No other form of divinity worshipped by the Hindu is so difficult of acceptance as Kali - the dark and terrible naked Mother, named after the night black complexion of her skin. Not just for Non-Hindus many of whom visibly blanch, even in these days of political correctness when they see a picture of Kali. Many Hindus of impeccable pedigree have the same problem in coming to terms with her. They include even so eminent a person as Tagore. A goddess that arouses so much genuine emotion, instead of tolerant curiosity, is a living force indeed, and Kali is easily amongst the six most popular forms of god worshipped amongst Hindus today. There is a concentration in Bengal, Assam and parts of South India however, for historical reasons.
Kali was never a goddess with great significance in the texts of the faith, though it would not be pushing speculation too far to say that she was always a popular deity amongst the little traditions. Most scholarship is veering away from the (previously prejudiced) point of view that she is a remnant of primitive beliefs, an appallingly bloodthirsty tribal totem of uncivilized peoples, who has unaccountably made her way into the modern world because of the Hindu tendency to never really render any belief system obsolete. That is a colonial point of view, though it does have its adherents even today. Kali is also not convenient shorthand for some local manifestation of the Weltmutter (the World Mother). She was always an independent and powerful goddess in her own right and the Official Canon had to come to terms with her. They never succeeded in marginalizing her, or rendering her subservient to male authority, unlike the examples of Saraswati, Laxmi and sometimes Durga. That is a pretty remarkable achievement in itself and testifies to the sheer power of the Kali Archetype.
In the Vedas there is a proto-Kali, a goddess of death, destruction, bad luck and grief. Called Nirrti, this awesome power was black in complexion, wore black clothes and rather incongruously had long golden hair. The only black skinned blonde goddess in all mythology I think. She lived in the South, the direction of death. While she was not Kali, she shares this trait with her in being unambiguously associated with and causing death. The presence of Nirrti in the official canon helped quite a lot when Kali had to be engaged with, by the guardians of the faith. So similar are the two indeed that Nirrti has vanished from the popular imagination, Kali being more than adequate to fulfill all her roles. For about two thousand years after that we have textual silence on Kali. The first mention of her is in the Mahabharatha and the accounts given vary widely. She seems to be a minor personage in Heaven, or one of the two warrior goddesses, Kalika and Bhadrakali, who accompanied Skanda (one of the foremost culture heroes of India) into battle. Yet a vital point about them is made here which will become the norm about all future descriptions of Kali. They live in trees, mountains and hills, crossroads, jungles, caves and cremation grounds. The two goddesses speak many tongues, i.e. not the language of the elite like all other well behaved gods. The parallels with the wild Innana-Ishtar of west Asia and the congruence of ideas with Shiva as to what constitutes ideal habitation are remarkable.
Another theory sees Kali as being the only survivor of the Matrikas, that group of Yaksha female deities who are ambivalent in the extreme, being simultaneously malevolent persecutors and kindly protectors. Specifically she is associated with Naravahini, a naked, skeletal and terrifying figure who rides a man as her vehicle. There is quite a lot to be said for this theory as the average person when confronted with a group of Matrika figures, one of the great sculptural clichés in India, identifies only Kali (the Naravahini) within it usually. It is however, in the Devi-mahatmayam that Kali is finally brought into the ambit of the formal faith. In this version Kali is an emanation of the great goddess Durga, or more specifically she is a personification of emergent wrath on the part of the older goddess when she goes to battle. The external appearance that gives so much offence to the squeamish is full blown here. She is red eyed from quaffing wine as well as wrath, has a garland of human heads, wears tiger-skin clothes and has a lolling tongue that she occasionally employs to emit frightful roars that fill up all the quarters. Her preferred mode of demon destruction is to either chew them up or cut off their heads as she does to Chanda and Munda.
Then comes the famous encounter with the demon Raktabija, 'Blood-seed'. This worthy has a peculiar power - if you wound him and his blood hits the ground, a clone springs up which is as powerful as himself and having the same power. To wound him is therefore totally counterproductive. Kali solves the issue by opening wide her gigantic mouth and drinking all the blood that spurts from the demons before they hit the ground! This episode gave her a taste for blood that has still not been slaked and Kali remains the only major Deity in actual worship in the twentieth century to whom daily offerings of blood are made. In her official debut as it were into the Great tradition, Kali comes in her most uncompromising and horrific forms. Very clearly this is not a god who is going to engage you on soft terms. And the wonder is that she has found millions of worshippers who do not object to her stern demands.
