By: Geetika Gaurav
Hell has broken loose over Leena Manimekalai’s poster of Kali, which shows the Goddess smoking a cigarette. Habitual to the new India, religious sentiments have been hurt again.
For centuries in India, Kali has epitomized a female of strength and free will who has fed on blood and flesh of the evil, has roamed around cloudless and has been offered alcohol as “prasad”. She represents liberation from conditioning and societal rules.
Source: Raja Ravi Varma
She is celebrated with a tradition in which a yatra is taken out on different occasions in various parts of the country to spread the message of truth. Scary in appearance, to fulfil the purpose, it has a person dressed as Goddess Kali dancing recklessly on beats of dhol roaming around the town roaring (depicting Kali as mentioned in the lores) and is offered liquor and made to drink it to make “prasad” that is later distributed to everybody.
People getting hurt over the poster don’t understand Hinduism or Kali much. They want to tame a filmmaker for adding a cigarette to the persona of a Goddess who already has been, for ages, an outlaw.
Are these protestors telling me they are offended by the Goddess smoking while it was okay to offer Blender’s Pride in her temple for prasad or Old Monk in her festivals? So Ma Kali can be a non-vegetarian and alcoholic, but you don’t like her smoking? Worried about her lungs, are you? Save forests then, maybe, instead of tearing a poster!
Being a staunch Kali and Shiva devotee myself, I have looked up to Kali all my life as an epitome of freedom, strength and cyclic order of good and bad. So the hypocrisy of these politically influenced people claiming their right over a context they hardly understand irritates me sometimes.
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