The animation I submitted in collab with gorgeous @tranlkelly, alongside the jewellery was an interpretation of that history where I imagined her power as not only a goddess but a รꌦ๓๒๏l, to illuminate the illusion of colonialism as she descends from a red and blood filled sky to shine light on the land.
One key point of research for the Kali ring was the reinvention of her tongue which once was symbolic to one side of her once controversial duality. During the growing dominance of the British in Bengal in the 1800s, due to the East India Company - which had become a military force there - Goddess worship (specially Tantra) informed British missionaries where they sensationalised India of being corrupted by black magic and sexual depravity. They said that “they worship the bloodthirsty Kali whom they seek to perpetuate by sacrificing in cold blood as many as they can”; which justified imposing stricter controls over the local communities. The Great Rebellion of 1857 which started out as a military mutiny against the EIC, escalated and the Bengali revolutionaries harnessed Kali Ma’s radical potential to play on British paranoia. Prints and paintings were sold to locals promoting Bengali revolutionary politics and anti-imperialism and she was reimagined specifically as figure of resistance and symbol of an independent India without the British.