Kali is the fierce, dark form of the Hindu goddess: wild-haired, wearing a garland of severed heads and standing on Shiva. Her name means "the black one" and is also linked with kala, "time", and she is understood as the power of time that ends all things and as the destroyer of evil. Her devotees also call her Mother, and in Nepal she is worshipped at temples such as Dakshinkali, in the south of the Kathmandu Valley.
How she is shown
- Black or deep blue skin, with loose, wild hair and often three eyes.
- Her red tongue sticking out. In a popular story from Bengal, she bit her tongue in shame on realising she had stepped on her husband.
- A garland of severed heads, in some traditions fifty or fifty-one, read as the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet.
- A skirt of severed arms.
- Four arms, most often. In the familiar form called Dakshina Kali, her left hands hold a sword and a severed head, and her right hands make the gestures of fearlessness and blessing. Other paintings, including some of ours, give her a curved knife, a trident, a head and a bowl.
- Shiva lying beneath her, calm, as she stands on him. In tantric thought he is pure consciousness and she is the energy that moves it.
The story
In the Devi Mahatmya, the great Sanskrit text of the goddess, Kali springs from the forehead of the goddess, dark with anger, to fight the demons Chanda and Munda. In the same war she faces Raktabija, a demon from whose every drop of spilled blood a new demon arises. Kali drinks his blood before it can reach the ground, and he is destroyed. Because the goddess of this text is identified with Durga, Kali is often described as born from Durga's anger.
What she stands for
To her devotees, Kali's violence is turned against evil, ignorance and ego, never against them, and she is a protective mother. She is also one of the forms of Parvati, the wife of Shiva. At Dakshinkali, near Pharping, devotees crowd the temple with offerings, above all on Tuesdays and Saturdays and during Dashain. Fierce goddesses of Tibetan Buddhism, such as Palden Lhamo, share some of her imagery, but they are separate deities with their own stories.
In a painting
Kali is hard to paint well: she should look fierce without becoming grotesque. Look for a balanced stance with her foot on Shiva, a garland whose heads are drawn one by one, a clear contrast between her dark, moving body and the still figure beneath her, and fine detail in the arms of her skirt. Some of our paintings show her blue, against gold-coloured line work on black. A dark goddess with a garland of heads and her tongue out, standing on a reclining man, is Kali.
