As a very young child, I once boarded a flight from New Delhi airport in tears, travelling abroad for the first time. Sitting next to me on the plane was an elderly lady, her wrinkled face radiating kindness. Over the next hour, she calmed me, gently reminding me of the adventures that lay ahead.
That was a certain nun called Mother Teresa, and that experience has ensured that I usually argue against those that criticise her.
But the current silliness over the RSS sarsangchalak’s comments on her “ulterior motive” hasn’t quite moved me to outrage. True, the RSS and its affiliates are given to byte-sized bluster, but in this case Mohan Bhagwat’s statement seemed to me to be unexceptionable, except that taking exception appears to be the rule in the echo chamber of the noisy surround sound studios of India’s anchordom.
There’s more to Mother Teresa’s canon than just canonisation and that cannot be ignored. After all, her global organisation, Missionaries of Charity, has two elements to it, evident in its nomenclature. Her promotion to the status of a living saint started when Malcolm Muggeridge made his documentary, Something Beautiful for God.
But there’s been plenty of research, including a 2013 paper from the University of Montreal, that take some of the shine off her stardom, although neither her faults nor her motives can lessen the respect due to the good Mother of Calcutta for her service to the destitute.
Instead, the response to Bhagwat’s statement points to a larger problem: Whether it’s Mahatma Gandhi, Babasaheb Ambedkar, or even Bal Thackeray, they’re apparently beyond reproach or research. If in 1960, Arthur Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot was banned for what can only be described as crossing the Gandhi line, four years ago the Government of Gujarat, with Narendra Modi as its Chief Minister, dished out the same treatment to Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India.
Such extreme deification of mortals is a peculiarly Indian disease. In January this year, as Canada observed the 200th birth anniversary of its first Prime Minister John Macdonald, the daily National Post featured an article with this headline: “Everyone knows John A Macdonald was a bit of a drunk, but it’s largely forgotten how hard he hit the bottle.”
Macdonald’s achievement, a railroad linking the Eastern and Western ends of the sprawling land, is considered the key to uniting the young nation. Similarly, in America, Abraham Lincoln has been submitted to multiple post-mortem analyses of his political, psychological and sexual orientation.
In India, meanwhile, there’s a missionary zeal to elevate the dear departed, and often, even the living, to demigod status. Far too many people are eager to take offense. Perhaps that is what we ought to find offensive.
This is the sort of idol worship we can do without.
(Based in Toronto now, Anirudh Bhattacharyya is a columnist and author of the humorous political novel, The Candidate)
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