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The Book of Kali
It is the evolution of Kali, from her origins as a Tantric Goddess to her metamorphosis into a divinity in mainstream religions, that the author captures brilliantly in this book.
- GenresHinduism
Paperback
First published September 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 1, 2014
At first, let me jot down something that enraged me very much!!
It's a tiny-tiny book, with near about 140 pages and a price-tag of Rs. 250.
Even after I received the book at half price, I was quite disappointed in the outlook of this book. I was like. . . .this is so tiny! And the myth of Kali is so huge in retrospect! What did they put into that? A bunch of popular stories and a couple of drawings! What is new in that! Why did I waste my bucks on this??
But now, after reading this NOT-EVEN-150-PAGES book, perhaps, I get the irony of the cover-picture! The picture of the Goddess with her tongue outstretched! perhaps Mocking Me, while I was judging it with my "NATURAL JUDGEMENT" . . . . . . judging the book by it's cover (size and thickness and relative price to be apt)!
Boy!! was I WRONG!!
It is literally like a compact and compressed book that compresses 1000 of information in those few pages. It's an extremely intense, vivid and acute book that requires you to go through several readings and separate understandings from each of the viewpoints the author offers to fully understand the import. From Kali's forms, to her manifestations, her tales and rituals of worshiping, her traces of origins from the pre-Aryan and perhaps Dravidian culture, and the metamorphosis the goddess went through when society wanted to domesticate her, and finally the wisdom she offers . . . . . it's really a great-read!! The book is really a beauty to read through. Based on the lectures and writings of the popular mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik and his unconventional and beautiful sketches, and the compilation his sister(the author) provides, it's a book that I am glad to keep in my bookshelf. There are also a couple of popular hymns, to Kali provided at last, acknowledging her, praising her, fearing her, and worshiping her.
The best part of this book is in it's CONCLUSION! Where, it succeeds in portraying riveting and fascinating details and the myriad manifestations of the enigmatic goddess. Here the author provides answers to the old-age stigmas, horrors and misunderstandings that are generally associated with Kali. Why is she dark and naked? Why is her hair unbound? Why does she drink blood? Why is her tongue open? Is she embarrassed of her behavior, or mocking the viewer? Why she looks so violent? and so many more! The different observations of the scriptures, legends and myths gives you a whole picture of the CIRCLE OF KALI, and the truth may set you free or blow-up in your face!
It helps you to decode the meaning behind the gruesome and grim, and help you to acquire the perception into the Hindu approach to the divine. Hrim, Srim, Krim!!
It's a tiny-tiny book, with near about 140 pages and a price-tag of Rs. 250.
Even after I received the book at half price, I was quite disappointed in the outlook of this book. I was like. . . .this is so tiny! And the myth of Kali is so huge in retrospect! What did they put into that? A bunch of popular stories and a couple of drawings! What is new in that! Why did I waste my bucks on this??
But now, after reading this NOT-EVEN-150-PAGES book, perhaps, I get the irony of the cover-picture! The picture of the Goddess with her tongue outstretched! perhaps Mocking Me, while I was judging it with my "NATURAL JUDGEMENT" . . . . . . judging the book by it's cover (size and thickness and relative price to be apt)!
Boy!! was I WRONG!!
It is literally like a compact and compressed book that compresses 1000 of information in those few pages. It's an extremely intense, vivid and acute book that requires you to go through several readings and separate understandings from each of the viewpoints the author offers to fully understand the import. From Kali's forms, to her manifestations, her tales and rituals of worshiping, her traces of origins from the pre-Aryan and perhaps Dravidian culture, and the metamorphosis the goddess went through when society wanted to domesticate her, and finally the wisdom she offers . . . . . it's really a great-read!! The book is really a beauty to read through. Based on the lectures and writings of the popular mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik and his unconventional and beautiful sketches, and the compilation his sister(the author) provides, it's a book that I am glad to keep in my bookshelf. There are also a couple of popular hymns, to Kali provided at last, acknowledging her, praising her, fearing her, and worshiping her.
The best part of this book is in it's CONCLUSION! Where, it succeeds in portraying riveting and fascinating details and the myriad manifestations of the enigmatic goddess. Here the author provides answers to the old-age stigmas, horrors and misunderstandings that are generally associated with Kali. Why is she dark and naked? Why is her hair unbound? Why does she drink blood? Why is her tongue open? Is she embarrassed of her behavior, or mocking the viewer? Why she looks so violent? and so many more! The different observations of the scriptures, legends and myths gives you a whole picture of the CIRCLE OF KALI, and the truth may set you free or blow-up in your face!
