SOURCE: Chaudhuri, Amit. “Why Calcutta?” London Review of Books (4 January 1994): 3, 5.

In the following review, Chaudhuri offers a generally positive assessment of The Missionary Position, noting that Hitchens's unflattering portrayal of Mother Teresa risks reducing her complex personality to “one-dimensionality.”

Among the welter of images and mythologies that constitute the middle-class Bengali's consciousness—P3 and Ganesh underwear, the Communist hammer and sickle, Lenin's face, fish and vegetable chops outside the Academy, wedding and funeral invitation cards, the films of Satyajit Ray, the loud horns of speeding state transport buses, Murshidabadi and Tangail sarees, the daily Ananda Bazar Patrika, the songs of Tagore, the destitute outside Grand Hotel, Boroline Antiseptic cream, Madhyamik school examinations (to name just a few of the constituents)—Mother Teresa, too, is present. Not only is she undeniably a part of the contemporary history of Calcutta, but she is, to the ordinary middle-class Bengali, only a...