Kali or Kanyakumari, the Indian Goddess is a prisoner of her devotees. Shweta’s article is among our best because it takes the reader through the enchanting chaos of goddess worship in its present form in India, at the two spots where the goddess has most followers – Kolkata’s Kali Ghat and Kanyakumari’s temple of Kanya – the virgin goddess.

At four in the morning, Kali Ghat in Calcutta comes alive. As morning light kisses the earth, throngs of people gather outside the temple. Young voices call out the price of red hibiscus flowers. Small hands forcibly thrust prayer baskets into the hands of distracted tourists. A long line of men and women, whispering softly, shifting impatiently, peering over the shoulders of those standing in front of them, reminds you that the gods are still very much alive. Or as in this case – the goddesses.

Dark and beautiful, powerful and intimidating, Kali seems to be very much the goddess of destruction that she is so reputed to be. The most powerful of the female goddesses, the highest in the order of the Mahavidhyas, Kali is often portrayed with her red tongue hanging out, her hair loose and her eyes glazed. Her naked breasts are hidden behind two of the fifty-one skulls strung to form a chain that hangs around her neck. A chain of severed arms, fastened below her waist, forms a short lower garment. Of her many powerful hands, two never go unnoticed. In one she holds the severed head of a man, his eyes still open, with blood dripping from the cut ends of his neck to a golden bowl she holds below; and in the other, the weapon that caused this death – a sickle still covered in blood. Her powerful right foot rests on the corpse of the male god of destruction, her counterpart, Kala or Shiva.

To Hindu enthusiasts, devotees and fanatics alike she represents the divine feminine in her most potent form. She symbolises freedom, liberation, female empowerment and unfettered female energy. Having severed man’s ego (represented by the severed head she holds in her hand), and thereby broken away from his dominating hold on her own ego, she alone among the goddesses becomes truly independent of her male consort. To her Shiva is an equal. By placing her leg on his bare chest, she lets him absorb her energy and in the union of their now liberated egos, they discover together the true meaning of enlightenment.

In Kali Ghat, it is surprising to see her being guarded fiercely by an all male priestly battalion. Kali, who is her divine form is free of any man’s domineering ego, seems hardly her own mistress here. She is allowed to grant but short audiences to her devotees and is ruled very much by the iron fist of local religious beliefs. A devotee can hardly look into her pearly white eyes, than the hand of a priest ushers him or her onward. Yet, Kali rules the spirit of Calcutta, allowing the city to taste from her feral passion; her jealously guarded and fiercely protected sanctum left to remain only an edifice to the prevailing domination of man in the human realms.

Far south, where the three seas – the Arbian sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean- mingle effortlessly at the feet of India, the consort of Shiva wakes up every morning to hordes of devotees in a completely contrasting avatar. The maiden, after whom the place is named Kanyakumari, waits patiently and piously for her groom to come for her. Her seat has not changed in all these years; her devout penance is etched in stone and frozen in time.

The temple around her has on the other hand, and bears witness to the handiwork of a changing country. Pillars from the Chola times, which have survived to this date have been painted over. The names of lovers and hall ticket numbers have been added to the inscriptions in the recent times. Rules and log books have been placed at the entrance. Unlike the bachelor god of Shabarimala, Kanya allows people of any sex to see her. Men are asked to remove their shirts in deference and walk in bare-chested. Women, not allowed pant or salwars, wait in saris and skirts to see her. It is not uncommon to see some jostling in the crowd and eve- teasing, like in other queues around India, is excused at the shrine of the meditating Kanya as well, as a minor fault of the male sex.

While Kali severed the male ego to deliver herself and Kanya chose to wait for that one perfect man to win her, countless other goddesses found their own perfectly secure niches in the patriarchal Republic of India. As mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, lovers and brides, they wove their ways into the everyday lives of Hindus and secured for themselves an identity that is almost always derived from and dependent on that of their husbands, lovers, fathers or male children. In a way, their dark stone bodies are sculpted to match the life of the average Indian woman and their eyes carved to reflect her demure ego.

Be it Kali, Kanya or one of these goddesses, they give rise to the very essential question that surrounds goddess worship in Hinduism or in any other religion: are these goddesses tributes in stone to the indomitable spirit of the feminine or are they symbolic of a religious social construct that has in their form obtained divine sanction?

This question can only be asked in rhetoric. When the sun rises every morning on Calcutta, young girls in Sonagachi, India’s well known red light area not far away from Kali Ghat, are still catering to their last customers. Young worshippers of Kanya elsewhere, have no choice in their own marriages and several million devotees across the country lose their individualities in a futile attempt to become the perfect daughter, wife or mother. In these cases and others, liberation or enlightenment seems a distant dream; gender equality an impossibility. Is it possible that in this land of the goddesses, they are as much the fetters that bind us to a moral construct of gender as we hope they would be our salvation?

As the light from the lamps fall on the dark bodies of our stone goddesses, one cannot miss the suppressed laughter on their lips, the hidden smiles in their eyes. Perhaps they do know the secret of empowerment and are loath to sharing it with us, mere mortals. Perhaps they are laughing at our attempt to confine them to our social constructs. Or perhaps they are wondering why we go in search of this thing we call the goddess; why the feminine has to become divine before it is respected. After all is the battle of the sexes not restricted to the realms of earth alone? And is gender equality not a human struggle?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

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The Author
 There is nothing Shweta loves more than writing. A graduate from Madras Medical College, she is now a student at the Knight's Center for Science and Medical Journalism at Boston University, from where she hopes to graduate a fine science writer and a nuanced thinker. Apart from experimenting with eggs in the kitchen and paint brushes in her room, Shweta enjoys watching cricket and tennis and just about any movie. She is a voracious reader and enjoys astrophysics, anthropology, genetics, archaeology, mythology and just about anything that will kindle her imagination. Sa, for Shweta is her means of telling the men and the women in the world that there is enough space for everyone. It is also her way of letting people know that no one is more equal than another.

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