It helps you to decode the meaning behind the gruesome and grim, and help you to acquire the perception into the Hindu approach to the divine. Hrim, Srim, Krim!!
February 5, 2026
I did not approach this text as a neutral reader. Kali is not neutral territory. She never has been. She arrives already thick with fear, devotion, misunderstanding, colonial distortion, tantric secrecy, feminist reclamation, and visceral intimacy. Mohanty knows this. More importantly, she refuses to dilute it.
This is not a book that tries to make Kali “palatable.” It does not sand down her teeth, nor does it prettify her darkness into metaphor alone. Instead, it insists—quietly but relentlessly—that ‘‘Kali must be encountered whole’’, or not at all.
From the opening pages, Mohanty situates Kali not as an aberration within Hindu cosmology but as its ‘‘terrifying and necessary axis’’. Kali is not chaos opposed to order; she is the ‘‘truth beneath order’’, the force that reveals the fragility of all constructions—political, patriarchal, metaphysical.
In this sense, ‘The Book of Kali’ reads as both theology and counter-theology, scholarship and confession.
The text reminded me repeatedly of a line from the ‘‘Devi Suktam’’ of the ‘Rig Veda’, where the Goddess declares her own sovereignty:
‘“Aham rudrebhir vasubhir carāmy aham ādityair uta viśvadevaiḥ”‘
‘I move with the Rudras and the Vasus, with the Ādityas and all the gods.’
Mohanty’s Kali is exactly this: ‘‘not marginal, not secondary’’, but coextensive with the cosmos itself. The book insists that Kali does not erupt at the edges of Hindu thought; she pulses at its center, even when later traditions tried to veil her.
One of the book’s great strengths is how deftly it navigates ‘‘textual Kali’’ and ‘‘lived Kali’’. Mohanty moves between Purāṇic sources, folk practices, temple iconography, colonial archives, and contemporary cultural anxieties without ever flattening them into a single explanatory frame. She allows contradiction to remain contradiction—an approach deeply faithful to Kali herself.
The ‘‘Kālikā Purāṇa’’, which Mohanty draws upon with care, does not shy away from Kali’s terrifying aspects. One verse that echoed insistently as I read:
‘“Śmaśānavāsini kāli karāla-vadanāṁ ghora-rūpiṇīm”‘
‘She who dwells in the cremation ground, Kali of fearsome mouth and dreadful form.’
Mohanty does not interpret this as mere symbolism. The cremation ground, she argues, is not just a metaphor for impermanence—it is a ‘‘political and spiritual refusal’’ of purity. Kali stands where caste, cleanliness, lineage, and propriety collapse into ash. In this reading, Kali becomes radically anti-hierarchical, her darkness a form of ‘‘ethical clarity’’ rather than moral negation.
This is where Mohanty’s work subtly but powerfully intersects with feminist thought—not the sanitized, empowerment-poster feminism of modern branding, but a ‘‘ferocious feminism that does not ask permission’’. Kali does not seek equality; she annihilates the terms on which inequality is produced.
At times, Mohanty’s prose approaches the incantatory. She writes not only ‘about’ Kali but ‘toward’ her, and occasionally ‘from within’ her gravitational field. This reminded me of Shakespeare’s own fascination with female power that terrifies patriarchal order. Lady Macbeth’s invocation feels uncannily Kali-esque:
“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty.”
What Shakespeare sensed intuitively, Mohanty articulates explicitly: that feminine power, when it refuses domestication, is read as monstrous. Kali is the ‘‘archetype of that refusal’’. She does not nurture in the expected ways; she liberates through destruction. She does not soothe the ego; she dismembers it.
Mohanty is particularly incisive when addressing how colonial scholarship and missionary anxiety reframed Kali as proof of Hindu barbarism.
The British obsession with Kali as bloodthirsty idol conveniently ignored Europe’s own intimate history with violence sanctified by God. Reading these sections, I could not help but think of Dante’s ‘Inferno’, where divine justice is rendered through exquisitely calibrated cruelty:
“Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
fecemi la divina podestate.”‘
‘Justice moved my high maker; divine power made me.’
Dante’s Hell is orderly, hierarchical, rational. Kali’s violence, by contrast, is ‘‘cosmic, ecstatic, indiscriminate’’. Mohanty suggests that it is precisely this refusal of rational containment that made Kali intolerable to colonial sensibilities. Hell could be mapped; Kali could not.
