[Reader-list] Is Sister Alphonsa India's first woman saint ?

Sun Oct 19 11:38:55 IST 2008

*Not India's first woman saint*
http://indiaview.wordpress.com/

 Francois Gautier, Pioneer

 *Indian media went into a tizzy while covering the canonisation of Sister
Alphonsa, an obscure nun, to prove its secular credentials! Indian
journalists forget that this country has had other women saints too.

*
As a Frenchman, I was coached right from childhood that logic, what we in
France call *cartesianism*, is the greatest gift given to man and that one
should use one's reason to tread in life. Thus, I taught to my students in a
Bangalore school of journalism, the SSCMS, that the first tool of a good
reporter is to go by his or her own judgement on the ground, with the help
of one's first-hand experience — and not go by second hand information: What
your parents thought, what you have read in the newspapers, what your caste,
religion, culture pushes you into…

 Yet in India, logic does not seem to apply to most of the media, especially
when it is anything related to Hindus and Hinduism. One cannot, for
instance, equate Muslim terrorists who blow up innocent civilians in market
places all over India to angry ordinary Hindus who attack churches without
killing anybody. We know that most of these communal incidents often involve
persons of the same caste — Dalits and tribals — some of them converted to
Christianity and some not.

 However reprehensible was the destruction of the Babri Masjid, no Muslim
was killed in the process. Compare that with the 'vengeance' bombings of
1993 in Mumbai, which killed hundreds of innocent people, mostly Hindus. Yet
Indian and Western journalists keep equating the two, or even showing the
Babri Masjid destruction as the most horrible act of the two.

 How can you compare the Sangh Parivar with the Indian Mujahideen, a deadly
terrorist organisation? How can you label Mr Narendra Modi a mass killer
when actually it was ordinary middle class, or even Dalit Hindus, who went
out into the streets in fury when 56 innocent people, many of them women and
children, were burnt in a train?

 How can you lobby for the lifting of the ban on SIMI, an organisation which
is suspected of having planted bombs in many Indian cities, killing hundreds
of innocent people, while advocating a ban on the Bajrang Dal, which
attacked some churches after an 84-year-old swami and his followers were
brutally murdered?

 There is no logic in journalism in this country when it applies itself to
minorities. Christians are supposedly only two per cent of the population in
India, but look how last Sunday many major television channels showed live
the canonisation ceremony of Sister Alphonsa, an obscure nun from Kerala and
see how Union Minister Oscar Fernandes led an entire Indian delegation to
the Vatican along with the Indian Ambassador. It would be impossible in
England, for instance, which may have a two per cent Hindu minority, to have
live coverage of a major Hindu ceremony, like the anointment of a new
Shankaracharya. What were the 24×7 news channels, which seem to have
deliberately chosen to highlight this non-event, trying to prove? That they
are secular? Is this secularism?

 The headline of the story "India gets its first woman saint", run by many
newspapers, both Indian and Western, is very misleading.

 *For India has never been short of saints.*
The woman sage from over 3,000 years ago, *Maithreyi, Andal*, the Tamil
saint from early in the first Millennium CE and *Akkamahadevi*, the 15th
century saint from modern-day Karnataka, are but a few examples of women
saints in India.
What many publications failed to mention in the story is that this is the
first woman Christian saint — not the first Indian woman saint.

 This statement is ok, when it comes, for instance, from the *BBC*, which
always looks at India through the Christian prism (*BBC* ran a few months
back an untrue and slanderous documentary on Auroville), but when it comes
to the Indian media, it only shows the grave lack of grounding in Indian
culture and history of most Indian journalists.

 *As a result, they suffer from an inferiority complex.*
This inferiority complex, as expressed by television's live coverage of the
canonisation of Sister Alphonsa, is a legacy of the British, who strove to
show themselves as superior and Indian culture as inferior (and inheritor of
the 'White Aryans', a totally false theory).

 *Is it not time to institute schools of journalism, both private and
public, where not only logic will be taught, but where students shall be
made aware of Indian history and of the greatness of Indian culture, so that
when they go out to report, they will use their own judgement and become
Indian journalists, with a little bit of feeling, pride and love for their
own country?*