COLM TOIBIN
THE OLD WOMAN’S monument is a quiet, well-kept place, a hospital with an air of deep spirituality and practical hard work. Those who labour here have a light in their eyes as well as a distinct businesslike spirit. At the entrance, there are directions to the Pain Clinic and a timetable for the immunisation services.
The doctor is clearly busy. This is, she says, the only hospital in Asia run by women for women. It was set up in 1981 by Dr Marie Catchatoor, who died in 1996 and was of Armenian origin. No, she herself, the doctor says, does not take a salary. She is a retired professor of medicine who trained in Calcutta and studied in England. All the doctors are volunteers. They charge the patients, she says, but the fees are very very small, almost a token, and most people can afford them.
‘You give me the money,’ she adds, ‘and I will provide it free.’ There are fifty beds; the hospital delivers babies and does surgery, whatever the patients need, it is a complete hospital, the doctor says. The only women they will not treat are those with more than three children. ‘If you have more than three children, we will not give you any medical help.’ In this male-dominated society, she adds, the husbands, whether Hindu or Muslim, are not keen on their wives having information about contraception. The hospital offers such information.
Dr Catchatoor’s hospital is a few doors down from the Mother House of The Missionaries of Charity, set up by Mother Teresa. ‘Oh yes,’ the doctor says, ‘they often send us people. Not as much now as before.’
What is the difference between the legacy of Dr Catchatoor, who gave up her life to this work, and that of Mother Teresa, who did the same?
‘Oh,’ the doctor says vehemently, ‘the difference is total. We are a hospital. They run homes for the destitute and the dying. We give people medicine and medical care.’
When I ask her if she has any literature about the late Dr Catchatoor, she shakes her head. No, she says, there is no book about her or pamphlet or memorial committee. The hospital merely organises a lecture in her memory each year, but it is highly specialised. It is never about the doctor as a person or the work she did. Last year’s was called ‘The Changing Scenario in the Management of Breast Cancer and its Psycho-Social Impact’.
‘Why do you spend your retirement in this city working for nothing?’ I ask her.
She becomes stern as she studies me to make sure I am listening. ‘We had our life,’ she says simply. ‘Do you do it out of love?’ I ask her. ‘Out of dedication to the nation,’ she says. ‘What do you say when you go upstairs? You have to announce to God what was your contribution to humanity.’ She thinks for a moment, before continuing. ‘In any case, I don’t want to come back in the next life as a spider or a rat.’
A few doors away lie the mortal remains of Mother Teresa, cased in a large tomb in the middle of a chapel which is a shrine to her memory. All around the walls the story is told of her life and her works. It tells us that she was born in 1910 in the former Yugoslavia, that she joined the Loreto Order of nuns, living in Ireland for some time before arriving in Calcutta on 6 January 1929.
‘I observed the life in the streets with strange feelings,’ she later said. ‘Most of the poor people were half-naked, their skin and hair glistening in the hot sun. Clearly, there was great poverty among them.’
On 9 September 1946, while on a train, a call came to her, something mysterious and powerful, that she should work with the poor and destitute of Calcutta. On 12 April 1948, she got permission from the Pope to leave the Loreto Order and set up The Missionaries of Charity. Between August and December of that year, she did some basic medical training, and then she rented two rooms in the city, one for a school and the other for the sick and dying. The first novice joined her order the following year and the order grew as her fame grew; she became synonymous all over the world with selflessness and charity and care. She became an Indian citizen in 1960. When she died in 1997, she was given a state funeral. Her body, the story written on the walls tells us, was taken on the same gun carriage as that used for Gandhi and Nerhu. Her favourite prayer was the Memorare. (‘Remember O most gracious Virgin Mary that never was it known that anyone who implored thy aid or sought thy intercession was left unaided.’) Early in the history of her order, she promised God that she and her nuns would say 85,000 Memorares, the story on the wall tells us.
The photographs of Mother Teresa in old age, her eyes shining with an ascetic missionary zeal, or her head bowed humbly in prayer, made her famous. She is loved all over the world; many books have been written extolling her virtues. ‘Her impact on the public imagination,’ John Cairns writes in his foreword to a book of her sayings, A Simple Path, ‘has been compared to the ripples a stone makes when it is thrown into a calm pool of water. For many non-Christians, Mother Teresa represents a form of Christianity they can wholeheartedly respect.’
Sunita Kumar worked with Mother Teresa for more than thirty years, and was spokeswoman for the Order, and helped, through her connections in the West, to make Mother Teresa’s and her work famous. In her book of pictures of Mother Teresa, she writes: ‘Mother’s life was unique. She lived very simply and humbly like the poor . . . Her room was small, approximately twelve foot by eight, with only one window . . . Her diet was frugal and similar to what the poor in Calcutta would eat.’
In becoming famous, Mother Teresa made Calcutta famous too, for its poverty, its destitution, its squalor. For many who lived in the city, however, or for outsiders who liked Calcutta for its richness, variety and complexity, the notoriety she gave the place, and the fame she won while doing so, and indeed the seeming madness within her medical methods, have made them less than impressed by her legacy.
The history of the city itself may go some way towards explaining the controversy about Mother Teresa’s reputation, about whether she is the saviour of the city or an aspect of its decadence. Calcutta was built by the British; it was a colonial outpost in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but more than that, a centre of trade whose growth was unplanned and unstructured, ‘chance-erected, chance-directed’, in Kipling’s phrase.
