Kali

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Speaker 6 Hello, the Hindu goddess Kali is often shown as dark blue, fierce, defiant, revelling in her power, and holding in her forearms or more arms a curved sword and a severed head with the cup underneath to catch the blood.

Speaker 6 She may have her tongue out to catch more blood spurting from her enemies, be wearing a garland of more severed heads and a skirt of severed hands.

Speaker 6 And yet she's also a nurturing mother figure, known in West Bengal as Markale.

Speaker 6 She's fiercely protective and can be conventionally beautiful and haggardly, so defying any narrow definition while inspiring deep devotion.

Speaker 6 With me to discuss Kali are Bihane Sakar, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Non-Western Thought at Lancaster University, Julius Lippner, Professor Emeritus of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion at the University of Cambridge, and Jessica Frazier, Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

Speaker 6 Jessica, can you give us an overview of where Kali is revered and in what forms?

Speaker 9 So Kali is really a universal deity who's revered throughout the Hindu world because she represents universal beliefs in Hindu theology to do with the power at the root of the cosmos, to do with the idea of a fundamental truth of reality that if we understand it will bring a kind of wisdom and enlightenment to all of us, she actually pervades worship of almost all of the deities that we find within the Hindu pantheon.

Speaker 9 And that means she's found across the Indian subcontinent, so from the depths of the south, all the way up to the Kali Gat temple in West Bengal, up into the foothills of the Himalayas in Kamakia and Assam or in Nepal at the heart of Kathmandu, you'll find different temples to Kali.

Speaker 9 But even beyond that, if you go to Asia, from Malaysia, where the Kaliaman temple sits in the centre of this urban city, I've even seen Kali inscribed on the walls of small temples in Buddhist China and in seaside temples to the goddess in Thailand.

Speaker 9 And of course, worshippers of Kali are very much present in North America, in contemporary England, and there are temples to Kali all around us now. So she's really a global deity.

Speaker 6 Do we know anything about her origin?

Speaker 9 The origins of gods are always very hard to trace.

Speaker 9 So we have to kind of look for roots that seem to suggest what might have been the sources of the idea.

Speaker 9 One of those roots, I think, probably lies in the indigenous belief in goddesses of misfortune that we find throughout the temples, tribes, villages of very ancient India.

Speaker 9 So if we go back about 3,000 years to the India of 1000, 1,500 BC, Clearly there were tribes, villages across the subcontinent and this is a global pattern.

Speaker 9 People almost certainly revered goddesses who represented all the difficulties and dangers that nature brings.

Speaker 9 Illness, drought, famine, weather problems, all of these things that can come at any time. You worship local goddesses to help bring you protection.

Speaker 9 So Kali seems to inherit that older, kind of non-pre-textual ancient heritage. But we can also maybe see two other goddesses who contribute to the meanings of Kali.

Speaker 9 If we look at Vedic literature, so these are the ancient hymns written in Sanskrit from around 1000 BC, we hear of two goddesses who perhaps feed into what we know about her.

Speaker 9 One is the goddess of chaos, niriti, disorder. She's described as associated with everything that can make the world fall apart, sort of danger, difficulty, weather problems, etc.

Speaker 9 And the hymns to her ask, please keep these dangers away from us, please protect us. And one says, when we fall, may we rise again and step forward.

Speaker 9 So there's a sense of recovery from what is difficult. The other goddess is the goddess Night, Ratri.

Speaker 9 And you might think Night would be a negative or dark goddess, but actually she's prayed to as someone who brings peace, an indiscriminate blessing of rest to all beings.

Speaker 9 It's night that brings comfort and regeneration. And we get two quite telling messages in those hymns.
One is, Goddess Night, please protect us from attackers who may come.

Speaker 9 And Goddess Night, please show us the way through the dark forest paths so we can reach our home. These three sources give us three meanings of Kali.

Speaker 9 One, that she's about helping us overcome misfortune. Two, that she's about helping us face unexpected, chaotic disturbances but still recover from them.

Speaker 9 And finally, three, that she's about the idea that darkness can bring a kind of wisdom, rest, and peace.

Speaker 6 And by praying to her, you can get some satisfaction from one of these sources.

Speaker 9 Later, these goddesses stop being revered as much, but what appears to take up these meanings is Kali, who's then prayed to by Hindus across the whole of India thereafter in the century of Swaning.

Speaker 9 And the prayer to her exactly brings a kind of a peace and a resilience to all of these problems that life can bring.

Speaker 6 Thank you very much.

Speaker 6 Julius, Julius Nippner, how would you know it was Kali in the way she's depicted?

Speaker 10 That would be quite distinctive. As Jessica hinted, she's associated with darkness, with night, and Kali is the feminine form of Kala in Sanskrit, which means both time and blackness, darkness.

Speaker 10 So she's always depicted as very dark in some form, either deep blue or black. She therefore lives up to her name in that respect.

Speaker 10 The annual festival of Kali is an autumnal festival in Bengal and she is often depicted in pavilions or pandals, as they are called, where she is standing on the supine body of her spouse or consort Shiva.

Speaker 10 And she has a number of hands, as the listener may be familiar with.

Speaker 10 Hindu gods and goddesses are given multiple hands, not because they are actually supposed to have them really, but because this is an artistic device in which different ayudhas or implements or or weapons are placed in the hand in order to identify that particular god or goddess and their attributes.

Speaker 10 So, Kali can have anything from four to, in some rare cases, twenty-four hands, and each one holds an ayudha or weapon or implement expressing her power, expressing stories from the myths and so on, where she plays a prominent part.

Speaker 10 She is often depicted as having a garland of severed heads, which are usually described as the different passions which she has conquered.

