Reflections: Enterprising Indians and Mother Teresa

Since Mamata Banerjee says she will not attend Mother Teresa’s September 4 canonisation in Rome as part of India’s official delegation but as a guest of the Missionaries of Charity and will sit with them, presumably she will also dress like them. Actually, West Bengal’s chief minister is no stranger to sartorial politics. She sports a hijab on occasion, and last week unveiled a statue of the Albanian nun wearing a blue-bordered sari like the Missionaries of Charity’s habit. What matters more than a politician’s gimmicks is the national craze for glamour. It’s no disrespect to Mother Teresa or to faithful Roman Catholics to say that many Indian worshippers are more impressed by her Nobel Prize and official sainthood than by her achievements — 19 homes for old people, women and orphans, a school for streetchildren, an AIDS hospice and leper colony — in Kolkata alone.

Everyone adores celebrities. But when Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, sneered that Britain’s royal family was “famous for being famous”, he can’t have known that fame is an end in itself in India, divorced from the cause of it. One of Indira Gandhi’s most naïve utterances was that blackmarketeers should be ostracised. Politicians aren’t bothered by the colour of the money they receive; when important enough, they might even publicly cut donors. But Delhi society fawns on the rich and the famous. Moral approval or legal strictures make little difference to stellar Indians who court Lalit Modi or Vijay Mallya.

Even Dawood Ibrahim might be lionised if he turns up in Mumbai. It used to be rumoured that Haridas Mundhra, who started life as a light-bulb salesman, created a '40-million empire through “fast deals and stock juggling”, and was regarded as the first of a succession of financial scamsters, held court every evening in a club in Kolkata when he was supposed to be in jail. No doubt his club guests were flattered to preen in their host’s glory. I wonder how many of the VIPs flocking to Rome for the canonisation know about Mother Teresa’s strong personal views about her vocation. She firmly rejected the label of social worker and told me herself that the beneficial effects of her labours were of little concern to her. She toiled because “Our Lord” had said serving the poor was the way to salvation. There was an outcry when I wrote this in Kolkata, and a storm broke out again when I repeated her words in my newspaper column in Singapore.

The reason was simple. Hindus and Muslims were baffled by the Christian concept of salvation. Seeing social service as the highest good and an end in itself, they forced her into a straitjacket forged out of their own limited imagination. For the multitude Mother Teresa was a selfless social worker whose greatness even foreigners (meaning white Europeans) acknowledged. Sushma Swaraj is going to Rome to claim a share of the glory bestowed on a naturalised Indian. Arvind Kejriwal may feel he needs the limelight, while Narendra Modi possibly calculates it might be easier to whip up Hindutva fervour against a chief minister who seeks the Vatican’s favour. The Catholics, lay and ordained, in the delegation have an obvious reason for celebration. But for many of the others the trip to Rome and the junketing here are probably best explained by the Bengali word hujug, whose dictionary translation as “a passing popular excitement or trend” misses the original’s infectious effervescence.

But of two things I am certain. A nation addicted to godmen won’t doubt that Mother Teresa performed not just the mandatory two miracles the Church demands from a potential saint but dozens more. Second, given our propensity to pull strings, cut corners and wriggle through loopholes, Indians are bound to applaud the fast-track process that brought her sainthood only 19 years after death whereas St. Bede, the 8th century English monk, had to wait 1,164 years. Smart Indians will see this as proof of their manipulative superiority over the bumbling English.

Mother Teresa isn’t the only victim of India’s craze for celebrities. As a small boy I was taken to see the funeral procession of Prafulla Chandra Ray, the pioneering chemist, educationist and entrepreneur. I hadn’t heard his name at that stage and wondered as I was pushed, shoved and dragged how many others in that heaving sea of humanity had. Looking back, I am convinced most of the mourners were not mourning at all. They yearned to be part of the spectacle of a “world-famous” (a favourite Indian description) man’s funeral. Lee Kuan Yew believed the thousands who flocked to Jawaharlal Nehru’s rallies didn’t understand what he said “but thought to be in his presence was to have been blessed”. There’s no need then for those taking part in the commemorative celebrations (quiz, symposiums, art exhibitions and film shows) to know that sainthood is a five-stage climb, the difference between “venerable” and “blessed”, or that a martyr can attain sainthood with just one miracle.

West Bengal’s chief minister is special. Atal Behari Vajpayee compared Indira Gandhi to Durga. Idris Ali, a Trinamul Congress MP, says Ms Banerjee is Mother Teresa and Saraswati rolled into one. But it took a percipient Catholic priest to expose her real reason for opting out of the official Sushma Swaraj-led delegation. “Didi, if you go to Rome wearing this sari,” remarked Father Rodney Borneo of the Archdiocese of Calcutta, when Mother Teresa’s statue was unveiled, “they will think you are from the Missionaries of Charity and you will surely get a front seat.” Even Mother Teresa would have been surprised at the opportunities her labours have created for enterprising Indians.