The Dance in the Banyan Forest

The two demon brothers Shumbha and Nishumbha lived in a forest of banyan trees in the Tamil country, and troubled the whole world from it. Parvati sent out Kali to kill them, and Kali killed them, and drank their blood, and the blood of their army.

"The forest is yours," Parvati told her. "Rule it."

But the blood had made Kali terrible. She ruled the banyan forest with her ghosts, and anyone who came into it was eaten, and the people round it lived in fear.

A sage called Munjikesa Karkodaka lived at the edge of the forest. He had one wish, which was to see Shiva dance, and he could not get near the place for Kali. He prayed, and Shiva came, in a fierce form, with his ghosts.

Kali came out of the trees to meet him.

"This forest is mine," she said. "If you want it, dance with me for it. If you win, it is yours. If I win, you go."

"Dance, then," said Shiva.

They danced under the banyan trees, with the ghosts drumming, and for a long time neither could win. Whatever step he took, she took. Whatever turn she made, he made. The sage watched with his hands folded.

Then Shiva, in the middle of a turn, let one of his earrings fall. It dropped to the ground. Without stopping, he picked it up with the big toe of his left foot, lifted the foot straight up past his body to his ear, put the earring back, and held the pose, standing on one leg, his foot raised to the sky.

Kali stopped dancing.

"I will not do that," she said, and gave way.

Shiva lowered his foot and went to her.

"There is no one in the world but me who could dance against you," he said. "Stay here in my forest. Whoever comes to me here will worship you first, before me."

So it is still. At Tiruvalangadu, pilgrims to Shiva's temple first visit Kali's shrine.

Long after, the poet Karaikkal Ammaiyar, who had begged Shiva to turn her body into a ghost's so that no one would look at her, came to the banyan forest walking on her head, because she would not set her feet on ground where Shiva had danced. She sat at his feet and played her cymbals, and sang to him, and her bronze sits beside his there today.

At Chidambaram the forest is a forest of thillai trees, mangroves by the sea, and Kali is its old mistress when Shiva comes to dance there.

He comes because two sages have asked him to. One is Patanjali, who is half a serpent, and the other is Vyaghrapada, who has a tiger's feet so that he can climb trees for flowers before the bees have touched them. They have waited in the thillai forest for years to see the dance.

"The forest is mine," Kali tells him. "Nobody dances here unless they dance better than I do."

She challenges him, as at Tiruvalangadu, and they dance, with the two sages watching, and he wins with the same raised foot.

But here she does not give way gracefully. She is furious. She leaves the centre of the town to him, where his golden hall now stands, and walks out to its northern edge, and there she stays, in her own temple, worshipped as Thillai Kali.

"Let him have his hall," she says. "This is mine."

The people say Brahma came to her there and sang her praises until her anger cooled, and in the same temple she is also worshipped as Brahma Chamundeswari, gentle, with four faces like his. The two goddesses are the same goddess, before and after.

Pilgrims to Chidambaram are told to go to her too. A visit to Nataraja's hall, they say, is not complete until it ends at her door on the northern edge of the town.