Kali

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Hindu goddess Kali, often depicted as dark blue, fierce, defiant, revelling in her power, and holding in her four or more arms a curved sword and a severed head with a cup underneath to catch the blood. She may have her tongue out, to catch more blood spurting from her enemies, be wearing a garland of more severed heads and a skirt of severed hands and yet she is also a nurturing mother figure, known in West Bengal as ‘Maa Kali’ and she can be fiercely protective. Sometimes she is shown as young and conventionally beautiful and at other times as old, emaciated and hungry, so defying any narrow definition.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Bihani Sarkar No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Comparative Non-Western Thought at Lancaster University
• Professor Emeritus Julius Lipner No other episodes
  Professor Emeritus of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion at the University of Cambridge
• Jessica Frazier 10 episodes
  Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford

Reading list

• The Goddess
  Mandakranta Bose (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Devi: Goddesses of India
  John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff (eds.) (University of California Press, 1996) Google Books →
• Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism, vol 1
  Knut A. Jacobsen (ed.) (Brill, 2025) Google Books →
• Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition
  David Kinsley (University of California Press, 1986) Google Books →
• Encountering Kali in the margins, at the center, in the west
  Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal (eds.) (University of California Press, 2003) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0028bng

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028bng

Auto-category: 294.5 (Hinduism)