The Turning Point:

The turning point in his life came one rainy evening, as Baba headed home. A huddled figure lay on the roadside. At first it seemed like a bundle of rags. But then he noticed some movement. Baba looked closer and recoiled instantly. Lying before him was a man in the last stages of leprosy. The dying man had no fingers. Maggots crawled over his naked body. Horrified by this sight, terrified of infection, Baba ran home.

But he could not run away from the self-loathing, which began to hound him. How could he have left a lonely forsaken man to lie there in the rain? So he forced himself to return and feed the man. He also put up a bamboo shed to protect him against the rain. That man, Tulshiram, died in Baba's care and irrevocably changed young Amte's life.

Baba had always thought of himself as being fearless and daring. The encounter with TuIshiram shattered this self-image. The very sight of Tulshiram filled him with an irrepressible dread. 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 honor of an Indian lady, Gandhiji called me 'abhay sadhak', a fearless seeker of truth. When the sweepers of Warora challenged me to clean gutters, I did so. But that same person who fought goondas and British bandits quivered in fright when he saw the living corpse of TuIshiram, no fingers, no clothes, with maggots all over.

And Baba was absolutely certain that: 'Where there is fear, there is no love. Where there is no love there is no God.' So what should he do? For the next six months Baba lived with the unrelenting agony of this crisis. There seemed to be only one answer, one lone way of overcoming this problem. He must live and work with leprosy patients: "That is why I took up leprosy work. Not to help anyone, but to overcome that fear in my life. That it worked out good for others was a by-product. But the fact is I did it to overcome fear."

And what of Sadhna? They had discussed the matter many times. But eventually it was Baba's decision. Indu said to him: 'You must follow the dictate of your heart. I shall find my happiness in following you.' Decades later she would tell a large public gathering, called to felicitate her, that had there been a women's liberation movement in her time Anandwan might never have happened!

Thus Baba, and Sadhna, set out on the path that is now history. He began by reading intensively about leprosy and offering his services at the Warora leprosy clinic. Soon, he was running his own clinic. In 1949, he went to the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine to learn more about leprosy. By the time Baba returned home the discovery of diamino-diphenyl-sulphone had made leprosy curable.

With this wonder drug in hand, Baba began treating leprosy patients in sixty villages around Warora. Soon there were eleven weekly clinics within a radius of about fifty kilometers from Warora, with a total of about 4,000 patients.

But stemming the disease did not make the afflicted whole again. And receiving charity is not particularly conducive to enhancing self-respect. Amte was fully aware that merely arresting the progress of the disease was not enough. Leprosy not only harms the body but also inflicts deep wounds on the mind. It destroys the personality. Traditionally, leprosy patients are excluded from society and even from their own family. With their face disfigured, crippled hands and feet, they are shunned by all. Even if the disease is arrested, and they are no longer infectious, it makes little difference. The stigma and the fear of society make it impossible for them to live as productive members. Thus self-respect is destroyed and this hurts more than losing fingers or toes.

"A person can live without fingers, but not without self-respect."

-Baba Amte

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