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NY Times, August 27 2016
A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa
The Saturday Profile
By KAI SCHULTZ
KOLKATA, India — Taking on a global icon of peace, faith and charity is
not a task for everyone, or, really, hardly anyone at all. But that is
what Dr. Aroup Chatterjee has spent a good part of his life doing as one
of the most vocal critics of Mother Teresa.
Dr. Chatterjee, a 58-year-old physician, acknowledged that it was a
mostly solitary pursuit. “I’m the lone Indian,” he said in an interview
recently. “I had to devote so much time to her. I would have paid to do
that. Well, I did pay to do that.”
His task is about to become that much tougher, of course, when Mother
Teresa is declared a saint next month.
In truth, Dr. Chatterjee’s critique is as much or more about how the
West perceives Mother Teresa as it is about her actual work. As the
canonization approaches, Dr. Chatterjee hopes to renew a dialogue about
her legacy in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, where she began her services
with the “poorest of the poor” in 1950.
Growing up, Dr. Chatterjee, a native of Kolkata, found himself bothered
by the narrative surrounding Mother Teresa, beginning with the city’s
depiction as one of the most desperate places on earth, a “black hole.”
Having been raised in the middle-class Kolkata neighborhood of
Ballygunge in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Chatterjee said the city of his
experience was cosmopolitan, even moneyed. “Every airline that existed
in those days, they all came.”
As the capital of the British Indian Empire for nearly 140 years,
Kolkata was considered one of India’s crown jewels. When the British
moved their headquarters to Delhi in 1911, Dr. Chatterjee acknowledged,
the city began a slow decline in international prestige.
Dr. Chatterjee worked as a foot soldier for a leftist political party in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, while he was studying at Kolkata Medical
College, campaigning and sleeping in nearby slums. During a year as an
intern, he also regularly saw patients from one of the city’s oldest and
“most dire” red-light districts.
“We used to see very serious abuse of women and children quite often,”
he said, noting that the city was still struggling to absorb an influx
of refugees after the civil war in what was East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
“I never even saw any nuns in those slums that I worked in,” he said. “I
think it’s an imperialist venture of the Catholic Church against an
Eastern population, an Eastern city, which has really driven horses and
carriages through our prestige and our honor.
“I just thought that this myth had to be challenged,” he added.
Over hundreds of hours of research, much of it cataloged in a book he
published in 2003, Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in
homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity,
with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin.
He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality
and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the
reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that
required patients to defecate in front of one another.
But it was not until he moved to the United Kingdom in 1985, eventually
taking a job in a rural hospital, that he realized the reputation
Kolkata had acquired in Western circles.
In 1994, Dr. Chatterjee contacted Bandung Productions, a company owned
by the writer and filmmaker Tariq Ali. What started as a 12-minute phone
pitch turned into an offer by Channel 4’s commissioning editor to film
an exposé of Mother Teresa’s work. The social critic Christopher
Hitchens was hired to present what would become “Hell’s Angel,” a highly
skeptical documentary.
Over the next year, Dr. Chatterjee traveled the world meeting with
volunteers, nuns and writers who were familiar with the Missionaries of
Charity. In over a hundred interviews, Dr. Chatterjee heard volunteers
describe how workers with limited medical training administered 10- to
20-year-old medicines to patients, and blankets stained with feces were
washed in the same sink used to clean dishes.
In the past, when similar criticisms were made, the Missionaries of
Charity typically did not deny the reports but said that the nuns were
working on the matter. Today, they say, speech therapists and
physiotherapists are regularly consulted to look after patients with
physical and mental disabilities. And nuns said they frequently take
patients who require surgery and more complicated care to nearby hospitals.
“In Mother’s time, these physiotherapists, they were coming, but at that
time, there weren’t as many available,” said Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman
for the Missionaries of Charity.
These days, Mrs. Kumar added, several nuns have undergone training to
“spruce up their medical background,” and the general upkeep of
facilities has improved.
Dr. Chatterjee agreed that after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, homes
run by the Missionaries of Charity began taking their hygiene practices
more seriously. The reuse of needles, he said, was eliminated.
Over the years, as Dr. Chatterjee tried to make his case, campaigning
for changes in the charity’s facilities, he said he began to feel
Kolkatans turning against him.
“Like a complete nincompoop, I thought that people would absolutely fall
over me with garlands and roses, people in Calcutta, if I came and told
them that I’m going to settle the score and I’m going to expose this
lady,” he said.
Part of this protection of Mother Teresa, Dr. Chatterjee believes, can
be attributed to the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1979. “Calcuttans have
got this fascination with Nobel Prizes,” he said, adding that the city’s
celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore won Asia’s first Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1913. Others, he said, were simply afraid to speak out.
But Dr. Chatterjee said that Mother Teresa’s place in the Western canon
was enough for some Indians to lionize her as part of an ingrained
colonialist mind-set. “The West is saying she’s good, so she must be
good,” he said.
When Indians have challenged aspects of Mother Teresa’s career, he said,
it has often been to safeguard what some see as the progressiveness of
her work, playing down the miracles and myths surrounding her.
“Because Calcuttans think that Mother Teresa is Western and she’s a
Western icon, she’s very progressive,” he said. “And they do not
associate her with miracles and mumbo jumbo and black magic just as they
do not associate her with opposition to contraception and abortion.”
Leading up to the canonization, several Hindu nationalists have spoken
out against Mother Teresa to different ends, arguing that her
Missionaries of Charity pushed conversion on its patients. Dr.
Chatterjee said he felt safer criticizing the nun with a nationalist
party like the Bharatiya Janata Party in power.
As for the reception of his work among Western audiences, Dr. Chatterjee
said there was an appetite mostly for the more sensational issues he had
raised.
“They don’t care about whether a third-world city’s dignity or prestige
has been hampered by an Albanian nun,” he said. “So, obviously, they may
be interested in the lies and the charlatans and the fraud that’s going
on, but the whole story, they’re not interested in.”
Asked if Mother Teresa’s becoming a saint would deter him from his
campaign, Dr. Chatterjee said he would continue his quest to right the
record as long as it took.
“In my mind, the dialogue will never die, because I think the myth goes
on and the issue goes on,” he said. “I will not go away. It’s as simple
as that.”
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