Abandoned Bodies and Eternal Souls: Mother Teresa’s Shelters and Biopolitics in Kolkata

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity (MC) homes in Kolkata, this paper examines how religious infrastructures shape urban moral geographies through the management of impurity and death. The MCs operate shelters that take in society’s most stigmatized members – the sick, dying and destitute – creating spaces that both contain and sacralize social marginalization.

In the secularized post-colonial context and particularly with the rise of religion-based identity politics in contemporary India, the MCs’ work provokes religious and political tensions. Nevertheless, authorities tolerate and occasionally welcome their presence, as they contribute significantly to the biopolitical order in cities by removing from public space those whom no other institution would accept. The sisters consciously restrict their works of charity to areas neglected by official institutions, readily retreating from spaces the state claims while confident there will always be abundant “bare life” excluded from biopolitical care systems.

Rather than simply supplementing state capacity, however, the MCs transform the impurity of the urban underbelly into a source of value. They use the bare life rejected by the city as a resource for self-cultivation, consciously framing their shelters as “classrooms” where volunteers, sisters and workers can obtain quasi-mystical experiences and emotional education through transgressive contact with the abject. Their shelters function as heterotopic spaces exempt from the outside biopolitical order, spaces of transgressive physical and emotional contact with death and suffering.