As a practical spin off and as an illustration of the power of mythology comes the curious story of the Thugees, the famous strangler bandit tribe of India, who waxed fat until the British administrator Sleeman, hunted down and hanged all of them in the nineteenth century. The thugees had their own version of the Raktabija story. According to them, Kali realized that the key to defeating the demon was that no blood be spilt. Therefore, she and her helpers devised the deadly scarf garrote and attacked the demons from behind, strangling them to death with no blood being spilt. Being her devotees, the thugees too used to kill their victims so, having a peculiar horror of shedding blood. Such stories go a long way in explaining the bad reputation that Kali usually had in urban centers.
Kali's next important inroad into the mainstream was her sudden elevation into the role of being a wife of Shiva. It was, in a sense, inevitable. Both are wild outsider gods totally indecorous and oblivious to convention, living in inhospitable terrain and associating with all the freaks and oddballs in creation. The difference being that Shiva is presumed to be an ultra cultured and civilized person who chooses to live so out of caprice and a peculiar sense of humor, while Kali is essentially wild and untamable. She can be worshipped by civilization but never be subsumed by it. Unlike most other goddesses who were put firmly in place by being married off to supposedly superior male gods, Kali's marriage did nothing to tame her. This is exemplified in the many stories popular in South India as to how Shiva had a trying time with his turbulent wife and he usually chooses a dance competition to show her that he is the Great God and must be obeyed. Mortifyingly, the wild Kali has no problem matching anything that Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance can come up with. Finally he dances in the Udharva Tandava posture, a movement that is indecorous in the extreme. Kali refuses to follow suit, because she is not deliberately shameless and he 'wins'. It has long been recognized as a hollow victory though there are some feeble attempts to interpret it as Kali finally learning modesty.
Another story represents Kali as being battle drunk as well as blood drunk. She killed and drank so much blood that she lost her balance and went on a demented dance of destruction across the universe. Shiva alone has the courage to approach her and he knows she will require a severe shock to snap her out of this madness. He throws himself on the ground in her path and she inadvertently steps on him. Even in her berserker state she realizes something unusual has happened, it is after all Shiva. Recognizing whom she had stepped on, she is mortified and bites her tongue in embarrassment. The dance stops immediately. This rather naïve story casts Kali as an extremely simple soul who respects her great husband but that is only the obvious take on it. The symbolic element in it is very clear also. Even Kali the terrible can only deal with so much death and destruction before one goes mad. Wrath that has run out of control has long been recognized as a form of illness, if not downright madness, in India. Wrath is the absence of consciousness and the only person who can give you back that vital component of your Psyche is Shiva - who is Pure Consciousness himself. In a real sense, every time you lose it because of rage, you are stomping all over Shiva. The shock of recognition implies that consciousness is again functioning and the passions recede to their proper position as servants not as masters. The tongue is the prime symbol of passions as it is the center for taste, which is regarded as the core passion. Once you can control your craving, not for food as such but for rasa, flavor in all its connotations, you have won over your passions. Kali's biting of the tongue is the acknowledgement of such control over the passions, but it was possible only when an outburst of rage revealed how fragile and easily lost the Conscious Awareness of Life is.
With the Tantrik tradition gaining importance from the eighth century however, Kali achieved a tremendous growth spurt in importance. She was clearly designated as Prakriti, the active energizing principle of the universe, and Shiva was merely Purusha, the passive male component. So much so that there is a saying that, "Without Shakti (Kali) Shiva is merely a Shava (corpse)." She was declared to be the supreme figure of godhood and all the other gods, including Shiva, were mere props to reflect her glory. This led to the classic Tantrik representation of a rampant fully armed Kali standing on the supine body of her husband. The symbolism behind that picture is far too elaborate to be dealt with in this article. Particularly the left-hand path of tantra, with its somewhat bizarre rituals, found Kali an ideal goddess. They even devised a 'heroic' form of worship (vira bhavana), which involved confronting the goddess in all her malevolence and refusing to be cowed down. That apparently resulted in liberation of the soul , not to mention the possession of myriad goodies for the rest of your life. Some of the assertions of Kali supremacy did not sit well with rival sects especially the Vaishnavas, and there were frequent skirmishes over turf. A typical example goes thus. The Vaishnavas declared that, "Krishna is the boat man who ferries the soul across the ocean of existence." The Kali worshippers, angered by this assumption of salvation, retorted. "Our Mother is the ruler of the universe and does not time for petty tasks like this, which is why she appointed that fellow Krishna to do the job!" Sometimes you can buy calendars with popular bazaar paintings on it that show Kali with an escort, a little Krishna running ahead of her like a herald and a tough looking Hanuman guarding the rear of her cavalcade. The implications are obvious.
