The Goddess Kali (recto), from a Kalighat album (c. 1890): Art, History and Details

The Goddess Kali (recto), from a Kalighat album (c. 1890) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Black-skinned, four-armed, her tongue out, and blood dripping from her mouth, Kali has a third eye—representative of enlightened or divine knowledge—on her forehead. Simultaneously benevolent and dangerous, she holds a sword and a demon’s severed head in two hands while the other two hands are in gestures of protection and blessing. This image would have been sold as a pilgrim souvenir to both locals and the colonial British around the Kalighat temple and is a replica of the image worshipped inside the temple. The frightening image of Kali especially fit into the colonial imagination and into Victorian popular culture and would have been an iconic souvenir/artifact to be shown to intrigued and horrified friends at home in England.

Object facts

• Title: The Goddess Kali (recto), from a Kalighat album
• Date: c. 1890
• Culture: Eastern India, Bengal, Kolkata, Kalighat
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, graphite, ink, and tin on paper
• Dimensions: Secondary Support: 49.7 x 29.3 cm (19 9/16 x 11 9/16 in.); Painting only: 45.9 x 28 cm (18 1/16 x 11 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2003.110.a

Collection credit

Gift of William E. Ward in memory of his wife, Evelyn Svec Ward

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sarma, Deepak. "Indian Kalighat Paintings." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 51, no. 4 (July/August 2011): 4–6.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.