There is basic incomprehension in the largely Abrahamic West when it comes to Maa Kali. Of course, it is not just Maa Kali. The West has discarded the large pantheon of Roman and Greek Gods of old, with their passions and contradictions that might have provided an insight.
Very few in the West understand our ancient religion which many of us call a way of life as well. Except, that is, for a most respectful sliver of those who are aware of the nuances, subtleties and tenets of Hinduism. These few people know it is a loosely woven repository of wisdom and spiritual knowledge combined with science, yoga, meditation and astrology. It has survived thousands of years without ever taking to the sword or trying to convert anyone. And there are many paths to salvation within its teachings.
To Hindus these aware people in the West are born again Hindus in the Western sense of having found new or dormant religious beliefs in adulthood, or are simply reincarnations of Hindus.
It is the oldest religion in the world, going back over 10,000 years, in contrast to Abrahamic religions, all born in the deserts around present-day Jerusalem and Mecca, at around 2,000 years ago.
At its core, the Hindu religion embraces paradox, illusion it calls Maya, redemption, contradiction, all to the utter exasperation of the Western mind. It is very hard for a superficial appreciation of it to make its way in the maze most Hindus proudly embrace, and take for granted since birth.
So, for most Westerners given to ‘either-or’ binary thinking, it is just so much horrifying and self-serving paganism, practised by India’s caste-ridden teeming millions, at least by over 75 percent of them.
The Abrahamic Muslims, converted largely by force in the subcontinent, Shia, Sunni, Ahmadia, Bohra, Aga Khan’s followers, some 20 percent of the Indian population, are schooled to think likewise.
If they belong to Opposition political parties, they regularly insult Hindu Gods. This includes many with ostensible Hindu names out to insult the BJP, Hindus and Hindutva, while pandering to their own minority vote banks. This is, after all, a very large number of people, given India’s population is now around 1.42 billion people. Their notions, of ‘animal worshipping’ Hindus that drink cow urine, with 33,000 crore Gods to their one, are also upheld and used by the subcontinental Mohammedan diaspora.
This sort of prejudice is backed to an extent by a smattering of erstwhile subcontinental Roman Catholics and Protestants, perhaps frustrated in their attempts to convert more and more Hindus. Recent legislation against forcible or inducement-based conversions has cramped their style. Clamp downs on illegal NGO funding is another flashpoint.
However, this evangelising and conversion does not hesitate to incorporate Hindu symbolism and that of the Sikhs to draw in their prospects. Bhagwa and tilaks are used, Christ and the Virgin Mary are depicted considerably Indianised, congregations are called satsangs.
All this influences and confounds the surface skimming White man in his views on Hinduism. He has enough Hindu-hating sub-continentals to take a cue from. The virulence against is even more pronounced amongst the Pakistanis abroad, brainwashed to hate Hindus from birth. So many poison pen pieces are written and TV shows anchored by ethnic sub-continentals.
Most Christian and Muslim preachers in India attempt to look down on Hinduism as just so much sacrilegious activity of unbelievers destined to never be admitted to Heaven. The same song is sung in mosques and churches frequented by sub-continentals abroad in the West.
But any Hindu will tell these blasphemers, because that is what they are from the Hindu perspective, that it is not at all a good idea to insult or denigrate Ma Kali, even if it is born of ignorance and prejudice.
Karmic retribution, Hindus believe, will certainly follow. This is a grand belief that does not involve the slaughter of the Kafir or non-believer in the Abrahamic style. Not a finger needs to be lifted against the culprit, because he will be made to pay for his sins automatically by the workings of his Karma and the ‘Akashic Record’ of his deeds. Particularly, it is said, the motivations behind them.
The plight that post-Brexit Britain finds itself in these days, its reduction to a middle grade power, that too in terminal decline, many Hindus believe, is because the British are now paying for their atrocities in India during their colonial domination. They are finding difficulty in feeding themselves and paying their day-to-day bills.
Karmic retribution, it is known works for centuries, is carried over from past lives. It is also inescapable.
That the British inflicted great hardship on many other countries during their imperial period, the same Hindus believe, will also be counted and duly punished. Of course, the West as a whole, thinks all this is so much esoteric mumbo jumbo, but a few amongst them are not so sure nowadays.
The White man is generally caught up in Maa Kali’s popular depiction. There she is, nude and blue, with a Kharga dripping with blood in one of her hands, her tongue sticking out in error at having accidentally stepped upon her Lord, red and vivid, a garland of human heads around her torso and waist, proud breasts exposed, hair worn long and open. She is standing with one leg on her husband Lord Shiva, lying prone at her feet.
That Maa Kali, sometimes the burning ghats Maa Kali, sometimes worshipped by bandits and thugees, is also Lord Shiva’s generally benevolent consort Parvati as well as Maa Durga, is lost on these people of little knowledge. The same deities with equally valid and myriad forms, is a concept hard to grasp for occidental thought.
