Bhadrakaliभद्रकाली

Bhadrakali is Kali with the word *good* in front of her name, and the whole of her theology is in that word.

Bhadra means auspicious, fortunate, benign. Attached to Kali — the black one, the goddess of the cremation ground — it produces a compound that a tidier religion would not permit: the auspicious terrible. She is not Kali softened. She is Kali identified as the good, which is a different and more difficult claim, and it is the claim the whole of Kerala's religious life rests on.

Her origin is a commission. Darika, an asura with a boon that no man could kill him, could not be stopped, and Shiva — in the Kerala account — struck the ground or tore a lock from his matted hair, and Bhadrakali came out of it and went. She killed Darika, and came back still carrying his head and still not calm, and the rites performed for her in Kerala are, in their own understanding, a continuation of the cooling down.

In north India she is one of Kali's names and a figure of the Devi Mahatmya's orbit. In Kerala she is the religion. The kavu — the sacred grove with a shrine in it — the Bhagavati temples in every locality, the Theyyam of the north and the Mudiyettu and Padayani of the centre and south, the Kodungallur Bharani with its shouted songs and its red offering: this is not folk religion at the edge of a Sanskritic centre. In Kerala it is the centre.

And she is one of the places in this encyclopedia where a goddess is not anyone's wife. She has no consort, and Kerala calls her Shiva's daughter.

From the Daksha story. The oldest strand: when Shiva, told of Sati's death, tore a lock of his matted hair and struck it on the ground, two beings came out — Virabhadra and Bhadrakali. He destroyed the sacrifice; she came with him. The Sati and Virabhadra pages carry that scene, and it explains why Bhadrakali in the north is inseparable from Daksha's ruined yajna.

From the Darika story. The Kerala strand, and the dominant one there. The asura Darika held a boon against death at the hands of any man. Shiva produced Bhadrakali — from his third eye in most Kerala tellings — and she went with Vetalam and the Yoginis. The battle is long; Darika's wife Manodari obtains from Shiva a weapon of disease, and the goddess's own sweat or Ghantakarna counters it; Darika is beheaded. This narrative is enacted annually, at length, in Mudiyettu, which UNESCO listed in 2010.

From the Devi Mahatmya's orbit. In the Sanskrit tradition Bhadrakali is among Kali's and Durga's names, appearing in the Markandeya Purana material and in the Bhagavata, where Kalanemi's or the bandits' attempted human sacrifice to Bhadrakali is turned on the sacrificers.

The Kerala layer is old and is not derivative. The kavu — a grove kept uncut, with a shrine and often no building — is a pre-Brahmanical institution in Kerala, and the goddess in it has absorbed Sanskritic identification without losing her own rites. The result is that in Kerala the most Sanskritised and least Sanskritised strands of Hinduism are in the same compound, often twenty metres apart, and everyone knows which is which.

Kannaki. At Kodungallur the goddess is also identified with Kannaki, the heroine of the Tamil Silappadikaram, who burned Madurai after the city executed her husband unjustly. That identification matters: it makes the temple's goddess a woman who was wronged by a court, and it is part of why her festival sounds the way it does.

And the Buddhist and Jain layer. Kodungallur — Muziris — was a port city with Buddhist, Jain, Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities from very early. Claims that the shrine was originally Buddhist or Jain are made and are not settled; the encyclopedia records that they are made.

In Kerala, and unlike anywhere else.

Colour and face. Dark, often intensely so; eyes enormous and round; prominent tusks in the fiercer forms; hair unbound and spread. The Kerala mural tradition gives her a face that is closer to the theatre than to the temple sculpture of the rest of India — and it is the other way round from what a reader expects: the masks and the murals came first and the icon followed.

The head of Darika. Held in one hand, and the single surest way to identify her. Kali holds a severed head too — but the Kerala iconography names this one.

Arms. Four, eight or sixteen. Sword, trident, bell, shield, a vessel of blood, the head, and often a kapala.

Seated on Darika's body, or standing over it; sometimes on a lion; sometimes on a vetala.

The Theyyam body. In north Kerala the goddess is not an image but a man in costume — towering headdress, painted face, a skirt of palm leaf, sometimes fire — who becomes the deity and speaks to the people in front of him, and answers them. This is the most extraordinary sight in Kerala's religion and is discussed below.

