ONE morning in January 1997, I walked into my office at a nonprofit grouphere after a visit to my hometown, Calcutta. A very senior colleague, whom Iwould have, until then, characterized as being the "sensitive" sort, greetedme: "Welcome back. And how is everyone in Calcutta — still starving andbeing looked after by Mother Teresa?"
At first I thought this might be a bad attempt at humor, but I soon realizedthat my colleague was seriously inquiring about my city's suffering humanityand its ministering angel — the only images Calcutta evoked for him andcountless others in the West. When Mother Teresa died eight months later, 10years ago today, foreign dignitaries and the Western news media descended onthe city. The reports on the funeral portrayed a city filled with starvingorphans, wretched slums and dying people abandoned on the streets, exceptfor the fortunate ones rescued by Mother Teresa.
They described a city I didn't recognize as the place where I had spent thefirst 20 years of my life. There was no mention of Calcutta's beautifulbuildings and educated middle class, or its history of religious toleranceand its vibrant literary and cultural life. Besides, other Indian citiesalso have their share of poverty, slums and destitution, as would beexpected in a country where a third of the population lives on $1 a day —for example, more than half of Mumbai residents live in slums, far more thanin Calcutta. Why were they not equally damned in the eyes of the world?
The answer was that none of them served for seven decades as the adoptedhome base for a saintly European crusader whose work could succeed only ifit was disproportionately magnified. It was an instance of spin in which thenews media colluded — voluntarily or not — with a religious figure who wasas shrewd as any fund-raising politician, as is evident from the global
expansion of her organization. For Calcutta natives like me, however, MotherTeresa's charity also evoked the colonial past — she felt she knew what wasbest for the third world masses, whether it was condemning abortion oroffering to convert those who were on the verge of death.
After the funeral, I comforted myself with the possibility that MotherTeresa's death might redress the balance of perception. Calcutta, oncecalled the second city of the British Empire, would again be seen as apulsing metropolis of 14 million that has survived despite being twiceslammed by huge influxes of refugees, once after the partition of 1947 andagain during the Bangladesh war of independence in 1971. In the absence of amissionary who had never allowed her compassion to be de-linked fromCatholic dogma, I hoped the world would recognize that Calcutta has notmerely survived, it has battled tremendous odds without losing its soul.
Ten years and one beatification later, however, the relentless hagiographyof the Catholic Church and the peculiar tunnel vision of the news mediacontinue to equate Calcutta with the twinned entities of destitution andsuccor publicized by Mother Teresa. With cultish fervor, her organization,the Missionaries of Charity, promotes her as an icon of mercy. Meanwhile,
countless unheralded local organizations work for the needy without theglamour of a Nobel Prize or of impending sainthood.
Charity need not be inconsistent with clarity. Calcutta is a modern Indiancity where poverty and inequality coexist with measurably increasingprosperity, expanding opportunities, cautious optimism and, above all, pridein its unique character. Mother Teresa might have meant well, but shefurthered her mission by robbing Calcutta of its richly nuanced identity
while pretending to love it.
Chitrita Banerji is the author, most recently, of "Eating India: An OdysseyInto the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices."
മലയാളത്തില് ടൈപ്പ് ചെയ്യാന് ഇവിടെ ക്ലിക്ക് ചെയ്യുക
അസഭ്യവും നിയമവിരുദ്ധവും അപകീര്ത്തികരവുമായ പരാമര്ശങ്ങള് പാടില്ല. വ്യക്തിപരമായ അധിക്ഷേപങ്ങളും
ഉണ്ടാവരുത്. അവ സൈബര് നിയമപ്രകാരം കുറ്റകരമാണ്. അഭിപ്രായങ്ങള് എഴുതുന്നയാളുടേത് മാത്രമാണ്. ഇ-മലയാളിയുടേതല്ല