Faux Musings

Thoughts about Kali

“A myth is a neutral structure that allows paradoxical meanings to be held in charged tension.” – Wendy Doniger

Conceived of in the waning days of the Suharto regime and amidst the social unrest in Jakarta during the brief term of Indonesia’s third president Habibie, Goenawan Mohamad’s libretto for Kali interweaves three tales, each a story of gods or man confronted by injustice. The story of Dhestarastra, Gandhari, and Kunthi left to reconstruct their lives after the carnage of the battle at the center of the Mahabharata. The Hindu-Buddhist parable of King Sibi Ausinara who, when confronted by suffering, offers his own life in exchange for another. And from the Hindu texts the Devi Mahatmyam and the Markandeya Purana, the story of Kali’s creation and unwilling acceptance of her role as death. Each tale, in turn, asks, “how should we act in the face of injustice?”

Kali is a post-apocalyptic tale, set like a Noh play, after the warriors have fallen on the battlefield, both victors and victims left with “the litter of war, an orgy of crows on dregs and bones.” Kali asks the question, “what happens after the fall?”

It is ironic, and perhaps fated then, that Kali should be staged in Berlin, in a country whose national identity is defined by what has happened “after the war,” in a city still struggling to define a new cultural identity “after the fall” of the wall. It is further ironic then that Goenawan Mohamad's meditation on fate and will, loss and redemption and the horrors of war should take on an unintended interpretation: an Indonesian Muslim's retelling of a Hindu tale as metaphor for the holocaust. Then again, it is a sad commentary on the 20th Century that Goenawan's libretto could be read as a metaphor for countless atrocities whether Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, or present-day Indonesia.

One also can not help but read Kali as a metaphor for Indonesia “after the fall” of the “new order” of the Suharto dictatorship. Indeed it was during the events that unfolded after the economic collapse of 1997 and the Suharto regime the following year, that the initial ideas for Kali unfolded in a series of workshops and creative discussions. And, although Goenawan Mohamad never intended for the story of Dhestarastra and Gandhari to be read as some veiled reference to the now-disgraced former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid and then vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri, one can not help but to appreciate the irony of the contemporaneous nature of events.

Wahid, the blind Muslim cleric, Megawati the daughter of Indonesia's first president Sukarno, unable to change the course of events that unfurled around them, the conflict that still tears at the heart of Indonesia, pitting Muslims against Christians, pribumi against Chinese. Indonesia spent 33 years in the woods under the rule of Suharto, after that one fatal dice game in 1965. Now, like the struggle that ensued with the Kuravas after the Pandavas returned from exile in the woods, Indonesia finds itself in a struggle between those committed to the ideals of democracy and those unwilling to yield the accreted power of 33 years of autocratic rule.

In the days immediately following September 11th the libretto took on a new dimension yet again. Was it fate that found Goenawan in New York City that day? To arrive in a city, a nation that suddenly “after the fall” found itself confronting cries for vengeance with competing calls for understanding? Indeed, it was in the days immediately “after the fall” and before the U.S. decided which path to take—between aggression and compassion, hawk and dove—that the final shape of the libretto emerged.

The Birth of Death

We live in the age of Kali, the last of the four great yuga (Krita, Treta, Dwapara, and Kali), an era of 432,000 years, the age of degeneration when Dharma stands on one leg and death, disease, and misery consume humankind. The age of Kali only ends when Visnu, in his tenth and final phase, riding upon his white horse Kalki, returns to end the world and begin the cycle anew again. Both Judeo-Christian and Hindu scripture agree on this: our age is an era defined at the outset by loss and at the end by the hope of one final cataclysmic, redemptive act; a longing for what once was and what can never be regained without transformation through death.

