Batara Kala

Also Known As: Javanese Bathara Kala; Balinese Bhatara Kala; also Sang Hyang Kala, Sanghyang Adi Kala
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Indonesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: The devouring giant of Javanese and Balinese belief, born of a god’s misspent seed, whose name is simply the word for time.
Role in Mythos: He is time itself given a mouth, licensed by his father to eat the people who put themselves in his way at the wrong hour or under the wrong stars.
Relation to Humans: Whole categories of ordinary people are marked out at birth as his food, and others earn it by carelessness. The only reliable defence is a puppet play, performed by a puppeteer of the right descent, in which Kala is fed until he relents.

The gongs start in the middle of the day, which is wrong. Wayang is night work. But this is a ruwatan, and the whole point is the hour: noon, when the sun stands directly overhead and a man casts no shadow, is when the giant hunts. Behind the screen a puppeteer who has fasted for a week is telling the story of a monster to the monster’s face, and somewhere in the shade of the pavilion sits a child whose only crime is having been born an only child. The oil lamp smokes. The bronze keys of the gender ripple. If the play works, the child gets to keep his life.

Batara Kala is the hungriest thing in the Javanese and Balinese imagination, and he is also, by name, nothing more sinister than the clock. Kala is time. It is a Sanskrit word that arrived in the archipelago with Shiva and stayed, and in Java it picked up a second meaning on the way: disaster, difficulty, the bad hour. Both senses fit him. He is what happens to you eventually.

His conception is the most famous accident in Javanese story. Siwa, whom Java calls Batara Guru, is crossing the sea above the waves with his wife Dewi Uma, and his desire for her overtakes him. She refuses. They struggle in the air, and his seed falls into the ocean. That falling is the whole of the problem, and the Javanese have a term for it: kama salah, the misplaced seed, the wrong thing done in the wrong place at the wrong time. The gods return to heaven and think no more about it. Beneath them the water begins to churn.

What comes out of the sea is a giant, already screaming for its parents and already starving. Brahma and Wisnu cannot meditate for the noise. The assembled gods bring their weapons against him, every enchanted club and discus and trident in heaven, and he beats them all, including his father. Only when Siwa finally acknowledges the boy, names him Kala and takes his right fang out of his head does the rampage stop. The Balinese palm-leaf manuscripts tell it other ways too. In one, Uma bears an egg the shape of an iron rice pot, and the gods try to drown it, bury it and burn it, and none of the three works, and the thing that hatches from it is bald and bawling and impervious. In another he arrives as a mass of crystal that the nine gods of the compass points shatter with their weapons, and out of the fragments he stands up with his thick hair and his sky-splitting voice. What every version agrees on is the sequence: a god loses control of himself for a moment, and the world inherits an appetite that cannot be killed.

So Siwa does the next best thing and writes him a licence. Kala may not eat everyone. He may eat those abroad at noon, at dusk and at midnight; those who sleep at sunset; children who cry in the night; people who dawdle in the middle of the road. He is posted to the crossroads and to the graveyard, where his mother in her terrible form as Durga already keeps house, and he becomes the lord of the lesser demons and of disease. On Java the licence is expanded into a list, and the list is the reason he still matters. The wong sukerta, the marked ones, are ordinary people: an only child, two brothers, two sisters, a boy and a girl born in that order, five sons, twins, a child born still wrapped in the caul, a child born feet first. Nobody has ever explained why. The rest of the list is earned rather than inherited, and it is startlingly domestic: you sleep at sunset, you put the rice on and then wander off to a neighbour’s house, you sweep your rubbish into a heap and never burn it, you leave food uncovered, you stand in a doorway. Do any of that and you have made yourself into food.

Picture him on the road, then, at the top of the day. The dust is white with heat and the shadows have gone. A man is walking without hurry, thinking about nothing, and behind him the air thickens. That is the whole of the encounter. There is no fight.

