Some discussion today brought up the topic of Goddess Kali's tongue, my sexagenarian Bengali mother insisted upon
a story behind the outstretched tongue, one that we all heard, accepted, and
lived at least in our lifetime.
The story says, Kali after
killing a demon called Daruka and drinking his blood was so driven by a blood
lust that she went on an unstoppable killing spree. Shiva, unable to find any other way, had to intervene and lie on the path of the Goddess in the form of a log. After
stepping on him and realizing who the log was, she bit her tongue out of
embarrassment.
We heard this time and again but
for some unknown reason (or known ?) hardly felt it to be not suited with the
other attributes Kali seems to possess. A woman (or goddess in this case) who is
so not caring about social orders, that she even rejects wearing clothes and
tying hair is intuitively very unlikely to have the thought of feeling ashamed
realizing she stepped on her husband. In the very first place, somebody who has
been depicted as a dweller of the crematorium or at least outside the
civilization and roaming around drinking blood, a societal concept like a
marital relationship is quite farfetched to be co-existing with her. So what could have brought this story up and made it so popular?
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Kali as a concept in the form she
is seen or worshipped today is post-Buddha, the concept of Kalaratri in
Mahabharata appearing on the last day of the great war and Korrabai in Sangam
texts associated with the battlefields in all possibility had been completed to
have been formed the goddess Kali when mixed up with Tara, the tantric, the embodiment of compassion in Buddhism.
The elements that traditional
Hinduism contributed to the idea is related to nature or Prakriti in its
untamed and uncontrolled form. In scriptures, it's nature that gives birth to
the human being and it's the human being who tries to control it in its pursuit of
survival. When tamed, the forest becomes a field or pasture– feeds the society.
Even if controlled, the element of killing is still prime in the food cycle –
plants are to be killed to feed the 1st order consumers, 1st order consumers
are killed to feed the 2nd level, and so on. When nature is tamed, the struggle
for food is minimized at different levels as the very basic skeleton for any
society is somewhat built on the primal food cycle in a bit more complicated form. The
element that is drawn from Buddhism is the humane qualities, which made the
goddess compassionate to the society even if she is an outsider and not
directly involved in the societal cycle.
The story of the outstretched
tongue of Kali is different for the puritan scripture followers there are
stories rather than a single one. The idea of the goddess might have been
completed in the post-Buddhist era, but well before that the first mention of
the word kali is found in Mundaka Upanishad of the Atharva Veda, where she is
one of the seven tongues of the fire God imagined as the blue flame
generating the maximum heat hence the burning power.
Post-Buddha literature, however,
tells many concrete stories of her tongue, in Devi Mahatya (CE 500) it brings the context of a demon
called Raktabeeja, who was blessed with the ability to reproduce himself from
every drop of his blood that touches the ground. The supreme Goddess had to
assume two forms simultaneously to kill the demon, one being the warrior
goddess Durga attacking the demon with the might of her ten arms and another a terrifying Kali with an outstretched tongue. Where the
former ensured Raktabeeja is hit enough and bled to death, the latter sucked
all the blood spilled out with her outstretched tongue before it touched the
ground, thus preventing the rebirth of the demon. This story is prude,
directly taken from a revered text – so could be the most acceptable explanation to some.
Another very common theme found in various Shaiva and Shakta texts, in which sages stumble upon Shiva and Shakti when they are making love. Upon realizing the presence of the watchers, the goddess just sticks her tongue out in defiance of their disapproval or jest, as the sages sought to judge nature.
If Kali symbolizes untamed nature the third story fits the best of all. As was believed at the dawn of the human thought process, it was the union between Purusha and Prakriti which created the Samsara (the world). This is nothing but the union between the seer and the seen, the subject and the object – the absence of any from this scheme would make the whole creation void. This union is beyond the judgment of those who themselves are the product of it; failing to understand this defeats the purpose of them being seers.
This goes beyond, Kali’s tongue
is jesting towards all those who seek to control nature – even if they are
successful, it’s because the almighty nature wanted them to be so at least
momentarily. Those who understand nature and its sovereignty would neither
judge nor seek control over it – rather he or she would be thankful for the
very existence that nature has granted not only to him or her as a person, but
the whole universe.
The iconography of Kali at its
every bit advocates this supremacy of sovereign nature. Her nakedness signifies
the uncontrolled terror in the forest outside the societal orders, where there
is no rule to save the interest of the weak, where there is no field or pasture
to ease the struggle for food. Her blood lust (the blood-soaked mouth or the
garland of skulls) approves the order of the forest, where killing is not a
crime but merely an instrument to survive – the killing of prey is the
only way of survival for the predator, thus sustenance of the cycle of the life.
Her one foot over the lying Mahadeva reinforces the supremacy of nature over 'self' or the 'consciousness' within – the central theme of tantric thought
process. This is where fits the jesting tongue of sovereign nature towards
mankind, struggling hard since the dawn of civilization to control this cycle.
On the ending note, how then the
story of the ashamed wife, who stuck out her tongue realizing she stepped on
her husband came up. Here again, comes the judging nature of paltry human beings
– in the British era, a naked goddess with blood stains and skull garland was a bit too much to handle for the rulers of the land, especially for those who are
used to the serene & motherly figure of Mary as the only goddess.
So in the 19th Century, more
Britishers linked the unfamiliar image of Kali with cruelty, brutality & savageness, more people here are
forced to start re-shaping the goddess as a decent affectionate mother, clad
in Saree, decked in Jewells wearing vermillion, red and white bangles, etc. The
advent of this ‘ashamed wife’ happened around this time, to make it gel with
the newly formed image of the mother of the universe.
Sadly the story however is born out of
the same judging nature of the human beings, again failing to understand the supremacy of nature; the goddess in actuality may have outstretched her tongue even
more in jest after this story was made.
~Avirup Chakraborty
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