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INTRODUCTION
Mother Teresa once made me cry. The year was
1988 - I was on one of my frequent holidays or visits to
Calcutta from Britain, where I had moved to in 1985. I was
standing by the kerb-side in Gariahat Morr, munching on a
famous 'mutton roll'. I was looking at scenes I had grown up
with - pavements almost obliterated by shops, people having to
weave their way through hawkers peddling their fares; buses
tilted to one side by the sheer weight of passengers and
belching out black diesel smoke, trams waiting for a manual
change of tracks before they could turn, the familiar neon
sign of an astrologer.
In the midst of all this I remembered the
'Calcutta' of the West - Calcutta the metaphor, not the city.
In my three years in the West I had come to realise that the
city had become synonymous with the worst of human suffering
and degradation in the eyes of the world. I read and heard
again and again that Calcutta contained an endless number of
'sewers and gutters' where an endless number of dead and dying
people lay - but not for long - as 'roving angels' in the
shape of the followers of a certain nun would come along
looking for them. Then they would whisk them away in their
smart ambulances. As in my twenty-seven years in Calcutta I
had never seen such a scene, (and neither have I met a
Calcuttan who has), it hurt me deeply that such a wrong
stereotype had become permanently ingrained in world psyche. I
felt suddenly overwhelmingly sad that a city, indeed an entire
culture should be continuously insulted in this way.
I am Calcuttan born and bred, and our family
has lived in the city for as long as can be traced. I know
Calcutta well, and many people who matter there, and many more
who do not. I do not have Calcutta 'in my blood', but the
place has definitely made me what I am, warts and all. My
mother tongue is Bengali, the language of Calcutta, but I
speak Hindi passably, which is spoken by a large number of the
destitutes of Calcutta.
I had no interest whatsoever in Mother Teresa
before I came to England. Difficult it may seem to a Westerner
to comprehend, but she was not a significant entity in
Calcutta in her lifetime; paradoxically posthumously her image
has risen significantly there - primarily because of the
Indian need to emulate the West in many unimportant matters.
I had had some interest in the destitutes of
Calcutta during my college days, when I dabbled in leftist
politics for a while. I also took a keen interest in human
rights issues. Never in the course of my (modest) interaction
with the very poor of Calcutta, did I cross paths with Mother
Teresa's organisation - indeed, I cannot ever recall her name
being uttered.
After living for some time in the West, I
(slowly) realised what Mother Teresa and Calcutta meant to the
world. It shocked and saddened me. In India itself, to say you
come from Calcutta is considered trendy, as Calcuttans are
considered, wrongly, 'brainy and dangerous'. The Bombayite
Gokhle is still widely quoted, 'What Bengal [Calcutta's state]
thinks today, that India thinks tomorrow.' In India, Calcutta
is - not entirely wrongly - stereotyped as a seat of effete
culture and anarchic politics. There is an Indian saying that
goes thus: 'If you have one Calcuttan you have a poet; with
two you have a political party, and with three you have two
political parties.'
The Calcutta stereotype in the West did not
irk me as much as did the firmly held notion that Mother
Teresa had chosen to live there as its saviour. I was
astonished that she had become a figure of speech, and that
her name was invoked to qualify the extreme superlative of a
positive kind; you can criticise God, but you cannot criticise
Mother Teresa - in common parlance, doing the unthinkable is
qualified as 'like criticising Mother Teresa'. The number of
times I have heard expressions such as 'So and so would try
the patience of Mother Teresa', I have lost count. Such
expressions would cause amazement and curiosity in Calcutta,
even amongst Mother Teresa's most ardent admirers.
Why I decided to do 'something about it' I
cannot easily tell. As a person I am flawed enough to
understand lies and deceit. Why certain people, themselves no
pillars of rectitude, decide to make a stand against untruth
and injustice is a very complex issue. Also, my wife, brought
up (a Roman Catholic) in Ireland on Teresa mythology, felt
angry and cheated when she went to Calcutta and saw how the
reality compared with the fairy tale; she has encouraged me in
my endeavours.
In February 1994, I rang, without any
introduction, Vanya Del Borgo at the television production
company Bandung Productions in London. She listened to my
anguished outpourings and, to cut a long story short,
eventually Channel 4 decided to undertake Hell's Angel (shown
on Britain's Channel 4 television on 8 November 1994), the
very first attempt to challenge the Teresa myth on television.
Ms Del Borgo chose Christopher Hitchens as the presenter,
knowing him as she did from their days together at The Nation
in the United States. I am not happy with how Hell's Angel
turned out, especially its sensationalist approach, such as Mr
Hitchens's calling Mother Teresa 'a presumed virgin'. The film
however caused some ripple, in Britain and also
internationally.
Mother Teresa, one could argue in her favour,
is dead and therefore would be unable to defend herself
against my charges. Criticisms of her however peaked during
her lifetime; apart from the November 1994 documentary, there
was a stringent (and quite detailed) attack on conditions in
her orphanages in India that was published in The Guardian of
London (14 October 1996) - charges of gross neglect and
physical and emotional abuse were made. The article alleged
her own complicity and knowledge in the unacceptable practices
that went (go) on in her homes. During January 1997, a
documentary - entitled Mother Teresa: Time for Change? -
critical of her working methods and accusing her of neglect,
was shown on various European television channels.
It was up to Mother Teresa to have defended
herself against such criticisms during her lifetime. She did
not. Her supporters (and others) would of course say that she
was like Jesus; that she would not demean herself by
protesting against muck raking - she would merely turn the
other cheek. Notwithstanding her image, she was a robust
protester whenever she had a case. Shortly before she died she
got involved in legal wrangles with a Tennessee bakery over
the marketing of a bun; and more seriously, with her one time
close friend and ally, the author Dominique Lapierre, over the
script of a film on her life.
On both occasions her Miami based solicitor
got properly involved. And then, there is that well-known
letter of protest she wrote to Judge Lance Ito protesting at
the prosecution (she perceived it as persecution) of her
friend Charles Keating, the biggest fraudster in US history.
After her death, her order continues with the
litigious tradition - less than a year after her death it was
involved in a court case with the Mother Teresa Memorial
Committee, a Calcutta based organisation.
The German magazine Stern (10 September 1998)
published a devastating critique of Mother Teresa's work on
the first anniversary of her death. The article, entitled
'Mother Teresa, Where Are Your Millions?', which took a year's
research in three continents, concluded that her organisation
is essentially a religious order that does not deserve to be
called a charitable foundation. No protest has been
forthcoming from her order.
To the charges of neglect of residents,
indifference to suffering, massaging of figures, manipulation
of the media and knowingly handling millions of dollars of
stolen cash, Mother Teresa never protested. Her responses were
'Why did they do it?', 'It was all for publicity.' She was
perturbed by the criticisms - so much so that after the 1994
documentary she cancelled a religious mission to the Far East.
During her lifetime I wrote to Mother Teresa
numerous times asking for a formal interview with either her
or one of her senior deputies. I had agreed to meet her in
Calcutta, or at the Vatican - mindful her frequent trips there
- or indeed, at any other place in the world. Despite her
image - carefully nurtured by her own self - of one who
shunned the media and publicity, she had always bent over
backwards to give interviews to sympathetic world media (in
other words, all the world's media). In 1994 she spent a whole
day talking to Hello! magazine; the same magazine ran a
lengthy interview with her successor in 1998. She however
never even acknowledged any of my many requests for an
interview. I had met her briefly on occasions in the company
of a roomful of worshipful admirers, but I did not feel that
was the time or the place to ask uncomfortable questions.
After two years of trying, when I failed to
elicit any response from her or her order, I contacted her
official biographers to ask whether they would answer some of
the serious question marks hanging over her operations. All of
them, bar one, replied, but only to turn me down. All of this
happened while Mother Teresa was alive.
Many people tell me that Mother Teresa should
be left alone because she did 'something' for the
underprivileged. I do not deny that she did. However her
reputation, which was to a good extent carefully built up by
herself, was not on a 'something' scale. More importantly,
that 'something', at least in Calcutta, was quite little, as
my book will show. Even more importantly, she had turned away
many many more than she had helped - although she had claimed
throughout her life that she was doing everything for
everybody. My brief against her is not that she did not
address the root or causes of suffering and I am not for a
moment suggesting that she ought to have done so, as I
understand the particular religious tradition she came from -
I am saying that there was a stupendous discrepancy between
her image and her work, between her words and her deeds; that
she, helped by others of course, engaged in a culture of
deception.
On a superficial level, I need to tell the
truth about Teresa because I feel humiliated to be associated
with a place that is wrongly imagined to exist on Western
charity. Perhaps the main reason why I want to tell this story
is because, I believe, each of us has a duty to stand up and
protest when history is in danger of being distorted. In a few
years' time Mother Teresa will be up there, glittering in the
same galaxy as Mozart and Leonardo.
I wish to convey my thanks to the some of the
world's most powerful publishing firms who put up obstacle
after obstacle in the path of this book. Indeed, the British
arm of a multinational publishing house signed me up and then
cancelled the contract nine months later by sending me a
half-page fax. My resolve to get the book published grew all
the more stronger by such obstacles.
I know I cannot change 'history' as
pre-ordained by the powerful world media, but I can attempt to
put a footnote therein.
I would disapprove of my book being called
'controversial', as I see it as a book of hard facts, albeit
disturbing sometimes.
Calcutta has recently been renamed Kolkata by
its rulers and a section of its citizens. The new name, which
is politically correct and is closer to the vernacular
pronunciation, has caught on faster than expected. In this
book, I have exclusively used 'Calcutta', partly because to me
it makes more historical sense, and also because to tell the
story of Mother Teresa, 'Calcutta' to me seems more
appropriate.
Aroup Chatterjee
London and Calcutta, 1996-2002
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