Speaker 10 She is depicted as having a girdle of severed hands, which is often described as having control over and abolishing the karma, the effect of good and bad deeds of human beings so that they can be utterly purified.

Speaker 10 So Kali, in that sense, is a great liberator who can conquer the things that keep us chained to our lower natures and to the world through devotion to her.

Speaker 6 What ought we to know about Hindu ideas of the Supreme Being and Shakta in particular?

Speaker 10 Well, traditionally, Hindu religious traditions are divided into three major strands, two of which regard the male form as representations of the Supreme Being, the Vaishnava and the Shaivite strands.

Speaker 10 But the third strand, called the Shakta strand, which a term that derives from the Sanskrit word Shakti, which means power or energy.

Speaker 10 The third strand has the main representation of the Supreme Being in a female form.

Speaker 10 And you see that Kali is very often associated with that strand, the Shakta strand, the power, the energy of the Supreme Being.

Speaker 6 Bihani, thank you very much. Bihani, talking about the worship of Kali, how was she worshipped at first? Do we know that?

Speaker 5 There are several early texts in Sanskrit that give us an idea about how Kali was worshipped in the early period.

Speaker 5 In a very ancient text called the Harivanksha, which might have been composed around the third, fourth centuries AD, Kali is said to be worshipped with animal sacrifice, she adores alcohol, those are the two things that she requires in worship.

Speaker 5 It is also said in that work that if a person wholeheartedly prays to her, that she would protect him or her in situations of grave danger.

Speaker 5 Say, you were lost in the, you were trapped in a cave, you were swimming out in the sea, you were trapped by a brigand, those are the situations that Kali will come to you and protect you.

Speaker 5 In a southern text called the Chilapattikaram, which is an old Tamil text, Kali is worshipped by a raider community before they set off on raids.

Speaker 5 And it is a lady, a lady, a woman votary who's said to be possessed by Kali, who dances a wonderful dance

Speaker 5 and then asks the raiders to feel the energy of the goddess and then go off into battle.

Speaker 5 So there would be Bacchanalian elements in her worship as well, with dance, with singing, with drink, and certainly animal animal sacrifice.

Speaker 5 The offering of blood to placate or calm her hot-blooded nature is a key feature of worship.

Speaker 6 I think my ears pricked up a little bit when alcohol was mentioned. What place did that play?

Speaker 5 If you look at the early myths, particularly in this early text, the Harivamsha, Kali is said to be nocturnal.

Speaker 5 She dances in the night sky, surrounded by a throng of ghosts, a very beautiful woman who is also one and the same with the sky and the monsoon.

Speaker 5 She flashes like lightning, she is blue-black like the monsoon clouds, and she always carries a cup that is filled with this divine liquor.

Speaker 5 So it's liquor that is celestial liquor, and it's the liquor that she loves to drink and which gives her the joy and freedom to dance as she wills.

Speaker 6 We've heard that West Bengal is a centre for Kali worship.

Speaker 10 What do we see a bit there?

Speaker 5 Kali is the most important goddess for Bengalis. Kali is the queen of all Bengalis hearts.

Speaker 5 In one of the most important temples to Kali, which is which stands in Dakshineshwar, if you go for an evening Arati illustration, you will find many, many pilgrims gathered outside.

Speaker 5 And once you enter the the sanctum sanctorum it's really a mesmeric experience there are flowers everywhere there are lamps there is the smell of incense and there in the middle is the magnificent goddess draped in beautiful saris in brocade but of course

Speaker 5 in beautiful jewellery diamonds and golds but of course

Speaker 5 a glorious queen and as the worship begins the worship is accompanied by drums creating a really heightened and powerful primal experience.

Speaker 10 This is very true but Kali worship and I've attended many occasions where Kali is worshipped either in a makeshift pavilion or in a temple because I grew up in West Bengal and my wife is Bengali so you see there the beating of drums as Bihani has said you see the ringing of bells, the clashing of bells you see quite often ululation and it wakes up as it were the goddess and it wakes yourself up it brings her attention to you she is what they call in Sanskrit a Jagratha goddess that is a goddess who is awake a goddess who is not sleepy in any sense she's attentive to her worshippers she's always awake to whatever needs her worshippers have and she is as has been indicated, a protectress.

Speaker 10 She protects the devotee.

Speaker 6 Can I come to you then, Jessica? There are several origin stories for Kali. Can you tell us about Raktabija?

Speaker 9 As Julia said, the goddess is addressed in the presence of people. It's a bit like the Eucharist.
She can enter into a physical form and be present for people.

Speaker 9 But all of this is given a kind of theological meaning, particularly in relation to a series of texts, a whole genre of texts that arose in India in around 500 to 700, 800, 900 BC, sorry, CE, called the Puranas, which tell stories about the gods.

Speaker 9 And each god in these stories is depicted as the ultimate reality. And their theology is unpacked through these wonderful narrative tales.

Speaker 9 Now, the tale about the goddess tells us in some ways what she's about. So one of the most famous ones was called the Devi Mahatmya, the glory of the goddess.

Speaker 9 And it tells a story where a king who's lost his kingdom and a merchant who's lost his fortune both are depressed are hopeless desolate and they go searching for consolation so it's a bit like the consolations of philosophy with Brotheus but actually what they're shown is the goddess and when they ask who this goddess is they were told a story the goddess is all the light of reality but also all the darkness the goddess is creation but she's also destruction the goddess is the delusion that we suffer from but also the key to enlightenment and wisdom and we find that she's stronger than all the other gods gods put together.

Speaker 9 So we have a very particular vision of the divine which C. Ji Jung talked about the idea that if you shine a bright light, the shadows become darker.
And he pointed this actually at Western thought.

