Writing the Goddess, Writing the Woman: Kali and the Politics of the Female Body
"As Kali’s devouring, violent energy was domesticated in nationalist and colonial discourse, the radical potential of female power was symbolically acknowledged yet materially constrained."
By Aasiya Altaf
Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation, is a fascinating and subversive mythological figure who embodies a form of “feminine” power that defies nurturing and domestic norms. Her violent iconography and ritual importance has been a site of fascination and fear across Indian history, and the ways she is represented—through devotionality, print, and political discourse—reflect broader anxieties about women, authority, and social order. In particular, moments of intensified political control, especially under British colonial rule, turned women’s bodies into objects of reform, surveillance, and moral anxiety, with Kali’s iconography becoming entangled in these struggles. This essay traces how Kali’s transgressive force has been domesticated across colonial, nationalist, and post-independence contexts, arguing that each transformation corresponds to male attempts to assert authority over women’s bodies—first through colonial intervention, then through nationalist reaction, and finally through commercial and visual regulation. Parallel to these shifts, women’s bodies are regulated, symbolically mobilised, and yet persistently capable of radical potential.
In Tantric traditions, Kali represents the “forbidden par excellence” because she embodies death, destruction, and the all-consuming nature of time itself (Kinsley, 1975, pp. 124-125). Her iconography of black skin, dishevelled hair, blood at her mouth, severed head and sword, alongside her residence in the cremation ground, separates her from other goddesses who protect devotees in a more conventionally feminine fashion. Unlike figures such as Annapurna or Prithvi, whose bodies signify fertility and saintly nourishment, Kali is emaciated yet hungry and explicitly devouring (Kinsley, pp. 126-127). Conversely, Annapurna embodies disciplined self-abnegation: she feeds all yet does not partake herself, a femininity defined by nurture through restraint. Kali, in the same symbolic register, represents the “primal female force that devours Creation itself.” This contrast highlights a tension central to Tantric discourse and later social regulation: the ideal of the self-denying, enduring woman versus the unruly, consuming female force.
Kali appears as a battlefield demon slayer whose “femininity” is ontological and transgressive—but she is still a vessel of creation. One of the most popular interpretations of Kali is as a nude dancing figure trampling on her husband’s body. There are interesting connotations to a female body that is imagined as hungry rather than nurturing, naked rather than veiled, standing over her husband rather than beneath him. This unruly female body would become increasingly difficult to contain within emerging regimes of political and moral order. Over time, it was feared, sanctified, softened, and eventually made maternal. The first major framework to reshape the discourses surrounding Kali’s body was the colonial encounter, in which British governance made Indian women’s bodies a central site of imperialist intervention.
From early British presence in India, Kali fascinated colonial observers. While the dominant and predictable viewpoint was one of horror, 18th century Orientalists such as William Jones and the Asiatic Society considered her an example of Hindu antiquity, which intertwined with Greek and Roman myth. In active worship, Kali was “personified” by a woman, making the female body ritually central. This was not an abstract symbolic association, but the temporary inhabiting of a living body by divinity: a woman standing before the idol, adorned and speaking as the goddess, her gestures seen as divine will. For the duration of the ritual, this female body was not confined to traditional feminine roles; it became a place of sacred appetite. Colonial observers recorded this embodiment with fascination. Through the Orientalists’ lens, the spectacle of a woman becoming Kali was treated as something culturally distinct that did not require immediate interference (Asiatick researches, 1832, pp. 224-225). Yet the scene of a female body at the centre of ritual authority rendered that body newly visible to imperial scrutiny.
Later notables in India, primarily colonial lawmakers in the early to mid 19th century, leveraged women’s lack of rights as oppressed subjects in indigenous social and labor relations to portray the colonial state as a civilizing protector. Under the governance of William Bentinck, for example, female infanticide and sati (widow-burning) were two of three primary concerns. The third was the criminal practice of thuggee, which was politicised as banditry that operated within a cult that worshipped Kali. Crucially, this cult was entirely male. While this was likely due to practical features of Indian society at the time—no woman could leave home alone and travel with a group of bandits to partake in roadside robbery—the association allowed colonial officials to frame Kali’s violence as a specifically feminine corruption, a power that ensnared men in irrational, horrific, and sexual devotion. Her body, already designated by blood and nudity, was translated into the centre of an imagined sexually excessive realm.
