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.