Speaker 9 He said, if you have a God who's meant to be only the good, then you have a problem with explaining the darkness in the world.

Speaker 9 Kali is meant to be a deity who really takes responsibility for all of it and says, all of this is the world we live in and the conditions of life and existence itself.

Speaker 9 So this sets the scene for a fabulous story about the goddess where she's shown to be strong because she's the only one who can conquer the demons who attack the gods regularly.

Speaker 9 This is kind of the legend of the goddess. She conquers many demons but the worst of them is a bit like the hydra in Greek myth.
It's a demon who, when you try to kill it, it gets stronger.

Speaker 9 So as the hydra grew new heads when you lop one off, so this demon, Raktabija, as soon as his blood hits the ground, it becomes a new demon. What are they going to do?

Speaker 9 Every time they start to kill him, more demons grow. The only thing that can defeat them is this extreme form of the goddess, this wild, uninhibited form of the goddess, which is Kali.

Speaker 9 She's able to drink the blood, and as a result of this, in her fierce, wild, uninhibited frenzy, the demon is defeated.

Speaker 9 And this allows this kind of strength and holism that is there in all the gods to be released and to conquer all evil and darkness.

Speaker 6 Can you come in here, Mihaly?

Speaker 5 This entire Raktabija myth is so rich in symbolism because, to add to Jessica's point, Kali appears as an embodiment of the goddess's anger at this point.

Speaker 5 So, the demons at the stage when Raktabija is described threaten the goddess, the main goddess of the Devi Mahatmya, with terrible acts of violence redolent of rape.

Speaker 5 And at this point, the goddess is said to become so angry that her face becomes black, and out of this blackness steps forth the goddess Kali, who is her anger embodied.

Speaker 5 So, this particular origin myth symbolizes Kali as an embodiment of anger at violence, especially patriarchal violence. But there are two other origin myths as well.

Speaker 5 One which I mentioned, which was in the Harivanksha, where she is the sister of the Hindu god Krishna, and she rescues him just as he is about to be killed by his wicked uncle.

Speaker 5 And there she is associated with the night, with everything nocturnal, not just the night of worldly existence, but also the final night when the entire universe is destroyed.

Speaker 5 So, in that particular myth, she is celestial and aerial. But there's another origin myth, lesser known, where she is the black skin that is sloughed off the goddess Parvati.

Speaker 5 The goddess Parvati is the goddess of sexuality, she is the consort of the great Hindu god Shiva, and one day it is said in an old text, the old Skanda Purana, that Shiva teases Parvati because she is dark, and Parvati also wants to gain a son.

Speaker 5 So, to acquire a son and to become fair, she performs penances.

Speaker 5 At the end of which she cries happy tears because her penances have been successful, she jumps into the the pond that has emerged out of her tears and washes off her dark skin, and out of that dark skin, the self that she rejects, the self that she is unhappy about, uncomfortable about, puzzled about, emerges this glorious, beautiful, dark goddess who not only protects but also symbolizes everything that one might perhaps be uncomfortable about.

Speaker 6 Thank you. Julius, there are so many different stories about the origin of Kali.

Speaker 10 Kali is the feminine form of Kala in Sanskrit, which means black or dark. And so she has been often associated with that aspect of creation before

Speaker 10 the bringing into being of all sorts of specific So this is the shrouding, enveloping cover of the whole universe and that is what Kali was and then through her we have all the individual creations of the world.

Speaker 10 But also as Bihani has mentioned, another story, I mean Hinduism has so many origin stories in order to add different aspects in different times and for different needs of our own particular and community needs.

Speaker 10 And so also, Kali comes from the darkened, angry brow of the goddess Durga and so embodies her anger, but always against evildoers and evil.

Speaker 10 So Kali is really in that sense a liberating and freeing goddess. Her fierce aspect, I mean she can have, and I hope we go on to talk about this, much more tender and

Speaker 10 as they say in Sanskrit, saumya, benign aspects, but her fierce aspect, the aspect of her anger, is always directed against evil and evildoers.

Speaker 6 Thank you.

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Speaker 6 Jessica, what other deities have Kali's qualities?

Speaker 9 Well, Kali is interesting because in some ways she fits into this big Hindu theology of divine energy.

Speaker 9 There's a notion of Shakti, which Julius mentioned, a kind of a power that's in everything. Shakti literally means the power, capacity.

Speaker 9 And that power is understood in almost every Hindu theology to flow through all of us and through all of nature.

Speaker 9 And when people talk about it in itself, in the abstract, if you like, the divine power, they think of it as this feminine energy.

Speaker 9 And it expresses itself in different texts in everything, but particularly in women.

Speaker 9 So as Bhihani says, there's an interesting notion here of power as something that women have in a way that men don't, and particularly where it's able to fight against oppression.

Speaker 9 So it's kind of a brilliant counterpoint, if you like, to political, social power, even physical strength, that the female power is something that can oppose that.

Speaker 9 And that idea expresses itself in Kali, but also in a range of other goddesses, famously in the Tantric tradition, which is a kind of an antinomian, unorthodox, slightly subversive tradition of very important kind of ritual and theological beliefs in India from the medieval period on.

Speaker 9 In Tantra, Kali is one of a range of goddesses, some of whom are more obviously benign. There's ten Mahavidyas, great wisdom females.

Speaker 9 One is the beautiful maiden, the Kumari. But one is even more extreme than Kali.

Speaker 9 Chinna Masta, for instance, who is often depicted beheading herself, drinking her own blood, standing astride a couple who were involved in sexual union,

Speaker 9 surrounded more naked, more radically expressing sexuality, the body,

Speaker 9 uninhibited power, the fundamental forces of nature. So we see Kali kind of on a spectrum.

