The allure of a blood-drooling goddess clothed in human limbs

The first time, I encountered the image of Kali, the dark goddess ferociously displayed as an old hag with her tongue sticking out staring wildly with intoxicated eyes, wearing a garland of human heads and a skirt of human arms. When I first visited the Kali temple in Kolkata (then Calcutta) as just a teenager, I wondered to myself what the attraction was. As I entered her famous temple at Kali Ghat, the stench of blood and guts on that hot, sultry day was enough to make even a slaughterhouse seem pleasant.

Yet hundreds of people came and went in a constant stream to offer obeisance to her. What on earth was going on? I later encountered her again much later in a Spielberg movie in which she was sensationally portrayed as a bloodthirsty goddess requiring human sacrifice. The filmmaker’s imaginary version of the goddess no doubt came from William Henry Sleeman’s 19th-century accounts of the Thugees he helped suppress while working as a British soldier.

Although there is certainly some truth to the relationship between dacoits and Kali worship during the colonial period, it wouldn’t be the first time that such “heathenry” would be hyperbolically exaggerated to justify oppressive British military action. In any case, it is this image of roguish thugs (our English word derived from “thugee”) worshipping a demonic female that perversely fascinated people in the west who thought of India in both exotic and barbaric terms for much of the land’s history, something we used to call orientalism.

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Given the biased western history of this celebrated Hindu goddess, who is she, really? She was rather obscure until the Devi Mahatmya (The Goddess Panegyric), a 700-verse long song which was most likely composed roughly 1500 years ago but crystallises as a section of the later Sanskrit text known as the Markandeya Purana, the first text to elevate the great goddess to a level on par with the deities Shiva and Vishnu, her male counterparts.

Kept short and in verse form for easy memorisation and recitation, the “glory of the goddess” text refers to the Devi by a number of names, but focuses on a cycle of three stories, the most important of which in Kali’s case is the one that describes the asura named Raktabija (blood drop), who had a boon that allowed each drop of his blood to generate into a new and fully formed demon upon hitting the ground, making him virtually impossible to defeat in battle.

It is precisely in this story that the Devi, created from all of the power of the male deities, appears as Kali, with a dreadful face, looking “utterly gruesome” with emaciated skin and carrying a sword and noose appears (7.5-7.7). With reddened eyes, a lolling tongue, and a massive roar that fills the universe, she attacks the asura army, lapping up each drop of Raktbija’s blood with her tongue before the drops can hit the ground. In this manner, she defeats the evil one.

Now, shouldn’t we fear such an apparently dreadful slayer of demons? If so, then why did the mystic Ramakrishna repeatedly fall into trance calling out “ma, ma,” mother, mother, to her? The Devi Mahatmya ends with her being worshipped with offerings coming from the blood of her worshippers’ own limbs as a form of sacrifice because she is the support of the universe, greater than all of the masculine deities combined. From verse 13.1 of the text onward to its sudden conclusion the reader (or listener) is reassured that the great goddess grants release to all who worship her.

The Devi, in her form as Kali, the black goddess, is scary exactly because she needs to be so in order to defeat those negative forces that challenge the world order to create chaos. Some western feminists focus on her liberating power as a form of female emancipation from the shackles of patriarchal society, but deeper down, she is the one who, from the Hindu perspective, liberates human beings from the endless cycle of birth and death to achieve moksha, ultimate liberation. That is what draws Hindus to her, despite her fearful external appearance. Victory to the Mother!