WHAT IS HINDUISM?
“To know the Hindoo idolatry AS IT IS, a person must
wade through the filth of the thirty-six pooranus ... he
must follow the Brahman through his midnight orgies
before the image of Kalee.” William Ward 1817
“One of the most pitiful of all the manifestations of unrest
... is the strange underground cult which has produced a
secret bomb and revolver cult, an assassination society with
secret initiation ...Behind all the cruelty and sudden death
of the world lies Kali, the goddess of all horror ... Not
even the perverted imaginations of the Marquis de Sade
could devise a more horrible nightmare than Kali ... to
minds such as students ... overstrained by premature
eroticism ... this deity becomes a cult in which half-
mystical murder may be a dominant thought.” MacMunn
1933
In detail too thorough and extensive to summarise
here, Urban shows how cults of the divine feminine or
Shakti, united around the traditional tantric image of the
mother goddess Kali as Chinnamasta (seemingly trampling
on the supine body of her own god and consort Shiva)
came to constitute, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a
‘dialectical image’ – “used not only to represent the
humiliation of modern India but also to arouse
revolutionary fervor and violence”. He also shows how it
was used to evoke a counter-image of the Bengali male as
possessed of a powerful, warrior-like masculinity – in