Of Hindu Temples, Forms of Gods and Mother Teresa
Some of you may have read about UK’s latest Hindu temple that opened its doors a few days ago in London. While glancing through the BBC report on its opening, what caught my eye was a reference to Mother Teresa. The report quoted Ajay Jobanputra, “governor of Shri Vallabh Nidhi UK (SVNUK), the charity which raised the funds to build the Shree Sanatan Hindu Mandir” as saying (emphasis/highlight added):
Famous spiritual leaders and forms of Gods from other religions are featured in the carvings such as Mother Teresa, Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji (a Sikh Guru), Meerabai, Lord Swaminarayan and many more.
Image courtesy: SVNUK
As you can imagine, the matter was quickly picked up by several alert devotees in UK that let to the following clarification from Dr Raj Pandit (chief priest of the temple):
Once we found out, we also queried the inclusion of the carving of Teresa (not a statue as some have stated) at the base of one of the 163 temple pillars and it is quite difficult to locate, given that the internal area of the actual mandir is some 12 thousand square feet! There are 29 separate garbha-griha (sanctums) within the main body of the temple which house the 41 pranpratishthit murtis.
The inclusion of Teresa was the decision taken by the then Board of Trustees (some years earlier) subsequent to a proposal from one of the Governors. The pillar was already carved and in situ when the present management took over and for a number of considerations, its removal was not tenable.
Understandable..except I was suprised at the apparent ignorance about Mother Teresa amongst the Board of Trustees. I wondered if they heard of a gentleman called “Aroup Chatterjee”. As some of you would know, Dr Chatterjee is
..the author of “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict” – a work which challenges the widespread regard of Mother Teresa as a symbol of philanthropy and selflessness.
He has accused Mother Theresa of unfairly damaging the reputation of the city of Kolkata (Calcutta). In his book Chatterjee claims that Mother Teresa exaggerated the work she did among the poor, that she failed to use the very large amount of money donated to her on helping the poor and that the medical care given to people in homes run by Missionaries of Charity was grossly inadequate.
Chatterjee’s criticism inspired a documentary named Hell’s Angel that was shown on Channel 4, a British television channel. The documentary was written by a well-known critic of Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens, who co-produced it with Tariq Ali
As the Wikipedia entry notes,
Chatterjee and Hitchens were the only two official hostile witnesses to Church procedures for the beatification of Mother Teresa in 2003.
Below are (brief) excerpts from Dr Chatterjee’s deposition before the committee for beatification/canonization of Mother Teresa (courtesy Atanu Dey):
..Over the years I have been dismayed at the discrepancy between Mother Teresa’s words and her deeds, and here I present some of them. Mother Teresa had said many thousands of times in her life that she “pick[ed] up” people from the streets of Calcutta. She expounded on it at length in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Her order did (and does) not “pick up” destitutes from Calcutta’s streets. They do not provide an ambulance service for the city’s poorest of the poor. If one rings the Kalighat home for the dying destitute, one is told curtly to ring 102 (the Calcutta Corporation ambulance line) so that a Corporation vehicle would bring the destitute to Kalighat…Her failure to provide vehicles (whilst continually claiming to do so) is even more significant because she had been donated a number of ambulance vehicles. These are used mainly (though not solely) as vans to ferry nuns, often to and from places of prayer.
…Mother Teresa is on record in various publications (written by her friends and followers) as having said that her order fed 4000, 5000, 7000 or 9000 people in Calcutta everyday (the figures are not chronologically incremental). I do not know what she meant by feeding that number, but the fact remains that her soup kitchens (numbering between two and three) in Calcutta did (does) not feed more than 300 people daily (a generous over- estimate).
…On the issue of bias toward Catholicism, I would also like to tell the Committee that worship inside Mother Teresa’s homes is solely Catholic, and non-Catholic worship is not at all permitted therein. This practice should be judged in the context of a minute proportion of the residents in her homes in Calcutta being of the Catholic faith.
…I would ask it to take note of the wide discrepancy between Mother Teresa’s deeds and her pronouncements. In 1984 Mother Teresa (publicly) declined the offer of cataract surgery from the St Francis Medical Centre in Pittsburgh, USA, telling the media that she could not possibly accept the £5000 treatment; but the very next year she had the same surgery (which cost even more) in St Vincent’s Hospital, New York.