When Gandhari protests to the gods, she aims her invective at Kali. Goenawan Mohamad’s Kali is an amalgam of several goddesses; both Kali—one of the ten mahavidyas (faces) of Mahakali, an incarnation of Durga from the Devi Mahatmyam—and Mertyu, the god of death created by Brahma out of boredom and a yawn because “the earth needs a cycle.” (Mahabharata Santi Parva 12.248.13-21)

“But as the noble Brahma suppressed the fire born of his anger, from all the apertures of his body a dark woman appeared, wearing red garments, with red eyes and red palms and soles, adorned with divine ear-rings and ornaments. As she came forth from the apertures she went to Brahma’s right, and the two gods, lords of everything, looked at the maiden. Then the god, the first, lord of people, summoned her and said, ‘Death, kill these creatures. I thought of you when I was angrily devising a means of destruction; therefore, destroy all creatures, imbeciles and scholars. In your passionate anger, destroy creatures without exception, and by my command you will win great merit.’ Then the young goddess Death began to brood in sorrow. Wearing garlands of lotuses, she wept copious tears, which she took in her hands as she prayed for the sake of the welfare of mankind… Then she began to destroy the life’s breath of creatures that breathe, at the time of their end, bewildering them with desire and anger. And the teardrops fallen from Death became diseases which injured the bodies of men.”

The Hawk and the Dove

When King Sibi Ausinara “offers his bleeding flesh” to the falcon is it an act of acquiescence? Or is it a conscious sacrifice that shames the gods, shames Indra, the god of war, the voracious hawk, into admitting that he has met his match in Ausinara’s selfless act, just as Gandhi’s acts of satyagraha shamed the British crown into relinquishing colonial India? Is it a tale of a noble prince giving himself over to save the dove, or the tale of an avaricious hawk, the psychology of war, consuming all compassion?

The story of King Sibi Ausinara first appears in the Pali Jataka tales of South India. Later, it becomes incorporated in altered form in the 4th Century Sanskrit Buddhist text of the Jatakamala of Arya Sura and in some versions of the Pancatantra as well as Jain folk literature. “King Sibi and the Dove” is also included in Somadeva’s 9th Century Sanskrit collection, the Kathasaritsagara or “The Ocean of the River of Stories.” However, it is the version of the parable included in the third book of the Mahabharata, the Aranyakaparvan, or Book of the Forest Teachings, that Goenawan Mohamad has chosen to adapt for Kali.

“The Book of the Forest,” J.A.B. van Buitenen has written, “is the celebration of the highest value in the moral code of the ancient Indians, truthfulness and faithfulness under all circumstances.” Its purpose is to elucidate dharma, the moral code by which Yudishthira—and by extension all kings and all men—must live. Therefore, it is not surprising to find the parable of King Sibi Ausinara included. At its core, the parable of King Sibi is an expression of the Hindu-Buddhist concept of dharma, or righteous duty.

Early versions of the story assign the role of the dove to Agni; however, later versions make the connection between the dove and dharma, the law, more explicit. The goal of the law—to achieve a balance and weigh competing interests—is made literal. The scales of justice, blind justice, prove the ultimate judge, the king’s compassion subsumed by dharma. The king, a proper ksatriya, lives—and dies—by dharma. The king both arbiter and subject to the full force and effect of the law… even when the scales of justice are rigged and corrupt.

And what are we to make of this deception, the cruel trickery employed by Indra and Dharma to test the young King Sibi? These gods are not motivated like the vindictive god of the Book of Job by the taunts of Satan, but by a nobler desire to instruct Ausinara on the proper path to choose. A choice more than just between hawk and dove, war and peace, but between the natural order of life, the “will of the gods,” and human action in the face of injustice. As Krpa counsels Asvatthaman, Drona’s son, at the conclusion of the Bharatayuddha, “There are two forces: fate and human effort. All men depend on and are bound by these, there is nothing else.”

So is the parable of King Sibi Ausinara an illustration of the limits of compassion within the constraints of the law? That compassion needs to be tempered, weighed, or we risk the ultimate cost: the sacrifice of ourselves in the pursuit of justice?

Or, does the parable teach us that the true reward for compassion lies outside our own mortality, in the world of the gods, that only by offering compassion equal in weight to the suffering can we ever counter fate?

The Blind King

Just as King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice provides the framework for Vaisampayana’s retelling of the Mahabharata, the story of Dhestarastra and Gandhari forms the framework, the bookends, for the tales of sacrifice and injustice at the heart of Kali.

However, instead of focusing on palace intrigue and the internecine conflict at the core of the Mahabharata, Goenawan Mohamad begins the opera after the great battle, the bharatayuddha. Like two sides of the same coin, the stories recount both victors’ and victims’ fates. The story of a blind king and his faithful queen forced to come to terms with the obliteration of their family, and the story of a devastated mother of the victorious but defeated victors left to reconcile her life amidst the spoils of war.