He is enormous, red and black in the face, with eyes that bulge and burn and a mouth too wide for the head it sits in, permanently open on its fangs. Javanese puppet-makers give him the worst face in the box, and the meanings are read off him like a chart: the staring eyes are surveillance, the red is rage and the black is grief, and the mouth is greed with nothing left over. Anyone who has walked under the gateway of an old Javanese temple has already met the family resemblance, because the monstrous head carved above the door, all glare and tusks and no lower jaw at all, is called a kala, and you enter the holy ground by walking into its mouth.

And still he loses, every time, and always the same way. He is unkillable but he is not clever. In the Balinese telling, Siwa and Uma ride out on their white bull to meet him, and Siwa poses a riddle: what has eight feet, six arms, three navels, six ears, two horns, seven eyes? The answer is standing directly in front of Kala and he cannot see it. He gnaws at the puzzle long enough for the sun to shift off its meridian, and with it goes his right to eat. He kicks the coconut palm that failed to hold the sunlight back, and coconut palms have leaned ever since. In the Javanese play, Batara Guru has written a text on his son’s own body, on the throat, the forehead, the chest and the back, and the puppeteer reads it aloud. Kala cannot read himself. To know a thing’s origin is to be older than it, and he submits.

Then the smell of the offerings reaches him and he stops caring about the child at all. He falls on the banten, the rice cones and the fruit and the roast fowl laid out for the show, and he eats them instead, and when the puppeteer demands payment for the meal he hands over the mantra that turns water into a thing that cleanses. That is the bargain the ceremony re-enacts every time: he was fed once, and he agreed to keep being fed. His weakness is that he is bribable, and that he cannot resist a good performance, and that he is bound by his father’s rules more tightly than any of his victims are.

Two other things are worth being straight about. The murwakala is not ancient. The oldest versions of the play run back to around 1670, and it went into wide performance in the seventeenth century, which means the Javanese Kala everyone knows was shaped in the same era as the arrival of Islam and not in some limitless antiquity. And the picture of him you will find in most English books, in which he rules the underworld from a cave alongside a goddess called Setesuyara and is credited with creating light and the earth, comes from general compilations and not from the Javanese or Balinese texts, where he keeps to the crossroads and the burial grounds and creates nothing whatsoever.

He has not gone. When the moon or the sun goes dark over a Javanese village, people still say the buto is swallowing it, and they still take the pans down off the wall and beat them until the light comes back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Batara Kala?

Batara Kala is the giant devouring god of Javanese and Balinese mythology, the son of Batara Guru (Shiva) and Dewi Uma. His name means time, and he is both the personification of time and a man-eating ogre licensed by his father to devour people who are out at the wrong hour or born under the wrong circumstances.

How was Batara Kala born?

He was born from kama salah, misplaced seed. Batara Guru’s lust for Dewi Uma overcame him above the ocean, she refused him, and his semen fell into the sea, where it grew into a starving giant who attacked heaven itself. Balinese manuscripts give variants: an indestructible egg shaped like an iron cooking pot, or a mass of crystal shattered by the weapons of the nine directional gods.

What is ruwatan and how does it protect people from Batara Kala?

Ruwatan is the Javanese purification ceremony held for people classed as sukerta, meaning marked out as Batara Kala’s rightful food. It centres on a daytime shadow-puppet play called Murwakala, in which the puppeteer narrates Kala’s own birth to him, feeds him the ritual offerings and reads aloud the writing on his body, at which point Kala renounces his claim.

Who counts as sukerta, or Batara Kala’s prey?

Sukerta status is mostly a matter of birth: an only child, two brothers or two sisters, five sons, twins, a child born in the caul, a child born feet first. It can also be earned through carelessness, such as sleeping at sunset, leaving rice cooking while you visit a neighbour, or never burning the rubbish you have swept up.

Does Batara Kala cause eclipses?

In living Javanese folk belief, yes. When the sun or moon darkens, villagers say the giant is swallowing it, and they beat pots, pans and drums to drive him off, a practice still recorded in rural Central Java. The eclipse is thought to be dangerous to pregnant women and livestock, and the noise is a way of getting the light back.