From 1813 English goods, with the exception of alcohol, could be imported paying only a two and a half per cent tax, while a much heavier duty was imposed on locally produced goods. Also, each time locally produced goods underwent a change of form, from raw material towards final consumption, a duty was payable. No such duty was payable on foreign imports. At the end of the First World War, more than 95 per cent of the joint stock companies had only British directors. All fifty jute mill companies were under British managing agencies. ‘It seems not only a wrong,’ Rudyard Kipling wrote in City of Dreadful Night (1890), ‘but a criminal thing to allow natives to have any voice in the control of a city adorned, docked, wharfed, fronted, and reclaimed by Englishmen, existing only because [of] English lives and dependent for its life on England.’
Yet Calcutta remained the richest city in India. The Bengali population who became wealthy did so not by keeping apart from British-controlled enterprise, but by working as clerks and middlemen, manipulators and arrangers. They took cuts on the deals the British made; they became moneylenders rather than traders; they invested in land and property rather than ships or perishable goods. The Indian share of the total tonnage of ships over 80 tons registered in the port of Calcutta was 5 per cent in 1805, 4 per cent in 1817 and 8 per cent in 1825. In My Reminiscences, Rabindranath Tagore remembered his brother saying that it was ‘a great shame that our countrymen had set their tongues and pens in motion, but not a single line of steamers’.
It was clear that money could be made by those who could keep ledgers and accounts, read orders, write letters. For the native population, literacy was thus one of the few roads to solvency. Education in the nineteenth century became a primary asset for Bengalis. Slowly a rich culture grew around the written word. Slowly, too, a class of disaffected men with an education but no proper employment developed. ‘While the Bengali middle class literati had made itself, and the city in which it lived, the unchallenged centre of cultural leadership for the state of West Bengal,’ wrote Partha Chatterjee, ‘it had virtually no participation in the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie which dominated the economy of Calcutta.’
As the city changed and grew, and a native middle class emerged, gradually too an artisan class, and a class of messengers and deliverers, people with roots in the countryside, moved into the city. A rich popular culture, using a rural oral tradition, but ready to smarten and change in the crowded city, emerged in the poorest parts of Calcutta with extempore poetry competitions, singing contests, satirical shows and farces, street theatre and dance and primitive painting. This sense of an intact and dynamic Bengali culture which was all around them was to have a powerful impact on the richer and educated Bengalis who had become more British than the British themselves. In the second half of the nineteenth century, through their reading of European writers and their experience of popular culture and through the distancing of the colonial experience, they grew increasingly self-conscious and nostalgic about the romantic associations of their roots and their traditions. The more urban and urbane they became, the more they became interested in the rural and the simple. The movement they established, which was to have immense cultural and political implications, was called the Bengali Renaissance.
What happened in Calcutta in the second half of the nineteenth century has astonishing echoes of events in Ireland and Catalonia during the same years. The three cities of Calcutta, Dublin and Barcelona were port cities in nations which were not states, deprived of political power by colonial forces, and increasingly alert to ideas of nationhood. After 1850, in all three places, a culture which depended upon ideas of a native tradition began to replace political apathy and powerlessness, until that same culture actually became politics. All three cities produced a persuasive idea. They represented the native culture as older and purer than that of the so-called conquerors, and now they were ready, using whatever technology they could lay their hands on, to combine that ancient culture with modern systems. Thus the Catalan architects would use Romanesque motifs and also steel frames; thus the Irish Literary Renaissance would use modern theatrical skills or modern idioms with constant references to Ireland’s heroic past. So too Bengali intellectuals used the printing press, Marxist philosophy, and any European and American influences – including, after 1930, film – they deemed worthy of their attention, to bring back to life what was, in their dreams, an oral and rural culture.
Both in Ireland and in Bengal in the second half of the 1890s scholars and amateurs applied themselves to study of medieval texts and the collection of folklore to establish the rich and ancient roots of their pre-colonial heritage. W.B. Yeats referred to Lady Gregory’s version of the Cuchulainn legends as the most important book to come out of Ireland in his lifetime. Five years earlier, in 1896, when Dineshchandra Sen published his Bengali Language and Literature, based on a collection of early and medieval manuscripts which he had gathered, Tagore wrote: ‘We did not know there was such a vast entity as early Bengali literature.’ Such discoveries and the pride surrounding them in both Ireland and Bengal were to have enormous political implications.
The leaders of these movements in Ireland, Bengal and Catalonia were deeply implicated in the very colonial experience which they sought to undermine. The Catalans had made fortunes out of Cuba; the leaders of the Irish Literary Renaissance, themselves deeply alert to what was happening in Bengal, were mainly Protestants, members of the ruling class, many of them landed; the leaders of the Bengali Renaissance also came from families who had become rich by associating with the British and serving British interests. In both Ireland and Bengal, these leaders were exceptional; rather than representing their class, they stood out from it; they used its power, and to some extent betrayed it. They also sought to establish a native spirituality against the materialism of the oppressor. Thus W.B. Yeats and his friends in Ireland approached mysticism with the same zeal as Gaudi, the leading figure in the modernist movement in Catalan architecture during the same years. In Calcutta, spirituality set the natives, rich and poor, apart from the mere traders who came from outside.