In the years to come, the devotional poetry of Bengal would do much to soften her rough edges and portray her as an essentially loving mother though she may act crazy by our limited human lights. Ramaprasad Sen and then Ramakrishana Paramahansa were the two most important figures in the 18th and 19th centuries where this process was concerned, though many others contributed to the genre. The attitude is that of a child who conquers the mother through sheer stubborn love. By hurling oneself without reservation onto the mercy and protection of the Mother, one gains everything. It was a remarkable project, to transform an essentially flinty goddess into an epitome of mercy and gentleness, but astoundingly they pulled it off. There are many people who are innocently unaware of Kali's gloomy history of evolution and they find it incomprehensible that Kali is regarded as anything other than a gentle goddess. That does not take away from the awesome reality of Kali; it merely shows that the mind of man is capable of many things.
Why is this bloodthirsty, unruly and supremely violent aspect of godhood so enduringly popular? Many answers have been attempted, and all of them are plausible, where they are not manifestly stupid. To attempt to classify and codify a phenomenon like Kali is an effort foredoomed. My personal take on the great Black Goddess is that she is the Living Personification of the Shadow. Kali is everything in human life and human nature that we would prefer to deny and ignore and smugly assign to the unenlightened past - until we have a crisis and all of the despised elements of the psyche come roaring out to take over the mind and soul. Kali represents the dark, which is as much a component of life as light. To deny the Shadow is to empower it in secret and it will extract a terrible vengeance when it finally breaks free. Kali however, brings all these unpleasant realities straight to the surface of the consciousness where you have no choice but to acknowledge them as well as to attempt to transcend them. Maturity is to accept and acknowledge one's faults and flaws but not be controlled by them. Immaturity is the opposite, the denial that there is anything wrong with one's shining perfection. Kali is therefore a constant reminder of the dark side, as well as a constant invitation to grasp the nettle of maturity. She is a dramatic visual symbol of an old, old truth that has found its twentieth century avatar in the inelegant but expressive phrase, "Shit Happens." To live is to risk, to encounter pain and loss and grief and anger, and above all, to live is to die. A Kali worshipper never loses sight of these truths, and being so firmly grounded in reality is not at the mercy of every buffet of emotion that arises either without or within.
In Calcutta, even today the festival of Kali puja actually sees her worship being done on cremation grounds. It is a fantastic sight. There is this joyous revelry, utmost piety and there are corpses being licked by the flames of the pyres, one of the names of which is Kali too. The fear of death is certainly overcome, but believe you me, you don't feel any grasping attachment to life either. Everything falls into perspective. Seeing Kali through the smoke and flame of a funeral pyre is to suddenly realize the symbolic truths in her wild appearance. The curved and bloodied sword she holds is the death of ignorance and self-deception. The long and unruly free flowing hair is the freedom from artificial constraints imposed by social expectations. (Women are supposed to bind up their hair in Indian culture, Kali as usual being a flamboyant exception.) Her nudity is the freedom of the realized person who does not need any barriers between her and the world. Mahavira and the Jains had to face tremendous opposition for this habit of going nude too. It distressed society too much, aroused too many anxieties about the collapse of one's social persona. Many people are held together only by their clothes, having no personalities of their own to do the job. The girdle of severed hands signifies the end of covetousness and greed, of grasping. Once you have seen and realized death you realize that a human life has more to it than merely money grubbing. The upraised hand of Kali in the Abhaya mudra, the granting of fearlessness, indicates that death is only a passing over into the true nature of the soul - Freedom. In a very concrete sense life becomes more real - keener, more enjoyable - because you are constantly aware, unlike all others who unconsciously assume immortality, that it will not last forever.
