If her life is proved to be virtuous and a model of Christian understanding, and the miracle is proved, the Prefect recommends the case to the Pope.” What happens next, and how fast, largely depends on him. It is no secret that Pope John Paul, who is suffering from a degenerative disease, is anxious to complete the process before he dies.In death as in life, Mother Teresa and India make a close fit. Nowhere produces gurus, godmen and saintly ascetics, both plausible ones and obvious frauds, half as prolifically as India; nowhere else do miracles seem part of the tissue of everyday life. This, after all, is the country where earlier this year 20 million Hindus immersed themselves in the filthy water of the Ganges at Allahabad, firmly believing that, at that precise moment, it had turned into heavenly nectar, and would guarantee them salvation.In some ways, Mother Teresa was an oppositional figure in India: removing the dying from the streets, she shamed the Hindus who ignored the misery all around them; bathing and dressing their wounds, she mutely condemned the still powerful taboos of untouchability which even today give many caste Hindus an abhorrence of physically mingling with the lower orders. Her energy made her distinctive, too ­ the furious way this dedicated religious figure flung herself into the construction of her empire. Holiness in India is always about passivity, stillness, renunciation of the busy world ­ or at least, the appearance of those things.In one respect, however, Mother Teresa was a very oriental figure, because she seemed to accept the notion of individual karma and fate. Those she rescued died clean, in decent surroundings; but she did not try especially hard to make them live longer, to turn their lives around.

In the House of the Dying at Kalighat when I visited two years ago, there were three or four young men, barely out of their teens, suffering from TB, India’s great scourge, even today. With a rigid regime of antibiotics, they would probably have recovered and gone on to lead long and even happy lives. But the Missionaries of Charity only dispensed the simplest medicine and did not seem interested in curing Mother Teresa did not see that as her order’s work. Her job was to help them “die beautifully”.In his acid critique of Mother Teresa and her work, entitled The Missionary Position, the British journalist Christopher Hitchens focused on this limitation to her work. She did not, he pointed out, aspire to change the lives of the lepers, orphans and terminally ill who passed through her hands.

They are, he wrote, “raw material for the demonstration of compassion… They are in no position to complain, and their passivity is considered a sterling trait.”Perhaps in that fundamental sense Mother Teresa went native in India. But the Archbishop of Calcutta, preparing her papers for her next big trip, betrays no misgivings. “I’m always very happy,” he said, “because she drew the attention of the world to the excluded of this country, to the fact that they were human people, to the sanctity of human life. She stands as a great inspiration for those who believe in God.”. James Gillray died, incurably insane, on 1 June 1815.

He had been mentally ill for four years but, being rarely violent, he was allowed to wander freely about the house of Mrs Hannah Humphrey, a printer and publisher, his long-term landlady and most enthusiastic exhibitor. In his confused state, Gillray sometimes received young artists, who came to sit at the feet of the age’s greatest caricaturist. One was George Cruikshank, who was to inherit Gillray’s spirit as well as his work table “Poor Gillray,” remembered Cruikshank. “[He] said, ‘You are not Cruikshank but Addison; my name is not Gillray but Rubens’…”

James Gillray died, incurably insane, on 1 June 1815. He had been mentally ill for four years but, being rarely violent, he was allowed to wander freely about the house of Mrs Hannah Humphrey, a printer and publisher, his long-term landlady and most enthusiastic exhibitor.