Kali, Clodia, and the Problem of Representation

Abstract

Introduction The study of woman in ancient literature is the study of men's views of women and cannot become anything else. --Phyllis Culham (1) Growing up in Nepal in the 70s, I witnessed my grandma worshipping Goddess Kali, a Hindu goddess of supreme power. A devotee of Kali, my grandma used to tell me stories about the many superhuman deeds attributed to the Goddess, one of which was to kill the demons and liberate the gods. Not only did I like the stories, I also identified the Goddess with my own grandmother because like the Goddess of the legends, she had also scored some extraordinary achievements by the standard of her times. She had taken my grandpa to court for his second marriage and extracted a fair share of property for her family. She had raised her only son alone in a much small property while her husband lived with his second wife in a relatively luxurious estate. Although unable to read or write, my grandma knew how to manage the household independently. If the Goddess was mother to the entire civilization, my grandma was the creator and protector of our family. But at about ten, my image of this Goddess came under what I then considered a mortal attack. I was attending a special nine-day, Goddess-worshipping, Fall ritual in which a pundit (literally) reciting and interpreting Devi Mahatmya (In Praise of Goddess) posited that the Goddess had emerged out of the combined energies of the three male gods: Brahma (the Creator), Bishnu (the Protector), and Mahadev (the Destroyer). To my young mind, it was hard to reconcile whether the Goddess was forged by the trinity of gods or she was a cosmic power operating independent of any other sources. According to the stories my grandmother told me, Kali was the cosmic power that started the motion of the wheel of universal time, as well as the primal impulse in the phenomenal existence and becoming. According to this tantric (ritualistic) version of the Goddess cult, while time (or kala, in Sanskrit) "devours" the worlds of all the three planes of Creation (the physical universe, the astral/ subtle universe, and the causal universe), at the end it is the Kali that "devours" even time (kala). Kali would, therefore, be the primordial cause of creation and destruction and in that could represent both consciousness and absolute existence. But according to this male pundit, the Goddess' existence was predicated on the will and energy of the male gods. Her role was tangential to the purpose set forth by these gods. I kept wondering which version was correct, and how one could reconcile the conflicting images of the same Goddess. To a young mind back then, it was more a problem of reconciliation than of representation. However, when I started pondering the silenced subjects in legends and other classical texts as a student of rhetoric, there was no such confusion. As I read about women in ancient rhetorical texts by men, for example, I knew these were the images of women at men's mercy, as Culham (in the epigraph above) suggests, rather than women's authentic voices. After all, there is hardly anything written by ancient women surviving today. The question, then, is, what do we make of such figures who come to us through somebody else? The question assumes added significance when we know that a given characterization was driven by a clear motive of portraying the subject negatively for tactical gain, as in a court of law. A telling example of such a treatment comes in the figure of Clodia in Cicero's Pro Caelio. (2) Much has been written about Cicero's speech and its cultural politics (3) which I do not intend to rehash in this piece. Instead, I want to use this occasion to engage the issue of representation in recovery and revisionary work. Scholars often wonder about the challenges and possibilities of recovering the historically silenced subjects, usually presenting these issues in ethical terms. Then, the challenge does not pertain simply to the historical accuracy or otherwise of the subjects under study but also, and more importantly, the act of (re)writing them in the ensuing text. …