INDIAN SHOWS HOW MOTHER TERESA FOOLED THE WORLD

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 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 canonisation 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”.

“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 honour.

“I just thought that this myth had to be challenged,” he added.

Over hundreds of hours of research, much of it catalogued in a book he published in 2003, Dr Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organisation, 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 realised the reputation Kolkata had acquired in Western circles.

In 1994, Dr Chatterjee contacted Bandung Productions, a company owned by writer and filmmaker Tariq Ali. What started as a 12-minute phone pitch turned into an offer by Channel 4 to film an exposé of Mother Teresa’s work. Social critic Christopher Hitchens was hired to present what would become “Hell’s Angel”.

Over the next year, Dr Chatterjee travelled the world meeting with volunteers, nuns and writers who were familiar with the Missionaries of Charity. In more than a hundred interviews, he heard volunteers describe how workers with limited medical training administered 20-year-old medicines and washed blankets stained with faeces 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, Ms 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,” he said. Part of this protection of Mother Teresa, he believes, can be attributed to the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1979.

Asked if Mother Teresa’s becoming a saint would deter him, 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,” he said.