Prayers to Kāli: practicing radical numinosity
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- Catalogue identifier
- kali-fifty4-003
- Alternate titles and import identifiers
- KALI-50B4-003
- Author or attribution
- Anjana Raghavan
- Record type
- Article
- Language
- English
- Date / edition
- 2019
- Source / repository
- Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive — accepted manuscript
- Access
- Open access
- Subjects
- 50 Full-Text Sources — Batch 4, November 2026; Scholarship and historical studies
Description and curator notes
Raghavan brings Kali into a contemporary queer-feminist and decolonial argument about spiritual knowledge, embodiment and resistance. The essay combines personal reflection with interpretations of translated Tamil poetry by Malathi Maithri, Sukirtharani and N. D. Rajkumar. Its account of sacred experience challenges the separation of intellectual inquiry from emotional and bodily knowledge, while questioning caste privilege and exclusion within religious traditions. Kali is both an organizing invocation and the addressee of the concluding prayer-dialogue. This is a useful record of contemporary scholarly and creative reception, rather than a historical reconstruction of ancient Kali worship or a complete anthology of the poets discussed. The institutional copy is the full accepted manuscript, whose pagination differs from the published article. Readers should retain the author’s situated, interpretive voice and not present its political or spiritual claims as a consensus description of Hindu practice.
Curator source KALI-50B4-003. Scholarship and historical studies. Research supplement dated 5 November 2026.
Except where specific checks are described below, source access, completeness and scholarly or devotional assessments are supplied by the curator document, not a new independent verification by this library. Comparative goddess identities, healing claims and devotional interpretations are attributed, not established universal or clinical facts. Full source content is linked, not reproduced.
03. Prayers to Kāli: practicing radical numinosity
Author/editor: Anjana Raghavan | 2019
Type / language: Scholarly journal article, accepted manuscript | English
Raghavan brings Kali into a contemporary queer-feminist and decolonial argument about spiritual knowledge, embodiment and resistance. The essay combines personal reflection with interpretations of translated Tamil poetry by Malathi Maithri, Sukirtharani and N. D. Rajkumar. Its account of sacred experience challenges the separation of intellectual inquiry from emotional and bodily knowledge, while questioning caste privilege and exclusion within religious traditions. Kali is both an organizing invocation and the addressee of the concluding prayer-dialogue. This is a useful record of contemporary scholarly and creative reception, rather than a historical reconstruction of ancient Kali worship or a complete anthology of the poets discussed. The institutional copy is the full accepted manuscript, whose pagination differs from the published article. Readers should retain the author’s situated, interpretive voice and not present its political or spiritual claims as a consensus description of Hindu practice.
Read the complete source: Open full-text document
https://shura.shu.ac.uk/24907/8/Raghavan_PracticingRadicalNuminosity(AM).pdf
Access check: Complete freely readable original-host PDF downloaded without payment or login on 2026-11-05.
Source links:
https://shura.shu.ac.uk/24907/8/Raghavan_PracticingRadicalNuminosity(AM).pdf
Source access
Rights and reading conditions
Curator-reported free reading is not a blanket republication licence. Follow each source's copyright and reuse conditions; third-party images may have different rights from the article text. No full texts or scans are reproduced here. Complete freely readable original-host PDF downloaded without payment or login on 2026-11-05.
Citation
Anjana Raghavan. Prayers to Kāli: practicing radical numinosity. Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive — accepted manuscript. 2019. https://shura.shu.ac.uk/24907/8/Raghavan_PracticingRadicalNuminosity(AM).pdf
This page supplies catalogue metadata and links. It does not reproduce the underlying source text. Historical, religious, healing and interpretive claims belong to the cited sources, not to an independent verification by this catalogue.