Speaker 9 She embodies all that nature can be, the bright, beautiful spring and the beautiful creatures of it, the parts of it which are to do with darkness, death. But it's interesting, the focus on blood.

Speaker 9 When Westerners saw blood in images of Kali, they assumed it meant violence. But blood can mean many things.
It's what keeps us alive. It's in childbirth there's going to be blood.

Speaker 9 For women, blood is part of fertility.

Speaker 9 So there's a sense in which Kali is part of a much larger set of symbolisms to do with female power, to do with the margins fighting back against elite power, and to do with nature itself encompassing a range of realities from blood to birth to death, all of which have to ultimately be affirmed as part of life.

Speaker 6 You want to come in again, Bahania?

Speaker 5 I'd like to expand actually on Jessica's wonderful point about the the the symbolism of blood because in Kali's case it's deeply redolent of the female. Women encounter blood at a creative level.

Speaker 5 I feel that men encounter blood in violent contexts, but women encounter blood every month and it's a symbol of their fertility.

Speaker 5 So, in Carly's case, blood is a profoundly female symbol of fertility, of sexuality, of creativity.

Speaker 5 And again, Jessica mentioned life. I think this, in Carly's case, it is a symbol nosh of violence, posh of life.

Speaker 6 Julius, you want to comment?

Speaker 10 And just a tiny little addition to what Jessica and Bihani have said, Kali is also associated quite often with war and with

Speaker 10 the destruction, as I said, of evildoers in and through battle and through war. And there again, you have the association with blood.

Speaker 10 So, Kali is associated with all these things, and yet there are so many gentle aspects to her, the other side of Kali, which sort of completes the figure.

Speaker 10 She's not only a one-sided goddess, but she is also one who is, the Sanskrit word is saumya, benign, kind,

Speaker 10 and the fierce form of Kali is Ugra. So you have the two combinations of fierceness and gentleness and kindness, both of them married into Kali.
Josek, sorry.

Speaker 9 Sorry, one more thing. But just I think that question about how she fits into the wider range of goddesses can also be seen on a global scale, comparatively across cultures.

Speaker 9 So many cultures have an image of a wisdom goddess. We see it in the Greek mythology in Athena, who's also a warrior, also represents wisdom of some kind.
We see it in Isis in Greek mythology.

Speaker 9 We see it in the Hebrew Bible in the figure of wisdom in the wisdom literature, in Proverbs and Job.

Speaker 9 That's a very common thing, and it probably comes from an ancient Indo-European root. Probably there's a source that they share.

Speaker 9 But what happens in India is this image of wisdom kind of comes through and merges with the existence of indigenous goddesses who represent small-scale tribal culture, who represent everyday women's experiences, and who represent misfortune, suffering and difficulty.

Speaker 9 And we get something new, a kind of wisdom which is about A. When you experience suffering, Some of it you can fight, but some of it cannot be conquered.
Illness cannot always be conquered.

Speaker 9 Kali has strongly associated many images with death as the suffering you can't get away from.

Speaker 9 So in the end, Kali is about the wisdom it takes to face the reality of life unfrightened.

Speaker 9 She also, in a sense, because she's in her imagery, she's surrounded with parts of corpses, she's surrounded with blood, she partly signifies a willingness to be able to face death.

Speaker 9 But she's also shown as a woman who's probably of low caste, a woman who is not to do with the cities, she's to do with the villages, she's darker skinned, so she's not the North Indian urban elite, she's something else.

Speaker 9 but she's strength in that context. And that comes up later when she's harnessed almost politically against the colonial establishment.

Speaker 9 She becomes a symbol of the power that is there lurking in a minority, ready to show itself and fight for the good.

Speaker 6 Mihan, I understand she's been an inspiration for many poets. Can you develop that?

Speaker 5 Yes, Kali, from the early medieval period in India right down to the 18th century, has been a muse for the greatest of poets.

Speaker 5 I have, in fact, an example with me from a 12th-century collection of Sanskrit poetry, and I selected it for today because it's in a way it's very atypical of Kali.

Speaker 5 We find that the stereotypical image of Kali with lots of ghastly cut-off heads and blood, but in this particular verse, she is treated as the night sky in full full glory.

Speaker 5 So I'll read that out as an example

Speaker 5 Shikhande Khandendu Shashidinakarao Karna Yugale Gale Tara Hara Staralam Uduchakram Chakucha Yoh Tarit Kanchi Sandhya Sichaya Rachita Kali Tadayam Tava Kalpah Kalpa Vyuparama Vidheo Vijayate

Speaker 5 on your crest the sliver of the moon, the moon and the sun on your ears, round your neck a necklace of stars, and on your breasts the constellations glimmering, your girdle, the lightning, arranged on a raiment of the dusk.

Speaker 5 O Kali, supreme are these your ornaments, ordained thus during the end of the universe.

Speaker 6 Thank you. Jessica, can we come to you here? Caring and mothering and gentle side has been hinted at more than once in this conversation.
Can you develop it?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 9 as Bihani said, there's a movement that arises in medieval India which wants to focus on emotional devotion to the gods. Love of all kinds, deep and intense, is encouraged on a wide scale.

Speaker 9 It's called bhakti and it affects everything. Suddenly, poets spring up and compose beautiful songs to the deities across the subcontinent.

Speaker 9 Now, in some ways, this is easy with gods like Krishna, who's about beauty and love, or gods like Vishnu, who's about governance and sovereignty.

Speaker 9 But what are they going to say to Kali? And exactly as Bihani says, they develop a beautiful poetry that's about that benevolence of the protectress.

