Kolkata — City of Kali

The city has a harmless communist government. But Kolkata'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 Kolkata's streets.

Unlike India's other great cities, Kolkata has no ancient history. No legendary kingdom awaits discovery in its foundations. For Kolkata 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 into 108 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.

Kolkata, 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 Kolkata'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 Kolkata, the suffering and waste of human life in Kolkata, concentrated more than the madness and suffering and waste of other overcrowded cities, is fitting for Kali's own city. Kolkata is Kali.

© Kenneth Wilson