The quiet doctor who turned a hillside into a home

Shivajirao Patwardhan — everyone in Amravati simply called him Dajisaheb — was not the kind of man who sought applause. He was the kind who quietly rolled up his sleeves and stayed when others turned away.

Born on 28 December 1892 in the small village of Asangi, he lost his parents early and was raised by his sister. In Kolkata he trained as a homeopath. One evening, after reading Swami Vivekananda’s words, he is said to have closed the book and told a fellow student:

“If I have learned anything, it is this — the poorest and the most rejected are not objects of pity. They are human beings waiting for someone to treat them as such.”

He returned to Amravati in 1916 and began practising medicine. When Gandhi’s call came, the soft-spoken doctor answered. He went to jail three times — nine months in 1930, a year and a half in 1932, and three long years after the Quit India Movement of 1942. In prison he kept treating fellow inmates with the few homeopathic medicines he could smuggle in.

When he finally walked free in 1945, a friend asked him, “Dajisaheb, will you return to politics? A seat in the new government is yours for the taking.”

He smiled and shook his head.
“No. Gandhi has asked us to serve the leprosy-afflicted. That is where I am going.”

In 1946, on a rocky hillside outside Amravati, he started with just four patients and a few thatched huts. He named the place Tapovan. Acharya Vinoba Bhave came to see it and later told others:

“This man is not building a hospital. He is building a village of dignity.”

Patients arrived carrying not only disease but deep shame. One man, his face half-covered by a cloth, whispered, “Doctor, will you even touch me?”

Dajisaheb gently removed the cloth, examined the sores, and replied,
“Of course I will touch you. And tomorrow you will learn to work with your hands again. This place is not a prison. It is your new beginning.”

He refused to let the residents live as dependents. Carpentry workshops, a printing press, blacksmithing, farming — every skill was taught so that once the disease was controlled, people could walk out with both health and livelihood. Over the decades, nearly 75,000 lives passed through Tapovan.

In 1959 the nation awarded him the Padma Shri. When the news reached him, a young volunteer excitedly asked, “Dajisaheb, how do you feel?”

He simply looked toward the hillside where patients were working in the fields and said,
“I feel the work is still unfinished.”

In 1984, after years of struggle to protect the institution’s independence, he handed over the entire property — land, buildings, and assets worth crores — to the government so the mission would continue beyond him.

He left this world on 7 May 1986 at the age of 93.

Even today, when people in Amravati speak of him, they do not speak of awards or political posts. They speak of the doctor who sat beside the discarded, held their hands, and told them, in the simplest words:

“You are still human. And this is still your home.”