It is easy to imagine, therefore, James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ taking place in the Barcelona or Calcutta of the early years of the twentieth century, places where musical life could be conducted with a peculiar intensity, and songs and singers handed a strange power. In all three societies, two languages were in conflict, so it is easy to imagine our Calcutta intellectual being attacked for not writing in his native language, Bengali, and being married to a woman from the countryside whom he, so urbanised and deracinated, will come to misunderstand and almost fatally desire. In all three societies, from the 1870s onwards, there was a fetishisation by poets and playwrights and painters, and then by intellectuals and politicians, of the countryside itself, the remote landscape where the nation’s source was at its most pure, the uncontaminated, uncomplex life of the village.
Ireland and Bengal had other things in common. Both places were troublesome, even in the early years of the nineteenth century, although Calcutta was, according to Lord Macauley who lived there between 1834 and 1838 and took a dim view of the native culture, less trouble than Dublin. ‘We have agitators in our own small way,’ he wrote. ‘Tritons of the minnows, bearing the same sort of resemblance to O’Connell that a lizard bears to an alligator. Therefore Calcutta for me, in preference to Dublin.’ Both places were partitioned by the British, Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905, Ireland in 1920. Both places suffered devastating famines, Bengal in 1943, Ireland in 1846. In both Ireland and Bengal, the city was not to be trusted either in art or in politics and those who trusted it, such as Sean O’Casey in Ireland and the filmmaker Mrinal Sen in Bengal, carried the atmosphere or the aftertaste of the village to the metropolis, made in the phrase of the Calcutta sociologist Ashis Nandy ‘an ambiguous journey to the city’. The slum, Nandy wrote, ‘is left forever trying to re-invoke a remembered village under different guises.’
Once the British moved their capital city to Delhi in 1911, then Calcutta would be left to its own ambiguous devices, to decay as much as it pleased, to become even more overcrowded and unsanitary and chaotic. The historian Sumit Sarkar has written of the Bengal Renaissance:
Calcutta . . . often had a negative image, a city somehow basically alien, where the gentleman would have his basa [residence or lodging] as against his proper bari [home] in the village or small town of his birth or retirement . . . Bengali high literature in the 19th century did not develop any distinctive ways of imaginatively visualising the new experience of life in the great metropolis, as Dickens did with London or Baudelaire with Paris. And as for the semi-popular literature of farces and tracts, or the Kalighat paintings, there Calcutta often became the city of Kali, the epitome of the degenerate present.
Bengali intellectuals and artists lived in the city by day, but when night fell they imagined, or in certain cases tussled with, a rural idyll, a dream community, all pure and unsullied, and they felt nostalgic for it, even though many of them had never experienced it.
In the city built on trade to which the masses came in search of opportunity, there is no pity. Even still, the medical services in the city are rudimentary, often non-existent. Mother Teresa’s reputation rests not on the efficiency or size of the service she provided, but on her rhetoric of service and mercy, elevating the poorest of the poor to the most exalted level in a place where there was, from the beginning, no system of help for those who fell by the wayside.
In the period I stayed in the city I spent time in a house owned by Europeans. A young man who had been working in the house, but whom no one had seen for a year, came back during my stay. He sat hunched alone in the garden on a low stool sheltering from the sun. It was clear that he was dying. His face was all bone; his eyes were blank. No one went near him although several greeted him; he was too weak to return any greetings. No one asked him where he had been or why he had gone away and not made contact for so long; everyone knew he was back because he had nowhere else to go now. His luck had run out. What happened to him over the next two days was a lesson in why a figure like Mother Teresa stood out in Calcutta and why the services she offered and the attitudes she articulated were so badly needed.
It was clear from the way the young man coughed and his general weakness that he could be suffering from several diseases, among them open TB, which meant that he could be infectious for anyone coming even close to him, breathing the same air. It was likely that he had been moving around the city with the disease. He had come back here merely because he was at death’s door. He looked sad and weak and dejected as he sat alone away from us while his fate was decided.
He could not stay here, because others could become infected. There was a special public TB hospital where he could be taken; we moved across the city with him, keeping him in the back of the jeep facing outwards. He could barely walk. It became clear as soon as we arrived at the hospital that being white, from the British Isles, still means a great deal. You can swagger into places, make your presence felt and demand to see whoever is in charge. But when it was announced that we had a local boy in the back of the jeep who needed a hospital bed now and was suffering from TB at least, the officials made clear that he could not stay. He would need x-rays; he would need an appointment; he would have to come back the next day; no, nothing could be done now, even though it was obvious he was very sick, and dangerous if he came close to people who had no immunity from TB. The officials were implacable and oddly hostile. We would have to take him away.
There were other ideas; other locations to which our patient could be taken; and these offered a strange key to the city, its levels and layers and history and legacy. Everywhere we went then in this jeep, two white men with this skeletal boy in the back, men of every age stood and stared at us, openly, unembarrassed, never for one moment averting their eyes. Once on the street, you were public property, every aspect of you to be taken in. I began to stare back and sometimes I smiled, and the starer would smile back, a smile of warm resignation, as if to say – here we all are in this puzzling universe, what can we do but stare, what else is there, except smile, maybe laugh?
Two Europeans in a jeep seemed to offer the street life of Kolkata enormous interest as we ferried the young man next to an American voluntary hospital, the Mission of Mercy Hospital on Park Street. We brought him with us into the small main office, knowing that someone should have immediately put a face mask on him, or kept him in isolation, but they were busy and full, and too preoccupied in trying to find a way to help us to notice the danger.
