Kali: the Furious

Posted by Phil Hine in History, tantra  |  June 28th 2022  |  About poster:

“Will the Bengalee worshipper of Shakti shrink from the shedding of blood? … The worship of the goddess will not be consummated if you sacrifice your lives at the shrine of Independence without shedding blood.”

Jugantar

“Mother, incomparably arrayed,
Hair flying, stripped down,
You battle-dance on Siva's heart,
A garland of heads that bounce off
Your heavy hips, chopped-off hands
For a belt, the bodies of infants
For earrings, and the lips,
The teeth like jasmine, the face
A lotus blossomed, the laugh,
And the dark body billowing up and out
Like a storm cloud, and those feet
Whose beauty is only deepened by blood.
So Prasād cries: My mind is dancing!
Can I take much more? Can I bear
An impossible beauty?”
Ramprasād Sen

As Mike Magee’s new book – Kālī Magic – for my Twisted Trunk imprint nears completion, I thought I’d do a brief essay on the goddess Kali and her key characteristics – the most enduring of which is her fury.

Of all the Indian goddesses, Kali is probably the most well-known and recognizable. Despite her South Asian origins, she can now be considered to be transglobal in her influence. She is everywhere, the inspiration for art, devotion, poem, and song. She is hailed as an empowering feminist icon and revered by witches; she has absorbed and been melded with other ‘dark goddesses’ such as Hekate as an archetype of primordial power.

Many of Kali’s characteristics first appear in the Devī Māhātmya – a purāṇic text which has been dated to between the fifth and sixth centuries of the common era and forms a part of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa. The Devī Māhātmya is an important work – perhaps the first – in the development of the concept of a single great goddess – a Mahādevī – with multiple aspects, is identified as the ultimate divine reality. It is also the first purāṇa in which Kali appears as a fully-developed figure. The text comprises of three frame stories, and Kali appears in the third story (books 5-12).

Here, two asuras – Śumbha and Niśumbha – have wrested the rulership of the three worlds from the devas. The gods call on the goddess – Caṇḍika – for help. At first, Caṇḍika easily defeats the armies of the asuras. Later, facing off against the asura generals Caṇḍa and Muṇḍa and their vast horde, who are attempting to capture her, Caṇḍika’s face blackens with wrath, and Kali emerges from her forehead. Kali easily destroys the horde of asura warriors, and, mounting Caṇḍika’s vehicle, a lion, slays the two generals, presenting their heads to Caṇḍika, who rewards Kali with the epithet Cāmuṇḍā. Later (in the eighth book), Kali fights the demon Raktabīja. Each drop of blood he sheds causes another instance of him to spring up. The devas are helpless against this seemingly indestructible foe, but Kali drinks the blood as it falls to the ground and devours the many instances of the demon. She helps Caṇḍika slay the demon.

The Devī Māhātmya describes Kali as black in colour, wearing the pelt of a tiger and garlanded with human heads. She has a wide, gaping mouth; is fanged, and hollow-eyed; her roars echo to the four directions. She cackles as she decapitates the asuras. She pounds at the earth with her hands. The noises she makes drown out all other sounds. She bears a noose, a spear, a sword, and a staff, topped with a skull. She is both physically grotesque and violent – drinking blood and devouring her enemies. She embodies and expresses anger and fury. She inspires terror and fear.

Kali makes a similar appearance in many of the Purāṇas. In the Liṅga Purāṇa for example, Śiva asks the goddess Pārvatī to destroy the demon Dāruka, who can only be killed by a female. Pārvatī enters Śiva’s throat and, drinking the poison stored in his throat, transforms herself into Kali. She emerges, accompanied by flesh-eating piśācas, and defeats the demon and his army. She becomes so intoxicated with blood-lust that Śiva has to calm her, lest she destroys the entire world in her fury. In the Vāmana Purāṇa, Śiva taunts Pārvatī, calling her “Kali” due to her dark skin. Pārvatī, offended, takes herself off to perform austerities to rid herself of her dark complexion. She succeeds and is henceforth called Gaurī – the golden. Her discarded dark form becomes Kauśikī, a ferocious warrior devī, out of whose fury Kali emerges.

