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This introduction to the book has five sections. These cover discussion of: the pathways to Bengali Hindu Śākta poetry (sources, precedents, and influences); the 164 compositions by 37 representative poets for the goddesses Kālī and Umā that are included in the book; family resemblances — the Śākta Padavali (collected poems to the goddess — a genre of poetry focussed on Kālī and Umā) as bhakti (devotional attitude) poetry; the challenges and choices in designing an anthology; and notes on transliteration, translation, and word definition.

Translations of ten Bengali Hindu Śākta poems are presented, each prefaced by an explanatory introduction. The poems are: Kālī among the corpses: poems of battle; The cosmic goddess of transformation; The magician's daughter and her playful deceptions; “What kind of mother are you?” Cries of complaint; Petitioning the compassionate; “Oh my mind!”: instructing the self; Prioritizing paths: Tantra, devotion, and ritual; The experience of Kuṇḍalinī yoga; In defiance of death; and Adoring the daughter: Āgamanī and Vijayā poems for Umā.

The central concern of this book is the influence of bhakti, or the devotional attitude, in transforming perceptions of Hindu deities and their famous poet‐saints. Methodologically, this study combines textual, historical, and anthropological approaches: transformations in the presentation of the goddesses Kālī and Umā, and their poets are charted through historical reconstructions of textual history and augmented, for the modern period, by fieldwork carried out in West Bengal, India, in 1988–90, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1998, and 1999. The book has three principal aims: the first is to introduce the life stories and contexts of Śākta poet‐devotees who, though not much known outside Bengal, represent an important three‐hundred year literary and spiritual tradition centered around Hindu goddesses; the second is to provide the material necessary for the Bengali Śākta padas (short poems written according to a particular meter and rhyme) to be noticed, discussed, and recognized within the larger field of bhakti literary studies; and the third is to contribute to a “history of ideas” about Bengali goddesses.

An assessment is made of Rāmprasād Sen's poetic contributions to the Bengali Hindu Śākta literature in the light of the textual precedents examined in the last chapter. The first part of the chapter looks briefly at the texts, editions, and musical notations. The remainder is mostly devoted to the Kālī‐centered poetry, with a short section following it on the Umā‐centered poetry, and a brief roundup. Many quotations are included.

An assessment is made of Kamalākānta Bhaṭṭācārya's poetic contributions to the Bengali Hindu Śākta literature in the light of the textual precedents examined in Ch. 5. The first part of the chapter looks briefly at the texts, editions, and musical notations. The remainder is devoted to the Kālī‐centered poetry, examining in turn the Śākta padas, and a Tantric meditation manual, Sādhak Rañjan (which is treated more briefly). Many quotations are included. A short conclusion assesses Kamalākānta's role in evolving trends in the goddesses Kālī and Umā.

The discussion of Rāmprasād Sen's and Kamalākānta Bhaṭṭācārya's poetic contributions to the Bengali Hindu Śākta literature in the last two chapters is brought up to the present by referring comparatively to the literary output of other important Śākta poets, so as to gauge trends and themes in the poetic genre as a whole. The first part of the chapter discusses the intersection of nineteenth‐century and twentieth‐century literature with interest in the goddesses Kālī and Umā, and the rest (the main part) examines in chronological order the poetry to the two goddesses of several major eighteenth‐century to twentieth‐century poets. The underlying interpretative questions are the ways in which and degrees to which these depart from the examples and trends set by Rāmprasād and Kamalākānta. Many quotations are included.

This concluding chapter has three aims. These are: to recapitulate and comment upon the nuances of the relationship between bhakti (or the devotional attitude) and Tantra as it is expressed in Bengal; to offer some conceptual and theoretical models that may help to explain the rise of this poetry tradition and its (at least partial) success in taming, humanizing, and universalizing Kālī and Umā; and finally to place these softened goddesses of the Bengali Śākta poets in an all‐India context by highlighting similarities and differences between their travels and those of other Hindu and Buddhist deities.

The ultimate reality can be depicted as a feminine principle or devī, drawing attention to the Goddess tradition and its role in modern Hinduism. This has various manifestations such as Kālī the Mother, Mother India, Mother Religion, and Mother Gītā. In the context of modern Hinduism, it is important to examine the role of the Devī in the feminist movement; the role actually played by the Goddess tradition in the life of Indian men and women; and whether the Goddess tradition serves as a positive resource for women. An interesting precedent for the question of feminism and the Goddess is provided by the metaphorical metamorphosis of the sacrifice of Kālī during the threshold years of the nationalist movement in Bengal. The study of the Goddess can be argued to be a central issue in the study of Hinduism in the West and is gaining attention in India.