Colonial accounts lingered on the corporeal details of Kali’s festivals: orgies, fetishistic self-mortification, and, unsubtly, nude dancing. Whether or not such descriptions reflected lived practice, they fixated on exposed flesh and uncontrolled bodily ecstasy. In this framing, feminine divinity became indistinguishable from erotic disorder, and the spectacle of Kali’s body—crucially recorded and circulated in colonial reports—served as evidence of a society supposedly governed by dangerous female influence. Through this gaze, the female body was violent and visually excessive, in need of surveillance and governance.
The ramifications that demonising cultural practices had on colonial discourse and British rule has been thoroughly considered by postcolonial historians. The long and short of it is that violent and “savage” iconography was interpreted as evidence that Indian society was irrational, cruel, and incapable of self-governance (Sarkar, 2001, pp. 203-204). However, the fetishisation of a female Indian figure had its most crucial implications on the lives of Indian women.
One of the most common colonial tropes was that of the nautch girl—nautch meaning dancer. These women were generally considered upper-class courtesans. They lived on comfortable property, and they were not treated as prostitutes, but their wealth was often tied to a male patron. Within the colonial imagination, the nautch girl appeared as a living embodiment of the excess already projected onto Kali: adorned and performing for a watching audience. The spectacle of women’s bodies was, of course, commodified and surveilled. Nautch girls and their purported excessive emancipation were also often juxtaposed with white imperial wives who were positioned as innately spiritual, read: Christian and domestic.
By the 19th century, many white women who had come to India were there due to a specific push of evangelical organisations that wanted to discourage the miscegenation that had been rampant for about a century in India (Gartrell, 1984, p. 170). So, white women were brought specifically to counter the allure of the hyperfeminine, hypersexual Indian woman, and once there, they were upheld as a model of chaste femininity. This hierarchy enforced a pre-existing colonial order that had already cast Kali as the emblem of dangerous feminine appetite. Indian women’s bodies, particularly darker female bodies, like Kali’s, were imagined as sexually excessive and fetishistically feminine, making their bodies a site of conquest and exacerbating their vulnerability.
20th century discourse on Kali is much more fruitful to examine through the lens of budding Indian nationalism. A popular text published in 1927, entitled Mother India, provides the sharpest insight into how nationalist iconography had adopted Kali’s figure, and the consequent response. The Indian nationalist movement had configured the nation as a goddess, but most crucially as a mother figure. Mother India argued that this was an insult to Indian women, who were glorified in nationalist discourse while treated terribly in social practice. The book explicitly challenged nationalist efforts to “redeem a once-glorious Hindu culture” by denying that women ever held a favourable position in some ancient Hindu past (Sinha, 2000, pp. 623-628).
In some ways, Mother India—and by extension the colonial bulwark—did not entirely understand the use of the goddess in nationalist propaganda. Kali was specifically prevalent in these discourses as a militant figure. Kali’s mythological origins were, in and of themselves, deeply tied to conflict and battle, and these aspects were well-utilised in nationalist ideas of resistance. Positioning Kali as her famed violent self would have also challenged the longstanding stereotype of Indian women as submissive and easily conquered. However, the conjoining part of anticolonial rhetoric was a reaction to the “emasculation” of Indian men. As such, when militant Bengali ideals materialised as part of nationalist revolution, they aligned Bengali men with the upper warrior caste of kshatriya and positioned Kali as a mere counterpart.
This discourse certainly defanged Kali’s image, but it also domesticated her. Kali became the source of patriotic energy, anger, and moral purpose, but only insofar as it channeled male heroism. The symbolic efficacy of the goddess was present still, but it was patriarchally managed. Kali’s body was made to signify a controlled militancy that affirmed male heroism rather than threatened it. In turn, this image shaped expectations for women themselves. The goddess could be invoked as a source of strength, but only within a framework that demanded female self-abnegation and moral purity. The devouring, violent energy of Kali was thus symbolically harnessed whilst simultaneously constraining the material lives of women: their bodies were to endure hunger, labour, and loss without complaint, mirroring the containment imposed on the goddess. Kali’s body was rewritten, and through her, women’s bodies were rewritten as well.