What I found most compelling is Mohanty’s insistence that Kali is not merely about death, but about ‘‘truth without anesthetic’’. Kali cuts because illusions cling. She destroys because preservation has become toxic. In this sense, Kali aligns uncannily with postmodern suspicion toward grand narratives—yet she predates postmodernism by millennia.
The book repeatedly returns to Kali’s tongue—extended, bloodied, often misread as shame or excess. Mohanty reframes it as ‘‘cosmic laughter’’, a refusal to pretend that the universe is polite. The image resonated with a line from Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’:
“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;
They kill us for their sport.”
Kali, however, is not sportful. She is honest. She does not kill capriciously; she reveals the violence already embedded in existence. Mohanty’s Kali is not crueler than reality—she is simply ‘‘less hypocritical’’.
Structurally, ‘The Book of Kali’ resists linear argument. It spirals. It returns. It contradicts itself productively. This is not a flaw; it is a methodological choice. Kali is not approached through thesis and conclusion but through ‘‘accumulation and resonance’’. By the end, the reader does not “understand” Kali so much as feel destabilized by her presence—which may be the highest fidelity possible.
There were moments where I wished Mohanty lingered longer—particularly on contemporary political appropriations of Kali imagery—but even these absences felt intentional, as though the book were reminding us that Kali cannot be fully enclosed within discourse.
In the end, ‘The Book of Kali’ left me with a strange calm. Not comfort—Kali does not offer that—but clarity. The clarity that comes from standing, however briefly, in the cremation ground of ideas and watching cherished illusions burn.
The ‘‘Devi Suktam’’ ends with an assertion of the Goddess as both terror and sustenance:
“Aham annam aham annādah”
‘I am the food, and I am the eater of food.’
Seema Mohanty’s book understands this profoundly. Kali is what we consume to survive—and what consumes us when survival is no longer enough. This is not a book you finish and shelve. It is a book that ‘‘stays’’, like ash on the skin, like a mantra half-remembered, like a question you are no longer certain you want answered.
Reading this book felt less like reading a book and more like entering a ‘‘charged ritual space’’—one where language does not merely describe the Goddess but ‘‘circles her’’, invokes her, occasionally trembles before her.
Highly recommended.
This is not a book that tries to make Kali “palatable.” It does not sand down her teeth, nor does it prettify her darkness into metaphor alone. Instead, it insists—quietly but relentlessly—that ‘‘Kali must be encountered whole’’, or not at all.
From the opening pages, Mohanty situates Kali not as an aberration within Hindu cosmology but as its ‘‘terrifying and necessary axis’’. Kali is not chaos opposed to order; she is the ‘‘truth beneath order’’, the force that reveals the fragility of all constructions—political, patriarchal, metaphysical.
In this sense, ‘The Book of Kali’ reads as both theology and counter-theology, scholarship and confession.
The text reminded me repeatedly of a line from the ‘‘Devi Suktam’’ of the ‘Rig Veda’, where the Goddess declares her own sovereignty:
‘“Aham rudrebhir vasubhir carāmy aham ādityair uta viśvadevaiḥ”‘
‘I move with the Rudras and the Vasus, with the Ādityas and all the gods.’
Mohanty’s Kali is exactly this: ‘‘not marginal, not secondary’’, but coextensive with the cosmos itself. The book insists that Kali does not erupt at the edges of Hindu thought; she pulses at its center, even when later traditions tried to veil her.
One of the book’s great strengths is how deftly it navigates ‘‘textual Kali’’ and ‘‘lived Kali’’. Mohanty moves between Purāṇic sources, folk practices, temple iconography, colonial archives, and contemporary cultural anxieties without ever flattening them into a single explanatory frame. She allows contradiction to remain contradiction—an approach deeply faithful to Kali herself.
The ‘‘Kālikā Purāṇa’’, which Mohanty draws upon with care, does not shy away from Kali’s terrifying aspects. One verse that echoed insistently as I read:
‘“Śmaśānavāsini kāli karāla-vadanāṁ ghora-rūpiṇīm”‘
‘She who dwells in the cremation ground, Kali of fearsome mouth and dreadful form.’
Mohanty does not interpret this as mere symbolism. The cremation ground, she argues, is not just a metaphor for impermanence—it is a ‘‘political and spiritual refusal’’ of purity. Kali stands where caste, cleanliness, lineage, and propriety collapse into ash. In this reading, Kali becomes radically anti-hierarchical, her darkness a form of ‘‘ethical clarity’’ rather than moral negation.
