2.  Colonial misunderstandings

Much of the misunderstanding of Kali’s iconography as purely gruesomely destructive stems from the perceptions of Kali and her worship disseminated by British colonialists and missionaries in India.

According to Hugh Urban, “In the eyes of the early British colonial authorities, missionaries, and scholars, Kali was identified as the most depraved of all forms of modern popular Hinduism, the quintessence of licentiousness and idolatry” (169).

For example, the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff, described Kali as the “most cruel” goddess:  “[Her] supreme delight…consists in cruelty and torture; her ambrosia is the flesh of living votaries and sacrificed victims; and her sweetest nectar, the copious effusion of their blood” (quoted in Urban, 174).

 British colonial authorities [also found] Kali frightening.  From the beginning of the 19th century on, she was believed to be closely associated with criminal and subversive groups, such as the infamous robber gangs, the Thuggee”.  With her combination of lasciviousness and bloody violence, Kali appears…as the quintessential symbol of the dark and terrifying—yet also strangely seductive and alluring—power of the Orient”(169-170).  It is this image of Kali that shows up most often in Western movies like the Beatles’ Help and the later Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

This British reaction to Kali was exacerbated by the later use of Kali iconography by Indian and Bengali nationalist parties; as Urban explains, “the nationalists seized upon the bloody, destructive figure of Kali as a symbol of Mother India precisely because she represented threat and terror to the colonial imagination.