Baba Amte, one of the last of India’s great social activists, despised charity. He sought to give the tens of thousands of lepers and cripples who passed through his ashrams the dignity of work, however meagre, and instilled in his followers his core belief that “charity destroys, work builds”.
Murlidhar Devidas Amte was born into a wealthy family of Brahmin landlords and gained a law degree with a view to becoming a high-earning barrister. But, he later recalled, he hated getting rapists acquitted and hated even more being invited to celebratory parties afterwards. His own work began to disgust him.
As a child he shocked his family by playing with the children of servants and low castes, and as a young man his sense of outrage at social injustice increased - as, paradoxically, did his wealth and social standing from his booming legal practice.
A chance meeting with a rainsoaked leper, huddled in rags on the ground, gave Amte the direction he was seeking. The man had no fingers and maggots were crawling on him. Amte, revolted and terrified of being infected, turned away and went home. But soon afterwards, feeling guilty, he returned and built a bamboo hut to protect the man from the rain. Amte never forgot the shame of abandoning the man, nor forgot his name: Tulshiram. He looked after him until he died.
He insisted that he pursued social work not to help others but to help himself. “Where there is fear there is no love. Where there is no love there is no God. That is why I took up leprosy work - not to help anyone, but to overcome fear in my life. That it worked out good for others was a by-product, but the fact remains that I did it to overcome fear.”
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He became an expert on leprosy and its treatment after enrolling into the Kolkata School of Tropical Medicine where he discovered that the disease could be cured with drugs. This turned the focus of his campaigns from seeking a cure to seeking an end to prejudice against its victims.
After Tulshiram died Amte began working among lepers and was soon running small operations in 60 villages. In 1951 he established a centre, Anandvan (“forest of joy”), in a remote area of Maharashtra in central India, which would remain at the heart of his operations. It was, coincidentally, close to the ashram founded by Mahatma Gandhi, whose work Amte admired and sought to emulate.
Unlike Gandhi, however, he wore his religion lightly - Baba was a nickname from childhood, not a religious term - and indeed he did the almost unthinkable for a Brahmin, the highest Hindu caste, by decreeing that he should be buried rather than cremated.
Thousands of people watched his burial at Anandvan, his body draped in the Indian flag. He was given full Maharashtra state honours and police fired a 21-gun salute. The Dalai Lama sent a tribute, as did Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, who described Amte as a legend and one of the great Indians.
Amte always coupled his social work with environmental campaigns, in particular against the construction of big dams that tore up vast tracts of countryside and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, almost always poor villagers. The only people who benefited from such projects, he insisted, were the urban elite and rich farmers.
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His campaigns included the formation of the Bharat Jodo (“Unite India”) movement to promote peace and harmony between castes and religions, and protection of the environment. He is credited with stopping a number of large dam projects, and for many years symbolically moved his centre of operations to the shores of the Narmada river in protest against a huge dam project that engulfed many villages and caused widespread environmental damage. He returned two awards given to him by the Government of India in protest at the Narmada dam project.
His many peace and justice marches around India - followed by hundreds of young people on bicycles - came at a high personal price because of a 45-year battle with spondylosis, a crippling degenerative disease. After life-saving surgery in London in the 1970s he could no longer sit, and had either to lie down or stand up. He spent much of his time lying in a cot, in the open, in his dusty headquarters at Anandvan cheerfully directing operations.
Today his centre at Anandvan houses 3,000 people, most of them disfigured, crippled, blind or deaf.
He is survived by his wife, Sadhanatai, and his two sons, both doctors.
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Murlidhar Amte, social and environmental campaigner, was born on December 26, 1914. He died on February 10, 2008, aged 93