Continued below..
Photograph of Mother Teresa: Courtesy Turelio
…In the matter of politics, the most serious issue that can raised about Mother Teresa’s actions was over her support of the State of Emergency in India (1975 – 77). ..Mother Teresa issued the State of Emergency a certificate of approval (acknowledged in the above official biography) to help her friend the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The Committee should decide if such action befits a potential Saint. The Committee should particularly consider the way Mother Teresa intervened in politics in this instance and compare it with her (political) intervention during the passage of the Freedom of Religion Bill in the Indian parliament in 1978. In the first instance when human rights were threatened, she aided and abetted the powers that were threatening them; in the second instance when Catholic rights were threatened she made a strident protest. One could not have criticised her if she had remained silent on both occasions….In this context, Mother Teresa’s fund raising from people of dubious reputation needs to be mentioned. To give an example, in 1991 she received a very large sum of money from Charles Keating, who had stolen most or all of it from the American public, many of them people of modest means. After Keating’s arrest, Mother Teresa steadfastly refused to even acknowledge requests from the authorities to return the money…
Read the deposition in full on Atanu’s site. By the way, the process that led to Mother Teresa’s “beatification” was one of the shortest in modern (Catholic) history:
..In early 1999—less than two years after Mother Teresa’s death—Pope John Paul waived the normal five-year waiting period and allowed the immediate opening of her canonization cause.
And the “miracle” that was cited for the “beatification” is interesting in itself:
In 2002, the Holy Father recognized the healing of an Indian woman as the miracle needed to beatify Mother Teresa of Calcutta. That healing occurred on the first anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death. It involved a non-Christian woman in India who had a huge abdominal tumor and woke up to find the tumor gone. Members of the Missionaries of Charity prayed for their founder’s intervention to help the sick woman.
Comments and thoughts welcome, as always.
P.S. The temple also promotes “..the message of Vasudev Kutumbakaum, a Hindu term to describe the world as one big family“(sic)…I am tempted to send the trustees this link.
P.P.S. I wonder if Shri Sathya Sai Baba‘s name was ever considered – as a spiritual leader (disclaimer: I am not a devotee or associated with him/ his organisation in any way). Just curious.
I saw the BBC documentary and was surprised, but I kept quiet…in this age, anything can happen.
Thanks for picking this one up.
I am wondering if there is a limit to our collective stupidity and cowardice.
Well no wonder what is happening around us, it is indeed the age of kaliyuga where the moron, idiots and ignorant decide what is the best for the nation, society and who needs to be preached and worshipped and who is a messenger of God etc. etc. Anything which is man made or artificially created like religion etc is there to serve someone ego. Created by self-centered egos and followed by morons.
The prime example is the cover up Jesus Christ life between 13-30 years for ages. Does the Vatican City or the Pope has the answer where was Jesus during that time or they still want to suppress it and continue to dominate over the morons.
http://www.slate.com/id/2090083
From Slate magazine 2003 – Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa! His book The Missionary Position on MT is fantastic!
Kedar, Sid, Bhuvan, Sanjay: Thanks for sharing your thoughts (and the link Sanjay). Will respond later tonight.
The inclusion of the inclusion of icons from other religions including Islam has their origin in Rama Krishna’s experiments with Bharat’s other faith groups. He came back satisfied that all these religions were different paths to the same God and confirmed the Vedic injunction that all paths lead to God. Of course it matters a great deal what we mean of the context of God but I have no doubt that Islam and Christianity take strong exception to representation of their religion not only as low order in the pantheon of Hindu idols but as not the all seeing and all powerful claims made for their religion. The inclusion of Jesus et al is not appropriate for inclusion in a Hindu temple for this religion. I would have thought it common courtesy for the religious denominations of those religions to have been asked for their approval. What I have said might put in the category of the Hindu fanatic. Where I part company with Hindus sharing my position is that for Hinduism to preserve its self respect needs to have a clear demarcation line for the definintion of the Hindu nation. Religion is a factor in such a decision but it has to be trumped by the “political”. Political is the sole criterian for Islam and Christianity. I see no reason why Hindus should lower themselves.
@Shri. Patel
“The inclusion of the inclusion of icons from other religions including Islam has their origin in Rama Krishna’s experiments with Bharat’s other faith groups. He came back satisfied that all these religions were different paths to the same God and confirmed the Vedic injunction that all paths lead to God”
Can you please show us the source for this statement?
