The man who created the ‘forest of joy’

ANANDVAN (Chandrapur): At 93, he looked still agile, though confined to his bed in the sprawling campus that he built some five decades ago. So when this reporter asked him, “Baba, how do you pass your time?” he said his inimitable style: “I watch the choreography of my dreams and memories.”

Baba Amte, a man of many parts but a social reformer and rebel, as he would like to be called, had a way with words. With his death, Anandvan, the self-sustaining and self-reliant commune that he set up in 1951 to look after those suffering from leprosy seems to lost its brightness.  The inmates say the ashram has lost its soul.

“This ashram is now an institution in which everything is systematised, but with Baba’s death, it has lost its soul,” reacted M V Kavishwar, a senior volunteer.

Born Murlidhar Devdas Amte on December 26, 1914 at Higanghat in Wardha, eldest son of a wealthy Brahmin landowner, Baba loved ports cars and bikes and had a passion for wrestling. He spent time building his body at the local gym. At 14, he owned his own gun for hunting.

He developed a special interest in cinema, wrote reviews for the film magazine The Picture Goer and wrote to Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer, who later became his first foreign donors. When he was old enough to drive, Baba was gifted with a Singer sportscar with cushions covered with panther skin!

But he remained very down-to-earth and never quite appreciated the caste restrictions that prevented him from playing with ‘low-caste’ servants’ children. “There is certain callousness in families like mine,” Baba would say. “They put up barriers so as not to see the misery in the world outside; I rebelled against it.”

As a student, Baba travelled far and wide; he visited Shantiniketan attracted by Tagore’s music and poetry. Closer home, at Sewagram Gandhiji’s ashram near Wardha, Baba was equally fascinated with Gandhi’s relationship with God.
The ideas of Marx and Mao also inspired him. But he felt closer to the worldview of John Ruskin and Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, which focussed on empowerment of the community with greater freedom from the state. He was also drawn to Maharashtra’s fiery social reformer, Sane Guruji.

As a trained lawyer, he built up a lucrative practice in Warora. On weekends, he looked into affairs at the family’s farm of 450 acres.

Soon he was organising farmers’ cooperatives and was eventually elected vice-president of the Warora municipality. But he always had time for hunting, bridge or tennis at the local club. But the money, prestige and comfort did not make him happy.  This surely could not be the purpose of life, he thought. Besides, he was even more appalled by the callousness within his own family. The turning point came one rainy evening, as Baba headed home. He stopped to see a huddled figure by the roadside. Looking closer, he saw a man dying of leprosy. Horrified, Baba ran home.

He thought nothing scared him yet this encounter with Tulshiram shattered his self-image. He decided to take care of  him and the young Amte’s life was never the same again. Even as he cared for the dying man this fear would not leave him: “I have never been frightened of anything. Because I fought British tommies to save the honour of an Indian lady, Gandhiji called me ‘abhay sadhak’, a fearless seeker of truth. “A person can live without fingers, but not without self-respect,” he said.

In December 1946, Baba married Indu (now Sadhanatai).That day, he  renounced his wealth, legal practice and his inheritance.

Anandwan is today a flourishing institution. People flock to see an institution that depends on the outside world only for salt and fuel. His two sons - Prakash and Vikas - and grandchildren now carry on his legacy.

Baba Amte always asked himself: “If we could build up a happy community under the most difficult circumstances, why cannot healthy people do the same under the favourable circumstances? Why can the youth of India not do the same?”