Speaker 9 But maybe it's also worth saying

Speaker 9 it doesn't hide or elide the dark sides as well. So we get, for instance, there's a wonderful poet called Ramprasad Sen,

Speaker 9 and he talks about Kali as the mother. He says, Mother, mother, you are the beauty of darkness, a luminous darkness, a darkness that inspires and brings brightness to us.

Speaker 9 So there's a kind of a play with opposite imagery, which means that there's a darkness that actually can bring a benevolence to us.

Speaker 9 He also talks a lot about suffering, but where we see protection from suffering.

Speaker 9 So he says, we're sitting in the lap of the cosmos, the lap of the mother, and yet we seem to think we're in a prison made of suffering. So there's a sense that we're being

Speaker 9 exhorted to shift our attitude and see the benevolence of the universe around us, even when we're facing difficulty. And a lot of this is aimed at being able to deal with death.
So that he says,

Speaker 9 Kali, Kali,

Speaker 9 when death comes and grabs you by the hair, which God will you call to? Kali, Kali, I will call to you, and then what can death do?

Speaker 9 So we have an interesting situation where Kali is depicted almost as a slightly volatile, charismatic, complicated, but loving mother, right?

Speaker 9 The mother who loves you but is honest with you about the circumstances of the world.

Speaker 9 So while other gods are being worshipped as a lover, a lord, a friend, this is a deity who's being worshipped as someone who acknowledges the difficult sides of reality but helps you to have the strength to go through it in your own right.

Speaker 10 Julius, well, this is just a hymn to Kali by a great devotee of Kali, a Bengali devotee of Kali called Kamalakantha Bhattacharya.

Speaker 10 And Bengal of course as you know has been associated particularly with Kali and she has been called the presiding deity of West Bengal. And Kamalakantha's dates are 1769 to 1821.

Speaker 10 And he was, as I say, a great devotee of Kali and many of his poems and hymns to Kali continue into the Bengali culture and Bengali consciousness till today.

Speaker 10 And here's a short hymn from him to the dark goddess. Is my black mother Shama, which means dark or black in Bengali, really black? People say Kali is black, but my heart doesn't agree.

Speaker 10 If she's black, how can she light up the world? Sometimes my mother is white, sometimes yellow, blue, and red. I cannot fathom her at all.
My whole life has passed trying to do so.

Speaker 10 She is matter, then spirit, then complete void. It's easy to see how Kamala Kantha, thinking these things, went crazy.

Speaker 6 When that was recited to, we're talking about the time when there were a lot of British people, people from Western Europe, in India at the time. How do they react to a poem like that?

Speaker 9 So I think when the Brits and the other European powers came to India, they were already predisposed to think of it as an uncivilised place that needed to be governed.

Speaker 9 And Kali sort of confirmed that to them. They didn't understand it.
They looked at, they didn't, actually, they didn't read, I think, most of that poetry. They saw the pictures.

Speaker 9 And what they saw looked like some kind of Indian image of the devil, but female. So even worse in their minds, right?

Speaker 9 Everything that was being hidden and elided from culture, the body, feminine power, sexuality, class,

Speaker 9 was being kind of brought to the fore in Kali imagery. And blood, of course, and you know, severed limbs.
And they think, well, it must, she must mean violence and malevolence.

Speaker 9 And you can see traces of that if you look at things like Rudyard Kipling's poem Gangadin.

Speaker 9 He writes this, he's a wonderful writer, but he writes a poem which is basically about Kali representing the evil of Hindu religion,

Speaker 9 sort of worshipped by violent thugs. And the only good character is Gangadin, who's basically a turncoat who betrays his people and becomes a good supporter of the British, you know.

Speaker 9 And that story is taken up in Hollywood version with Kerry Grant, and it finds its way into Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where the ultimate bad guy is Carly.

Speaker 9 And so it really has a modern kind of message. We still find that prejudice, really, that rather uninformed picture, making its way into modern consciousness.

Speaker 9 However, there is a happy side of the story. There are also those who tried to say there's much more going on here.
One of the most famous was a man called Sir John Woodruff.

Speaker 9 He was born in Kolkata, sent back to England for his schooling. He went to Oxford, but came back to India again and became a lawyer.

Speaker 9 He did have an encounter with Indian tantric religion, the beliefs in the goddess there, and ended up devoting much of his life to writing books which were about explaining the deeper philosophical background.

Speaker 9 He collaborated in this with a Bengali intellectual called Atul Bahari Ghose, and the two of them kind of became a combined writer called Sir Arthur Avalon, a name meant to appeal to all the esoteric theosophical interests of the time, explaining how there is a much deeper insight into the nature of reality and the potentialities of the mind and the body.

Speaker 9 And that kind of Western will to understand more clearly what's going on here carries on into the modern period with scholars like David Kinsley, who was one of the people who brought back the study of Kali.

Speaker 9 In a book called The Sword and the Flute, he said, Well, Hinduism, like other religions, has a bright picture of the divine, Krishna, beauty, love, but also it acknowledges this other side of the peace and wisdom that come through acknowledging dark and difficulty.

Speaker 9 So, that's Kali.

Speaker 9 Kinsley wrote many books, and towards the end of his life, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he taught almost until the end, and his very last class apparently was on healing and the transformative vision of Kali.

Speaker 9 And he made it clear to his students that he felt able, better able to deal with the realities of life and mortality by having spent his life dealing with a goddess who was about the wisdom that comes of understanding these things.

Speaker 6 Bihani,

Speaker 6 in what way does Kali seem to empower women?

Speaker 5 I think there are things in the myths themselves when we learn about the stories of Kali's birth that there is a vital connection with womanhood.

Speaker 5 The story about her jumping out of Parvati's rejected black skin always,

Speaker 5 for me at least, always represented a kind of duality within ideas of femininity.

