Blood, Belonging, and the Goddess Outside the Gate

Written By David Kalal

This week, one of India’s most subversive religious festivals unfolds in Guwahati, Assam. The Ambubachi Mela, held annually at the Kamakhya Temple, marks the menstruation of the goddess Kamakhya—a fierce and generative Tantric deity linked to fertility, the rhythms of the earth, and feminine power. For three days, the temple’s sanctum remains closed, symbolizing the goddess’s retreat during her cycle. Devotees do not seek her darshan; they honor her absence.

At a time when menstruation across much of South Asia remains a source of stigma—considered impure, hidden away, and used to justify the exclusion of women and gender minorities from religious life—Ambubachi offers a radical counter-narrative. Here, menstruation is not only visible but sacred. The goddess bleeds, and the world pauses to revere the cycles of her body.

This is not just a local tradition. Ambubachi represents an entire theological thread in Hinduism that challenges the mainstream. It honors the messy, liminal, and taboo as sites of divine power. Rather than sanitize the divine, it embraces bodily reality.

The figure of Kamakhya is joined by that of Matangi, one of the ten Mahāvidyās—Tantric goddesses who embody unorthodox and esoteric forms of wisdom. Matangi’s myth begins with her birth to Matang Rishi, a sage from an outcaste community whose prayers for the divine were answered through the goddess’s incarnation as his daughter. In this telling, divinity is not given despite caste status, but through it. Matangi is not a sanitized goddess of the center—she is a goddess of leftovers, of outcasts, of the outskirts. She sits where others refuse to look. She sanctifies what society deems polluted.

This logic flies in the face of a dominant Hindu narrative increasingly shaped by upper-caste respectability, sanitized temple rituals, and nationalist politics. In that context, Kamakhya and Matangi are not mere figures of devotion—they are spiritual dissidents. They speak to a lineage of Hinduism that embraces those excluded from mainstream religious spaces: Dalits, Adivasis, women, queer and transgender people, the working poor.

At the Ambubachi Mela, these communities are not token participants; they are central to the celebration. Pilgrims include tribal devotees, hijra sannyasis, rural women, and sadhus who defy social categorization. The festival’s theology resists commodification and its rituals do not cater to polished broadcast aesthetics. It remains defiantly embodied.

Blood and dirt—terms often wielded to exclude—are reframed at Ambubachi as the very markers of sacredness. The goddess’s retreat is not an act of shame but an assertion of power. Her bleeding is not a flaw but a source of renewal.

In an age of increasing religious conservatism, festivals like Ambubachi reassert a truth too often forgotten: that the divine is not limited to the clean, the powerful, or the socially acceptable. It pulses in the margins, in the messy and the mundane, in cycles and in silence. The goddess outside the gate does not ask for entry—she transforms the gate itself.

images via: www.savaari.com

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David Kalal
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