chose this life alongside him.

The forest of joy

In 1951, on a stretch of rocky, unwanted land near Warora, the Amtes began. They had their two small sons, six patients with leprosy, a lame cow and very little money. The land was full of scrub, snakes and scorpions. They dug wells with their own hands.

They named the place Anandwan, the forest of joy.

From the start, Baba Amte did not want charity. He wanted the patients to work, to farm, to build and to earn, so that they could hold their heads up. A saying often quoted from him became the motto of Anandwan: work builds, charity destroys.

The patients cleared the land and grew crops. They built houses, workshops and a hospital. As medicine improved and leprosy could be cured, Anandwan kept growing. Over the years it became a whole town, home to thousands of people: people cured of leprosy, people who were blind, deaf or disabled, and their families. It had farms, schools, colleges and its own orchestra.

Marching on

Baba Amte did not stop at Anandwan. In 1973, the family started a project at Hemalkasa, deep in the forests of Gadchiroli, for the Madia Gond tribal people, who had no doctor or school. His son Prakash and Prakash's wife Mandakini, both doctors, went to live and work there. His elder son Vikas and Vikas's wife Bharati ran Anandwan.

In the 1980s, already in his seventies and in pain from a spine injury that made sitting very hard, he led long cycle marches of young people across India, from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and from the north-east to Gujarat, called Bharat Jodo, to bring the country together. Later he went to live on the banks of the Narmada river, to support the villagers who would lose their homes to the big dams. He stayed there for years.

He received many honours, among them the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1985, the Padma Vibhushan in 1986, the Templeton Prize in 1990 and the Gandhi Peace Prize in 1999. He gave the prize money to his work.

The end of fear

Baba Amte died at Anandwan in February 2008, at the age of ninety-three. He was buried there, among the people he had lived with.

He often said that he had not started his work to help others, but to overcome his own fear. The fear had lasted only a moment. The forest of joy it led to is still growing.

Want to read more?

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and the Templeton Prize both publish his biography. Maharogi Sewa Samiti, the organisation that runs Anandwan, shares its history on its website. His son Prakash Amte's Marathi memoir, Prakashwata, tells the story of Hemalkasa.