To worship Kali is to realize that death is a necessary and inevitable consequence of having fully lived.
Kali was never a goddess with great significance in the texts of the faith, though it would not be pushing speculation too far to say that she was always a popular deity amongst the little traditions. Most scholarship is veering away from the (previously prejudiced) point of view that she is a remnant of primitive beliefs, an appallingly bloodthirsty tribal totem of uncivilized peoples, who has unaccountably made her way into the modern world because of the Hindu tendency to never really render any belief system obsolete. That is a colonial point of view, though it does have its adherents even today. Kali is also not convenient shorthand for some local manifestation of the Weltmutter (the World Mother). She was always an independent and powerful goddess in her own right and the Official Canon had to come to terms with her. They never succeeded in marginalizing her, or rendering her subservient to male authority, unlike the examples of Saraswati, Laxmi and sometimes Durga. That is a pretty remarkable achievement in itself and testifies to the sheer power of the Kali Archetype.
In the Vedas there is a proto-Kali, a goddess of death, destruction, bad luck and grief. Called Nirrti, this awesome power was black in complexion, wore black clothes and rather incongruously had long golden hair. The only black skinned blonde goddess in all mythology I think. She lived in the South, the direction of death. While she was not Kali, she shares this trait with her in being unambiguously associated with and causing death. The presence of Nirrti in the official canon helped quite a lot when Kali had to be engaged with, by the guardians of the faith. So similar are the two indeed that Nirrti has vanished from the popular imagination, Kali being more than adequate to fulfill all her roles. For about two thousand years after that we have textual silence on Kali. The first mention of her is in the Mahabharatha and the accounts given vary widely. She seems to be a minor personage in Heaven, or one of the two warrior goddesses, Kalika and Bhadrakali, who accompanied Skanda (one of the foremost culture heroes of India) into battle. Yet a vital point about them is made here which will become the norm about all future descriptions of Kali. They live in trees, mountains and hills, crossroads, jungles, caves and cremation grounds. The two goddesses speak many tongues, i.e. not the language of the elite like all other well behaved gods. The parallels with the wild Innana-Ishtar of west Asia and the congruence of ideas with Shiva as to what constitutes ideal habitation are remarkable.
Another theory sees Kali as being the only survivor of the Matrikas, that group of Yaksha female deities who are ambivalent in the extreme, being simultaneously malevolent persecutors and kindly protectors. Specifically she is associated with Naravahini, a naked, skeletal and terrifying figure who rides a man as her vehicle. There is quite a lot to be said for this theory as the average person when confronted with a group of Matrika figures, one of the great sculptural clichés in India, identifies only Kali (the Naravahini) within it usually. It is however, in the Devi-mahatmayam that Kali is finally brought into the ambit of the formal faith. In this version Kali is an emanation of the great goddess Durga, or more specifically she is a personification of emergent wrath on the part of the older goddess when she goes to battle. The external appearance that gives so much offence to the squeamish is full blown here. She is red eyed from quaffing wine as well as wrath, has a garland of human heads, wears tiger-skin clothes and has a lolling tongue that she occasionally employs to emit frightful roars that fill up all the quarters. Her preferred mode of demon destruction is to either chew them up or cut off their heads as she does to Chanda and Munda.
Then comes the famous encounter with the demon Raktabija, 'Blood-seed'. This worthy has a peculiar power - if you wound him and his blood hits the ground, a clone springs up which is as powerful as himself and having the same power. To wound him is therefore totally counterproductive. Kali solves the issue by opening wide her gigantic mouth and drinking all the blood that spurts from the demons before they hit the ground! This episode gave her a taste for blood that has still not been slaked and Kali remains the only major Deity in actual worship in the twentieth century to whom daily offerings of blood are made. In her official debut as it were into the Great tradition, Kali comes in her most uncompromising and horrific forms. Very clearly this is not a god who is going to engage you on soft terms. And the wonder is that she has found millions of worshippers who do not object to her stern demands.
