Kali as a poem from Shiv K. Kumar calls for a criticism of what we practice or have been carrying down over the years as a burden of the past, or of inhuman rituals though the matter may relate to aboriginal or native stuff and it is difficult to cut the anthropological and sociological ice of race and ethnicity. How has it crept in, how to say that? Such a thing Lawrence too uses in with a zest as for repudiating Western hollow ethics and morality in his Mexican novels of primitive consciousness and dark gods.

Here the worship of Kali has not been questioned, the Dark Goddess, but that of sacrifices made for blatantly holding blind rituals and practices without questioning the base of it. Can Kali be pleased with bloodshed,  is the question seeking an explanation from us. How to balance horror and terror element with a sense of awe and wonder justifying good wisdom? Here the note of Kumar is like the one observed and put by the conscious European visitors. The animals need compassion and this, the warring tribes, ethnic and primitive people, do not understand it, not even the devotees and worshippers of hers.

When we read the poem, the primitive practices in the form of the sacrificing of animals dishearten us to see the bizarre goddess, awesome and grotesque. A lamb bleating and waiting to be beheaded at the altar is but awesome. A child clinging to famished nipples will die anyway. The poem conjures upon the imagery of Blake’s The Little Black Boy, The Tiger and The Lamb. Jayanta Mahapatra’s hungry Indian countryside in the spate of summer, heat and dust, poverty, backwardness, underdevelopment and lack of sustainable resources, ever hungry and thirsty flashes upon the mind’s plane.

The terrible and horrible image is for purge our feelings and emotions.

The stony eyes of a mangled dog glare at his self’s patina, the rufous tongue of the cobra sticks it every time and the poet circles round her ebony torso as per the making of the idol. She may be tantric, but to experiment with tantra is not to be superstitious and blind.

The image of Kali too is frightening when we see her with the tongue out of her lips and the blood dribbling and she in anger as well as shame. The cobra of her hand and the jackal beneath show her in a strange mood and she wears a garland of the heads of devils cut and wreathed.

The hungry belly knows no rules and regulations. If blood is nectar, why shed it? How is the end of Creation? How the wars fought, how the blood shed? What is the legitimacy of which we do not know? But the blood at the altar repels us.

The famished mother, poor child, grotesque Kali, bleating goat, altar and the tales of hunger, lust and greed add to the story. Is she of the dark country of poor hamlets and famished people? What is Kali? How the image! Dark, horrendous and frightful!

Stone eyes of a mangled dog
lare at my self’s patina.
The rufous tongue of a cobra
sticks out each time
I circle round your ebony torso,
jabbed in the privates
by your devotees.
 
Beyond the priest’s monotone
a lamb bleats for the knife-edge.
A child clinging to famished
nipples will die anyway,
but your nectar is the blood
that jets from fresh arteries.
 
If the way to create
is the way to kill,
I have hoarded enough blood
in my throat
for all the hyenas to suck from.

Is creation but destruction? Is to create is to destroy? And if this be the truth, he has enough blood in his throat to let the hyenas suck from. Can one be Kali? Kali is a supernatural phenomenon to be felt. Kali is but a non-Aryan goddess. She is the Dark View of Creation, the Feminine Power. Kali is but the name of the dark girl too whom we see around us. But we interpret the myth differently. She is the Night of Darkness, the Night of Sadhna. But when experimenting with darkness and its gloom, from which light comes breaking, is to keep myth and mystery at bay with logic and reason otherwise one may get misled, astray.

How dark the image of Kali, ethnic, racial, primitive! How our practices! What is Kali? How to understand the myth of creation shrouded in mystery? But why do we get misled? How have inhuman practices crept in?