By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world.
That is how Mother Teresa described herself. No pompous declaration of self-worth; just a simple statement of fact. Born Gonxha Agnes, in Skopje, Mother Teresa left her home at the age of eighteen to join the Loreto sisters in Ireland; an order involved in teaching and running schools across the world. There she acquired the name Sister Mary Teresa. She arrived in India in January 1929 joined the Loreto Convent, Entally, Calcutta and taught at the Saint Mary’s School for girls, becoming the school’s principal in 1944. She found her role too comfortable, restricted and confining. At around this time, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to Darjeeling for treatment and recuperation, and returned a transformed person, convinced that her work somehow lay in the slums of Calcutta.
Mother Teresa started teaching the slum children whose parents could not afford to send their children to school. One day she found a woman dying half eaten by maggots and rats. She sat with her stroking her head till she died. The experience convinced her that her work lay, as she put it, with the “unwanted, unloved and uncared for”. After repeated requests, Pope Pius XII gave her permission to leave her order and form the new order “Missionary Sisters of Charity” with a small group of like-minded nuns around her. After a short course at the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, the order was officially established in October 1950 in the Archdiocese of Calcutta. Their work consisted of going into the slums and tending to the sick and the dying, washing sores and providing nursing attention. She learned Hindi and Bengali, and adopted the simple white sari with blue borders as standard uniform. Mother Teresa took over a dysfunctional hostel which had once served as a rest house for pilgrims to the Kali temple, and used it as a base for looking after the dying collected from the gutters of Calcutta so that they may die in peace. In 1952, she started the “Nirmal Hriday Home for Dying Destitutes” followed the next year by her first orphanage. But her work largely focused on lepers.
There is a recorded incident where the locals complained about the “unpleasant” accumulation of destitutes, at the home, petitioning the civil authorities to close them down. The police commissioner himself inspected the makeshift clinic. His verdict: he would close them down only if the complainants’ mothers and sisters would take over and continue the work the nuns were doing. The complainants were silenced permanently. In time her work gave her access and recognition in the corridors of power across the spectrum, from Dr. B.C.Roy to Jyoti Basu. Even at the height of the Naxalite menace in Calcutta, paralyzing the city, her institutions functioned unaffected. She died in 1997 and has since been declared a saint.
The seed grew to a tree with over 4500 members in more than 126 countries. Honors followed; the Padmashri Award in 1962, the Nobel Prize in 1979, and the Bharat Ratna in 1980. She requested the Nobel committee to cancel the traditional and lavish dinner and donate the money to the poor. The Bharat Ratna, usually awarded to Indians, was for the first time awarded to a naturalized Indian. She had her detractors. She was referred to as a “hells angel” for her strong stand against abortion. She was criticized for accepting donations from “Baby Doc” Duvalier and Charles Keating the swindler. There were articles against her for not utilizing her considerable funds to make the lives of her fellow nuns more comfortable. But the most despicable and pathetic criticism came recently from Mohan Bhagwat, when he dismissed all her exemplary work as a conversion oriented spree.
I was fortunate in completing my undergraduate medical education at the Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College, Calcutta, spending about nine years there from student to resident. Mother Teresa’s home was within walking distance from our hospital on the Acharya Jagdish Chandra Bose Road (previously the Lower Circular Road). The sisters often brought their difficult patients to our OPD, and were occasionally admitted to the hospital. In all those years I did not see, hear or experience a single incident of acrimony from the sisters. Far from trashing the hospital as party goons have done on at least three occasions in Maharashtra, we found their patients general care meticulously provided for as they were trained in nursing themselves, and supplemented our own nurses in patient care. I am ashamed to admit that some of the patients were brought in with such revolting sores that made tending to them a nauseating medical challenge. Not once did they flinch, thereby imparting a lesson to me not found in text books. As for the allegations of conversions; as students and residents, we would have surely come to know about it directly or from the staff in all those years. It simply did not happen; their work carried an exemplary degree of dedication which has remained a bench mark at least to me; and which I have found difficult to replicate.
The puzzling question is why does a minority community of a mere 2.3% provoke such rabid hatred that they have to be threatened with disenfranchisement and even sterilisation to “keep their numbers down” (even as the census indicates otherwise). Even her portrait has been declared unfit to hang besides other Indian greats by the BJP. The simple answer is that these fringe elements do not have any answer to the sort of work done by the great Mother. There is no outfit functioning under Mohan Bhagwat that can even remotely resemble that kind of work. And so to camouflage your own inadequacy, you attack minority institutions, ban beef causing great economic hardship even to your own community (cutting your nose to spite your face, I believe it is called) and make outrageous suggestions that infringe on fundamental rights. And through all this our Prime Minister stays silent, apart from inane platitudes for international consumption. If only one of his cronies could draw his attention to a poem by Martin Niemoller on the cowardice of German intellectuals during the Nazi pogroms:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Maybe the leaders of our own minority communities should also read and reflect on this poem.
(Dr Gladstone D’Costa is the Chairman, Accreditation Committee and member, Executive Committee, Goa Medical Council).