As a practical spin off and as an illustration of the power of mythology comes the curious story of the Thugees, the famous strangler bandit tribe of India, who waxed fat until the British administrator Sleeman, hunted down and hanged all of them in the nineteenth century. The thugees had their own version of the Raktabija story. According to them, Kali realized that the key to defeating the demon was that no blood be spilt. Therefore, she and her helpers devised the deadly scarf garrote and attacked the demons from behind, strangling them to death with no blood being spilt. Being her devotees, the thugees too used to kill their victims so, having a peculiar horror of shedding blood. Such stories go a long way in explaining the bad reputation that Kali usually had in urban centers.
Kali's next important inroad into the mainstream was her sudden elevation into the role of being a wife of Shiva. It was, in a sense, inevitable. Both are wild outsider gods totally indecorous and oblivious to convention, living in inhospitable terrain and associating with all the freaks and oddballs in creation. The difference being that Shiva is presumed to be an ultra cultured and civilized person who chooses to live so out of caprice and a peculiar sense of humor, while Kali is essentially wild and untamable. She can be worshipped by civilization but never be subsumed by it. Unlike most other goddesses who were put firmly in place by being married off to supposedly superior male gods, Kali's marriage did nothing to tame her. This is exemplified in the many stories popular in South India as to how Shiva had a trying time with his turbulent wife and he usually chooses a dance competition to show her that he is the Great God and must be obeyed. Mortifyingly, the wild Kali has no problem matching anything that Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance can come up with. Finally he dances in the Udharva Tandava posture, a movement that is indecorous in the extreme. Kali refuses to follow suit, because she is not deliberately shameless and he 'wins'. It has long been recognized as a hollow victory though there are some feeble attempts to interpret it as Kali finally learning modesty.
Another story represents Kali as being battle drunk as well as blood drunk. She killed and drank so much blood that she lost her balance and went on a demented dance of destruction across the universe. Shiva alone has the courage to approach her and he knows she will require a severe shock to snap her out of this madness. He throws himself on the ground in her path and she inadvertently steps on him. Even in her berserker state she realizes something unusual has happened, it is after all Shiva. Recognizing whom she had stepped on, she is mortified and bites her tongue in embarrassment. The dance stops immediately. This rather naïve story casts Kali as an extremely simple soul who respects her great husband but that is only the obvious take on it. The symbolic element in it is very clear also. Even Kali the terrible can only deal with so much death and destruction before one goes mad. Wrath that has run out of control has long been recognized as a form of illness, if not downright madness, in India. Wrath is the absence of consciousness and the only person who can give you back that vital component of your Psyche is Shiva - who is Pure Consciousness himself. In a real sense, every time you lose it because of rage, you are stomping all over Shiva. The shock of recognition implies that consciousness is again functioning and the passions recede to their proper position as servants not as masters. The tongue is the prime symbol of passions as it is the center for taste, which is regarded as the core passion. Once you can control your craving, not for food as such but for rasa, flavor in all its connotations, you have won over your passions. Kali's biting of the tongue is the acknowledgement of such control over the passions, but it was possible only when an outburst of rage revealed how fragile and easily lost the Conscious Awareness of Life is.
With the Tantrik tradition gaining importance from the eighth century however, Kali achieved a tremendous growth spurt in importance. She was clearly designated as Prakriti, the active energizing principle of the universe, and Shiva was merely Purusha, the passive male component. So much so that there is a saying that, "Without Shakti (Kali) Shiva is merely a Shava (corpse)." She was declared to be the supreme figure of godhood and all the other gods, including Shiva, were mere props to reflect her glory. This led to the classic Tantrik representation of a rampant fully armed Kali standing on the supine body of her husband. The symbolism behind that picture is far too elaborate to be dealt with in this article. Particularly the left-hand path of tantra, with its somewhat bizarre rituals, found Kali an ideal goddess. They even devised a 'heroic' form of worship (vira bhavana), which involved confronting the goddess in all her malevolence and refusing to be cowed down. That apparently resulted in liberation of the soul , not to mention the possession of myriad goodies for the rest of your life. Some of the assertions of Kali supremacy did not sit well with rival sects especially the Vaishnavas, and there were frequent skirmishes over turf. A typical example goes thus. The Vaishnavas declared that, "Krishna is the boat man who ferries the soul across the ocean of existence." The Kali worshippers, angered by this assumption of salvation, retorted. "Our Mother is the ruler of the universe and does not time for petty tasks like this, which is why she appointed that fellow Krishna to do the job!" Sometimes you can buy calendars with popular bazaar paintings on it that show Kali with an escort, a little Krishna running ahead of her like a herald and a tough looking Hanuman guarding the rear of her cavalcade. The implications are obvious.