The image of the mother, and how Kali was shaped into her, is exceptionally important to considering the body: domestic labour is possibly the most relevant discourse to the lives of Indian women, historically and contemporarily.
The symbolic use of the goddess was accompanied by the intensified regulation of actual women’s bodies. The nationalist rhetoric was a direct reaction to colonial idealism where colonial authorities had specifically leveraged women’s bodies through campaigns against anti-female practices like sati and female infanticide, and nationalist reformers inherited and intensified this focus, regulating women’s bodies under the guise of cultural conservation.
On the one hand, Indian women were figured as symbols of excess and danger—part of a culture imagined as sexually decadent and spiritually degenerate, a perception that resonated with the colonial reading of Kali as a destructive, unbridled feminine force (Sinha, pp. 623-628; Sarkar, pp. 203-204). On the other hand, the Indian male body was ridiculed as weak and emasculated under colonial modernity. The nationalist reaction to this seized sharper control of women’s bodies as a tactic to “regain power.” The Indian woman’s body became “pure and unmarked,” governed not by Western corruption but by “our” internal custom and scripture (Sarkar, pp. 203-204). This implicitly marked women as custodians of an untouched inner domain of tradition, and their bodies as repositories of national virtue capable of compensating for male political humiliation.
Further, the political use of women’s bodies lay not in strength or the same autonomy that men enjoyed, but in endurance. Practices such as infant marriage and enforced widowhood inscribed self-abnegation onto women’s bodies—the ideal woman was expected to mirror the disciplined restraint symbolised by Annapurna: bearing hunger, loss, and suffering implicit in anticolonial struggle without complaint (Sarkar, p. 104). The diaries of Rassundari Devi highlight this—she relates cooking endlessly for her household while unsure whether she would be permitted to eat: “If you serve yourself, you will be called shameless. If you wait for others to serve you, you may have to go without food” (Sarkar, pp. 122-123).
Nationalist discourse thus split feminine embodiment into extremes by translating the earlier Tantric tension between Annapurna’s restraint and Kali’s devouring energy into lived social expectations. There was a line drawn between the hungry, restrained, self-sacrificing woman of the household and the insatiable, destructive goddess whose energy was invoked symbolically to inspire male heroism that was materially denied to women themselves. If separated in one aspect, though, these two ideals were made the same in others. Even the most insurgent heroine was ultimately reinscribed within domesticity: “Debi Choudhurani lays down the glorious garb of the robber queen and turns to dish-washing” (Sarkar, pp. 256-257).
In the post-independence period, goddess imagery did not disappear from political discourse. Instead, it was reabsorbed into feminist vocabularies of empowerment. Urban, upper-caste Hindu women at the forefront of the autonomous women’s movement frequently invoked Kali as a symbol of strength, rage, and assertiveness, deploying mythic language to counter accusations that feminism was “Western” and alien to Indian soil (Agnes, pp. 138–139).
Yet this reliance on dominant Hindu iconography inadvertently narrowed the representational field of feminism. Because secularism was not always foregrounded as an explicit objective, symbols familiar to upper-caste Hindu activists surreptitiously crept into the movement, and minority women often felt compelled to internalise these idioms—or distance themselves from their own traditions—in order to participate in a supposedly universal “Indian” feminism (Agnes, 1995, pp. 138–139). At the same time, invocations of a “great national sisterhood,” articulated by figures such as Maya Devi Gangulee, imagined solidarity across Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and lower-caste women (Sinha, p. 634)—but this sisterhood still dealt within a symbolic order structured by Hinduism.
The managed rhetoric of Kali’s image in colonial and nationalist discourse was never merely symbolic. In the colonial period, her presence was materially reproduced through festivals and the large-scale production of clay idols and later chromolithographs. The making of Kali images was not only devotional craft: it sustained entire artisan communities whose livelihoods depended upon the annual demand. The circulation of her body in clay, pigment, and print constituted a form of cultural particularism under colonial rule, by reiterating specific Hindu ritual life that did not require colonial approval to persist. Kali’s form was being manufactured, purchased, installed, and immersed in highly localised economies of exchange. The goddess’s body was thus embedded in labour, caste hierarchies, and market circulation. Her body existed materially, in the hands that molded her limbs, painted her eyes, and positioned her stance.