Speaker 5 That while Gauri Bharvati represents the good, dutiful consort, Kali is the consortless, free, slightly mad other half.

Speaker 5 So Kali represents aspects of womanhood that in normal day-to-day life I think women find it difficult to express. Another thing that Kali is associated with is hunger, for instance.

Speaker 5 She's always a very hungry goddess. She manifests herself at the time that the universe is completely destroyed, swallowing all creatures into her mouth.

Speaker 5 Hunger is something that, you know, during most of historical time in India, women and hunger were not really, you could express your hunger as a woman when you're pregnant, but otherwise, it's not really the appropriate thing.

Speaker 5 Dancing in the skies, completely naked, joyful freedom. I think all the aspects of womanhood that

Speaker 5 society condemned and, in a way, still feels uncomfortable about, Kali represents.

Speaker 5 And I think in that sense, there has always been a strong connection with womanhood.

Speaker 9 Just agreeing with that, and there's this extraordinary sense in which you see in Kali and the goddesses around her expression of aspects of femininity you see almost nowhere else in world history, and you see it as a positive.

Speaker 9 So, for instance, one of the Mahavidyas is Dhrumavati.

Speaker 6 She's an old woman.

Speaker 9 She's a poor woman. And if you go to India, to poor areas, you'll see old women who perhaps are widowed and have no one who can take care of them, and they're facing a difficult life.

Speaker 9 These people are often the bottom of society. We're talking about from a class perspective, the absolute margins.

Speaker 9 And yet, this woman is elevated into being a form of the divine, right, and has a kind of power and insight to give that you don't find anywhere else.

Speaker 9 And Kali, it's interesting because in Bengal, often she's seen as the same as Parvati, who's a mother, who's married. But actually, in images of Kali, she's always autonomous.

Speaker 9 If she's with her husband, he's not her husband, he's actually her consort, she's the dominant one. He does not control her, and she's almost never pictured with children.

Speaker 9 She's a very unusual, striking image where often the West expects a nature goddess to be somehow simply affirmative and positive.

Speaker 9 Kali represents a kind of freedom, fierceness, strength that you see almost nowhere else.

Speaker 6 Julius, you see a link, as I understand it, between Kali and the Indian independence movement. What's that?

Speaker 10 Well, Kali played a very important role in the Indian independence movement, starting already in the latter part of the 19th century and going into the 20th century.

Speaker 10 And she, of course, was made a very important symbol and figure of the independence movement mainly in Bengal because

Speaker 10 but not exclusively so but also in Kerala because she was really associated as a very Bengali goddess.

Speaker 10 Now the fact that she was revolutionary in character as Jessica has indicated that she went against convention, that she was an independent goddess.

Speaker 10 She's often shown in a superior position to her consort Shiva if he's ever portrayed with her.

Speaker 10 In fact, she's often portrayed in Bengal as standing upon dynamically, one foot forward, the supine form of Shiva. And so she is the dynamism of the Bengali culture and consciousness.

Speaker 10 And during the independence movement, you had great devotion to Kali.

Speaker 10 She represented revolution, she represented the breaking of conventional moulds, she represented going against the British rule, the shackles of British rule.

Speaker 10 She was often regarded as the symbol of liberation and revolution and freedom. And many Bengalis resorted to Kali as a symbol of independence.

Speaker 6 Thank you. Bhihani, we're coming towards the end now.
Can you tell me what aspects of Kali are most valued now and why?

Speaker 5 Kali is a boon giver now. If you go to her temple in Dakshineshwar, mostly you will have a wish, a deep wish, and it is believed that if you ask the goddess there, she will grant you that wish.

Speaker 5 Kali is also a fierce protector, a mother who will protect you in a primal way,

Speaker 5 like a tigress will fight all battles to protect you. Kali is also a symbol of non-duality in that much of orthodox Hindu beliefs is based on divisive practices of pure and impure,

Speaker 5 which is why, in many ways,

Speaker 5 substances like alcohol are used in Kali's worship.

Speaker 5 Because they're interdicted substances in conventional Hindu worship, they are brought into Kali's worship because Kali transcends these dichotomies of pure and impure.

Speaker 5 And in her, these divisions and binaries are combined so that she is transcendent, absolute non-dualism.

Speaker 6 Last word, Jessica?

Speaker 9 I think sometimes in the Western theologies, you think of God as being about good at the expense of bad.

Speaker 9 If you look back to Kali, some of the imagery of her as the creation, but also the void, goes back to a very old Indian hymn, which says, Before any existence existed, there was an absolute nothingness.

Speaker 9 Kali is both, and it reminds us that, in a way, if you prefer life over the void, if you prefer existence over non-existence, you have to accept that the whole process will be there.

Speaker 9 There will be birth, there will be death, there will be suffering and struggle, as well as happiness.

Speaker 9 And so, a kind of holism that is important is embodied in Kali's theology.

Speaker 6 Thank you very much. Thanks, Jessica.
It's Jessica Frasier, Julus Lippner, and Bihani Sarkar.

Speaker 6 Next week, pollination: the interplay of flowers and insects that ensures the survival of plant life and of our life. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 13 And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Speaker 6 Right, so thank you all very much.

Speaker 6 What we're going to do now is more, if you don't mind, for the podcast.

Speaker 6 You're going to do the talking this time.

Speaker 6 And the idea is we'll start by saying

Speaker 6 And continue by saying, are there things that you would like to have said you didn't have time to say?

Speaker 5 Just adding to the lovely points that Jessica made, and that

Speaker 5 Kali in the esoteric literature is the the starting point of everything.

Speaker 5 She is a source in which all life, everything really dissolves, but also the point at which from which everything erupts and emerges. So she is the void that swallows all, but also creates all.

