Chennai: It is three cheers to the eminent Indian sociologist Prof Dipankar Gupta, who in a recent newspaper article on elevation of Mother Teresa from ‘Mother’ to ‘Saint’ by Pope Francis last week in Rome, drew our attention to how the Catholic Church goes lot more by the cannons of medical science in judging at least ‘two miracles’ that qualified the tireless humanitarian worker of Kolkata to the hallowed status of a ‘Saint’.
In saving a person’s life, by the norms of the papacy, Prof. Gupta lucidly explained how something counted as a ‘miracle’ only because qualified allopathic doctors “cannot explain it (the miraculous event) in terms of the current science”, beating any causal explanation to qualify for the canonisation process by the Roman Catholic church.
Though Prof. Gupta’s primary concern is about how a ‘Godly’ attitude to health issues ought to be taken in measuring the progress of modern societies without just confining to GDP numbers, the sociologist’s insights have unwittingly opened up windows to what may be termed ‘many-sidedness of sainthood’, particularly in the Indian context in nurturing a fragile pluralistic society.
From pre-modern times, there are several examples that attest to ‘many-sidedness of sainthood’ in India. The first such spiritually charismatic personality who comes to one’s mind is endearingly called ‘Saint-composer’ Thyagaraja, one of the great triumvirate of Carnatic music; he had combined miracles and sainthood through his eternal compositions, giving his music a unique therapeutic quality, alongside the two other greats – Muthuswamy Dikshitar and Shyama Shastri, that continues to make pain bearable for thousands of suffering souls.
In fact, the late violin maestro Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, who was trained by his father Ramaswamy Sastry and who had done considerable research on the ‘therapeutic quality’ of Carnatic music ‘ragaas’, had once in a media interaction recalled how the playing of ‘Anandha Bhairavi’ could cure hypertension.
Kunnakudi told us in an emotion-choked voice that day, when his father once fell ill and slipped into a coma, the young violinist chose to play the ‘Bhairavi’ raga on the doctor’s request for several hours.
His father recovered after a few days and went on to live for several years, which Kunnakudi described as an ‘amazing miracle’, something that could not be explained purely by modern medical science, at least at that time.
Again, take the life and times of Mahatma Gandhi himself. “We see in the life and thought of Gandhi, the father of modern India, a paradigm of the immense impact which Jesus and his teaching can have upon the adherents of another faith. Gandhi has been widely recognised as one of the great saints of the 20th century and he freely acknowledged the deep influence of Jesus upon him,” writes Prof John Hick, in his work, ‘God Has Many Names- Britain’s New Religious Pluralism’-.
For Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus implied a “spiritual birth”, not so much an incarnation in the conservative, doctrinaire theological sense, points out Prof. Hick, quoting from the former’s essay, “What Jesus means to be me”.
And should anyone ask if Gandhi had any ‘miracle’ to his credit to claim to sainthood, it is the incredibly brave way he walked through the Noakhali riots to quell the communal madness when New Delhi was ‘celebrating’ the transfer of power from Britain in mid-August 1947.
Interestingly, the late Prof. Ramchandra Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma and Rajaji, recalling a meeting of his with Mother Teresa in Hyderabad (re-published in The Seven Sages, edited by Prof. A Raghuramaraju of the Central University of Hyderabad), wrote, “I say, we want to help beggars in Hyderabad by teaching them songs and sayings from scriptures and also hungry and naked people on pavements.” To that, Mother Teresa replied, “But you must go to the needy with help and no conditions…..Do not make generalisation about the poor; they have their separate, unique personalities.”
Thus, Prof. Ramu Gandhi’s ‘Easter Tribute’ to Mother Teresa describes her service as a “wide-awake Samadhi and Tapasya in the sacred heart of Jesus Christ, if one may permitted the use of the categories of Hinduism” in understanding her service to humanity.
And again for Swami Vivekananda, whose discovery by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, was itself a ‘miracle’, sought to go beyond the image of his ‘Guru’ as a ‘miracle-worker’.
Vivekananda was always “inclined to rational solutions”, says Prof. Amiya P. Sen, in his work on the iconic monk of Bengal who took the message of Hinduism to the West.
These examples show how outside dogmatic institutional religious structures, the larger semantic connotations of ‘miracles’ and ‘sainthood’ that dovetails notions of the ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ approaches, have complemented traditional religious values in holding together a complex, multi-cultural changing world.
