What did Melcolm Muggeridge see on the streets of Calcutta?
Answers
By the time of her death in 1997, Mother Teresa was internationally famous. Her white sari with a blue border, enclosing a deeply lined face often smiling, was widely familiar, and her mission among ‘the poorest of the poor’, in Calcutta and elsewhere, was celebrated by popes and presidents alike, as well as by vast numbers of ordinary people.
From the late 1940s, when she set about founding her Order, the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa attracted popular interest in India and surrounding countries.
But it was only in 1968 that she was catapulted to world prominence by a TV interview conducted by the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, followed by a special TV program he made in Calcutta called Something Beautiful for God.
Muggeridge was by then a world-renowned author and TV personality. He had been a newspaper correspondent and columnist in various countries – including Australia for several months in 1958 – and had achieved international fame for his interviews and documentaries.
Yet he was in some ways an unlikely choice for interviewing Mother Teresa. He was well-known as a religious sceptic, possessed of a corrosive wit and a penchant for mocking cherished beliefs and institutions.
In 1955, he provoked outrage when he described the British monarchy as a ‘Royal Soap Opera’. A year later, in Australia, he ruffled feathers with his criticism of the British Commonwealth and his description of Australia as a ‘second-hand’ country, which had not managed to shake off its anachronistic loyalty to England but was now being absorbed by the facile conformities of mass American culture.
At the same time, he had a long history of interest in spiritual matters and moral concerns, even if these were disguised by a cynical, and at times caustic, public persona.
A series of journalistic opportunities occurred in his life that highlighted and advanced his experience of life as a spiritual journey. In the 1920s, soon after he graduated from Cambridge University, he taught at a Christian college in India – a country, as his biographer Gregory Wolfe has noted, that “would haunt his imagination for the rest of his life”.
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