Power of Place: Kālañjara Fort and the Fierce Goddess in Medieval India

The Lecture

The Fierce Goddess, most commonly known as Kālī or Cāmuṇḍā, gradually emerged as one of the preeminent female deities in Hinduism, starting in the eighth century. Emaciated, adorned with skulls, standing atop a corpse or ghost, and wielding a range of fierce attributes, she embodies both destruction and transcendence. Yet, despite her prominence, medieval sites and temples dedicated to her remain understudied and little understood.

At the foot of the Vindhya Mountains in present-day Uttar Pradesh stands the immense hill-fort of Kālañjara. While Kālañjara—literally ‘destroyer of time’, a reference to Śiva—was primarily a Śaiva centre, Purāṇic sources also cite it as an abode of Kālī. This is reflected in the prominence of Kālī’s imagery within the fort’s extensive rock-cut sculptures, where she appears alongside Śiva.

Kālañjara, a prominent pilgrimage site (tīrtha), held both religious and political importance, frequented by kings—particularly under the Chandellas—and ascetics, most notably the Pāśupatas. It functioned as a nexus of royal authority and sectarian devotion, illustrating the complex interplay between ascetic traditions, kingship, and the goddess—an interplay governed also by the fort’s functional and topographical context.

This lecture provides the first in-depth analysis of Kālañjara’s Kālī imagery within the broader networks of the Chandella kingdom and beyond. By situating the fort’s iconography in relation to nearby sites such as Khajuraho and Ajaygarh, as well as placing it within cross-regional sculptural traditions, this discussion re-evaluates the depiction and significance of the Fierce Goddess in medieval North Indian religious history.

Finally, the fort’s unique setting will be addressed, considering the relation between natural, self-sustaining sacredness and human intervention through architectural form in shaping Kālañjara’s religious and ritual power.

The Speaker

Sandra Sattler is a J. Gonda Postdoctoral Fellow at IIAS, Leiden, and a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London, where she convenes the Arts of India and Arts of the Buddhist World courses for the SOAS-Alphawood Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art. Previously, she served as Curator of Medieval to Modern South Asian Art at the British Museum and has lectured internationally at universities, museums, and cultural institutions for over a decade. She holds a PhD from SOAS, where her doctoral research examined the Goddess Cāmuṇḍā in medieval North Indian temple art and Purāṇic literature. Her research focuses on the textual and visual history of Hindu goddesses in medieval India.

Registration

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