The Mudiyettu face. The huge painted mudi headdress, and the floor-drawing — the kalam, a Bhadrakali made in coloured powders on the ground, which is created, worshipped and then erased with bare hands at the end. The erasure is the point.

Distinguishing her. From Kali: the head is Darika's, the setting is Kerala. From Chamunda: Chamunda is emaciated; Bhadrakali is not. From Durga: Durga has the buffalo and the lion; Bhadrakali has the asura's head.

Bhagavati. The name every Malayali actually uses. A Bhagavati kshetram is a Bhadrakali temple, and there are thousands.

Kodungallur Bhagavati / Kurumba. The goddess of the Bharani festival.

Chottanikkara Bhagavati. Where the goddess is Rajarajeshwari in the morning, Saraswati at midday and Durga at evening, and where the Keezhkkavu shrine is associated with mental distress — a matter treated carefully below.

Kannaki / Kodungallur Amma. The Silappadikaram identification.

Vanadurga, Rurujit, Dakshinakali — related Kerala ritual forms with their own prescriptions in the tantric manuals (Tantrasamuchaya, Sesha Samuchaya).

Theyyam forms. In north Kerala there are hundreds of named Theyyams, many of them goddesses and several of them Bhadrakali: Muchilottu Bhagavathi, Kathivanoor Veeran (not a goddess), Thottumkara Bhagavathi, Pottan Theyyam (a Shiva form whose song is an argument against untouchability). The variety is enormous and the encyclopedia does not attempt a list.

Bhadrakali in the north — a name of Kali, with no independent cult.

Not Badrakali of the Devi Bhagavata's Bhadrakali Vijaya, a distinct regional text.

And Virabhadra, her brother in the Daksha account, who has his own page.

Darika. He could not be killed by a man. Bhadrakali is not one, and the entire apparatus of the boon collapses in a single clause — the same mechanism as Narasimha's and Mahishasura's. She fights him for days, kills him, takes the head, and comes back with the fight still in her, which is the detail Kerala's whole liturgy is built to address.

Manodari's weapon. Darika's wife, a devotee of Shiva, obtains a boon that every drop of her husband's blood falling to the ground will produce another Darika — the Raktabija device — and later a weapon of smallpox, which she throws at the goddess. Bhadrakali takes the disease onto herself and is cooled by Ghantakarna, her brother, who licks it away. The Shitala page carries the same disease and a different theology, and the comparison is instructive: north India made smallpox a goddess to be propitiated, Kerala made it something the goddess absorbed.

The cooling. Every substantial Kerala rite for Bhadrakali is understood as cooling her down after the battle: the pouring of kuruthi, the songs, the oil, the guruthi tharpanam at dusk. She is not being asked for anything in the first instance. She is being calmed.

The Bharani songs. At Kodungallur, during the Bharani festival, the Bharani pattu are sung — songs that are obscene, deliberately and traditionally so, sexually explicit and sometimes directed at the goddess herself. The oracles, the velichappadu, come in red, whirling, striking their own heads with a sickle-sword until they bleed, and in the kavutheendal they run round the shrine beating it with sticks.

This encyclopedia states plainly what this is and is not. It is an old, licensed inversion of the kind anthropologists have documented across the world and the Holi and Aiyanar material touches elsewhere; the participants are overwhelmingly from communities that Kerala's caste order excluded from the Sanskritic temple; and the songs' obscenity is, on the participants' own account, an offering. It is also, in its modern form, a very large crowd, and the self-wounding and the animal sacrifice have both been subject to regulation. Both things are true at once and the page will not flatten either.

Kannaki at the gate. In the identification with the Silappadikaram heroine, the goddess of Kodungallur is a woman who was refused justice by a king and burned his city. Kerala's fiercest festival is, on that reading, about a court getting it wrong.

The kavu. A grove, often genuinely uncut old-growth forest, with a shrine in it. Kerala's sarpa kavus and bhagavati kavus are among the last remnants of the state's original vegetation and are increasingly studied as biodiversity refuges. They exist because they were not cut, and they were not cut because of her.