The Aghorīs are one of the most enigmatic of all Hindu ascetic sects. Throughout North India, they are infamous for their extremely transgressive practices, which fly in the face of Brahmanical Hinduism's obsessive concern with ritual purity. The Aghorīs act out their denial of the distinction between spirit and substance, purity and pollution, by ingesting any form of food or intoxicant, engaging in a variety of sexual practices, ritually or otherwise, and allegedly meditating on dead bodies in cremation ground rites. Although they call themselves Śaivites, Aghorīs are nonetheless inextricably bound to the Goddess. This chapter focuses on a mysterious, spiritually masterful, and yet vulnerable Kālī in the form of a living incarnation. Kālī Māyī is an old woman, living in poverty, who acts as the priest in a small Kālī Māyī temple in Banaras. Although she is the catalyst for several transformative events in the author's life, Kālī Māyī is the victim of a local goonda, and it is the author herself, in an enraged and sympathetic response, who embodies the Goddess's compassionate revenge.

This chapter moves from an emphasis on Kālī's iconography to a discussion of the festival proper. Kālī's festival follows Durgā's by three weeks, on the dark-moon night of the month of Kārtik, coincidentally also Diwali. In many ways their pairing makes sense, as from at least the sixth century ce, Kālī has been claimed as a multiform of Durgā who issued like a daughter, younger sister, or helper from Durgā's angry forehead to help her battle demons. Kālī herself holds Tantric reminders in one set of hands and devotional reassurances in the other—illustrating the limits on how much the past can be watered down or smoothed over in the worship of a deity. And yet the fact that, even superficially, Kālī's festival has become so like Durgā's, testifies to the democratizing and leveling effects of bhakti, popularity, and urban religion. The street festival forms its own homogenizing world.

Assessing early Vaiṣṇava, epic, ritualistic and literary sources and iconographic evidence, this chapter discusses how an archetypical cult of an early Durgā, the form of the goddess prior to her absorption of other identities, acquired prestige from obscure origins between the 3rd and 5th centuries, while empire under the Guptas was in its heyday. Beginning in the 3rd century, the chapter examines the roots of Durgā in the black-hued, yellow-robed, ghost-encircled, liquour-loving, peacock-feather crested Vaiṣṇava goddess of Death, Time and Sleep, Nidrā-Māyā-Kālarātri-Kālī and examines her cult of averting dangers in that period. Within Vaiṣṇava thought, Kālarātri-Nidrā is Viṣṇu's yogic sleep and creative, active magical power (māyā) embodied, the great night of aeonic destruction too, while in her earthly form, she is Kṛṣṇa's savior from Kaṃsa, the intercessory salvific sister Nidrā born on the dark Navamī, who puts beings to sleep and is also responsible for their deaths at the end of their lifetimes. This goddess, who was also worshipped in Cambodia and Indonesia, her belief systems and her ritual worship with buffalo sacrifice on Navamī, the Dark Ninth of Śrāvaṇa, provided the idea-matrix—the classical archetype—for Durgā's later characterizations and ritual modifications.

By assessing early Śaiva and literary sources, this chapter demonstrates how Kālarātri-Nidrā-Kālī, Durgā's early form, was assimilated and transformed by Śaivism from the 5th century onwards, in which Durgā eventually acquired co-identity with Pārvatī, the consort and inalienable other half of the great god Śiva. Her dark complexion, a genetic feature of the Vaiṣṇava Nidrā, the sister of dark-hued Kṛṣṇa, is explained within this tradition as Pārvatī's rejected black skin, a symbol of mystery and danger, that she removes from her body to acquire a fairer complexion. The emergent goddess is the antonym of Pārvatī, a warrior virgin who, though a protector of Dharma, nevertheless remains potentially dangerous, as her earliest form Nidrā-Kālī. In this way, the Śaiva tradition views attributes of antinomianism, potentially within Pārvatī, to be transferred to Durgā, now known as Caṇḍikā, the Fiery Lady, Pārvatī's unwanted self, thereby enlarging the conception of the latter to a binary deity, who like Śiva, incorporates a gentle as well as a fierce or bhairava aspect. The chapter also argues that the goddess's capital-creating aspect was heightened in Śaivism. Navamī, initially a day when the goddess was said to be born, became crucial as one of the occasions when capital could be most profitably accessed from the goddess. What we find being developed from the earlier conception of the Vaiṣṇava Durgā and acquiring greater sophistication within Śaiva mythological and ritual domains is the ability of her spiritual repertoire to function as a religion for managing times of state crises and for granting largesse and power.