This is where Mohanty’s work subtly but powerfully intersects with feminist thought—not the sanitized, empowerment-poster feminism of modern branding, but a ‘‘ferocious feminism that does not ask permission’’. Kali does not seek equality; she annihilates the terms on which inequality is produced.
At times, Mohanty’s prose approaches the incantatory. She writes not only ‘about’ Kali but ‘toward’ her, and occasionally ‘from within’ her gravitational field. This reminded me of Shakespeare’s own fascination with female power that terrifies patriarchal order. Lady Macbeth’s invocation feels uncannily Kali-esque:
“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty.”
What Shakespeare sensed intuitively, Mohanty articulates explicitly: that feminine power, when it refuses domestication, is read as monstrous. Kali is the ‘‘archetype of that refusal’’. She does not nurture in the expected ways; she liberates through destruction. She does not soothe the ego; she dismembers it.
Mohanty is particularly incisive when addressing how colonial scholarship and missionary anxiety reframed Kali as proof of Hindu barbarism.
The British obsession with Kali as bloodthirsty idol conveniently ignored Europe’s own intimate history with violence sanctified by God. Reading these sections, I could not help but think of Dante’s ‘Inferno’, where divine justice is rendered through exquisitely calibrated cruelty:
“Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
fecemi la divina podestate.”‘
‘Justice moved my high maker; divine power made me.’
Dante’s Hell is orderly, hierarchical, rational. Kali’s violence, by contrast, is ‘‘cosmic, ecstatic, indiscriminate’’. Mohanty suggests that it is precisely this refusal of rational containment that made Kali intolerable to colonial sensibilities. Hell could be mapped; Kali could not.
What I found most compelling is Mohanty’s insistence that Kali is not merely about death, but about ‘‘truth without anesthetic’’. Kali cuts because illusions cling. She destroys because preservation has become toxic. In this sense, Kali aligns uncannily with postmodern suspicion toward grand narratives—yet she predates postmodernism by millennia.
The book repeatedly returns to Kali’s tongue—extended, bloodied, often misread as shame or excess. Mohanty reframes it as ‘‘cosmic laughter’’, a refusal to pretend that the universe is polite. The image resonated with a line from Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’:
“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;
They kill us for their sport.”
Kali, however, is not sportful. She is honest. She does not kill capriciously; she reveals the violence already embedded in existence. Mohanty’s Kali is not crueler than reality—she is simply ‘‘less hypocritical’’.
Structurally, ‘The Book of Kali’ resists linear argument. It spirals. It returns. It contradicts itself productively. This is not a flaw; it is a methodological choice. Kali is not approached through thesis and conclusion but through ‘‘accumulation and resonance’’. By the end, the reader does not “understand” Kali so much as feel destabilized by her presence—which may be the highest fidelity possible.
There were moments where I wished Mohanty lingered longer—particularly on contemporary political appropriations of Kali imagery—but even these absences felt intentional, as though the book were reminding us that Kali cannot be fully enclosed within discourse.
In the end, ‘The Book of Kali’ left me with a strange calm. Not comfort—Kali does not offer that—but clarity. The clarity that comes from standing, however briefly, in the cremation ground of ideas and watching cherished illusions burn.
The ‘‘Devi Suktam’’ ends with an assertion of the Goddess as both terror and sustenance:
“Aham annam aham annādah”
‘I am the food, and I am the eater of food.’
Seema Mohanty’s book understands this profoundly. Kali is what we consume to survive—and what consumes us when survival is no longer enough. This is not a book you finish and shelve. It is a book that ‘‘stays’’, like ash on the skin, like a mantra half-remembered, like a question you are no longer certain you want answered.
Reading this book felt less like reading a book and more like entering a ‘‘charged ritual space’’—one where language does not merely describe the Goddess but ‘‘circles her’’, invokes her, occasionally trembles before her.
Highly recommended.
June 6, 2019
How to do a short but compact god-biography right.
July 16, 2023
Awesome read
October 29, 2023
Amazing book for those who are looking for the background of the contrasting descriptions and beliefs about Kali and perceiving something beyond the traditional value system.
July 9, 2024
Jai Maa Kali
This book has helped me to understand the philosophy and practices surrounding Maa Kali. May She always protect us from all evil.
This book has helped me to understand the philosophy and practices surrounding Maa Kali. May She always protect us from all evil.
May 1, 2014
At first, let me jot down something that enraged me very much!!