As they took down the details, I walked out into the hall and noticed smashed windows, and then everything I saw seemed to have been broken, an ambulance had had its windows smashed, there were signs everywhere of recent violence. I asked one of the staff, who explained that two days earlier the hospital had been attacked by members of the local Muslim community, whom the hospital served. The Muslims were angry at first because of rumours that members of their community had died unnecessarily in the American hospital, but angry then because of the American presence in the city at all, and had smashed up the place in their anger. It had never happened before. The staff wondered if this was the beginning of new hatred in a city which had not known such things for a long time.
They could not keep the young man, they said, they had no space and no expertise in TB, but they could do x-rays and give them to us for a very small payment. The x-rays confirmed that the young man had open TB, and this meant that it was essential that he be put in isolation and treated by specialists as soon as possible. The hospital still said that there was nothing they could do. As we drove across the city again, I was fascinated by the staring eyes along every street corner and at traffic lights, taking their time to study us as we stopped in the traffic jams which clogged the city. The driver was increasingly worried about the patient, and the patient sat inert, expressionless and immobile in the back of the jeep. It was possible, the driver said, that no one in the city would take him in and that would be a catastrophe, one that happened every day in the city, but no less worrying for that.
While the first hospital we visited had been built since Independence, and was a cluster of one-storey sheds and outhouses, and the second hospital had been built by the Americans in the 1960s and was bright and functional, the next hospital, the largest in the city, had been built by the Victorians and, a maze of additions and extensions, was sturdy in parts, the rest falling down, rotting slowly in the sun. It was hard to find the centre of power, the admissions office, the place where decisions could be made, but eventually we found a room full of men who were not doctors, one seated at a desk and the others clustered around.
No, there was no room, they said, and no isolation ward. The chief shook his head; there was nowhere for the patient. Could he see a doctor? We asked. No, the chief said. It was too late. Maybe come back tomorrow. Five men stood and watched as we begged and bargained. It was clear that the chief could not give in; he could direct us lazily, almost contemptuously, to the admissions office, where there were doctors, but it would be no good, he said. We asked him to write his name down, while thanking him for his help. He found a piece of paper and wrote his name.
With this piece of paper as our key, we attempted to open the labyrinth of buildings and bureaucracy that was the largest public hospital in Kolkata. We found an admissions unit and made our way into the inner office, x-rays in tow. The patient was still outside in the jeep. As a doctor told us to wait, I looked around me. On the top of a metal cupboard in the office was a set of huge old ledgers. They looked as though no one had touched them since Edwardian times; damp and fetid, they were festering, mouldering. I had a terrible urge to get a black bin bag and remove them, and I looked at every member of staff who arrived, wondering why they did not have the same idea.
We showed the chiefs signature to the doctors and said that he had said they could help us. They looked at the x-rays, but hesitantly, carefully, almost doubtfully. They did not ask to see the patient. I wondered what would happen if I touched the ledgers on the press, if the grime and dust of a whole century would engulf us all. In all the years, surely one doctor might have asked what was in them, and could they be thrown out, or stored away? They looked like a very contagious disease in themselves. Soon, the medical team said that the patient would need hospitalisation, but they had no beds for that night. He would have to be brought back the next day and they could take him then. We pointed out how infectious he was, and dangerous if left at large in the city. They nodded in agreement and said firmly that they could not take him until the next day.
It was getting late and the traffic was building up. There was still only one place where we could go, the driver said, but it was miles away. It was better, he added, not to use the telephone. It was easier to turn people away by phone; it seemed to me easy to turn people away in person as well, but the driver said it was worth a try. He knew someone who knew someone who worked in the next hospital so we drove to find this guy and convince him to come with us. This was the last stop.
Along the way, I asked the driver and his friend why we did not try one of Mother Teresa’s hospitals. They said that was where we were going now to a place called Naba Jeeban, but there was no guarantee they would take us in. It was a hospital which dealt with some TB patients, but with limited resources, and not a place used to taking people in for one night. The home for the destitute and dying in the city centre, also run by the Sisters of Charity, would not be suitable, I was told. Our passenger needed hospital treatment rather than the basic shelter provided there.
The hospital was a small, dingy, dimly lit place, and we were greeted with suspicion because what we were looking for was irregular. It was clear that my two friends were ready to be insistent and not go away without an argument. Just one night, they emphasised, as the Brother, a member of the men’s branch of The Missionaries of Charity, looked doubtful but said nothing. When it was promised that the young man would, without fail, be collected in the morning, the Brother offered a sort of nod, a tacit assent, meaning that he did not disapprove enough to send us away. But still he did not say yes. So a game had to be played of standing around, making small talk, shifting from one foot to another, while the patient still remained in the back of the jeep. Tea was had and many matters were discussed before finally the subject could be broached again: Could the patient be brought in and was there a bed ready for him? In the end, assent was given and the poor patient after his long day’s travelling could be taken in and put in the TB ward.
As we were finishing, a Brother from the Order came in, and he was introduced as a senior and influential figure within Mother Teresa’s organisation. He was uneasy at first when I asked if I could speak to him alone. The Order, he explained, have not had an easy time with journalists recently and have tended to avoid making statements to the press at all; it was easier to get on with their work. But, nonetheless, he invited me to come to a room upstairs and agreed that he would speak off the record.
