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correspondent is nevertheless imposed on the woman in Hindu society). Durga does not
perform household duties, is not submissive to a man, and excels in the traditional male
domain of battle.
9.4. Kali: the Great Dancer of Creation and Destruction
The third important manifestation of the Eastern divine feminine is Kali. Parvati is
sometimes called Kali, ‘the dark one’, because of her dark complexion. Parvati, Kali and
Durga are treated separately in the Hindu texts, yet the three are taken as manifestations of the
same goddess. Parvati is the universal mother, Durga, her warrior-queen aspect, and Kali, her
especially ferocious guise as cosmic guardian. In Across the Sea Wall, the Indian, Sunder, who
accompanies O’Brien and Ilsa into India, describes Kali in terms familiar to descriptions of
Parvati and Durga, but he stresses emphatically the vicious mask of this embodiment of the
universal mother. He says that Kali is
the cruelest of all—and yet she’s an aspect of Shiva, who’s good. She’s his
female aspect, you see: she’s the power of creation. But she’s also action; and
action can mean mischief. Kali doesn’t care: joyful action or destruction, it’s
all the same to her; it’s life, and life is Kali’s dance. She wears a necklace of
skulls, and her dance never ends: she’s the goddess of Time, she’s the
destroyer, and yet her worshippers pray to her for children and protection.
She’s mother as well as destroyer, you see (ASW, 72).
The personification of Parvati’s wrath, Kali, whose name means ‘black’, is indeed black-
skinned, either goes naked or wearing only a tiger or elephant skin and a garland of human
heads, and wields a skull-topped staff. Though sometimes described, like Parvati, as beautiful,
Kali is often depicted as a wild animal,
gaunt, with sunken eyes, gaping mouth, and lolling tongue. She roars loudly
and leaps into the battle, where she tears demons apart with her hands and
crushes them in her jaws (Kinsley, 118).
The bloodthirstiness of Kali is an especially important quality of the Asian concept of the
divine feminine. In one story, Durga is fighting a demon but finds that every time she wounds
him the drops of his blood falling to the ground turn into duplicates of him. Durga is stymied
by this quickly multiplying adversary until Kali springs from her forehead, sucks the demon’s
body dry of blood, then gobbles up all of his duplicates (Kinsley, 118).
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