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.