Caste, performance and subversive women: What makes Kali iconography distinctive in South India

Kali’s primary character is that she is ungovernable and exists outside accepted modes of behaviour. This lends her an extreme nature but also a certain malleability in contemporary times for manifold appropriations by fringe groups that challenge the dominant order. It also allows for the accommodation of her extreme nature, between the bloodthirsty and the violent, and the protective and the maternal. It has been argued that goddesses appear auspicious, gentle and welcoming when they submit to the will of their husbands, within the bounds of accepted tradition and order, but fierce and dangerous when they do not. Kali ‘is at home outside the moral order and thus seems unbound by that order.’

The interchangeability of the devi’s names and, occasionally, attributes is seen in different parts of the country. Making the distinction between Bhagavati and Bhadrakali, both as forms of Kali, Sarah Caldwell writes: ‘Bhagavati, the predominant deity of Kerala, is a form of the pan-Indian goddess Kali. As Bhagavati, she is a benevolent protectress, but in her more common angry and violent form, she is referred to as Bhadrakali.’ According to Devdutt Pattanaik, a Kali without the outstretched tongue is Chandi, Chamunda, Bhairavi or Bhadrakali (literally, the auspicious Kali).

Kali iconography across...

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