Killing for Mother Kali/Time Asia Mag.

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Killing for 'Mother' Kali

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It was at most a fringe practice, but a spate of ritual killings in

India shows that human sacrifice lives on

 

Time Asia/September 13, 2002

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By Alex Perry Atapur

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For the magic to work, the killing had to be done just right. If the

goddess were to grant Khudu Karmakar the awesome powers he expected

from a virgin's death, the victim had to be willing, had to know what

was happening, watch the knife, and not stop it. But even

tranquilizers couldn't lull 15-year-old Manju Kumari to her fate. In

his police confession, Karmakar says his wife, daughter and three

accomplices had to gag Manju and pin her down on the earthen floor

before the shrine. In ritual order, Karmakar wafted incense over her,

tore off her blue skirt and pink T shirt, shaved her, sprinkled her

with holy water from the Ganges and rubbed her with cooking fat. Then

chanting mantras to the "mother" goddess Kali, he sawed off Manju's

hands, breasts and left foot, placing the body parts in front of a

photograph of a blood-soaked Kali idol. Police say the arcs of blood

on the walls suggest Manju bled to death in minutes.

 

Human sacrifice has always been an anomaly in India. Even 200 years

ago, when a boy was killed every day at a Kali temple in Calcutta,

blood cults were at odds with a benign Hindu spiritualism that

celebrates abstinence and vegetarianism. But Kali is different. A

ferocious slayer of evil in Hindu mythology, the goddess is said to

have an insatiable appetite for blood. With the law on killing people

more strictly enforced today, ersatz substitutes now stand in for

humans when sacrifice is required. Most Kali temples have settled on

large pumpkins to represent a human body; other followers slit the

throats of two-meter-tall human effigies made of flour, or of animals

such as goats.

 

In secret ceremonies, however, the grizzly practice lives on. Quite

simply, say the faithful "known as tantrics" Kali looks after those

who look after her, bringing riches to the poor, revenge to the

oppressed and newborn joy to the childless. So far this year, police

have recorded at least one case of ritual killing a month. In

January, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, a 24-year-old woman

hacked her three-year-old son to death after a tantric sorcerer

supposedly promised unlimited earthly riches. In February, two men in

the eastern state of Tripura beheaded a woman on the instructions of

a deity they said appeared in their dreams promising hidden

treasures. Karmakar killed Manju in Atapur village in Jharkhand state

in April. The following month, police dug up the remains of two

sisters, aged 18 and 13, in Bihar, dismembered with a ceremonial

sword and offered to Kali by their father. Last week on the outskirts

of Bombay, maize seller Anil Lakshmikant Singh, 33, beheaded his

neighbor's nine-year-old son to save his marriage on the advice of a

tantric. Said Singh: "He promised that a human sacrifice would end

all my miseries."

 

Far from ancient barbarisms that refuse to die, sacrifice and sorcery

are making a comeback. Sociologists explain the millions who now

throng the two main Kali centers in eastern India, at Kamakhya and

Tarapith, as what happens when the rat race that is India's future

meets the superstitions of its past. Sociologist Ashis Nandy

says: "You see your neighbor doing well, above his caste and

position, and someone tells you to get a child and do a secret ritual

and you can catch up." Adds mysticism expert Ipsita Roy

Chakaraverti: "It's got nothing to do with real mysticism or with

spiritualism. It comes down to pure and simple greed." Tarapith in

particular is a giant building site of new hotels, restaurants and

stalls selling plastic swords and postcards of Kali's severed feet.

Judging by the visitors here, Kali appeals to both rich and poor: the

rows of SUVs parked outside four-star hotels belong to the ranks of

businessmen and politicians lining up with their goats behind

penniless pilgrims. ("The blood never dries at Tarapith," whispers

one villager.)

 

There are no human sacrifices at the temple these days. But the

mystique of ritual killing is so powerful that even those who

actually don't perform it claim to do so. In their camp in the

cremation grounds beside the temple, a throng of tantrics tout for

business by competing to be as spooky as possible, lining their mud-

walled temples with human skulls and telling tall tales of human

sacrifice. "I cut off her head," says 64-year-old Baba Swami

Vivekanand of a girl he says he raised from birth. "We buried the

body and brought the head back, cooked it and ate it." He pauses to

demand a $2 donation. "Good story, no?" While most of this is

innocent, some followers, like Karmakar, are inevitably emboldened to

take their quest for power to the extreme. Karmakar, like many

others, was caught. But in the dust-bowl villages of India, where

superstition reigns and blood has a dark authority, the question is

how many other "holy men" have found that ultimate power still rests

in the murderous magic of a virgin sacrifice.

 

 

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