Story Of Mahakali
The first time I saw an image of Kali, I couldn’t look away. Her tongue out, her eyes blazing, a garland of skulls around her neck, standing on Shiva’s chest. She didn’t look like the goddess I was taught to pray to as a child. She looked like… me. Or at least, the part of me I was always told to hide or to look away from.
Kali was born when the demon Raktabīja, like everyone with power thought he was invincible. Every drop of his blood created another him. He laughed at the gods. He laughed louder when a woman came to fight him. But Kali didn’t fight like gods. She didn’t fight like men. She didn’t swing harder; she drank his blood. She swallowed his arrogance whole.
She destroyed him by being everything he underestimated and overlooked.
And that has always been her essence, Kali doesn’t play by the rules others set, she rewrites them entirely. She was fast enough to catch every drop of blood, inventive enough to drink it at its source, merciless enough to end what none of the other gods could. And isn’t that what women do even now? Solve problems no one else can, hold worlds together when no one else will, bear the weight of responsibilities and silence, often unacknowledged. She was feared and misunderstood for her ferocity, just as women are often labeled “too much” when they show strength, assertiveness, or fire. Yet those very traits are what make survival possible in impossible times.
Kali is also worshipped not just as destroyer but as mother, and her puja across India reflects that duality. In Bengal, she is the night herself, celebrated during Diwali when the rest of India worships Lakshmi. At midnight, devotees light lamps, chant her mantras, and offer red hibiscus the only flower fierce enough to mirror her spirit. Liquor and meat, once part of older traditions, symbolise breaking away from purity-taboo and embracing the raw truth of life and death. In Assam, at the ancient Kamakhya Temple, she is tied to fertility, menstruation, and the unapologetic force of creation itself. In Kerala, she appears as Bhadrakali, honored with fiery Theyyam dances, drums, and rituals where devotees embody her in trance, reminding us that she lives through human bodies, not just idols. And in Kashmir’s Shaiva traditions, Kali was once seen as Kala—time itself, the one who strips away illusion until only truth remains.
Every part of her worship is soaked in symbolism. The red hibiscus is her blood and her beauty, her power and her tenderness. The offerings of liquor, rice, or meat were never just indulgence but reminders that the sacred does not only live in purity, it lives in shadow too. The skulls around her neck are not horror but wisdom, the severed arms she carries are not cruelty but freedom from ego, and her great red tongue is not shame but the truth no one can silence. Even Shiva understood this: when her rage threatened to burn the world, he did not scold her, he lay down beneath her feet. Because the right kind of masculine does not fear the fire of the feminine; he steadies it, honours it, and embraces it.
And I think of all the times I bit my tongue, smoothed my edges, dimmed my light just to fit into what was acceptable. Now, when I see her, I see a friend reminding me that my anger is not ugly, it is Human. That my voice is not too much, it is exactly enough to change the story.
Kali’s puja may look different across temples and traditions, but the meaning is always the same: to face what terrifies us, to honour the darkness as much as the light, to remember that destruction is not the end but the beginning of renewal. She is the mother who holds her children close, and she is the fire that refuses to let them shrink. She is not terror, but truth. And when I see her now, I no longer look away, I see myself.