To the ignorant and propaganda-soaked White man, brought up on racist ideas, this striking depiction of Maa Kali in her retributive form, is conveniently representative of innate Hindu bloodthirstiness. It can therefore always be used against the Hindu religion and its practitioners. We are meant to be savages beyond redemption because of our regressive religion without borders, beginning, or end. It is another matter that Hinduism spread across a large part of the Asia-Pacific along with Buddhism without any attempt at conquest.
The White man does not do much better with the Pashupati Lord Shiva in his animal skins and his necklace of cobras, Lord Ganesha with his elephant’s head, Lord Hanuman in his form of the celestial monkey, even Buddha, his ribs showing, meditating interminably under a Bodhi tree.
There’s Lord Vishnu, lying on a raft made of the divine snake Sheshnag, quite often with his wife the Goddess Lakshmi. And another blue-hued Sri Krishna playing his flute surrounded by cows and his band of loving Gopikas. And this is just a sampling, without going into the avataras of each God, and indeed our 33,000 crore deities. There is nothing ridiculous about it but it is too much to expect Abrahamic religions to understand this.
Maa Durga, again depicted in multiple forms with different aspects, is yet another form of Lord Shiva’s consort. She is almost always depicted fighting evil, killing demons called asuras, riding a lion, weaponry in several of her hands. It goes on and on.
Maa Durga’s children — Lord Kartikeya, a bold warrior and epitome of male beauty, Maa Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, Maa Saraswati, The Goddess of Learning, Lord Ganesha, the learned one, who wrote down the epic Mahabharata as the sage Vyasa recited the verses, is the auspicious God of all new beginnings. He is always prayed to first.
And then there is the deep and abiding belief in reincarnation, the quality of a subsequent life based on one’s deeds, the indestructability of the soul. The concept is shared by spin-off religions like Buddhism and Jainism as well.
The Abrahamic religions have suppressed the doctrine of reincarnation, though the doctrine of the resurrection exists in Christianity to this day.
So what does the West understand when it depicts our Gods on underwear, floor-mats, chappals, umbrellas and so forth, and when in civilised mode, on T shirts?
Sticking to Maa Kali in the main here, it is clear that when the West wants to be particularly malicious about Hinduism, Maa Kali in her retributive form, is the chosen deity. There’s enough blood and gore there to titillate Western audiences.
The irony is, sometimes there are sub-continentals, even putative Hindus, living in Canada, for example, Leena Manimekalai, who depicted Maa Kali with a Pride flag in the background, drinking, smoking, street walking in Toronto, in a film launched at the Aga Khan Museum there. The Museum took the film down after the ensuing outrage from Indian lawyers and others, but the filmmaker remained unrepentant. She proceeded to brazen it out. Its free publicity, after all, for the woman who had made an execrable film, safe in the knowledge that Hindu outrage won’t result in her being beheaded. But the bad Karma that comes from this kind of thing is undeniable and that she will have to pay for.
The Hindu public is agitated also at the constant insults to its Gods in the largely ISI, Qatar and other elements antithetical to India financed Bollywood films. Of late, several have been boycotted involving some of its storied Muslim and Woke stars.
Companies that show Hindus in a bad light, or nudge them towards Islamic cultural mores in their advertisements at Diwali and Holi, such as Tanishq and Fabindia have also faced the brunt of public disapproval.
One of the most pernicious and predatory phenomena recently is the practice of ‘Love Jihad’ that cold-bloodedly lures Hindu and Christian girls into conversion and often grisly ends thereafter.
A famous Sufi shrine in Ajmer has lost a lot of its Hindu worshippers because of relentless and gratuitous insults to Hinduism, and support in the beheading of a Hindu tailor in Udaipur by ISI-trained and radicalised terrorists.
Hindu festivals are subjected to Muslim stone-pelting on a routine basis these days, though the converse is much more rare. The same applies to cattle smuggling and illegal slaughtering.
The good thing in a sense is that the Hindu majority has awakened at last, and it is no longer an easy one-way street. If nothing else, the enormous buying power of the Hindu is acting as a deterrent.
The latest effort at foreign denigration has come from Ukraine, which is slowly being demolished by Russia. The perpetrators may be annoyed with Indian neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine War. And so, let us insult Maa Kali!
Ukraine’s Defence Ministry tweeted an image of Maa Kali over a blast fume and labelled it ‘Work of Art’. Following outrage from Indian tweeters, the Ukraine Defence Ministry did delete it fairly rapidly. What purpose did it then serve?
The concepts of Hinduism are too deep and ancient for these cheap shots to make any difference. However, the problem of hostility to Hinduism, Hindutva, in the only country with a massive Hindu population, under siege to an extent by rapid increases in Muslim population, is going to take a lot of work to set right.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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