#Tarabai

“A Bengali clerk filled his employer's account books with songs to Kālī and was pensioned rather than punished — and the songs he went home to write turned the goddess of terror into somebody's mother.”

“He took the most terrifying deity in the Hindu imagination — Kālī of the cremation ground, black, garlanded with severed heads — and sang to her as a small, aggrieved son sings to his mother, complaints included. He did not soften her. He claimed her. Bengal has been singing along ever since.”