Post-independence, Kali’s image has been framed by capitalistic markets. Just as her image was rhetorically defanged in nationalist discourse, it was also visually disciplined in the expanding print economy of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early chromolithographs often retained her more terrifying attributes: blood, severed heads, the cremation ground—but as calendar art became increasingly commercialised, overtly violent or inauspicious depictions of deities were gradually softened or withdrawn from circulation (Jain, 2007, p. 236). The towering black-skinned goddess, once wild with fury and clutching a sword, was transformed—her skin lightened, her eyes widened in benevolence, her mouth closed, her limbs curved in stylised grace, and the cremation ground replaced with neutral platforms or gardens (Jain, p. 224). The corporeal ferocity that had made her presence physically and spiritually unsettling was erased.
This visual rewriting mirrored social regulation of women’s bodies. Just as Kali’s violent appetite was muted in print, women were expected to suppress appetite and aggression. Musculature, conflict, and excessive bodily force—once central to certain depictions of Kali—were displaced. The goddess’s energy as such became transcendent rather than corporeal, visually disconnected from the possibility of material agency. At the same time, eroticised spectacularisations of feminine figures were rendered publicly acceptable through devotional or nationalist framing, allowing the female body to circulate as object of collective visual consumption while reinforcing patriarchal scopic privilege (Jain, pp. 303-305). Kali’s body, once feared and respected for its material force, had been softened into a controlled, legible and non-threatening form.
This visual economy also served a political and religious purpose. The sacralisation of active patriarchal violence, as in popular prints of 18-year-old Roop Kanwar’s 1987 self-immolation after the death of her husband (sati), showcases how visual “divine aura” was used to legitimate female suffering. In the widely circulated photomontage of Kanwar on her husband’s funeral pyre, her death is not represented as coercive brutality. Rather, she appears calm, haloed and absorbed in prayer, while a hovering mother goddess directs a beam of divine light toward her body. Documentary evidence of this outlawed patriarchal practice of widow-burning served to create religious fervour, directly leading to the acquittal of the 45 people who were charged in relation to her death. The same visual grammar that rendered goddesses benign and harmless was mobilised to aestheticise and depoliticise the destruction of a woman’s life and body.
As Kali’s devouring, violent energy was domesticated in nationalist and colonial discourse, the radical potential of female power was symbolically acknowledged yet materially constrained. Women’s bodies were disciplined and regulated in everyday life to mirror this containment: the “femininity” that inspired awe and resistance in mythic form was mapped onto domesticity and moral labour. In effect, the trajectory of Kali—from transgressive deity to sanitised nationalist icon—demonstrates a consistent pattern: radical female potential is first recognised, then symbolically harnessed, and finally contained.
Yet this containment is never total. The persistent reframing of a “transgressive” feminine goddess—both spiritual and material—highlights the desire for such a figure. Ritual, print, and feminist invocation continually reinterpret this abstract force, and with it, the possibilities for women’s agency. Kali’s body, like the bodies she symbolises, remains the interjection of ideology and patriarchal power, but also where radical potential endures. Far from a closed history, the negotiation of women’s roles and symbols in India suggests that the transformative capacity of female bodies is alive and revolutionary, continuously shaping and reshaping social and cultural life.
I can assure you as a practicing Hindu and someone who grew up watching Shākta worship by my own father for pretty much my entire life, no actual worshipping Hindu really has the second picture by Murugakani in their households. Ma Kaali’s rage or violence has never been a matter of questioning or diluting, it's not some coloniser’s myth. She has always been worshipped in the way she's depicted within the first photo, and celebrated for it.
I do not disagree with most of the things you said, a well written and researched article, especially when the topic isn't as mainstream as it should be.
I do want to ask about annapurna's self abnegation, as that's something I've never heard of, annapurna is anything but traditional or, as you say restrained. So I genuinely want to know where this one's from as there are many local lores.
Other than that, a beautiful and eye opening read!