Reformers, Ramakrishna, and the Missionaries of Charity

Calcutta was where Hinduism argued with itself in public in the nineteenth century. Rammohan Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj in the city in 1828, arguing from the Upanishads for a formless God, rejecting image worship and caste, and campaigning against the burning of widows. The movement split and split again over how far to go, and it shaped a generation of Bengali public life out of all proportion to its numbers.

Into that setting came Ramakrishna, a priest at the Dakshineswar Kali temple north of the city from the 1850s, who was almost the opposite of a reformer: an ecstatic devotee of the goddess, largely unlettered, who undertook the disciplines of other traditions in turn and reported that they reached the same destination. His conversations, recorded verbatim by a schoolmaster who visited him for years, are a rare thing in religious literature, a day by day transcript of a teacher talking. His disciple Vivekananda took that message abroad and founded the Ramakrishna Mission at Belur in 1897, giving a Hindu monastic order a programme of famine relief, hospitals and schools; its temple is designed so that its silhouette reads as temple, church and mosque together.

In 1950 Mother Teresa began the Missionaries of Charity in the same city, opening a home for the dying beside the Kalighat temple. The order spread worldwide and she was canonised in 2016. Criticism of the medical standard of care in her homes and of her positions on suffering has been sustained and is part of the record.