What do our deities eat: Vegetarian or non-vegetarian food?

What are our deities? Are they vegetarian or non-vegetarian?

The contentious debate came for judicial scrutiny when a right-wing outfit, the Akhil Bhartiya Gau Sevak Sangh, moved the Calcutta High Court seeking a curb on animal sacrifice at a Kali temple in West Bengal.

A division bench of Justices Biswajit Basu and Ajay Kumar Gupta, while hearing the plea earlier this week, observed that since religious practices in eastern India differ from those in north India, it would not be realistic to put restrictions on what may have been an “essential religious practice” for many communities.

The court even wondered whether the intention of the petitioner was to turn the people of eastern India vegetarian.

Whatever may be the motive, the petition once again laid bare the Hindu right’s lack of understanding of the complexity of the religion that has developed over centuries from varied beliefs and reveries.

The temple in the controversy is Bolla Raksha Kali Temple located in Dakshin Dinajpur. It follows a ritual of slaughtering more than 10,000 animals — including goats and buffalo — on a Friday after Rash Purnima every November.

Kali Puja is generally observed on Amavasya in the Bengali month of Kartik. It falls on the night of October 31 this year.

The temple, however, follows a different nirghanta (schedule). This year the puja will be on November 22.

A prayer answered

The story behind the rescheduling goes back to a deity who resided in a 400-year-old makeshift structure. A zamindar named Ballav Chowdhury, after whom the village was named Bolla, was arrested by the British for failing to pay his taxes.

A devotee of Kali, Chowdhury prayed to the deity for his release. His prayer was answered and Chowdhury was soon released.

As thanksgiving, after his release the zamindar built a proper temple at the spot in 1787. Some say it is in 1790s that the zamindar built a temple in honour of the deity and started the practice of animal sacrifice on a grand scale. Since he was released on Friday after Rash Purnima (full moon), the Kali puja is observed in the temple on that day.

The ritual and the schedule followed here were conceived in the imagination of the zamindar. That became the practice.

Just as Chowdhury initiated the tradition of mass animal sacrifices in this temple, in another legend associated with another Kali Puja, it was a zamindar who stopped a sacrificial-practice after getting a “divine ordain”.

This was the legend associated with Vidyasundar Kalibari of Burdwan. This story dates back to the 18th century when Tejchand was the zamindar of the Burdwan estate.

The offering of the life of a convict to goddess Kali at the family temple was a common mode of punishment for zamindar Tejchand.

It so happened that the son of the priest of the temple and the daughter of the zamindar fell in love. The priest’s son Sundar was so enamoured that he dug a tunnel from the temple to the zamindar’s palace to have rendezvous with his beloved Vidya. Everything was going smoothly until spies of the zamindar blew the lid off the assignation.

The furious zamindar ordered that both the lovers be sacrificed before Kali. While carrying out the order, the Kapalik (the sacrifice) felt unconscious. The bigger surprise for the onlookers was the disappearance of the two lovers from the scene. As the two remained untraced even after rigorous searches, the disappearance was assumed to be a divine intervention. For Tejchand, it was a message that the goddess was not willing to take human life as offering.

Till date Kali puja is performed at the temple where the goddess is perceived more as an Aphrodite than the epitome of power and destruction.

The above tales illustrate how the iconography of Kali was fashioned by imaginations.

It was not that only landlords and zamindars patronised the deity as the way they visualised her in their mind’s eye. As diverse a group as saints to dacoits sculpted the varied iconographies and decided what to be offered to the goddess.

A dacoit and roasted fish

The traditional offering at a Kali temple, established in mid-1700 at Bansberia in Hooghly is roasted ‘lyata’ fish (Bombay duck).

Thus goes the legend associated with the unique practice. The temple was built by Raghu dacoit. Before setting out for his mission, the dacoit offered human sacrifice and roasted fish to the deity.

One day when Ramprasad Sen, the 18th century Shakta poet and saint, was passing by the temple, Raghu dacoit’s gang captured him to offer him to the goddess.

As his last wish, the saint wanted to sing a hymn dedicated to Kali.

Ramprasad pleaded to Raghu dacoit to unbound him and allow him to sing his last hymn in praise of goddess kali before being killed. Raghu, being himself a Kali devotee, granted the wish.

As Ramprasad started singing one of his own compositions, Raghu had a vision of his divine mother being prepared to be sacrificed with her neck placed in the trident.

He interpreted the vision as an instruction from the deity to stop human sacrifice. Thereafter, he stopped the practice and became a follower of Ramprasad. But the tradition of offering the roasted fish has continued till date.

Thousands of devotees beelined every year during the Kali puja to have the roasted fish as a “prasad” believing that it would cure them of all ailments and bring good tidings.

At Dakat kali Mandir in Hooghly’s Singur the goddess is offered fried grains of rice and fried black gram.

Fried grains of rice and black grams

There is another interesting folklore associated with the offering.

The temple was set up by another dacoit (dakat in Bengali) Gagan. As per the story goes, one evening the dacoit accosted Sarada Devi, the wife of saint Ramakrishna Paramhansa, when she was going to Dakshineswar Kali temple to meet her husband.

To his horror, Gagan saw that Sarada Devi’s eyes turned bloodshot and her face was manifesting as Kali. Terrified, he fell into her feet and begged forgiveness.

In the meantime, it became dark. So, Gagan pleaded Sarada Devi to spend the night at his home. She was served fried grains of rice and black grams for dinner.

The encounter with Sarada Devi transformed the dacoit into a devotee of Kali. He established a temple where the goddess was offered what Gagan had served to Sarada Devi.

The morale of the stories is simple — the deities eat what the devotees offer.