Multiple Names, Infinite Forms & Quantum Kali

There are at least a thousand names for Kali Ma and as many forms. There is an essence of Kali, divine goddess of creation and death, that runs as a theme through all versions but the forms can be drastically different. She exists as wilderness, protector, teacher, terror. Darshan is the divine exchange that happens when we witness the being in front of us and are being witnessed in return. What you witness in her might be what she allows you to see or what you have capacity to hold. What she evokes in you to be witnessed might enliven, nurture or terrify you.

She is Chamunda, a killer with fangs and claws, scorpion on her belly, tiger skin on her waist, sitting on a pile of corpses.

She is Dakshina-Kali when she is placed in home shrines, a “gentler”, sometimes vegetarian version of herself.

She is Tara in Bengal and Tibet.

She is Siddha-Kali when she reveals occult mysteries to a Tantrik aspirant she is pleased with, decked with the sun & moon as earrings, a flaming tongue and a skull with the nectar of immortality.

I too am different in different settings. There is an essence consistently running through me, but who I am by the ocean is not the same as from who I am in concrete jungles. Many people I grew up with call me by a different name than the one you know. My accent changes unthinkingly based on who I am talking to. I am different in English than I am in Hindi. I feel like a different type of foreigner when people around me are conversing in Marwadi than if they are speaking Arabic. All languages I have grown up around, all contexts that fill a different space of belonging, all versions of me that exist separately and simultaneously. All whole parts and parts that make many wholes.

For years I felt these varied versions of me was proof of a fractured, broken sense of self. The key to belonging, I imagined, was a single clearly articulated self that could at least be explained to if not clearly understood by those around me. Knowing that wasn’t my experience I viewed my variations are flaws. As maladjustments to a life lived on borderlands of gender, culture and homelands.

This sense of fragmentation was particularly acute when I felt called to choose a new name for myself for reasons of gender and beyond. (A different version of this feeling is with me now as I consider physical transitions.) It was then that I read this in Adi Parva by Amruta Patil:

“If a name is a promise and a prediction, how inadequate to live with just one! So much better to have a name for dawn, and a name for dusk. A name in the presence of the teacher, a name in the presence of the lover. A childhood name, a coming-of-age name. A kingly name, a name to wear while travelling incognito.”

In Kali Ma, I witness the divinity of multiplicity, hers and mine. To be in more than one place as different whole versions with different names at the same time is ancient and cosmic quantum presence. Kali Ma is not a scarce entity.

One name, one form is not enough. Not for Maha-Kali, Bhairavi, Saptarna, Jari-Mari, Guhya-Kali. Not for me.