Anandwan: Tke Value of People Story and photos by Ariin Narayan Toke Anandwan is a cooperative village carved from barren land by crippled social outcasts. The town is home to some 3,000 survivors of leprosy who are socially independent, live off the land, set the world’s standards for rehabilitation, and coordinate some of India’s most daring and prominent ecological and social programs. For centuries societies shunned those who contracted leprosy, a deforming disease of the nervous system that was incorrectly thought to be unusually contagious. The infected could stigmatize their entire family, so even close relations abandoned them. Over the last 40 years the people of India have changed their view of leprosy, a change in part attributable to Anandwan and its founder Baba Amte, who today in his 70’s, fiery and controversial, is probably the most respected secular figure in the country. In 1949, when Amte founded the community, he was a lawyer, activist, and Brahmin from a well-off family who had rejected his inheritance. As part of the core group in the Quit India movement, he helped Mahatma Gandhi and Page 22 Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2 Pandit Nehru lead the country to independence from the British. Like Gandhi, Amte tackled the entrenched caste system, challenging all taboos regarding the untouchables, those who did society’s most degrading work. While organizing the untouchables in the city of Warora, he shocked people by taking on low-caste tasks, such as carrying human feces in a bucket on his head, even though he was an official of the city. One evening, while doing this work, he stumbled upon an abandoned leprosy victim lying half-dead in a gutter. The sight of the man, whose flesh was being eaten by worms from lack of care, frightened Amte into running away. Ashamed with himself, he went back and took care of the man until he died. In short order this social activist resolved to change the lot of leprosy victims. He imagined that to give meaning to their lives, for them to regain self-respect and that of society, they must become independent and self- sufficient in all aspects. With his wife Taee, also a rebel from the upper classes, and a group of leprosy patients, he began to build Anandwan on abandoned land outside of Warora. By modem standards, Anandwan is quite isolated. Leaving Bombay by the evening train on March 5, 1991,1 traveled 16 hours west to Wardha, home to Gandhi’s famous Sevagram Ashram, and then 4 hours south by bus to Warora. Instead of taking a cycle rickshaw, I covered the last 3 km of the journey on foot. It was not long after I walked through
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