It is within the context of the rise of the tantric traditions that a different view of Kali emerges. No longer is she just the embodiment of the anger or fury of the great goddess, but she progressively emerges as the Mahādevī in her own right – the supreme ontological reality and generative power. She is both transcendent and immanent; present and hidden; the embodiment of Time and beyond Time; everywhere in the cosmos, the elements, the tattvas, and the heart of the sadhaka.

Kali is one of the goddesses in the cluster known as the Mahāvidyās. The most common grouping is of 10 goddesses, although their numbers vary as do the goddesses included in the group. Some scholars have suggested that the Mahāvidyās represent and attempt to create a pan-Indian tradition, reconciling Buddhist, Śaiva, and Vaiṣṇava doctrines. Of the goddesses, Kali is usually granted primacy – she is ādyavidyā – the first vidyā. In some sources, all the other Mahāvidyā devīs are considered to be aspects of Kali. An origin story for the Mahāvidyās in the Mahābhāgavata Purāṇa relates that the goddess Satī argued with Śiva over Dakṣa’s sacrifice. ¹ Angered by Śiva’s insults, the goddess assumed the form of dreadful Kali – and Śiva, afraid, ran from her. The goddess then multiplied herself, taking on ten forms, each of which took up their place in the ten directions, so that no matter where Śiva turned to flee, he was faced by one of the goddesses. Kali tells Śiva not to fear, and introduces each of the Mahāvidyās to him in turn. She says that these forms of the goddess are the most superior forms. ²

According to Rachel Fell McDermott ³ the worship and veneration of Kali stepped out of the shadows of esoteric tantras into the popular limelight during the seventeenth century. The main reasons for the rise in popularity of Kali – particularly in Bengal – she gives as follows. Śākta authors, responding to the growth in popularity of Vaiṣṇava devotion, brought forth a new wave of literature incorporating both Śākta and Vaiṣṇava themes. At the same time, Kali began to be featured in the genre of Bengali epic poetry known as Maṅgalakāyya. In the eighteenth century, Kali is addressed frequently in the Śākta padas – short, lyrical poems of personal devotion and praise. Although she retains many of her time-honored characteristics, Kali’s image is sweetened somewhat. She is addressed in terms of endearment; becoming loving, compassionate, and maternal. Rāmprasād Sen (1718-1775) for example, describes Kali as:

What could be more amazing?
The Beautiful One beautifies Herself
	with heads
	Caṇḍa's and Muṇḍa's! strung
on a necklace.

The sweetest smile breaks out on Her cheerful face;
in a dazzling flash of teeth, lightning shoots
	to sparkle in Her nose jewel
With a wink of Her eyes
sun, fire, and moon
She Stomps
	up
	and down
and the earth
	quakes
	and quakes. 4

These literary developments were accompanied by the building of Kali temples which – although they drew on tantric dhyānas of the goddess, catered for popular modes of pūjā rather than the esoteric forms of worship given in the tantras. Wealthy landowners (zamindars) adopted Kali as their clan deity, worshipping the fierce, martial goddess during a period of political and cultural instability, and their patronage included Śākta festivals, literature, and professional entertainers. In 1764, the East India Company had been granted the right to collect revenue by the Mughal emperor. Bengal suffered two major crop failures (and a smallpox epidemic) and during the Bengal Famine of 1770 (in which over a million people died) devotion to Kali as a goddess of strength and salvation increased.

Kali in the European imagination
Early European contacts with Kali were overwhelmingly negative. She was generally regarded as the most extreme and horrific manifestation of Indian superstition and depravity. Pictorial images depicting her gruesome aspect begin to appear by the end of the eighteenth century. Edward Moor’s The Hindu Pantheon (1810) featured a demonic Kali, the illustration emphasizing her elongated tongue, pendulous breasts, and fangs. Moor noted that the goddess assumed this form to “frighten sinners into repentance” but also noted that her worship included human sacrifice. Charles Coleman describes the worship of Kali in his The Mythology of the Hindus (1832) as “truly horrid” and that during the festivals dedicated to the goddess, “her temples are literally swimming with blood”. ⁵ The missionary William Ward wrote, after visiting the Kalighat temple just outside Calcutta in 1811 that “The bleating of the animals, the number slain, and the ferocity of the people employed, actually made me unwell, and I returned about midnight filled with horror and indignation.” ⁶ The travel writer Fanny Parks, on visiting the same temple in 1850, described the statue of the goddess as “a great black stone cut into the figure of an enormous woman, with a huge head and staring eyes; her tongue hangs out of her mouth, a great broad tongue, down to her breast. The figure is disgusting.” ⁷ Kali gained her lasting association with the so-called cult of “Thuggee” thanks to the work of Captain William Sleeman, who directly linked the worship of Kali to the activities of the murderous thugs ⁸ and Colonel Meadows Taylor’s 1839 novel, Memoirs of a Thug.

