India & Kaali: Do We Understand Her Fluidity & Syncretism?

The Hindu goddess, who became the subject of several controversies recently, is bigger than our narrow definitions.

Canada-based filmmaker Leena Manimekali faced a tsunami of outrage recently when she put out a poster of her film Kaali, which showed an actress dressed as the goddess smoking a cigarette. Soon after, Trinamool Congress leader Mahua Moitra sparked an almighty controversy when she said that the Kaali that is worshipped in Bengal accepts alcohol and meat.

A few weeks later, the fearsome Hindu goddess of darkness and destruction was at the centre of yet another furore: in Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur, enraged activists of the Hindu fundamentalist group Bajrang Dal burnt copies of The Week, because the magazine had published a picture of an 18th-century Kangra painting of Kali, which they found offensive. The illustration, which was carried alongside a column on the goddess by economist Bibek Debroy, depicts her in her traditional form, although Shiva, her consort, who lies supine at her feet, is represented in a more explicit fashion.

Beyond Hurt Sentiments

Debroy seemed as irked by the picture of the 200-year-old painting as those who felt that their religious sentiments had been hurt by it. He severed his association with the magazine and even broadcast that news on Twitter.

Evidently, Kaali had quite a moment in our earthly domain, with emotions, whether warranted or not, running high over the way her mortal children represent her divine persona.

But let’s look beyond the haze of hurt sentiments and the mist of outrage that envelops the Devi today. If one harks back to her origin as a concept and a godhead, the philosophy behind her representation, and the evolution of her iconography, one will find the idea of a deity that is as immanent as it is fluid.

Nrisingha Prasad Bhaduri, an expert on the Indian epics and the Puranas, says that the earliest mention of the word “Kali” is to be found in the Manduka Upanishad (c 1500- c 500 BCE), where Kaali (the dark) and Karali (the terrifying, an adjective often used to describe the goddess) are two of the seven tongues of agni (fire). Fire is, of course, a destructive force, which the Devi also embodies.

The Tale of Durga and Kali

The most commonly known story of the genesis of the goddess Kaali is the one narrated in the Devi Mahatmya section of Markandeya Purana (c 250 CE). When Durga was engaged in a fierce battle with the asuras (demons), she furrowed her brows in fury, and Kaali emerged from between her brows — a dark, elemental force of destruction, and one that is terrifyingly visualised. Here, her face is huge, her tongue lolling, and her hair is wild; thin and dark, the four-armed goddess wears a garland of human heads around her neck and a tiger skin around her loins.

Durga summons this fearsome manifestation of herself to help her kill the asuras, especially Raktabija, because every drop of his blood that fell to the ground gave rise to another demon just as ferocious as him. She instructs Kaali to drink the blood from Raktabija’s wounds so he would be unable to replicate himself by the thousands.

Kali laps up his blood, while Durga strikes the demon and kills him. And then, intoxicated with the blood that she has drunk, Kaali launches into a terrible dance, wreaking havoc all around.

Interestingly, says Bhaduri, the Puranas tell another tale about Kaali who is both Durga, as well as an emanation of her. In the Varaha and Vamana Puranas, Uma or Parvati (or Durga), the daughter of Himalaya, who becomes Shiva’s consort, is described as dark-skinned. One day, Shiva teases her about her dark skin colour. (Clearly, the fair skin bias of Indians predates history.) Upset, Parvati sheds her skin to emerge as Gauri (the fair one), while her dark remnant becomes Kaali.

Kali the Protectress

In essence, though, Kali, who is sometimes visualised with six or eight arms as well, is the most fierce aspect of Shakti or the female principle. She is an unquestionably fearsome deity, associated with darkness, death, destruction, and kaal, or time, which devours all. In traditional iconography, she is naked but for a skirt of severed human arms, and holds a blood-stained knife in one hand and a human head in another; with her left hand she makes the reassuring abhaya mudra, while with her right, she makes the offering or the varada mudra.

“As a rule, in the Hindu religion, manifestations of Shakti are not fear-inducing. Durga may be a belligerent, warrior goddess, but she is not unfeminine. However, Kaali is a terrifying mother goddess, a protectress who needs to be propitiated,” says Jawhar Sircar, MP and former bureaucrat, who has written extensively on Indian myths and religious and cultural practices.