Theyyam (north Kerala, roughly December to April). The performer — traditionally from communities including the Vannan, Malayan and Pulayan, whom the caste order excluded from temple entry — puts on the costume, and becomes the deity. The deity then speaks, gives blessings and hears complaints, and people of every community, including those who historically could not enter a Brahmanical temple, come and stand in front of the god and are answered. The reversal is complete and is the single most remarkable fact in Kerala's religious life.

Mudiyettu (central Kerala) — the ritual theatre of the Darika story, listed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010; and Padayani (Pathanamthitta), with its enormous painted kolams of areca spathe.

Kalamezhuthu. The powder drawing of the goddess on the floor, worshipped and then wiped out by hand.

Guruthi / kuruthi. The red offering, poured at dusk. Historically blood; now, in the temples, a preparation of turmeric and lime that turns red. The change is recent, general and worth stating.

Animal sacrifice was formerly part of several of these rites. It is prohibited in Kerala temples under the state's legislation, and the prohibition is enforced. Where accounts of these festivals describe sacrifice in the present tense, they are usually describing the past.

Chottanikkara and mental illness. The Keezhkkavu shrine has a long-standing reputation for the relief of mental disturbance and of what is locally described as possession, and large numbers of people bring relatives there. DharmSetu records this as practice and makes no claim of any kind about it. Mental illness is a medical condition with effective treatments. Anyone caring for a person in distress should be under the care of a qualified psychiatrist or physician, and India's Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 guarantees that person's rights — including the right not to be chained, confined or subjected to cruel treatment anywhere, religious premises included. Faith and treatment are not alternatives, and nothing on this page suggests they are.

Kodungallur Sree Kurumba Bhagavathy Temple (Thrissur district, Kerala) — the principal seat. The Bharani in Meenam (March–April) draws enormous crowds; the kavutheendal, the oracles and the Bharani songs are described above.

Chottanikkara Bhagavathy Temple (Ernakulam district, Kerala) — three goddesses in a day, and the Keezhkkavu shrine; see the note above.

Kadampuzha, Thirumandhamkunnu, Kreedapuram, Muthappan's Parassinikkadavu and several thousand other Bhagavati kshetrams across Kerala. There is no Malayali village without one.

Parassinikkadavu Muthappan Temple (Kannur) — not Bhadrakali, and the best place to see a daily Theyyam.

Bhadrakali Temple, Warangal (Telangana) — a large, ancient and quite different foundation, Chalukyan in origin and Kakatiya in patronage, with a stone image seated on a lion.

Bhadrakali Temple, Kurukshetra (Haryana) — a Shakti Peetha in the local reckoning, associated with Krishna and Balarama's tonsure.

Kali temples across north and east India carry the name Bhadrakali without the Kerala cult; the Kali, Kamakhya and Dakshineswar pages cover that world.

And the kavus themselves — hundreds of small groves, most of them unsigned, several of them botanically irreplaceable.

The adjective is the argument. Bhadra — good, auspicious — placed in front of Kali. Most religions solve the problem of a terrifying deity by splitting her: a kind face here, a fierce one there. This name refuses the split. It says that the thing with the sword and the severed head is the good thing, and Kerala has organised a religion around that sentence for at least a thousand years.

A goddess who is nobody's wife. She is Shiva's daughter, or she is from his hair, or from his eye. She does not have a consort, a household or a domestic role, and her temples do not supply her with one. In an encyclopedia where consort-relations account for a great many of the goddesses, she stands out for having none.

The lowest caste becomes the god. Theyyam is the most remarkable institution in this encyclopedia. A man from a community historically forbidden to enter a temple puts on the costume, and becomes the deity; and then the people who were permitted to enter come and stand before him and ask for blessing, and he gives it. Whatever one concludes about caste in Hinduism — and the honest conclusions are not comfortable — this happened, in public, annually, for centuries, in the same society that enforced the exclusion.

Cooling, not petitioning. The distinctive grammar of her worship is not give me but be calm. She came back from Darika with the fight still in her, and the songs, the oil, the drums and the red offering are addressed to that. It is a theology of aftermath, and it is unusual.

And a grove that was not cut. The kavus survive as fragments of Kerala's original forest because a goddess was in them and nobody would take an axe in. In a century that has cut nearly everything else, that is not a small result, and it is worth saying that the goddess of the cremation ground turns out to be, on the ground, the reason anything is still standing.