Kali against the British
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kali was frequently invoked to fuel anti-colonial fervor in India. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s 1882 novel Anandamath – set during the 1770 famine, compares India under foreign rule to the domain of Kali – a cremation ground and looks forwards to a time in the future when the power of the Mother stretches in all the ten directions. ⁹ Activists such as Bipin Chandra Pal circulated pamphlets suggesting that Kali pūjās should be enacted in every village and that Kali would rouse the energies of the nation – that just as Kali defeated the asuras who had usurped the rule of the gods, so would Bengal drive out the British. It was also suggested that the goddess should be given 108 white goats as a sacrifice – ‘sacrificing a white goat to Kali’ being a euphemism for killing an Englishman. Across India, voices were raised supplicating Kali to begin her dance of destruction and trample down the demonic British.

In 1907 a lithographic print of Kali (advertising a local brand of cigarettes ¹⁰) was produced by the Calcutta Art Studio. Herbert H. Risley, a colonial administrator, deemed it seditious, believing that the garland of heads Kali was adorned with were European and that a decapitated head in the right lower corner of the image was that of a British soldier. ¹¹ The Times correspondent Sir Valentine Chirol, in his 1910 book Indian Unrest, made much of the close relationship between Indian unrest and “the cult of the terrible goddess” and “the horrible and obscene rites of Shakti worship”; quoting a Bengali publication “What have we learned from the Shakti Puja? Sooner or later this great Puja will yield the desired results. When the Hindus realize the true magnificence of the Mother, they will be roused from the slumber of ages, and the auspicious dawn of awakenment will light up the horizon.”

A Bengali newspaper, Jugantar, founded in 1906 by Barindra Kumar Ghosh ¹² and Abhinash Bhattacharya, openly advocated for the overthrow of British rule and featured essays aimed at mobilizing popular support for revolution. Its editor, Bhupendranath Dutt, was arrested and charged with sedition in 1907 and closed down by the authorities in 1908. Jugantar’s activists, as the epigraph with which I began this essay indicates, frequently called upon the goddess in her ferocious forms – Kali, Durga, Kalika, representing her as thirsting for blood; a thirst that could only be quenched by the blood of the invaders.

As Hugh Urban ¹³ points out, the very features of Kali that so horrified Europeans – her garland of human heads, her bloodthirsty visage, her fury – became a unifying force to inspire revolutionary fervor.

Sources
Jasodhara Bagchi. Interrogating Motherhood. Sage Publications India. New Delhi. 2017.
Valentine Chirol. Indian Unrest. Macmillan and Co., London. 1910.
Charles Coleman. The Mythology of the Hindus. Parbury Allen, London. 1832.
Cynthia Ann Humes. “Wrestling with Kali: South Asian and British Constructions of the Dark Goddess” in Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J Kripal (eds) Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West. University of California Press, Berkeley and London. 2003.
Madhu Khanna. Śāktapramodaḥ of Raja Deva Nandan Singh. D.K. Printworld, New Delhi. 2014.
David Kinsley. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahāvidyās. University of California Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1997.
Rachel Fell McDermott. Singing to the Goddess. Poems to Kali and Umā from Bengal. Oxford University Press. Oxford and New York. 2001.
Rachel Fell McDermott. Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The Fortunes of Hindu Festivals. Columbia University Press. New York. 2011.
Leonard Nathan and Clinton Seeley. Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair: Selected Poems to the Mother Goddess. Great Eastern. Boulder. 1982.
Edward Moor. The Hindu Pantheon. J. Johnson, London. 1810.
Fanny Parks. Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during four-and-twenty years in the East with revelations of life in the zenana. Pelham Richardson, London. 1850.
Imma Ramos. Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution. The Trustees of the British Museum/Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. 2020.
Shukla Sanyal. Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal. Cambridge University Press. 2014.
Hugh Urban. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion. University of California Press. 2003.

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