Kaliਕਾਲੀ

Kali is the goddess who frightens people who do not know her, and comforts those who do. Her image is the most startling in Hinduism: a black or deep blue goddess, hair loose, tongue lolling out, wearing a garland of severed heads and a skirt of arms, a sword in one hand and a severed head in another, standing on the still body of Shiva. Read as the tradition reads it, nothing in that image is evil: it is a picture of time itself, which devours everything, and of the mother who frees her children by cutting away the ego that binds them.

Who is Kali?

Kali's name comes from kala, which means both time and black. She is a form of the supreme goddess, closely bound with Durga and Parvati, and the wife of Shiva in his form as Mahakala, great time. In the Shakta and Tantric traditions she is not a servant of the goddess but the ultimate reality itself. Among the ten Mahavidyas, the great wisdom goddesses of Tantra, she stands first. Her worship is strongest in Bengal, Assam and Nepal, and her devotees include the saint Ramakrishna, who served her image at Dakshineswar and taught that she was the living mother of the universe.

How Kali was born in battle

The Devi Mahatmya tells her birth. In Durga's war against the demons Shumbha and Nishumbha, the generals Chanda and Munda attacked the goddess; from her knitted brows, dark with anger, sprang Kali, gaunt and terrible, who destroyed them and earned the name Chamunda. Then came Raktabija, whose every drop of spilled blood grew into another demon exactly like him, so that the battlefield filled with his copies. Kali stretched out her tongue, drank his blood before it could fall and devoured the clones as Durga struck, until Raktabija bled dry and fell. After the victory her fury would not stop, and the gods feared she would destroy the world, until Shiva lay down in her path; stepping on her husband, Kali came to herself and put out her tongue in shame. That frozen moment, the goddess arrested above Shiva, is her most famous image.

Reading her image

The tradition reads meaning into every detail. The garland of heads is counted as fifty, one for each letter of the Sanskrit alphabet: she is the whole of sound and language, from which all names and forms are built, and she takes them back. The skirt of arms is action and its fruits, stilled. Her darkness is the formless night into which all forms dissolve, and her sword severs ignorance and attachment. Even her playground is a teaching: she is worshipped in cremation grounds, at midnight, because the devotee who faces death in her company has nothing left to fear.

Forms, festivals and temples

Kali takes gentler and fiercer forms. Dakshina Kali, the beloved household goddess of Bengal, stands with her right foot on Shiva and two hands raised in blessing. Bhadrakali, the auspicious Kali, is the great protector of Kerala; Smashana Kali haunts the cremation ground. Her festival, Kali Puja, falls on the new moon night of Diwali in Bengal, Assam and Odisha, when lamps are lit for her while the rest of India worships Lakshmi. Her temples include Kalighat in Kolkata, counted among the Shakti Peethas; Dakshineswar, where Ramakrishna served; and Kamakhya above Guwahati. In Nepal, the temple of Dakshinkali below Kathmandu draws crowds of devotees on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Kali in Punjab

Bengal learned to sing to Kali through Ramprasad Sen, the 18th-century poet-saint whose Shyama Sangeet, songs to the Dark Mother, are still sung in homes and at Kali Puja. Ramprasad addressed her not as a distant power but as a wilful beloved child and a mother in the same breath, teasing her, scolding her, begging her attention, and his audacious intimacy set the tone of Bengal's devotion: the terrible goddess is met with a child's familiarity, because children are not afraid of their mother.

At Tarapith, in Bengal's Birbhum district, Kali is worshipped in her form as Tara, and the temple is among her most visited in the east. Its fame rests on the saint Bama Khepa, called Bamdev, a 19th-century devotee who lived at the Tarapith cremation ground, was held mad by the world and a beloved child of the goddess by her worshippers, and whose own shrine beside the temple now draws as many offerings as some temples do. The cremation ground beside the shrine is still in daily use, and pilgrims pass between the place of the dead and the temple of the mother without any sense that the two are separate.

Kali is worshipped in Punjab's Hindu temples alongside Durga, whose forms she shares, and Kali Puja is kept by the region's Bengali families and in Kali temples in the cities; Tuesdays and Saturdays, her days, draw steady crowds of women devotees in particular. Punjabi devotees also travel to Kalighat and Kamakhya, and in the diaspora her image stands in temples from London to Toronto, where she is honoured, as everywhere, not as a goddess of horror but as the mother who destroys what harms her children.