Calcutta – City of Kali
The city has a harmless communist
government. But Calcutta's real ruler is red-tongued, naked,
and gruesomely garlanded with the skulls of her victims. For
this is the city of Kali, who demands human sacrifices.
There have been many in its 300 year history. In 1757, 123
British prisoners died overnight in the infamous "Black
Hole". Four years before Independence a hundred thousand
refugees from the surrounding countryside died of hunger on
Calcutta's streets.
Unlike India's other great cities, Calcutta has no ancient
history. No legendary kingdom awaits discovery in its
foundations. For Calcutta was entirely a British invention.
At the end of the seventeenth century the East India
Company's factories further up the Hooghly river were
becoming inaccessible due to the shifting and silting nature
of the great waters. The Company's principal officer in the
district, Job Charnock, bought a site further downstream, at
the village of Sutanuti. Within a few years the new
settlement had so prospered that it absorbed the two
adjoining villages, including Kalikata - from which its
present name is derived.
No-one knows when the village of Kalikata acquired its
religious significance. There is a story. Daksha, married to
Sati, Siva's daughter, carelessly spoke ill of Siva. Sati,
hearing this slight, was overcome with shock and died. In
his fury, Siva seized her body and began to dance in such a
frenzy that the earth shook and threatened to disintegrate.
In order to save the earth, Lord Vishnu used his solar disc
to dismember Sati's body into108 parts, so that the focus of
Siva's grief was removed from his sight. Sati's body was
scattered over the earth, and the Kalighat marks the spot
where her little toe fell.
Calcutta, according to many devotees of Kali, has become the
great city that it is, in reflection of the great Kali. She,
they say, infuses the city with her spirit; she is its soul.
Without her blessing, it would not have prospered as it has;
but that prosperity has its price. As we struggled through
Calcutta's traffic jams, avoiding semi-permanent
excavations, encroachments and processions, Mr. Shanti told
us about his wonderful, crowded, city. "We have 40,000 foot
rickshaws, 196,000 people who recycle paper and plastic,
2000 temples, 141 cinemas..." Who knew whether the figures
were accurate; but certainly they were impressive.
"Don't miss our enormous rats," he interrupted himself to
point out, as we passed a corner of the Maidan. We looked,
and could hardly believe what we saw. The normally nocturnal
disease-carriers were scuttling about the dusty earth, from
which every blade of grass had been scraped away, in and out
of the trenches and burrows that made the ground look like a
miniature battle field. "So many people worship God in this
form. It is because Ganesha travels on a rat. So we have the
biggest rats, and the biggest rat colony in the world. At
least that is something."
We arrived at the Kali temple. A man was waiting for us. Mr.
Shanti, full as always of figures, explained. "In this
temple, there are two hundred priests, and six hundred
beggars. This man is in charge of all the beggars. He makes
sure they are all fed, that no-one goes hungry. He is their
father, if you like; he is in charge of them, all of them.
So he keeps order; he is their judge, too. It is most
important," Mr. Shanti went on, "that you do not give
anything to any of the beggars. If you do, they will all
come, and we will be drowned. I am giving something to this
man, for all of them, and he will instruct them to leave us
in peace." The fellow was small, and young, with handsome
black curly hair. His splayed feet showed him to be quite
unused to shoes. He wore only a dark blue chequered lungi,
hoisted up and tied like a short skirt, and a colourless
vest. He was lame, and completely blind. But as he shifted
constantly from one foot to the other, and fingered the
dirty lungi, there was something in his movements that
spoke, not of nervousness, but of power. So here was a real
Beggars' King. Yes, this was the man who ruled the Kali
temple.
The King assigned a boy to go with us, to prevent us taking
photographs of forbidden objects, and by a single word to
keep the beggars away. Pressing through the dense crowd,
less accommodating of foreigners than most Indian crowds, we
turned suddenly into the temple compound itself, and into
chaos. Mother Kali's shrine was in the centre, raised above
its surroundings. Within the compound, close to one wall of
the shrine, stood the boli enclosure, place of goat
sacrifice. It was marked out only by a low wall, surrounding
two blocks of stone and an iron ring for putting an animal's
head in to decapitate it. The whole was covered in old
blood, and swarmed with a million flies. One stroke takes
off a goat's head. Its eyes, with no further power to blink,
look back in surprise at its own unaccountably flailing
legs.
We watched a Brahmin prayer meeting noisily competing with
ecstatic prostrations before the image of Kali. So
surrounded was she that we only caught brief glimpses of her
golden eyebrows and scarlet tongue. Broken coconuts and red
hibiscus flowers littered the ground around her feet. The
coconut symbolises the breaking of the self-will, a lesser
symbol than the sacrifice of a goat, but more commonly
performed. Human sacrifices were regularly made here, said
Mr. Shanti, until the British stopped the practice in 1821.
Was that really the last one, we wondered? Even today, it is
said, in the wildest parts of Bengal Kali will receive
annually a human life or two.
Not quite everything in the Kali temple inspired gruesome
thoughts, however. In a quieter corner outside, squatting
before a low platform covered in more red hibiscus, a mother
and grandmother, aged perhaps fifteen and thirty, were
performing the rites of thanksgiving for the birth of a
child. At the far end of the compound modest Siva lingams
surrounded a small and ancient tree curtained with hibiscus
and jasmine flowers. A great press of women, young and old,
pouring oil and caressing the symbols of fertility, prayed
for Siva's gift of children.
We walked the short distance down a row of shops, past
astrologers and palmists, and a young Brahmin being
tonsured, to the ghat itself, the place of prayer and
cremation at the water's edge. The Hooghly proper had long
since ceased to flow past here, and the water that remained
was only a narrow and stagnant black canal. The ablutions
that take place anywhere along the Ganges were being
performed here, too, even in this water.
Suddenly we felt tired; we needed to breathe a different
air. It had been like a mad and wild performance, a
fantastic chimera, a bad dream. But that is what Kali stands
for; she represents maya, the confusion and delusion that
afflicts the world because of avidya, "not-knowing". In the
Hindu epics, the gods, sometimes called mayins, playfully
create artificial and fantastic worlds, worlds of fickle and
changing appearance. The spiritual person must see through
this veil of appearance, and focus on the reality. Kali
shows the cruelty and deception of these appearances, and
what their true nature is, to someone who has seen beyond
them. Kali is often said, by her devotees, to be mad. She is
intoxicated, and with her an intoxicated world plummets to
its destruction. No-one who sees Kali clearly will believe
any more in a world that is safe, dependable or permanent.
Kali, consuming human remains in the cremation ground,
heralds the end of all things. She is that Time who "bears
all its sons away." So it is, they say, that the madness of
Calcutta, the suffering and waste of human life in Calcutta,
concentrated more than the madness and suffering and waste
of other overcrowded cities, is fitting for Kali's own city.
Calcutta is Kali.
© Kenneth Wilson
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