It is at this point in the great epic that Kali makes her only appearance in the Mahabharata, “after the fall,” after the slaying of the sleeping Pandavas (Mahabharata Sauptika Parva 8.65-68) at the conclusion of the bharatayuddha:

Then, chanting, there appeared before them a black-skinned
Woman, the Night of all-destroying Time,
Whose mouth and eyes were the color of blood,
Whose garlands and unguents were just as crimson,
Who wore a single blood-dyed garment, and
Held in her hand a noose.

They saw horses,
Elephants, and men, bound by terrible cords,
Driven by her as she carried away
All kinds of hairless spirits, roped together
With the great warriors, divested of their arms.

On other nights, the greatest of those warriors
Had seen her in their dreams, leading the sleepers
Away, and Drona’s son forever killing them.
Ever since the war between the Kuru
And Pandawa hosts began, they had dreamt
Of that baleful goddess, and of Drona’s son.

And so the opera begins, the conclusion already foretold. Literally, by the cast of Yudishthira’s dice thirteen years prior. An outcome foreseen by Vyasa and foretold by the Kurava’s uncle Vidura, whose impassioned counsel against the war fell upon the deaf ears of Dhestarastra’s son Duryodhana. Even the warriors knew the predestined outcome, after all, “ever since the war… began, they had dreamt of that baleful goddess.” So, more than a struggle between dharma and adharma, between good and evil, the bharatayuddha becomes a struggle between fate, daiva, “the will of the gods,” and individual human action, karman. Dhestarastra refuses to intervene and quell Duryodhana’s vengeful aspirations even though he knows it will lead to his family’s destruction.

Dhestarastra’s blindness comes to symbolize not just loss of sight but his own unwillingness to try to alter fate, even after Vyasa bestows upon Sanjaya the antithesis of blindness: omniscient vision. Sanajaya’s vision allows Dhestarastra to witness the bharatayuddha as it unfolds, but he is powerless: unwilling to affect the outcome. Dhestarastra gains what he had lacked—sight. But he is like the dying man who having attained what he has sought his entire life comes to realize the futility of his own desires on his deathbed.

Sanjaya, the narrator, becomes a metaphor for our own mediated society, and Dhestarastra, for our own disengagement and blindness. We are more informed than at any point in our history, more literate than any civilization, more adept at constructing and parsing our complicated visual and auditory grammars, but insulated from the human dimension, and still powerless to stop the bloodshed we bear witness to around the world everyday. As Stalin said, “One man’s death is a tragedy; the death of a million, a mere statistic.”

The Design of Kali

Five major metaphors run throughout Kali. Each image finds its origin in the libretto and in ideas discussed in the creative workshop discussions we have held since 1998. I have expanded this symbolic vocabulary to encompass as wide a frame of reference as possible, from the mythological to the contemporary. These five major metaphors are: sacrifice, the circle, the door, fire, and blindness.

Sacrifice

The idea of sacrifice, both symbolic and literal, remains central to both the Mahabharata and Kali—sacrifice as an appeasement of the gods, as a practice in pursuit of moksa, liberation from the cycle of birth and death. In fact some have argued that the Mahabharata is primarily a tale of sacrifice. The snake sacrifice of King Janamejaya that begins the Mahabharata, the horse sacrifice of King Yudisthira at the close, the human sacrifice that unfolds between these bookends.

Moreover, as Roberto Calasso has written, “sacrifice no longer has to do [solely] with the equilibrium between gods and men but between men and other men….” The sacrifice, almost always a woman, a child, or better yet both, a female child, a virgin girl, used as a practice to manipulate the wills of men. The prescriptions for sacrifice that constitute the book of Leviticus, that quantify our sins, and our salvation, in terms of sacrifice—the measure of man that forms the basis for all Judeo-Christian-Islamic law.

The ritual offering of a slaughtered goat to Kali, at Passover, and at the end of Ramadan. The tethered goat sacrificed to tyrannosaurus rex—the king—in Jurassic Park. An animal’s head on a pedestal, the falling of an ax, a side of beef, swinging like a pendulum on a hook, a dead body, raw meat falling from above, pulled across the stage, a clothesline of severed hands, of birds plunging “themselves into a shattered cliff.”

The Circle

The circle, or the pendulum, the recurring balance of life, derives from the poem and imagery that originally spawned the idea for Kali: the ouroboros, the self-consuming snake, the emblematic symbol of ancient Egypt, the continual process of death and regeneration, and wheel of life.

