‘My father was against our marriage’

It’s not easy to forgo the comforts of a cushy urban life and shift to a jungle to serve tribals. But 35 years ago, Dr Mandakini Amte nee Deshpande, chose to tread a road less traveled. At 62, after three decades of tireless service for the betterment of the Madia-Gond community in the remote and disconnected areas of Gadchiroli, she and her husband, Prakash Amte have won this year’s Ramon Magsaysay award

After completing my MBBS, I decided to do my post-graduation in anaesthesia. Prakash, my husband, was a surgeon and that’s how we met. We worked together in the same operation theatre. We found that our values matched and we gelled well, which finally led to marriage. Prakash told me that he would be working in some forest area and I had no idea about forests, or the work of his father, Baba Amte. I had heard of Anandvan and Baba, but had never visited Warora. I thought it would be a place like Chikhaldara, a hill station in Amravati.

I came from a staunch VHP background; my father was a hard-core RSS man. He was dead opposed to our marriage as he feared that I would have to live among lepers, which was a taboo then. It still remains so, to an extent. Baba called me over to Anandvan and asked if I was ready to live with Prakash in a jungle for the rest of my life. When I assured him that I was, he gave his consent.

We came back from our honeymoon to Hemalkasa. I had completed my post-graduate diploma in anaesthesia, but Prakash was yet to finish his post-graduation. So we went back to Nagpur, where I took up the job of a lecturer in the medical college, while Prakash went back to his studies. In the meantime, Baba came to Hemalkasa after the government gave him land and began a small centre with the help of volunteers from Anandvan. Prakash did not complete his post-graduation, since he was not interested in general medicine, and decided to shift here. I was angry with his decision to not complete the course. But he didn’t budge. So I gave up my job and we came to Hemalkasa in early 1974. There was a small shade and a hut, where we lived. It had one room and a store to stack food-grains.

Once I committed myself to social work, there was no hesitation or resentment. My marriage with Prakash changed my life for the good. The journey has been tough, but thrilling. We have learnt lots of things together on the way.

It was challenging, but we faced the problems together. There were no roads, no electricity and no water. We would fetch water from a nullah, boil it and keep it for a day before it could be potable. Snakes and reptiles would be all over our living space. The Madia-Gonds would fear civilized people, so we had difficulties connecting with them. This phase of great difficulty stayed for two-and-a-half years. In monsoons, the area would be cut off from the rest of the world for four-five months. But we had been joined by volunteers, who came from Anandvan, to work with us. First we tried to learn the language of the tribal community; we took the help of local foresters and built our workable dictionary. Then, we went to the villages, trying to establish connection and offering medical help. We had to grow vegetables and paddy for ourselves; which was a totally new concept for me. We oscillated between treating patients and growing vegetables. But we still hadn’t won the trust of the villagers.

Then the breakthrough happened. A Madia boy, who was suffering from epilepsy, was burnt 40 per cent when he fell in fire after an attack of fits in Hemalkasa village. His parents had tried village remedy, but when his condition worsened, they gave up hope. We asked them if we could take him to our clinic for treatment, which they allowed. We then treated him with modern medicine and in five months, he was cured. We also began treating him for epilepsy and he showed drastic improvements. When the village saw our medicines working, we knew we had won their confidence. Others started coming to us thereafter. There were also times when we could not cure serious cases like cancer and snake bites and they’d stop coming. But we kept treating patients and as villagers realised that our medicines worked their trust in us grew with time.
We did have our limitations, in terms of instruments, infrastructure and medicines. We are talking of a very remote and backward area, with no facility of any kind. When patients came, they came with full faith and felt we could treat every disease: From an infection in the eye to cancer. We had no choice - either we treated them or they died. We could not consult other doctors or refer patients to city hospitals. So we studied and read from medical books, learnt things, and charted out our ways through challenging problems to cure patients. I never believed in miracles. Everything is science, and if one applies his or her knowledge with full dedication, there will be results.

My parents were proud of what we were doing, though many of my close and distant relatives did not come here for the first ten years. Today, I am happy that my children — Dr Digant and Aniket — too have joined us in this journey.

Dr Mandakini Apte spoke to Jaideep Hardikar
h_jaideep@dnaindia.net