Speaker 6 Jessica?

Speaker 9 Just one wonderful image of her power as a rebel was that there was a brand of cigarettes produced while the independence movement was ongoing called Kali Swaraj.

Speaker 9 Swaraj, of course, was the phrase that meant independence, self-rule against the Brits. And in that image, you saw Kali with the the heads.

Speaker 9 I think in one version, one of the heads she has around her neck, if you look closely, was the head of a British officer.

Speaker 9 So there was a real sense that Kali could express an active revolutionary power.

Speaker 6 When you pray, do you give gifts in the prayer, or is it do you go to do you have to pray in a temple?

Speaker 10 What's the procedure? No, in that sense, perhaps unlike

Speaker 10 the Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism has two forms of worship. There's a great stress on personal worship, on the individual's worship, and then sometimes temple worship.
And it's very common for

Speaker 10 Bengali Hindu homes in particular to have their own shrine to

Speaker 10 the deities or to the forms of the deity, because there's ultimately only one Supreme Being in Hinduism, which appears in different forms. And in that sense, it's a kind of polymorphic monotheism.

Speaker 10 It's a belief in one God that appears in different forms. And so, Kali is, in some Hindu minds, a manifestation of the Supreme Being.

Speaker 10 In many other Hindu minds, she is a representation of the Supreme Being itself.

Speaker 10 So,

Speaker 10 you pray at home, you have your shrine at home, but you also have temples to Kali, or you have temples to the goddess where Kali has her own shrine.

Speaker 10 So there are different ways of doing it, but I suppose above all, since Hinduism is a very personal religion, you pray to Kali in your heart, you pray to Kali in

Speaker 10 your soul. So

Speaker 10 she's omnipresent, she's everywhere, and you can pray to her at any time you feel you need. She removes obstacles, she is the great

Speaker 10 protectress, she protects her devotee. And so, whenever there's danger, whenever there's a problem that looms on the horizon, the heart goes to Kali.

Speaker 9 And I think there's a lovely image. So, back to the Western interpreters, but one of the Germans love to explore Indian culture.

Speaker 9 One of the people who was interested in this and went to India was an old writer called Hermann Hesse, who in his book Siddhartha has this vision at the end where he says, look, the insight that he gets from India seems to be you have to either love it all, all that life entails, ultimately accept it, or none of it will really mean anything.

Speaker 9 And sometimes I think Kali expresses this idea that if you want to be born, you're going to have to take the whole go of what that entails. So, Kali brings a kind of wisdom.

Speaker 9 It's interesting where a lot of other theologies are about escaping from the world.

Speaker 9 She's partly about being able to face it and to be able to accept all that it involves as the kind of the gift of existence that we're benefiting from at each moment.

Speaker 5 I would like to say that in a lot of the early theology, Kali is also called Kalaratri, the night of destruction.

Speaker 5 And she is an eschatological goddess who is associated with the final night of destruction, that is to say, with Sanghara.

Speaker 5 The idea of time in Hindu belief is three-phase. There's a point of

Speaker 5 creation, then there is stability, and then there is destruction when everything is destroyed, and then the whole process starts again.

Speaker 5 So, Kali emerges at that final phase when everything needs to be destroyed in order for the cosmos to be reborn.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 death in the Hindu imagination is not a negative negative idea.

Speaker 5 It's needed for life to go on. It's natural, and Kali is part of the idea of natural death so that new things can be born.

Speaker 6 Would you like to say anything?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I love the idea, and I think it's really interesting that,

Speaker 9 in some ways, as Kinsley points out, to get involved in a deep love of Kali is to try and find that psychological space where you yourself can face these things in the world.

Speaker 9 There's something quite existential about Kali in a weird kind of way. I think of this in the poems.
As I said, the other gods, you might worship Krishna as your love.

Speaker 9 You might worship another god as your dear friend. You might worship a god as your lord or even as your child.

Speaker 9 But this particular imagery of like love for a mother, a mother who can be difficult, a mother who is teasing, a mother who has had to force you to deal with difficult things, but who actually is helping you grow, who is helping you to learn and to become wise,

Speaker 9 a mother who is going to tell you the truth and you're going to have to take it in.

Speaker 9 There's a kind of an interesting psychological journey, I think, that people go on in the literature of Kali, the imagery of Kali, about what it would look like to face the whole of reality, the whole of life in some way.

Speaker 9 So there's, I think, a profound psychological aspect to it.

Speaker 10 Julius, what I want to say a little more about is the ways that Kali was appropriated, not always with attention to her cultural roots, by the Western feminist movement.

Speaker 10 The way that Kali represented rage

Speaker 10 against the oppression that women had to suffer in the West from patriarchal forces and powers. Kali represented emancipation, liberation.

Speaker 10 She represented a challenge against the established order. And there didn't seem to be much in Western tradition as a symbol to turn to.

Speaker 10 So quite a number of the early feminists in particular chose Kali as that symbol because she broke up Western platitudes about freedom, about

Speaker 10 equality and so on. And she challenged the way that women were being, or felt themselves to be repressed.
So she played an important symbolic role in the feminist movement of the West.

Speaker 9 It's also interesting, I think, that India has had to go on a long journey of figuring out how it feels about Kali. So that you see some image.

Speaker 9 If you go to Nepal, she's Bhairavi, she's fierce, she has fangs, she's terrifying.

Speaker 9 If you go to the deep south, you might find her, Kali, as the goddess, but also the maiden covered in flowers, in love with her husband.

Speaker 9 And if I go, she often has a tongue-lolling as a kind of a beyond-all boundaries expression.

