However, today in India and in Goa, every woman needs to emulate this goddess to protect herself to protect her family.
Choosing Kali as an icon isn’t reclaiming the right to be aggressive, feral, ugly, or merciless—it is embracing that the ultimate goal for which women continue to be at war is, simply, to be. Like Kali—whatever the human gaze may choose to see in it.
Women in Goa, especially, need to be Kali to slay the modern-day demon. We see the rising crime against women every other day, and there has to be an end to it.
SURAJ NANDREKAR
Editor, Goemakrponn
Wild, naked, her tongue sticking out—an uncomfortable, feral image of force, bursting sheer power. She wears the most gorgeous jewellery—ornate bracelets and necklaces, and some amazing elephant-shaped earrings. There’s blood—that unsettling substance with which women are intimately familiar—everywhere on and around her: It drips from the severed head of a demon that she is holding up with one of her arms; it collects in the plate below it; it’s on her tongue, on the necklace of severed heads, and the skirt of ripped out arms which, alone, cover her nudity; it’s on a pool at her feet.
There lies the beheaded demon, too, and next to it, her husband—Shiva, the destroyer, snake and all.
Kali’s role in the mythology vehicles a concept of femininity very different from the demure, graceful ideals that are mainstream the world around—including in India, the land that gave birth to this fierce goddess and yet prescribes the ideal woman as dutiful, submissive, obedient.
Kali is none of that: Her power and ferociousness are greater than Shiva’s, whom she nearly kills by stomping upon him, an image so upsetting to the patriarchy that, explains mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik in Seven Secrets of the Goddess, it was long kept secret.
However, today in India and in Goa, every woman needs to emulate this goddess to protect herself to protect her family.
Choosing Kali as an icon isn’t reclaiming the right to be aggressive, feral, ugly, or merciless—it is embracing that the ultimate goal for which women continue to be at war is, simply, to be. Like Kali—whatever the human gaze may choose to see in it.
Women in Goa, especially, need to be Kali to slay the modern-day demon. We see the rising crime against women every other day, and there has to be an end to it. The politicians, the police are protecting the demons, so who will protect our mothers, sisters? It is they themselves emulating teh Goddess Kali.
For the demons have changed today and so have the weapons to exterminate them.
Today’s demons spread across dowry deaths, child infanticide, rape, trafficking, domestic violence and discrimination against women at work, amongst so many other scourges in society.
The modern-day weapons for women are education, healthcare, women’s empowerment and economic freedom.
This is because the government and police are simply not interested in protecting our women.
While more crimes against women were reported, the investigation and prosecution of these cases were tardier than other categories’.
Simply take the Siddhi Naik, where is it heading – nowhere?
Siddhi Naik is not just one case; rape made for nearly 8% of crimes against women in India in 2020 when a total of 32,316 cases (including 283 incidents of murder with rape and rape of girls) were registered.
This averages 88 rape cases a day or one rape every 16 minutes. Of these reported cases, 80% of rape survivors/victims are adult women, in the age group of 18 to 45 years of age, 60% are 18-30 years.
Data also indicate another trend: 7.3% of all rape cases involved repeat incidents for the woman who was targetted (Section 376(2)(n)). In 94.2% of cases in 2019, the offender was known to the victim. In 51% of the cases, offenders were friends, online friends, live-in partners and ex-husbands – against whom charges of rape on pretext of marriage can be filed. In 36% of cases, the accused were family friends or neighbours, and family members in around 9% of cases.