I asked him first about the allegation that his organisation has no medical expertise and that standards of care within the Mother Teresa institutions are less than ideal, which is strange considering the wealth of the organisation. I was expecting him to walk out of the room, but he grew thoughtful and quiet as he considered the question. It was partly true, he said, because the organisation had been set up when conditions in the city were at their very worst, and the act of merely taking people in, giving them shelter when they were dying, was an act of rare mercy in the Calcutta of the late 1940s and the 1950s. It still was today, he said. Which is why people still threw themselves on the mercy of The Missionaries of Charity at Nirmal Hriday, the centre for the destitute and dying.
The organisation was not perfect, he said, but it had done more good than harm; more lives have been saved than lost. The poorest of the poor, he said, were treated as holy by The Missionaries of Charity without making any effort to convert them; the focus was on the person and this might seem nothing in a European city, but here, with so many living in the most appalling and degraded conditions, being offered shelter and treated with kindness was immensely important. But it was, he admitted, a drop in the ocean. The aim was not to cure the problem, but to come as witness, as a way of serving Jesus. The work is not a failure if we cannot reach everyone in Kolkata, he added. Our aim is to be a friend of those caught up in poverty; we are not claiming to have the best approach.
Was it true, I asked him, that needles were reused in the medical centres? It was true in the past, he said. In the old days, he added, if a needle was sharp enough to get through a piece of cotton, then it was reused. But not over the previous ten years, he said. Once HIV and hepatitis became rampant, you couldn’t go on doing that. Now there was more attention to the medical side of things, while trying not to lose the spiritual care; the organisation was changing, he said, and it was also important to remember that most of the written attacks on The Missionaries of Charity came from people who had seen only Niram Hriday, the centre for destitute people in the centre of Calcutta. There were other centres too, he said, which journalists and so-called witnesses never visit.
I asked him to give me an example. Such as Prem Nivas, the centre for leprosy treatment, he said. It’s a good distance out of the city, and hard to get there, but you should go there, he insisted. Would someone from the Order take me there, I asked, or talk to me when I got there? Probably not, he said. We have had too much negative coverage. But don’t write about us without going there, he warned. His laugh was friendly but dismissive when I asked him again for directions there. I can’t help you any more, he said. But if you want to tell the truth, visit Prem Nivas, the centre for the treatment of leprosy along the railway line at Titagarh. That’ll open your eyes for you, he concluded.
In the morning we took the patient back to the largest hospital in the city and left him in a huge ward where he would begin a course of treatments and tests. I noticed that all around the hospital were bookshops and book stalls and I spent the rest of the day there because I had a list of books I wanted to buy. Some of the books were out of print and almost unobtainable; this meant that time could be spent talking to the booksellers and waiting in the bookshops as messengers were sent to other booksellers. Most of the booksellers were old and trade was now mostly in schoolbooks and textbooks. The booksellers remembered a time when Bengali literature was still glorious and the printing presses of the city were busy with new volumes of poetry and prose by the great figures in their culture; as early as the 1780s type foundries were set up for Bengali characters and a thriving publishing industry was in place until as late as the 1930s.
These men’s fathers had shaken the hand of Rabindranath Tagore, who was born in 1861 and died in 1941; they had handled his books as they came fresh from the press, they had heard his poetry and his songs and read his stories and seen his plays in the years they were written. Tagore was, Ashis Nandy reports (echoing Auden on Freud), ‘not merely a person or an institution, but a climate of opinion’. Tagore’s books are still on sale everywhere; he remains to this day a powerful presence in the life of the city. His family background and his writing tell us much about Calcutta and its hinterland in the years of Bengal’s cultural flowering.
The Tagore family made their fortune from working for British businesses and from money-lending. They were enormously wealthy; in the early nineteenth century they formed part of the ‘pattern of conspicuous consumption and waste of resources . . . characteristic of the new rich of Calcutta’, according to the historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, creating ‘an impression in public memory of great wealth – while eroding the very basis of wealth’. They diverted ‘from business towards land purchase . . . a means of acquiring social status to set the seal on the new wealth earned in business’. The Tagores stood apart, however, because of their interest in Bengali society and culture. Dwarakanath, Rabindranath’s grandfather, was active in promoting education and social reform; his sons were interested in philosophy and religion and literature. His grandchildren in turn became artists and writers and philosophers and reformers. One of them invented a system of Bengali shorthand and became a leading feminist; another founded an important literary magazine; the women in the family were as educated as the men and several of them became writers as well. Tagore himself set up the rural university, Shantiniketan.
Tagore was educated by private tutors and by his talented siblings. His account of his childhood offers an extraordinary version of luxury coupled with a family environment dedicated almost entirely to cultural pursuits, the writing of poetry, the learning of languages, travelling, theatre. The Tagores were steeped in Bengali culture but also highly Europeanised. ‘Tagore,’ Ashis Nandy has written, ‘spoke both the languages of continuity and discontinuity.’ His family seemed to see no distinction between the need for social reform and the need for servants, the need for new songs and poems and plays in their native language and the need for travel in Europe. The painter William Rothenstein, when he visited the family house in 1911, thought that ‘their collection of Indian paintings was the best I had seen, made, as it was, by artists’.
