A naked, midnight-dark figure wearing a skirt of severed arms and a necklace of decapitated heads, tongue dripping red as she stands on a man's chest. To outsiders it looks like pure terror, yet to millions of devotees this is the ultimate loving mother. This deep dive traces the biography of the Hindu goddess Kali, from her birth in the sixth-century Devi Mahatmya as the physical manifestation of Durga's rage to her role as a symbol of spiritual liberation and modern empowerment.

Along the way we unpack the battle with the self-replicating demon Raktabija, the moment Shiva stops her world-shaking dance by lying down among the corpses, and why every piece of her terrifying iconography is actually a philosophical map. We also follow her into the cremation grounds of tantric practice, the intimate poetry of Ramprasad Sen, parallel goddesses l ...