In the years to come, the devotional poetry of Bengal would do much to soften her rough edges and portray her as an essentially loving mother though she may act crazy by our limited human lights. Ramaprasad Sen and then Ramakrishana Paramahansa were the two most important figures in the 18th and 19th centuries where this process was concerned, though many others contributed to the genre. The attitude is that of a child who conquers the mother through sheer stubborn love. By hurling oneself without reservation onto the mercy and protection of the Mother, one gains everything. It was a remarkable project, to transform an essentially flinty goddess into an epitome of mercy and gentleness, but astoundingly they pulled it off. There are many people who are innocently unaware of Kali's gloomy history of evolution and they find it incomprehensible that Kali is regarded as anything other than a gentle goddess. That does not take away from the awesome reality of Kali; it merely shows that the mind of man is capable of many things.
Why is this bloodthirsty, unruly and supremely violent aspect of godhood so enduringly popular? Many answers have been attempted, and all of them are plausible, where they are not manifestly stupid. To attempt to classify and codify a phenomenon like Kali is an effort foredoomed. My personal take on the great Black Goddess is that she is the Living Personification of the Shadow. Kali is everything in human life and human nature that we would prefer to deny and ignore and smugly assign to the unenlightened past - until we have a crisis and all of the despised elements of the psyche come roaring out to take over the mind and soul. Kali represents the dark, which is as much a component of life as light. To deny the Shadow is to empower it in secret and it will extract a terrible vengeance when it finally breaks free. Kali however, brings all these unpleasant realities straight to the surface of the consciousness where you have no choice but to acknowledge them as well as to attempt to transcend them. Maturity is to accept and acknowledge one's faults and flaws but not be controlled by them. Immaturity is the opposite, the denial that there is anything wrong with one's shining perfection. Kali is therefore a constant reminder of the dark side, as well as a constant invitation to grasp the nettle of maturity. She is a dramatic visual symbol of an old, old truth that has found its twentieth century avatar in the inelegant but expressive phrase, "Shit Happens." To live is to risk, to encounter pain and loss and grief and anger, and above all, to live is to die. A Kali worshipper never loses sight of these truths, and being so firmly grounded in reality is not at the mercy of every buffet of emotion that arises either without or within.
In Calcutta, even today the festival of Kali puja actually sees her worship being done on cremation grounds. It is a fantastic sight. There is this joyous revelry, utmost piety and there are corpses being licked by the flames of the pyres, one of the names of which is Kali too. The fear of death is certainly overcome, but believe you me, you don't feel any grasping attachment to life either. Everything falls into perspective. Seeing Kali through the smoke and flame of a funeral pyre is to suddenly realize the symbolic truths in her wild appearance. The curved and bloodied sword she holds is the death of ignorance and self-deception. The long and unruly free flowing hair is the freedom from artificial constraints imposed by social expectations. (Women are supposed to bind up their hair in Indian culture, Kali as usual being a flamboyant exception.) Her nudity is the freedom of the realized person who does not need any barriers between her and the world. Mahavira and the Jains had to face tremendous opposition for this habit of going nude too. It distressed society too much, aroused too many anxieties about the collapse of one's social persona. Many people are held together only by their clothes, having no personalities of their own to do the job. The girdle of severed hands signifies the end of covetousness and greed, of grasping. Once you have seen and realized death you realize that a human life has more to it than merely money grubbing. The upraised hand of Kali in the Abhaya mudra, the granting of fearlessness, indicates that death is only a passing over into the true nature of the soul - Freedom. In a very concrete sense life becomes more real - keener, more enjoyable - because you are constantly aware, unlike all others who unconsciously assume immortality, that it will not last forever.
To worship Kali is to realize that death is a necessary and inevitable consequence of having fully lived.
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