Teresa had a horrendously corrupt mind. She gave a bad name to Kolkata, which was already suffering anyway after Partition.
Bharat,
the quote is actually correct. Shri Rama Krishna did experiment with Islamic ways of worshiping which did stir some controversy among the orthodox elites. Details of this can be found in any good biography of the sage (except of course that idiot Kripal’s book – “children of kali”). But this can not serve as an argument to put Mohammed or Jesus or Mother Teresa in our temple.
I suggest the Vedics make/send a petition requesting the temple board of trustees to silently remove the teresa’s murti from the temple, and provided reasons/facts why it is necessary to serve the Vedic interests. Dr Chatterjee’s book – “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict” – tells what teresa did and how she was. Her statue does not belong in the vedic temple because:
- She was not god.
- She was not a self realized person.
- To put an ordinary person in the category of god is blasphemy of god.
- Christianity is anti-vedic, and the temple is/should be pro-vedic.
- Her statue in the vedic temple will keep giving wrong and undesirabme message to the visitors. The non-Hindus will laugh at the stupidity of the hindus. The less informed or new generation will incorrectly think that teresa or Christianity are pro-vedic.
- No Christian curch has placed a statue of a Vedic personality in church.
- If we are not spreading dharma pro-actively, we should not spread anti-vedic religion.
@Sid
Thanks.
@Bharat
The following is attributed to have been uttered from the mouths of Rama Krishna: “Creeds and sects matter nothing. Let every one perform with faith the devotions and practices of his creed. Faith is the only clue to get to God.”
Take a look at here on Gurumurthy’s take on what he calls “Hinduised Christianity”:
http://gurumurthy.net/
Look at the article with heading “Lisa Miller needs to rethink”.
@Shri.Khandu patel,
“The following is attributed to have been uttered from the mouths of Rama Krishna: “Creeds and sects matter nothing. Let every one perform with faith the devotions and practices of his creed. Faith is the only clue to get to God.”
AFAIK, SRK’s life is well documented.
let’s try to get the correct context of this statement.
Courtesy Atanu, please read this link on the Missionaries of Charity – A legacy of medical negligence & financial fraud.
Thanks to Vijay for this: Mother Teresa’s legacy is under a cloud
“It’s impossible for a non-Christian layman to assess Mother Teresa’s impact and legacy…”
http://telegraphindia.com/1100821/jsp/opinion/story_12829132.jsp
Prime example of brown sahib Shri Sunanda K Dutta Ray as apologist cum cheerleader for Mother Teresa!
Sanjay,
If you know Dutta-Ray’s mail id, then forward Hitchens’ excellent article on her:
http://www.slate.com/id/2090083
I know am too late to comment on this post.But, it is not too late to realize truth.
It hurts the very self… if u realize that Mahatma Gandhi was impractical fool and MT does not deserve noble prize
here’s a review of Hitchen’s work.
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?200219
Excerpt from an interview of Sh Sita Ram Goel:
Mother Theresa is a part of this gang, presenting India as a starved, diseased and corrupt country to her Western audiences and collecting fabulous sums for the missionary machine.
I met her briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown.
I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill, when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in the drawing room. Teresa told her, “He is not your real father. Your real father is in heaven.” The girl said, “He is very ill.” Theresa commented, “If he dies, your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never ‘dies.” The girl was in tears. My friend came back and gave her the money. She departed. He saw his daughter in tears, and turned towards me.
I reported the dialogue. He was furious, and said, “Had I known what sort of a bag she is, I would have thrown her out. I am not a Christian. I was never baptised. Nor do I care for Christianity. I was only moved by her appeal in the name of the poor, and gave her some money. I hope she does not come again, and try to poison my daughter’s mind. ”
The closed mind of Mother Teresa was revealed a few years back in an interview published In India Today, a prestigious fortnightly (then, now weekly -ed) which had devoted a special issue to her. One of the questions put to her was: “Where would you have been between the Church and Galileo?” Came the reply, “With the Church. ” That is a measure of her intellectual equipment.
But Western establishments have built her up into a colossal myth with Nobel Prize and all.
Also read: Mother Teresa: Giving Charity an Uncharitable Name by Rakesh Krishnan Simha
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