It's a tiny-tiny book, with near about 140 pages and a price-tag of Rs. 250.
Even after I received the book at half price, I was quite disappointed in the outlook of this book. I was like. . . .this is so tiny! And the myth of Kali is so huge in retrospect! What did they put into that? A bunch of popular stories and a couple of drawings! What is new in that! Why did I waste my bucks on this??
But now, after reading this NOT-EVEN-150-PAGES book, perhaps, I get the irony of the cover-picture! The picture of the Goddess with her tongue outstretched! perhaps Mocking Me, while I was judging it with my "NATURAL JUDGEMENT" . . . . . . judging the book by it's cover (size and thickness and relative price to be apt)!
Boy!! was I WRONG!!
It is literally like a compact and compressed book that compresses 1000 of information in those few pages. It's an extremely intense, vivid and acute book that requires you to go through several readings and separate understandings from each of the viewpoints the author offers to fully understand the import. From Kali's forms, to her manifestations, her tales and rituals of worshiping, her traces of origins from the pre-Aryan and perhaps Dravidian culture, and the metamorphosis the goddess went through when society wanted to domesticate her, and finally the wisdom she offers . . . . . it's really a great-read!! The book is really a beauty to read through. Based on the lectures and writings of the popular mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik and his unconventional and beautiful sketches, and the compilation his sister(the author) provides, it's a book that I am glad to keep in my bookshelf. There are also a couple of popular hymns, to Kali provided at last, acknowledging her, praising her, fearing her, and worshiping her.
The best part of this book is in it's CONCLUSION! Where, it succeeds in portraying riveting and fascinating details and the myriad manifestations of the enigmatic goddess. Here the author provides answers to the old-age stigmas, horrors and misunderstandings that are generally associated with Kali. Why is she dark and naked? Why is her hair unbound? Why does she drink blood? Why is her tongue open? Is she embarrassed of her behavior, or mocking the viewer? Why she looks so violent? and so many more! The different observations of the scriptures, legends and myths gives you a whole picture of the CIRCLE OF KALI, and the truth may set you free or blow-up in your face!
It helps you to decode the meaning behind the gruesome and grim, and help you to acquire the perception into the Hindu approach to the divine. Hrim, Srim, Krim!!
It's a tiny-tiny book, with near about 140 pages and a price-tag of Rs. 250.
Even after I received the book at half price, I was quite disappointed in the outlook of this book. I was like. . . .this is so tiny! And the myth of Kali is so huge in retrospect! What did they put into that? A bunch of popular stories and a couple of drawings! What is new in that! Why did I waste my bucks on this??
But now, after reading this NOT-EVEN-150-PAGES book, perhaps, I get the irony of the cover-picture! The picture of the Goddess with her tongue outstretched! perhaps Mocking Me, while I was judging it with my "NATURAL JUDGEMENT" . . . . . . judging the book by it's cover (size and thickness and relative price to be apt)!
Boy!! was I WRONG!!
It is literally like a compact and compressed book that compresses 1000 of information in those few pages. It's an extremely intense, vivid and acute book that requires you to go through several readings and separate understandings from each of the viewpoints the author offers to fully understand the import. From Kali's forms, to her manifestations, her tales and rituals of worshiping, her traces of origins from the pre-Aryan and perhaps Dravidian culture, and the metamorphosis the goddess went through when society wanted to domesticate her, and finally the wisdom she offers . . . . . it's really a great-read!! The book is really a beauty to read through. Based on the lectures and writings of the popular mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik and his unconventional and beautiful sketches, and the compilation his sister(the author) provides, it's a book that I am glad to keep in my bookshelf. There are also a couple of popular hymns, to Kali provided at last, acknowledging her, praising her, fearing her, and worshiping her.
The best part of this book is in it's CONCLUSION! Where, it succeeds in portraying riveting and fascinating details and the myriad manifestations of the enigmatic goddess. Here the author provides answers to the old-age stigmas, horrors and misunderstandings that are generally associated with Kali. Why is she dark and naked? Why is her hair unbound? Why does she drink blood? Why is her tongue open? Is she embarrassed of her behavior, or mocking the viewer? Why she looks so violent? and so many more! The different observations of the scriptures, legends and myths gives you a whole picture of the CIRCLE OF KALI, and the truth may set you free or blow-up in your face!
It helps you to decode the meaning behind the gruesome and grim, and help you to acquire the perception into the Hindu approach to the divine. Hrim, Srim, Krim!!
June 4, 2018
for learning
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews