The Final Verdict - 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.
Dr. Aroup Chatterjee
London and Calcutta, 1996-2002
.jpg)
