Hundreds of thousands of worshippers worldwide

Sonia Gandhi's Foreign Chic By Sunanda K. Datta-Ray International Herald Tribune Thursday, December 17, 1998

According to a bitter little joke that did the rounds of Calcutta during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's emergency rule between 1975 and 1977, India's troubles were due entirely to Raja Rammohan Roy. He was an 18th century Bengali social reformer who spearheaded the movement to ban suttee, the Hindu practice of burning widows on the husband's funeral pyre.

Today, stories are flavored with extra spice. For not only does another female, and a widow to boot, loom large on India's political horizon, but Indira Gandhi's daughter-in-law, Sonia, who led the disgraced Congress party to victory in three states in recent elections, was born abroad. Listening to these tales, you would be justified in supposing that Indians are as uptight about the rest of the world as the Chinese with their Middle Kingdom complex and horror of gweilos, or foreign devils.

Actually, no country could be less xenophobic. Indeed, many historians hold that India's receptive attitude to all comers, be they from across the Hindu Kush mountains in the northwest or from beyond the oceans, has been its undoing, playing into the hands of predators and conquerors. Add to a trusting nature a deep veneration of the Mother Goddess, and its fleshly embodiment of mother, wife and daughter, and you have an explanation of why so many women from abroad have risen to positions of power and influence in India through the decades.

Mrs. Sonia Gandhi — whose husband, Rajiv Gandhi, was prime minister when he was assassinated — was Italian before she acquired Indian citizenship. Mother Teresa, now on the fast track to canonization, was an ethnic Albanian from Yugoslavia.

There was also the Frenchwoman known simply as The Mother who presided over the devotees of Sri Aurobindo, a Bengali revolutionary who fled to French-ruled Pondicherry. The community flourished and expanded under The Mother's stewardship, with branches in every Indian city and hundreds of thousands of worshippers worldwide. .I remember her at tennis in baggy satin slacks, or taking the salute at the daily dusk parade of the faithful, from tiny toddlers in green shorts to lumbering ancients in khaki, while the band rolled out sonorous Wagnerian music. No detail of ashram administration, its farms and factories, cars and clinics, was too petty or complicated for The Mother's personal attention.

Understandably, most of the other foreign women who rose to prominence in India were British. There is Margaret Noble, the daughter of an Irish Protestant clergyman, who attached herself to Swami Vivekananda, the 19th century Hindu preacher, and became famous as Sister Nivedita. One of Mahatma Gandhi's most loyal disciples, Marjorie Slade, known in India as Mirabehn, was not only the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral but also Winston Churchill's cousin. .Nor is Mrs. Sonia Gandhi the Congress Party's first female European chief. There was Annie Besant, a radical humanist who went on to found the Theosophical Society; also Nellie Sengupta, the English wife of a Bengali nationalist barrister on whom Indians had bestowed the sobriquet of Deshapriya, Lover of his Land.

Some of these women were dragons, belying Francis Fukuyama's idyllic view that a world run by women "should become less aggressive, adventurous, competitive, and violent." When the British closed down the nationalist-spiritual magazine that Sister Nivedita edited, she warned darkly of violence. "Evidently the Government is thirsting for the day when the propaganda of assassination shall be the only method of service for men who desire to give their lives to their country," she wrote. Fearful of her revolutionary activities, the Ramakrishna Mission, the religious order with which Swami Vivekananda was connected, eventually had to disavow her.

Mrs. Besant was just as formidable, declaring during World War I, "The moment of England's difficulty is the moment of India's opportunity." She too had to be restrained by Indians. "Mrs. Besant, you are distrustful of the British; I am not, and I will not help in any agitation against them during the war," Mahatma Gandhi admonished her. He believed then that a victorious Britain would voluntarily grant India independence.

I once heard someone suggest that so many of these European women attached themselves to eminent Indians that some might have been plants. This was at a time when people in the milieu in which I grew up were beginning to suspect the influence of Lady Mountbatten, the wife of the last British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, on Jawaharlal Nehru, soon to be India's first prime minister after independence. But those rumors were soon squashed. Whatever might be whispered about the last viceroy's consort, not an adverse word would Indians tolerate against foreigners, men and women, who gave themselves to a people and a cause so far from home. That was an act of identification that deserved gratitude.

Foreigners might even have an edge in a land that places such a high value on everything imported. Mahatma Gandhi was addressing Chinese women, not locals, when he said in 1947 that if only they united, they could "kick away the atom bomb like a mere ball." So Mrs. Sonia Gandhi has everything going for her. She is a woman in a male-dominated society and an outsider in a land that loves foreigners. Nor, if Mrs. Gandhi does scale dizzy political heights, would she find it lonely at the top. Little noticed at home and abroad, India's first lady, President K.R. Narayanan's wife, is Burmese. The writer, a former editor of The Statesman in India, is an editorial consultant with The Straits Times in Singapore. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.