This metaphor manifests itself in numerous ways and, like all charged symbols, contains both the original intended meaning and its opposite. The circle of life, the mandala, the circle of fire encircling Jesus of Nazareth’s visions in the desert, the arc of the sun, the circle of barbed wire surrounding, encircling the concentration camp. The sound of bull-roars swung above men’s heads pulsating across an empty battlefield.

The scales of justice—blind justice—that weighs Agni/Dharma disguised as a dove and King Sibi Ausinara’s flesh. The metronome that signals the passage of time and the kalpa: one day in the life of Brahma equal to 4,320 million years. The hourglass, the pendulum, a bare light bulb on a tether swinging in an empty room, a 1940s microphone spot-lit from above in an empty boxing ring, the wrecking ball, the swinging of an ax, and a dead-body swinging from a tree.

The Door

The open door with hands, the goddess as passageway, as birth canal, as regenerative power and sexual energy, a window onto the soul, and goddess as void, as Kali’s passage to death, the red door, the descending staircase, as Freud’s “absence”. The door as passage: as blue sky, as window, seat of power, Dhestarastra’s and Gandhari’s thrones, as entryway into the court, as staircase, ghats (baths) at the river’s edge, as funeral pyre. The door as entry into a story: a box opening, successive panels of an unfolding story, the kelir, the unfurling of a wayang beber scroll, the slots of a kinescope, the frames of a film.

Fire

The all-consuming fire of the funeral pyre, sati, the cremation, the transformation of matter to ether, from solid to gas, and form to formlessness. The miner’s lamp, the gas lantern, oil smudge pots, intense yellow safety lights, Vietnamese floating paper lanterns, and cremated offerings floating in the slow ebb of the Ganges. The fire at the House of Lac, the lonely campfire, the raging forest fire that consumes Dhestarastra and Gandhari, oil fires, nuclear fire, and “friendly” fire.

Blindness

“When Brahma was thinking about creation, at the beginning of the era, there appeared a creation preceded by ignorance and made of darkness; from it was born fivefold ignorance, consisting of darkness, delusion, great delusion, gloom, and blind-darkness. Seeing that this creation was imperfect, Brahma began to create again…” [Visnu Purana 1.5.1]

The only one of the five symbolic metaphors expressed through absence; the absence of sight, of color, of vision (i.e., wisdom), of proof, of acuity; blindness as a symbol of darkness, of ignorance, of unwillingness to accept the truth. Dhestarastra is born blind because his mother, Ambika, closes her eyes and can not bear to look at the face of the wise sage Vyasa while conceiving Dhestarastra; closing her eyes to wisdom and swayed only by external appearances.

Gandhari chooses to blindfold herself. As a sacrifice, yes, but also as an offering to her husband, and as an acceptance of her role in society; to maintain external appearances, to be at her husband’s side but always in his shadow—blindness and shadow.

Dhestarastra sits in blind justice, helpless by his own creation, constricted by laws that define his reality, his world, unable to grasp the exception, ruled by Dharma. He “sees” no other path than the one that leads inevitably to the bharatayuddha, no exception to a life ruled by dharma; as a ksatriya that is his duty. So too Yudisthira’s “blind” allegiance to dharma, and his own weaknesses—gambling, leads to the demise of the Pandawas.

The gods of Kali

From a monotheistic perspective, it might seem strange on first encountering the system of beliefs surrounding a polytheistic religion. Our god, whether Christian, Jew or Muslim, is at times compassionate, spiteful, or swayed by human suffering, but always with the best intentions of humankind in mind.

By contrast, the polytheistic gods of the Hindu pantheon might be thought of more as embodying the qualities of their domain. Agni, the god of fire, feels no remorse at the human damage wrought by fire, nor joy at the use of fire by humans to keep warm, cook, or smelt metals. Fire is a quality; to deny its qualities denies her very essence. To think of fire otherwise, with intent, only anthropomorphizes the gods.

So too with Kali, for Kali struggles to accept her role as a god, to deny that which is human, to become the instrument of death. Kali doesn’t make distinctions between good and bad, deserving and undeserving, lucky and unlucky in death. Death comes to all. Her acceptance of her role as death becomes a metaphor for our unwilling acceptance of the inevitably of death.