Kali-kata

Kali Puja announced, I saw Calcutta
descend on us. Three thousand slums,
usually rapt in themselves, crouched low
by walls or sewer water, now all
ran out, rampant, beneath the new moon,
the night and the goddess on their side.
Saw, in the holes of uncountable mouths,
the lacquered tongue of black Kali
flutter red. Heard her smack her lips:
I, numberless, from all the gutters
and drowned cellars. I,
set free, sickle-sharp I.
I show my tongue, I cross banks,
I abolish borders.
I make
an end.

- Günter Grass, "Show Your Tongue", translated by John E. Woods

From 1987 to 2006, Calcutta might have changed a lot, but Grass' words seem no less true. Surely, there is no surfeit of gutters and slums in Calcutta and no social worker would probably earn the dubious sobriquet of "Saint of the Gutter" now, but it's still a city that sticks out its tongue much like its favourite idol, Kali. Ever since Mother Teresa made Calcutta her home, providing succour to thousands of destitutes, the outside world has looked upon the city as a hellhole of poverty and destitution, well, even when Lapierre called it the City of Joy. Perhaps, there is no better analogy of this gulf between distant perception and intimate realisation of Calcutta than that applies to Kali herself.

Kali has always been regarded as the terrible goddess, the violent incarnation of the Divine Mother, even by her adherents. She represents the unadorned and unrestrained aspect of nature, uninhibited in her actions; she represents the pristine truth, uncovered, laid bare, free from illusory Maya, untouched by civilisation and unaffected by time; she represents the eternal. But to one looking at her idol for the first time, she looks hardly better than a blood-thirsty demoness engaged in an orgy of genocide. There could hardly be a greater mismatch between perception and reality. Even without going into the philosophy behind the various terrible aspects of Kali, it is not difficult to understand, if one is fairly acquainted with Calcutta, why Kali is Calcutta's favourite goddess.

And that is not just because, in the hoary mythological past, Shiva was dancing with the corpse of His wife, who had just immolated herself in fire, unable to bear her husband’s humiliation and Vishnu, realising that this divine madness would annihilate the universe He has a responsibility to protect and maintain, used His sudarshan chakra to cut this body into 51 (or 52) pieces, one of which happened to fall at a place in south Calcutta, we now call Kalighat. And this Kalighat, according to one theory, gave the city its ancient name of Kalikata, which the British settlers conveniently anglicised to Calcutta and a Communist government changed to Kolkata on the instigation of over-zealous self-appointed guardians of the Bengali language and culture. But that has hardly diminished the importance of Kalighat which happens to be the most popular of the 51 (or 52) peethas existing throughout the Indian sub-continent. And if you are a tourist in Calcutta, you would not like to give this place a miss, even though you are not religiously inclined and despite the fact that the pandas (some even call them the touts of God) will make sure that your visit is not exactly an inexpensive one.

Or even because a hundred years before the modern edifice at Kalighat was built by the Raja Santosh Roychowdhury in 1809, Shankar Ghosh established a small temple in north Calcutta around 1703 whose importance in this day can be considered totally disproportionate to its size. On a personal level, Thanthania Kalibari is also my favourite temple in Calcutta.

The fact that Portugese Hensman Anthony, immortalised by Arun Kumar Chatterjee in the film Anthony Firingee, established a Kali temple in Bowbazar in the early 19th century and even wrote devotional songs for Kali is rather the effect than the cause for Calcutta’s love of Kali. And Ramakrishna Paramhansa represented the quintessence of this love when he was engaged in a rather unconventional worship of the Divine Mother at Dakshineswar Temple in the middle of the same century.

Kalikata, Calcutta, Kolkata or whatever you call it identifes itself with Kali because she represents the philosophy of the city as a whole, least so in the religious sense of the term. Like Kali, you can’t understand Calcutta superficially, you can’t draw inferences from what is readily visible, not from shanties bordering Adi Ganga, neither from City Centre. You know Calcutta when you realise it, when you feel its pulse and you don’t have to be born in Calcutta or emotional about it to do that. You just have to probe deep, beyond the illusory façade. And you’ll find an eternal city.