Tagore’s output runs to 29 large volumes; the 2,000 songs he composed have the status of folk songs in his country. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He writes with much greater tenderness about village life and the beauty of the countryside than he does about Calcutta itself, even though he was in 1899 the first novelist in his language to set a novel in the city. In his letters, he wrote about his joy, akin to Tolstoy’s, at running the family estates in rural Bengal and being out of the city. In July 1915, he wrote: ‘After long years I have come among my tenants, and feel, and they also, that my presence was needed. It was a great event of my life when I first dwelt among my own people here, for thus I came into contact with the reality of life.’ The following year he wrote: ‘Coming away from Calcutta, I have come to myself. Every time it is a new discovery for me. In the town, life is so crowded that one loses the true perspective.’ In an interview in 1935 he said: ‘Being a landlord I had to go to villages, and thus I came in touch with village people and their simple mode of life . . . The river system of Bengal, the best part of this province, fascinated me . . . At first I was quite unfamiliar with the village life as I was born and brought up in Calcutta and so there was an element of mystery for me.’
It would have been impossible in these years of political ferment for Tagore’s work not to have political implications. At times he became directly involved, writing patriotic songs to oppose Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905; in 1919 he returned the knighthood the British had given him four years earlier in protest against the Amritsar Massacre. At other times, by remaining strictly in the cultural realm, by passionately supporting literature in his native language, his political influence became all the greater. On his visits to London he became close to the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, another city boy who had found his inspiration in the rural landscape, who understood also the power of poetry and theatre in a nationalist movement. ‘As in our country,’ Tagore wrote, ‘so too in Ireland, there has for some time been an endeavour to give the inner powers a distinctive character . . . In its efforts to express its distinctive spirit, Ireland turned to its own language and legends and mythical tales.’ In 1917 the Abbey Theatre in Dublin put on Tagore’s play Post Office. Tagore had come to know Thomas Moore’s Melodies in India. ‘I often listened to their enraptured recitation by Akshay Babu. The poems combined with the pictorial designs conjured up a dream of Old Ireland. I had not then heard the original tunes, but had sung these Irish melodies to myself to the accompaniment of the harp in the pictures.’ In 1921, in London again, he followed events in Ireland very closely: ‘Things that are happening in Ireland are ugly,’ he wrote. ‘The political lies that are accompanying them are stupendous.’
Tagore continued, even from his country estates, to edit literary magazines for distribution in Calcutta and publish small journals in the city. The history of the city from his beginnings as a writer in the 1870s until his death in 1941 includes intense cultural activity. Pradip Sinha has written about the city in the 1930s as a golden age
with a thriving commercial theatre, a pioneering film industry, Bengal’s own tradition of music, the leisurely conversational sessions, football, politics, good scientists and Indologists, the spiritual legacy of the nineteenth century, terrorism, musclemen, the Bengali circus, novels of sentiment, the comparative freedom of women, and over the entire scene, the presence of Rabindranath Tagore, the ultimate civilised man. But the idyll was less than total, and simple regret or nostalgia would be an inadequate response to an inevitable end. The real time of truth was soon to come, when war, famine, riots and Partition struck the city and the nation.
The days of glory are long gone now; the booksellers belong to a tradition which is over. But the days when culture mattered in Calcutta did not end with the famine of 1943 or Partition in 1947. Satyajit Ray was born in the city in 1921. He too came from an old family known, as Ashis Nandy writes, ‘for its enormous contribution to Bengali literary and cultural life’. Ray’s education was more British than Bengali, however, and, according to Nandy, ‘he started life poorly acquainted with Bengali literature and Indian music and unacquainted with Indian village life, later so closely identified in world cinema with his films. His familiarity with Western literary classics and music, on the other hand, was deep and abiding.’
Ray thus belonged to a central strand in the life of the city: cultured, middle-class and ready to work with the British, if work were available. Ray was employed by a British-owned advertising agency as a graphic artist. His move from the city to the country, from a deracinated culture to the place close to where tradition was being invented, is similar to that of John Millington Synge in Ireland, who also moved for his dramatic subject from a cosmopolitan world, which he viewed as jaded, towards the vibrancy, as he saw it, of a remote culture. Ray’s first film, a strange masterpiece called Pather Panchali, was made in 1955. In 1976 in his book Our Films, Their Films, he wrote: ‘Looking at “Pather Panchali” today, I am upset by errors of detail which keep blurring the social identity of some of its characters. I know this was caused by my lack of familiarity with the rural scene.’ In a diary kept while filming in the Bengali countryside in 1956, he wrote: ‘One just wants to go on absorbing it, being chastened and invigorated by it.’ Yet he loved urban improvement: he once told a young journalist that to understand Indian modernity one had to contemplate the Calcutta subway.
Ray’s career as a Bengali filmmaker working in Calcutta in the 1950s and 1960s makes clear how complex this society remained even in the years of economic decline. He writes about the significance of a film festival in the city in 1952, about Jean Renoir’s coming in 1949 to make a film in Bengal, about film clubs, film magazines, the availability of foreign films. Yet by making his films in Bengali, Ray was limiting his Indian audience, the language being understood by only 15 per cent of the population. In Bengal itself, as he worked on his films, since only 20 per cent of the potential audience was literate, then the market for a serious film was very small indeed.
Nonetheless, Ray’s career was almost as varied as Tagore’s. He wrote about film with acute intelligence, alert to his own strange cultural circumstances as to movements in European and American cinema. He worked until his death in 1992 in a number of styles, moving from the rural to the urban for his later films, from the starkly beautiful rural images to versions of Ibsen set in the city. He was awarded an Honorary Academy Award by the American Academy for his life’s work. His background is typical of the world which gave us the Bengal Renaissance; his father and his grandfather were distinguished writers and illustrators for children, and his grandfather was also an important innovator in printing techniques in Calcutta; both men were friends and supporters of Tagore.
