Books: Picture of Love

MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA
BY SUNITA KUMAR
WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON
PRICE: Rs 795
PAGES: 120

The trouble with photographing an icon who doesn't do much by hand -- like play tennis or act on stage -- is in iconising the subject. It is easier in art. In religious painting, the halo came naturally. Then came the Renaissance, and representation of the human form became robust enough to replace the lighted circle at the back of the head. As photography came of age, the brush strokes of light and the angle of the camera replaced the iconic artist's ancient bag of tricks.

Nowhere are these tricks better in evidence than in the picture books on Mother Teresa. She started being extensively photographed in the '60s, when crow's feet were stamped -- untimely though -- on her cheeks and she'd grown a hump. As a photographic subject she could hardly set the shutter fingers afire. But after Malcolm Muggeridge's seminal book on her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta and the subsequent world attention, photographers discovered an icon in the making. In the next three decades, the Albanian saint of the slums posed a challenge to shutterbugs.

Sunita Kumar's coffee table book, the first since the passing away of Mother in 1997, is an interesting compendium of iconic photography. The pictures in Kumar's 120-page book are a procession of celluloid hagiography.

In Jay Ullal's two photographs of Mother reading by the altar, the light from the windows invades the frame like a harbinger of celestial grace. A couple of portraits drawn from unnamed private collections are taken so close they could give ideas to ad men selling skin moisturisers. The pictures of perhaps the greatest documentary value are those of the young Agnes Bojaxhiu in Skopje, and of her youth at the Loreto Abbey in Ireland. Who knew that the saint-to-be was such an attractive young woman?

AUTHORSPEAK
SUNITA KUMAR

Missionary Writer

On being a saint's friend-and now biographer

This was bound to happen some day. How could you be a friend and confidante of Mother Teresa, spokesperson of the Missionaries of Charity (MOC) and yet not write a book on her? "When Mother died, I had no intention of doing this," says Sunita Kumar, author of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, "but then it occurred to me that the sisters would never get down to doing something like this because it's just not their style, or their mission."

So she made it hers since March this year, contacting Mother's friends and relatives and photographers across the world. The accompanying text is a brief biography sprinkled with details of Kumar's association with Mother since 1967. Most of the photographs, she says, have come free. Even the -- 15,000 advance will go to the missionaries who have been so much a part of her life.

Kumar was 25 then, a young mother and housewife. "I had just had my second child the year before and I decided that I wasn't going to only sit at home." She joined a group of MOC volunteers, meeting once a week to make little medicine packets for leprosy patients. One day Mother Teresa dropped in: "She just had this way of inviting people to work with her. She never demanded it nor did she preach." So when Mother called one day in the early '70s and asked if the MOC could use her house for the weekly sessions, Kumar readily agreed.

Now an elegant 56 and a grey-haired grandmother of six, she can talk endlessly about those years. Seated in her spacious home away from home -- she's on a visit to Delhi but otherwise based in Calcutta -- Kumar's embarrassed at the solitary tear rolling down her cheek as she recalls the telephone call from Sister Nirmala a year ago: "Mother has gone home to Jesus." She doesn't touch on the comparisons that were made between Mother and Princess Diana at the time, but if you ask her she doesn't mince words either: "Mother Teresa had devoted her entire life to the poor. If Princess Diana had been at it for about two years, where is the comparison?"

After three decades of friendship, Kumar -- incidentally, former Davis Cup captain Naresh Kumar is her husband -- even speaks the language of the nuns. One of the photographs in her book is captioned: "I am announcing Mother's going home to Jesus to the press." In September, Kumar held an exhibition of her paintings of Mother Teresa. The book is just an extension of that -- a tribute from a friend.

--Anna M.M. Vetticad