While Kaali has her counterparts in other ancient civilisations of the world, such as Asia Minor’s Kybele (she had her own city called Kalli-polis, which later become First World War’s Gallipoli) or the goddess Kalma of ancient Finland who haunted tombs and ate the dead, Sircar says that the pre-Aryan, indigenous traditions of this part of the world also had similar deities who were feared and venerated.

“The Mahabharata describes a dark goddess worshipped by the Sabaras, Pulindas, and ‘barbarians’ whose rituals were associated with blood offerings,” and this is the tradition that travelled via the Puranas and other texts and entered mainstream Hinduism, he says.

How the Worship of the Goddess Evolved

But as the worship of Kaali spread, it was also undergoing a process of evolution. The goddess became the first among the Dasha Mahavidyas central to tantra and tantric practices. “In tantra, which evolved over the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, we see the idea of Kaali being ‘processed’. For example, though she may have drunk blood on a certain occasion, in tantra, the act of drinking blood now becomes one of her regular features,” says Bhaduri.

With tantra co-opting Kaali into its belief system, the panchamakara (the five Ms) or the five elements of tantric practice — madya (alcohol), mamsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudra (dried grain) and maithuna (sex) — also came to be associated with the Shaakta tradition of worshipping the goddess, especially in Bengal and other parts of eastern India like Assam.

There is the school of thought that says that the panchamakara are actually metaphorical, that madya is not alchohol but a symbol of nectar, and so on. However, in practice, and despite the purported higher philosophy behind the five elements of tantra, such offerings were (and are) real rather than imaginary or purely metaphorical.

Likewise, Kali’s violent mien and the marked insistence on blood and death in her depiction led to the deity’s association with the shamshaan (cremation ground). Shamshaan Kaali is the most powerful and dangerous form of the goddess, while Dakshina Kali, who is represented with her right foot on Shiva’s chest, is the most benevolent one, and most commonly worshipped.

A Force That Destroys and Creates

But is the goddess all about death and darkness and the destruction of evil? Witness the depiction of Kaali stepping on the body of her husband Shiva who lies prone at her feet. This can also be linked to the engagement between purush (the male principle) and prakriti (nature, or the female principle). In the Hindu philosophical text, Sankhya Darshan, which belongs to the post-Vedic era, purush is conceptualised as pure consciousness, but one that is inert and unable to act or indulge in sensory experiences. On the other hand, prakriti is pure energy, able to act, but is devoid of consciousness. In the aftermath of a mahapralaya (the destruction of all existence), when purush looks at prakriti, she becomes active (purushaadhishthita prakriti) and the process of creation begins.

The iconography of Kaali standing over a still, corpse-like Shiva mimics this engagement between purush and prakriti. In other words, the two deities are different aspects of the same primordial force — that which destroys and creates.

What is interesting is that although Kaali is Shakti at its most fiery and uncontrollable form, her Shaakta worship is often imbued with softness and love. This is particularly evident in Bengal, says Bhaduri, where famous devotees of the goddess such as 18th-century Kaali worshipper and songwriter Ramprasad, and 19th-century religious leader Ramkrishna Paramahamsa, interacted with the goddess in intimate, familiar terms — as a child does with his mother.

In fact, Ramprasad’s devotional songs are so drenched with love that the Shaakta representation of the Devi takes on an almost Vaishnava hue. (In Bengal, the worship of Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, underpins the Vaishnava faith, and its predominance was such that it influenced Shaakta traditions too.)

'Dance Like You Did, Ma'

Ramprasad sings:

Temni, temni, temni kore naach dekhi, Ma,

Braje jemon nechechhile hoye Banamali,

Ashi chhere, banshi loye,

Mundamala chhere, bonomala dhore

Temni kore naach dekhi, Ma…

(Dance like you did, Ma,

When in Braja you danced as Banamali,

Shedding your sword, holding your flute,

Shedding your garland of skulls and wearing a garland of flowers,

Dance like you did then…)

In other words, Ramprasad is identifying a fearsome, apparently blood-thirsty Kaali with the pleasing figure of Krishna, the same Krishna who played the flute, wore flowers and made love to Radha.

It’s a perfect example of the fluidity, intersectionality and syncretism that informs the interpretation of the gods in the Hindu pantheon.

Our ancients understood this. It’s a pity that many of us ‘moderns’ don’t.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author. She tweets @ShumaRaha. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)