The career of Tagore and Ray as central figures in the rich and complex life of Calcutta and its hinterland spans more than a hundred years. Their work was passionate and sophisticated as it sought simplicity and a return to roots both real and imagined; they both had been superbly educated, with an equal sense of ownership of their own culture and that of Britain. They both discovered freedom and inspiration in the rural heartland where their best work is set. Both were fascinated by Bengali music. For the old men who sell books now in the old city and for their customers, this is the legacy of Calcutta, its true value, what the world should know. For them, the idea that the city has become synonymous, to the outside world, with the life and work of an elderly Catholic nun, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who did nothing except look after small numbers of the poor, is both absurd and insulting. They cannot understand why this has come to pass.
The Gandhiji Prem Nivas centre for the treatment of leprosy, run by the Brothers of the Missionaries of Charity, set up by Mother Teresa, at Titagarh is about an hour from the city. You travel by metro until the end of a line and then wait for the train. The train is crowded beyond belief, with people sleeping flat-out on the ground while others struggle to push through the packed bodies to get out at the next station. There are no seats: these are cattle wagons. Everyone remains polite, even though, at each stop, the shoving and crushing means that many of us are lifted off our feet.
At Titagarh there are miles of low warehouse buildings down one side of the tracks. In another context, this could be a refugee camp, hastily built, or a prison camp. This is, in fact, the centre for the treatment of leprosy. The director, a brother, shows me to the pharmacy. The disease is treatable, he says, especially if you get it early enough. The problem is that there is a real stigma attached to it, so that people deny to themselves that they are infected, they disguise the symptoms, they let them go until it is too late. Most hospitals won’t admit them, and the ones that do are afraid even to touch them. Often, their families want nothing more to do with them. They are destitute, cast-out, alone, penniless.
That is when they come here. The object, the director says, is not only to cure them but to love them. To give them medicine and dress their wounds and then try and prepare them for the world again by giving them work in the small workshop which is part of the complex. And making clear to them that they are not outcasts, not untouchable. The director talks about different doses of medicine and different combinations used for different degrees of the illness. We go through a list of the treatments and the length of time they take. Patients live here in the clinic until they are well enough to go – it sleeps almost seven hundred – and then return once a month for medicine until they don’t need it any more. Those who get early treatment, the director says, can get an early cure, and late treatment means a late cure. Although the clinic can usually prevent a relapse, he says, sensation in the damaged tissue will not return and deformity caused by the leprosy often cannot be reversed. The director makes clear that although he is a Catholic, and the Missionaries of Charity is a Catholic organisation, they never question people about their religion. Conversions, he says, are very, very rare.
This emphasis on the physical condition of the patients and the need to use medical science as much as spiritual care surprised me, as it seemed far away from the rhetoric surrounding the treatment of the dying and the destitute in which Mother Teresa and some of her supporters had specialised. It was practical; it sought to cure as much as comfort. I asked if I could see the inside of the hospital, the wards and the treatment facilities. The brother led me across the railway tracks from his office to the clinic. All around us, families, living in shacks and hovels just on the edge of the track, were cooking on open fires, children were playing.
We entered the dark building. In one of the wards, men sat on their beds or lay there quietly watching us. Some of them had bandages on their hands and feet. In the corner bed, one man sat motionless, studying us. He could have been in his late forties, early fifties. He looked like a connoisseur of something, fine wines perhaps, or paintings, or prose style. He gazed at us, evenly, closely. If someone had told me that he was a distinguished novelist, whose work combined a deep understanding of the comedy of human affairs with a dispassionate interest in our propensity for self-delusion, I would have understood. In this dark place, he exuded moral intelligence and a mixture of bottomless sympathy and a knowledge bordering on cynicism. Nothing would shock him, I imagined, least of all his own bandaged foot. We took each other in across the dimly lit room. I nodded towards him and he smiled at me patiently, never for a moment losing his poise, the sense that the real world, whose foolishness had not escaped him, was here in front of him, having been assembled for his contemplation.
I asked to see the clinic itself, the place where patients were treated. The brother warned me that I might find what I saw difficult and I knew what he meant as soon as I came into the room. Two brothers were working with patients while others waited. They found me a chair and let me sit watching them work. They were cutting the dead flesh from the fingers and feet of the patients, using small, sharp knives. The patient looked on, clearly used to this procedure. The flesh was dead, it had no feeling, there was no pain, but there was blood. The knives had to be carefully dipped in disinfectant after each cut, and the blood wiped with clean cotton wool, also dipped in the disinfectant. Finally, when the dead flesh had been cut away, and the skin was all raw and bleeding, the wound was bandaged, using new bandages. Then the next patient would come, proffering their foot or hand, as appropriate. No one cried out or complained. The work was done with an extraordinary care for hygiene, and with great precision. Later, I toured the depressing workshops where patients could earn tiny amounts of money as they got better and prepared once more to go into the world. As I took the train back to Kolkata, I came to the view that if anyone wishes to canonise the entire Missionaries of Charity for offering this service to people suffering from leprosy, then it is all right with me.
