Healing touch
USHA JESUDASAN
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The community that Vishwanath Ingle founded for leprosy patients provides the necessary support systems for them to face life with confidence again.
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PHOTO: USHA JESUDASAN
Vishwanath Ingle: Restoring the dignity of leprosy patients.
VISHWANATH INGLE was diagnosed with leprosy when he was in class XI, in 1957. He knew that the stigma attached to a disease like his would ruin his sister's chances of finding a good husband. So, he left home.
He realised that the first thing to do was to get his ulcer treated, so he went to the Leprosy Mission Hospital at Kothara. By then his fingers had begun to claw, and his eyes were also affected. At Kothara, his hands and eyes were operated on, and he was sent to Faizabad to learn the shoe-making trade.
For some years Vishwanath worked as a cobbler at Rajnandgaon, and then as a daily labourer. He developed another ulcer and went back to the hospital to get it treated.
Stirred to action
Vishwanath reflects, "When it had healed, I boarded a train to come back to Rajnandgaon, and got down at Bhilai railway station to stretch my feet and drink some water. There, near a fountain, I saw a dead body. People were passing by and no one was doing anything about it. When I asked the railway police about it, they said nobody wanted to touch him because he had leprosy. When I insisted that he be given a decent burial, they asked me whether he was a relative of mine. I replied that every human being deserved a decent burial. Finally, they reluctantly assigned two railway sweepers to help me carry the body to a graveyard and bury it.
"After I buried him, I realised that it could easily have been me. This realisation, that I was alone, and that there were others who had this disease who were also alone touched me deeply. Until this point, it was only rejection, loneliness and the violence caused by the stigma of leprosy that I had had to face, and I had thought that it was my burden alone. Now I realised that there were others like me, I made an oath to myself that, henceforth, I would work towards restoring dignity to those affected by leprosy.
"One day, after a specially bad thrashing, I realised that all I had was my wife, a small box with some clothes and a gold chain around my neck. `Of what use is this chain if I don't have a home?' I thought. So I sold it and found a place a little away from the town, where there were no other houses. With the money from my chain, I built seven huts and 13 people joined me."
When Vishwanath Ingle first set up Asha Deep, he knew that he did not want the ills that besieged other communities to sprout here. So he had a few basic rules. The first was that no alcohol was to be consumed at Asha Deep. They would not seek funds from outside to build their community, but would work to build it themselves and ask the municipal authorities to treat them like any other community. Everyone at Asha Deep had to be gainfully employed. And every child had to go to school. There were to be no divisions of caste or religion.
Vishwanath Ingle believed that those with leprosy also had rights as human beings. That they were also entitled to water, pension, rations cards and employment without discrimination. He worked hard to get these rights for his people.
He realised that women also had to have something to do besides child rearing, and had to be financially independent of their husbands to have self-respect. So he set up self-help groups to teach them a trade, to make decisions for themselves, save for the future, and take care of themselves in a way they had not imagined they could before.
Compulsory education
Vishwanath Ingle knew that the lives of men and women in his generation were made difficult because they had no education. So every child has to go to school until he or she passes their final school exams.
"It is not just love and the community values of sharing and caring that holds us together. It is also the deep suffering each one here has faced. It is shared pain and suffering that holds us together. We know now that we can be healed and made whole by living together and helping one another in love."
He says there's great satisfaction in knowing that a person like him has been the vehicle to better someone else's life and to remove the terrible stigma that they once faced. "Today, people come to us. Women from outside come into our compound to get water. The vegetable man brings his cart inside, the biscuit man, the bangle seller, all come in and treat us as equals. We have a nursery school to which outsiders send their children. The municipal workers come in and clean our streets just like every one else's. This is a great step forward," he says.
India Beats features stories of the unusual, the exotic and the extraordinary.
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