The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Native Calcuttan intellectuals have reflected upon the cultural economy of the Mother
Teresa image, suggesting that its creation and perpetuation reflected the “vested
interest” that the west had in a “dependent, capitulating posture”. The Calcutta poor
were viewed in a way that reinforced notions of the city as black hole of misery, a
metaphor that had colonial origins. It was in relation to this notion that the western
media had “carefully nurtured” an image of Mother Teresa as “the epitome of purer
than pure”. 47
Aroup Chatterjee, a London‐based doctor who grew up in Calcutta, suggested that there
was an “astronomical” discrepancy “between her actual work and her mythological
image in the West”. Mother Teresa, he argued, was “essentially a fictional identity”,
which obscured the large number of secular and religious people “who are doing much
more than she is, but have never been heard of”. In Calcutta itself, Mother Teresa was
“almost a nonentity”. The Calcutta‐born scholar of Rabindranath Tagore’s writings,
Krishna Dutta, concurred with this view, and claimed that he had never heard of
Calcutta’s supposed “guardian angel”, Mother Teresa, until he went to Britain. “Calcutta
did not need her – she needed Calcutta as a means to her end”, he argued. For him it
was indeed ironic that while Mother Teresa “wanted to take the poor of Calcutta into
her church, … in reality they [had] taken her into their temple”. 48
The social life of Mother Teresa’s biography did not end at her death in 1997. On the
contrary, Vatican officials incorporated Mother Teresa biographic narrations and
contests into an examination of whether she should be declared a saint. The pope had
earlier waived a rule requiring five years to pass for the beatification process could
commence and a three‐member tribunal was appointed in 1999 to study the case for the
beatification of Mother Teresa. The ‘fast‐track’ process was also facilitated by other
papal decisions by Pope John Paul II. In what was seen as an attempt to “democratise
47 Aroup Chatterjee, ‘Mother Teresa: her life, her work, her message’, New Statesman, 26 September
1997.
48 Aroup Chatterjee, cited in Anne Sebba, Mother Teresa: Beyond the Image, p124; Krishna Dutta,
‘Charity begins in Calcutta’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 October 1997, p 26.
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