It is early in the morning of Good Friday in Kolkata. The nuns of The Missionaries of Charity have asked to see me. They have read one of my books and I know that they want to tell me that they do not wish me to write about Mother Teresa. The nun who makes such decisions is a bit surprised when I tell her that I merely wish to pray with one of the Sisters downstairs in the chapel where Mother Teresa’s body lies. If there is a sister down there, and she is free, then I can ask her, the nun says. I take my shoes off and go into the chapel. All the nuns speak English and they have been ordered to smile if anyone approaches. As I come towards a young nun who is praying in the corner, she smiles gently. I wonder, I ask her, if she could say the Memorare for me, which was Mother Teresa’s favourite prayer. She nods and we both kneel down. She begins: ‘Remember O Most Gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who implored Thy aid or sought Thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, we fly to Thee, O Virgin of Virgins. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, do not despise our prayers, but graciously hear and answer them. Amen.’ When she finishes she smiles again. I have not heard anyone saying these words for almost forty years.
Not far away, those who implored aid and sought intercession are lying in the grim space of Niram Hriday, the home for the destitute and the dying. As soon as you open the door from the street, you walk straight into the ward. There are other wards too, but it is astonishing how small this place is, as it is the central location in Mother Teresa’s dream of mercy, and how modest it is against the teeming, massive city outside. It is clear that what has mattered more to the world has been Mother Teresa’s image of ascetic self-sacrifice, her words about the poor, her intentions, her aura of holiness, than any set of actions, any great buildings. If you visit Shishu Bhavan, the home for children she set up, it is also amazing how small it is and how few are looked after there. The gap between Mother Teresa’s reputation and the buildings which house her projects is like the gap between a landscape and a map of the landscape made to a very diminished scale.
What she did in 1948 was brave and visionary. The Loreto Order in Ireland, where she had first come as a novice, is known for its grandeur. It educates the upper middle classes, teaching manners and deportment to young girls. For a nun from that order to decide to work only with the poor, to offer them comfort in a climate of tragic mayhem and deprivation, and to get permission from the Church to do so, was an heroic act.
The year Mother Teresa set up the Missionaries of Charity is often taken to be one of the worst years in Calcutta’s history. The famine had caused the deaths of millions, and Independence and Partition had meant the withdrawal of British capital and the narrowing of the hinterland. But things became dramatically worse after 1948. In fact, something occurred in the city which is almost unheard of. As wages decreased and unemployment rose, vast numbers of immigrants still arrived each year in Calcutta. They came from the countryside where there was a continuing slump in the value of agricultural produce. Eastern India was in such a poor economic state that Calcutta could offer low wages and yet have an inexhaustible supply of workers. The slum population as a percentage of the total population rose from 22 per cent in 1961 to 41 per cent in 1981. ‘These people began their lives, without exception, in the villages,’ Raghap Bandyopadhya has written. ‘They came here lured by the city’s gold, and this was the end of their rainbow. They have adopted a curious, mixed, half urban life style. They illustrate a special history and a special social mobility.’ Bandyopadhyah also writes about the large number of pavement dwellers in the city. ‘The pavement dweller is a truly “unaccommodated man”. He has no special skill by which to earn a living: sheer physical labour is his only asset. Nearly all his kind can tell a tale of destitution, or natural or personal calamity, sickness and death.’
This is the world Mother Teresa worked in for two decades before the world took notice of her – Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous interview with her was not until 1969. As things became worse each year, it is easy to understand how she had not developed sophisticated or imaginative plans for a modern hospital in Calcutta. She made one great leap into the dark; it is impossible to expect that she should have made another and developed independent views on birth control or politics or health care. Yet in all the years of her power and fame no one can remember her ever pleading the case for treatment for an individual patient, or demanding that rich doctors in the city should take in someone and cure them. She continued as she began, offering shelter and meagre comfort at a time when no one else was doing so.
The city itself continues to change and grow. It is the evening of Good Friday and the beggars and the pavement-dwellers have settled down in allotted patches in the city centre. One of the most expensive restaurants in the city is full. There are no tourists; these are all locals, many in large family groups. How do they manage to afford such meals? I asked an astute native of the city who has studied its mores. Watch the computer, he advised me, watch the phone. Very often, he says, if there is a large family, the meal is being paid for by credit card from the absent son in the United States, who is working in Silicon Valley, or for one of the computer firms in New Jersey. He will book the restaurant, he may even see the menu, I was told, and he will pay the bill.
In the years after Independence, the old middle class who had emerged as clerks and middle managers in the nineteenth century, using literacy as a route to solvency, did not go away. It was as in Ireland where education was the key to success, where no one inherited capital, where becoming a teacher or a clerk was, in many families, the highest ambition. Thus when the revolution in technology came, the American computer firms would make Ireland the second largest exporter of software in the world because Ireland’s best and brightest had been educated and were ready to work for others; they longed for an indoor job with a monthly wage, they were intelligent and reliable. So, too, with the Bengali middle class, whose sons were in great demand by the new technology firms who could not locate in Bengali due to the poor infrastructure; instead, they imported the Bengalis to the United States in large numbers. These bright young men cannot be present at family meals; they hang out in cyberspace instead where they can read the menu, see what everyone is having, and pay the bill.
Too much food comes and I can eat only half of what is on the dishes all around me. The waiter smiles. What should I do with the food? I ask him. It is up to me, he replies. It can be wrapped and I can decide who to give it to among those waiting on the street outside, or the restaurant will do it for me. Nothing will be thrown out, he says. I pay the bill and tell him that I will leave the matter in his hands. He nods in approval. Outside, the poor of the city wait for the food to be distributed. Others lie sleeping, or sitting in groups, watching the world go by, at everyone’s mercy.