Since the 1970s, interest in goddesses and goddess-like figures has been on the rise in Western culture on both the popular and scholarly levels. During this same period, scholars have continued to debate the role of culture, history, psychology, and gender in the construction and representation of these same goddess figures. This book explores the complexities, promises, and problems involved in meeting and interpreting a specific Hindu deity, the goddess Kālī, who represents the totality of life and death. It looks at what her indigenous South Asian contexts have long acknowledged and even celebrated, the excesses of her power, sexuality, and violence. Part I is devoted to Kālī's indigenous South Asian iconography, mythology, and symbolism and provides evidence for her associations in South Asia with blood and power, sexuality, and Tantra. Part II turns to the West and investigates the various contours of Kālī's different Western representations.

This chapter, a reprint of the chapter on Kālī in David Kinsley's book Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition, provides an introduction to Kālī's basic story for those who are unfamiliar with it. It surveys Kālī's Sanskrit and Bengali textual history, proposes likely reasons for her growing importance in Tantra during the medieval period and in devotionalism in late eighteenth-century Bengal, and concludes by explicating her theological significance as a symbol of unconventionality, death, and the possibility of spiritual awakening. Iconographic representations of Kālī and Śiva nearly always show Kālī as dominant. She is usually standing or dancing on Śiva's prone body, and when the two are depicted in sexual intercourse, she is shown above him. Kālī occupies a central position in Hindu piety and is of central importance in Tantrism, particularly left-handed Tantrism, and in Bengali Śākta devotionalism.

This chapter describes the Mahābhāgavata Purāna, a late medieval Śākta text that glorifies the Goddess in her form as Kālī. It shows that the Kālī to emerge from this work is not simply a blood-thirsty, demon-slaying deity but also a magnificent mother, who tests and then lovingly rewards her devotees. It sees in this text an early prototype of what later happens in the eighteenth-century Śākta bhakti poetry of Bengal: the Goddess is sweetened as her rough edges and extremities are increasingly downplayed and muted by devotion, public popularity, and modern sensibilities. The Mahābhāgavata Purāna develops a devotionalism to Kālī centered on Mahādevī, the Great Goddess. Its portrayal of Śiva's relationship with the Goddess and his passage through her test culminates in a myth of origin for the Daksinākālī image, in which Kālī stands on Śiva's chest. The Mahābhāgavata consistently places the Goddess's (various) parents in devotional relationship with her. Prasūti, Satī's mother, passes Kālī's test with flying colors. Daksa fails miserably.

Kālīghāt, the landing stage sacred to Kālī on the old course of the river Ganga at Calcutta, is regarded as an important seat of the Goddess (mahāpītha or śāktipītha) and is visited by thousands of pilgrims everyday. One particular feature of Bengali religiosity is a deep-seated devotion to mother goddesses. The most important public religious festivals in Bengal are connected with two goddesses, Durgā and Kālī, the goddess of war and victory and the goddess of death and regeneration, respectively. Two religious streams fuse at Kālīghāt: the non-vegetarian Śākta tradition and the vegetarian Vaisnava tradition. This chapter narrates how the priests of Kālīghāt, Kālī's most famous temple in Bengal, have been systematically Vaisnavizing her, removing as many reminders of her Tantric background as possible in their ritual regimens.

In 1991, the authors investigated the meanings that Oriya Hindus living in the temple town of Bhubaneswar attach to a particular Tantric icon of the goddess Kālī—the one in which the Goddess is depicted with her eyes bulging and tongue out, equipped with the weapons and emblems of all the male gods, grasping a bloody decapitated head, and with her foot placed squarely on the chest of a supine Śiva. This chapter suggests that this unmistakably Tantric icon with its emphatic, extreme representation of female power has been almost completely assimilated into mainstream Hinduism as it is practiced today in Bhubaneswar. The icon is used to uphold Hindu family values, especially those encouraging female self-control and self-restraint. The chapter also argues that an Oriya text, dating back to the fifteenth century—the Candzī Purāna—provided the conceptual framework for a creative interpretation of this Tantric icon, an interpretation that has today become a powerful way of persuading listeners of the importance of respectful self-restraint in maintaining social relations and preserving harmony within the family.