:: OP-ED

Mother Teresa is very much ours

Antara Dev Sen

Oct.15 : In this wonderful season of love, fellowship and giving - with Diwali coming up and the warmth of Eid, Durga Puja and Navaratri fresh in our hearts - we suddenly find ourselves fuming and unable to give. No question, we snap, this is ours, you can't claim it, buzz off. We said it twice this week, to China and to Albania. With good reason.

The claims were not comparable. Albania, in an adventurous act worthy of Ripley's Believe It Or Not, lay claim to Mother Teresa's relics. She's Albanian and we want her to be buried here, they demanded, so ship her remains back to us forthwith. Once we had got over the shock of this outrageous demand, we shut our gaping mouths with effort, and refused.

We were prompter with China, which had meanwhile expressed disapproval of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's recent visit to Arunachal Pradesh. Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India, we said curtly once again. Like Aksai Chin, Arunachal Pradesh has been disputed territory for long. China claims parts of this northeastern state of India, like Tawang. It has even refused visas to people from Arunachal (But they are Chinese! Why do they need visas to visit China?). On the northwestern border, China has started giving separate visas to people of Indian Kashmir, refusing to stamp on Indian passports. The China-India border dispute goes back centuries - the curious 1962 war only blurred the issue further - and our attempts to wish it away have failed.

So the two claims are not comparable. Except in the outrage they triggered among us. Arre bhai, our Prime Minister is visiting our own state, how dare the Chinese object? Next they will tell us how to run the country! The anger is genuine, but so is the lack of clear understanding of the issue. The inscrutable Indo-China border dispute has taken on a filmi patriotism. Meanwhile, the Centre's attempts at letting sleeping dogs lie doesn't work amidst threatening growls, especially when flanked by aggressive Right-wing barking about territorial integrity and mealy-mouthed mumblings from the Left. There is urgent need for more public information on the matter if we really want to resolve it.

On the other hand, Albania's claim on Mother Teresa is easily resolved. She was an Indian citizen and lived here for almost 70 years, from 1929 till her death in 1997. She was certainly Albanian by ethnicity, since her parents were Albanian. But Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu became Mother Teresa in India, the country she came to as a teenaged nun and made her home. This was her country, where she had found her calling, the country that embraced her as Mother. She had become an Indian citizen back in 1948, right after Independence, much before she started The Missionaries of Charity. Besides, even deliberating Albania's claim would open a Pandora's box. For example, Italy could one day lay claim to one of our most distinguished citizens.

Most importantly, Mother Teresa regarded Kolkata her home. I was privileged to know her a little (in spite of her legendary kindness and simplicity, the bird-like lady was a hard nut to crack) and to her, home was Kolkata. And she said "aamaader desh" (our country) quite frequently, emphasising in Bengali the needs of poverty-stricken India. Of course, Mother Teresa finally belongs to the whole world. She is too big a personality to be restricted to any nation, too magnificent a human being to be squabbled over. But if there is a claim, it can be made only by her family, the Missionaries of Charity; and if there is a final resting place it is where she is right now, at Mother House, her home in life and death. As our government said, "Mother Teresa was an Indian citizen and she is resting in her own country".

Albania has some cheek, asking for her remains now that she is on her way to becoming a saint. She was born in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now capital of Macedonia. Sure, her parents were Albanian, but she was never treated as an Albanian citizen by the country that is now keen to claim her. In fact, she was not even allowed to visit her mother and sister, who lived in Albania. Later, when she had become a "living saint", Albania let her visit their graves.

Albania's claims on Mother Teresa began after the Nobel laureate's death. After the collapse of their communist regime, Albania has been hungry for national icons and Mother Teresa was an obvious target. They named their international airport after her in 2001 and from the time of her beatification in 2003, fought loudly with Macedonia, rubbishing her birthplace Skopje's claim on her. They declared the day of her beatification, October 19, as a national holiday and announced 2004 as Mother Teresa Year. But even as recently as 2006, the proposal to erect her statue in Shkoder, Albania, was nixed by the local council, apparently because it would hurt Muslim sentiments. Not in a public place, they said, if there is to be a statue, it must be in a Catholic space. So even now Mother Teresa is just a Catholic nun in Albania, not a national icon.

The fact is, you don't need to possess human remains to lay claim to a saintly figure. You just need to carry on their work. Albania could have gone that way. Especially because Mother Teresa never denied her Albanian ethnicity. As she said, famously: "By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus…"

And we too will do well to remember that. We can't claim her merely by citing citizenship, or by having her remains on Indian soil. We can't push her into a slot as a Catholic, because she believed that each one of us could serve our own God. And every time there is violence against Muslims or dalits or the underprivileged in the name of religion, we would do well to remember her words: "How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbour whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live?" To keep Mother Teresa with us, we need more than a grave. We need to make space for her in our conscience.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at sen@littlemag.com