Speaker 9 If I go to certain regions, friends will say, oh, no, no, she's always scared that she's going to disobey and embarrass her husband, which is a domestication of what was actually a much wilder image.

Speaker 9 So I think even within Hindu culture, you get some who want to see her as more of a mother figure, more placid, more calm. Some who want to see her as wild and unbridled and unbound.

Speaker 9 And actually, if you look at the broader outline of history, particularly in India, it doesn't have to be all one thing.

Speaker 9 You know, that's true, I think, in every religious tradition: that God can be sometimes the dispenser of justice and sometimes the dispenser of mercy.

Speaker 9 So, too, Kali can be fierce and wild and loving and gentle. So, there's a kind of a complex conversation within the culture about what Kali means.

Speaker 6 Do you have anything like that? In the way she's depicted, Jessica.

Speaker 9 Images of Kali are very different in different regions of India, so that in some regions you'll have an image of old images of Kali where she may be gaunt, haggard, terrifying. She clearly is

Speaker 9 poor, she's suffering, she's homeless, and she'll be old. And those are often meant to show Kali as really outside the pale, outside the norm.

Speaker 9 In other areas, you'll see art which shows her as a beautiful woman, still fierce, still with this wild, naked, dark skin, her lolling tongue, her red eyes, but actually quite lovely.

Speaker 9 There's a famous picture by, I think it's Raja Ravivarma, which makes her into this kind of lovely creature who is also frightening at the same time.

Speaker 9 And in some regions, you get very abstract images of Kali, certain Bengali images.

Speaker 9 She's almost an iconic, an abstract image of the goddess, which is really meant to represent the energy of the divine itself.

Speaker 9 So there's a whole range of different ways that she'll be depicted, some of them more explicit in their imagery of the stories, some of them much more abstract.

Speaker 9 So you can kind of pick and choose which theology you want to address.

Speaker 6 How would you know? So far, everybody that you've referred to has been a woman.

Speaker 10 Is that the case always, Julius? With regard to Kali?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 10 Well, Kali really emerged from a male god in ancient tradition. So that's where the male god comes in.
And sometimes it's the great god Vishnu, and sometimes it's the great god Shiva.

Speaker 10 She is regarded as emerging from the forehead of Vishnu in order to get the better of, to kill, to destroy certain demons. So she is a destroyer of evil.

Speaker 10 And her dark visage, her dark form, her fearsome form actually reflects the fact that she is, as Jessica hinted,

Speaker 10 she is a destroyer of evil, of bad things. So she is somehow, you know, Hindu tradition has a lot of patriarchy in it, and therefore, even the goddess emerged from Vishnu in some stories.

Speaker 10 In other stories, however, she emerges from

Speaker 10 or is a change of form of the goddess Durga, the great goddess Durga. So there are a number of origin stories about Kali, some accentuating the male and some the female.

Speaker 5 So linked to empowerment,

Speaker 5 Kali is

Speaker 5 very important for the empowerment of royalty and royal power. So Kali and politics have a long story in Indian history.

Speaker 5 Indian rulers, before they went off to battle, would worship Kali for success in battle, as they did with Durga, another warrior goddess.

Speaker 5 And sometimes special incantations of the goddess Kali would be written in pieces of paper tied up in amulets, and the amulets would be worn around the soldier's arm, and the soldier would go into battle,

Speaker 5 thinking or believing that the goddess is on his arm protecting him. So, there is a link between martial power and the goddess in Indian history.

Speaker 9 I think linked to all of this is an interesting question about the extent to which Kali is empowering to women. And it's a really interesting question.

Speaker 9 Actually, it's one of the questions we often set students when they study the goddess traditions.

Speaker 9 Does this have a direct impact on the way that women themselves are treated to have an image of the female divine as the ultimate reality, the source of everything?

Speaker 9 And the question is a difficult one. In some ways, in some regions, you do seem to see that women have a greater power in society.

Speaker 9 On the other hand, overall, in Hindu cultures, in the past at least, it's not always necessarily the case.

Speaker 9 So there are interesting questions about the ways that Kali may or may not actually impact on women's lives. But you do see some cases.

Speaker 9 One nice example is a female saint called Mahadeviyaka from the medieval period who left her husband, went into the forests of the south and became a female devotional poet.

Speaker 9 And she addressed her poems, she took off all her clothes, the story goes, and also, like Kali, became completely naked, covered with her hair, lady Godiva-like, and was accepted by other male saints and poets for her great devotion.

Speaker 9 But it was partly because she was devoted to Shiva and took on, if you like, the role of a consort of Shiva that she was able to be this independent female who is going beyond social taboos and partly through a kind of a religious vision was able to carve a place for herself in society.

Speaker 9 So I think there's different stories about the ways in which her actual impact on women in society worked.

Speaker 9 There are some evidence that she could be empowering, but it's still perhaps a work in progress.

Speaker 6 Well, thank you all very much.

Speaker 6 I think Sam has got enough on his plate now.

Speaker 10 Literally, literally.

Speaker 6 I'm alright with this. Thank you very much.

Speaker 10 Tea or coffee?

Speaker 7 Jeans?

Speaker 10 If it's not an inconvenience. Oh, it's not.
Okay, I'd love some tea, please.

Speaker 9 I feel so bad that you have to say that, but all right, I'll have some if you're making something lovely. Thank you.

Speaker 6 Some tea would be great, yeah.

Speaker 6 Tea, peas,

Speaker 6 thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you.

Speaker 6 Okay, thank you very much.

Speaker 10 Thank you, Melvin. Thank you very much.

Speaker 10 Thank you.

Speaker 1 In our time with Melvin Bragg, it produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

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Speaker 1 So if that sounds like your kind of thing, you can listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage first on BBC Sounds.

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