Reportage: Aroup Chatterjee, a native Calcuttan was profoundly irritated by the image of his home town as portrayed by Mother Teresa. However his attempt to put the record straight as he sees it is hampered by misprints, appalling syntax, missing words and repetition. In short, according to Catriona Crowe, Chatterjee's personal agenda ultimately undermines the points he is trying to make.
In November, 1994, Channel 4 broadcast Hell's Angel, a documentary presented by Christopher Hitchens. It was a critical investigation of the activities of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and her order of nuns, the Missionaries of Charity. Hitchens used testimony from former volunteer workers in her home for the dying and her orphanage in Calcutta to allege that admission policy, hygiene standards and, most importantly, care for the patients and children left a great deal to be desired. He also wondered where the large sums of money and many gifts donated to the order had gone, and what Mother Teresa was doing mixing with such unsavoury characters as Baby Doc Duvalier and Charles Keating (one of the major beneficiaries of the Savings and Loan scandal in the US).
Hitchens went on to write a short book on the subject - The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice - which was published in 1995. In it, he tracks Mother Teresa's career from her discovery by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1969, the real beginning of her international fame, through her receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, to her constant and highly politicised opposition to contraception and abortion. The book does not pretend to be a thorough investigation of the matter, but the evidence offered is convincing, and several important questions, particularly about money, are raised.
Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, by Aroup Chatterjee, purports to be the full investigation foreshadowed by Hitchens's long essay. Chatterjee is a native Calcuttan, and has been on Mother Teresa's trail for some time. He is profoundly irritated by the image of his home town put about by Mother Teresa's often grossly exaggerated accounts of it. He claims to have been the inspiration behind Hell's Angel, but Hitchens doesn't mention him in his otherwise comprehensive acknowledgements.
Chaterjee begins by complaining about the programme: "I am not happy with how Hell's Angel turned out, especially its slanderous and sensationalist approach. I have dissociated myself from the film." The film, he says, does acknowledge him with a special thanks. "Ever since the film, Mr Hitchens has extracted from the saga the last drop of publicity that he could manage."
Sour grapes, or justified resentment at being written out of the story? Whatever, Chatterjee had an opportunity to state his case at much greater length than Hitchens, and has squandered it in a most infuriating book. He repeats a lot of what we've heard already from Hitchens and others, and includes some new eye-witness testimony from volunteers and co-workers in the Calcutta institutions. He gives a muddled and contradictory but sometimes interesting picture of Calcutta in the 20th century, analyses local and international media coverage of Mother Teresa, looks at her relationship with the city, compares her charitable activities with those of other Calcutta charities (to her extreme disadvantage), and ends by recounting his efforts to prevent her being canonised.
He constantly undermines his own arguments. For example, on the very serious question of what happens to the substantial sums of money donated to this cause, he first tells us the order does not have to register its accounts in India; some pages on we find ourselves in the office of the Registrar of Trusts, Societies and Non-Trading Corporations in Calcutta, where the order's accounts are lodged, and supposed to be publicly accessible. Chatterjee is not allowed to see the accounts on the direction of Mother Teresa's successor, but lets the matter drop and does not pursue his legal right to inspect them. There is some flim-flam about "the way things work in India", to which I'm sure Chaterjee would strenuously object if written by anyone not from Calcutta.
The book is full of misprints, appalling syntax, missing words, and repetition. The tone is one of heavy sarcasm, which only detracts from the important points which are there to be made. The first-hand testimony from people who worked in Mother Teresa's organisation, although mostly not new, is truly shocking. Of the famous house for the dying, we are told grossly inadequate pain relief is offered to the patients, that needles are unsterilised and re-used until blunt, that no visitors are allowed, and that people with treatable illnesses are not brought to hospital. There is mention of forced baptisms. It's a very long way from the principles of the hospice movement.
In the orphanage, we are told, children are eight to a cot, handicapped children get no appropriate care, there is no running water because the sisters refuse to get an electric pump, there are no washing machines, bottles and spoons are shared, toilet facilities are appalling and unhygienic, and nutritionally inferior powdered milk is provided for infants. There is a deeply unpleasant ethos which exalts suffering as redemptive, even when the sufferer does not share this view. All of this is very serious, and deserves wide dissemination.
Mother Teresa was and is an iconic figure, beloved of all kinds of powerful people, and known all over the world for her charitable work among the poor, and particularly the dying poor. The case made by Hitchens was disturbing, convincing and illustrative of the power of a certain kind of manufactured image to obscure the reality of the delivery (or not) of crucial services to highly vulnerable people - children and the terminally ill. Many people were shocked by Hitchens's exposure, and a fully documented account of Mother Teresa's activities would be welcome. Chaterjee's book, undermined by contradictions, inconsistencies, and sloppily edited, is not it.
Catriona Crowe is a senior archivist in the National Archives of Ireland
Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict. By Aroup Chatterjee. Meteor Books, 428 pp. €14.99