Kalki and Cosmopolitanism: Chronicling the Life and Times of a Lesser-Known Vishnu Avatāra in Kevin Missal’s Kalki Series

The last decade has seen an explosion of mythic fantasy literature based in varying degrees on Hindu stories and deities. In this paper, I examine one such example, Kevin Missal’s best-selling mythic fantasy series Kalki: Avatar of Vishnu. I admit to being puzzled when I first learned of the existence and popularity of this series. For many of us who research and teach about Hindu traditions, Kalki appears as a minor character in the vast expanse of Hindu texts, deities, and practices. He is most well-known as the tenth avatāra of Vishnu in a list of ten avatāras that appears in the Garuḍa and other Purāṇas and has since become well known in academic and popular Hindu circles. In relation to this list, he is the only avatāra presented as having a future but no past: he will appear at the end of Kali Yuga, our current degenerate age, riding on a white horse, sword in hand, to destroy evil (adharma) and usher in the transition to the next Satya Yuga, a future age of purity and moral stability.

The popular idea of Kalki as a prophesied savior figure free from the constraints of any narrative past has in some contexts turned Kalki into something of an “empty set” upon which one can project one’s fantasies. Gore Vidal’s science fiction fantasy novel Kalki (1978), for example, imagines Kalki as the religious name for James Kelly, a former American soldier who plots to destroy the world and humanity in a nuclear apocalypse and repopulate the world with his wife, Lakshmi, but instead ends up causing the extinction of all humanity. Kalki may also be associated symbolically with the process of inner, spiritual transformation. Ra Gohar Shahi, the founder and spiritual leader of the transnational Kalki Avatar Foundation, claims to be the awaited avatāra who has arrived on earth in this historical moment to bring about a “new era of mutual love and enlightenment” (http://www.kalkiavatarfoundation.com/about/our-mission).

While the biography of the yet-to-be Kalki is not well known, it does exist and is narrated in some detail the Kalki Purāṇa (ca. 18th century), a secondary or upa-purāṇa composed most likely in Bengal sometime from around 1700-1900. This Purāṇa tells of the “pastimes” of the future avatāra, when Viṣṇu will take form as Kalki at the behest of Brahmā and other deities who will ask him for protection from the evils of Kali Yuga. The text narrates that in the future, Kalki is born in the village of Śambhala, where he studies Hindu scripture and becomes a dharmic warrior. Shiva grants him a sword and white horse based on Kalki’s piety. Kalki marries; goes to battle to destroy numerous evil forces, including Kali, Māyā, and a host of other demons (asuras); and eventually becomes the ruler of Śambhala, where he ushers in the end of Kali Yuga and the start of Satya Yuga. Having completed his mission on earth, he then ascends to his rightful place in Vaikuṇṭha, Viṣṇu’s heaven.

Missal’s series reimagines this story, combining elements of the Kalki Purāṇa with story elements that the author acknowledges freely that he borrows from blockbuster films and television series like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Games of Thrones, The Godfather, The Dark Knight, and Terminator 2. Missal, a graduate from the elite, English-medium St. Stephens College in New Delhi, published the three books of his Kalki Trilogy when he was between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. These are not sophisticated books, and many readers have complained of bad grammar, bad character development, and the like. But they sell very well. It seems clear that Missal has capitalized on the successes of writers like Amish Tripathi, whose three books of his best-selling trilogy The Immortals of Meluha were published between 2011 and 2013.

Missal’s Kalki Trilogy reinvents Kalki in a way that reflects an aesthetic cosmopolitanism of twenty-first Hindu elites, like Missal. As Tulasi Srinivas (forthcoming) has observed, for many Hindus, myths are not “musty tales” with no relevance to modern life; they are a touchstone for understanding oneself and the world we inhabit. Modern globalization, the rise of the internet, and the economic changes of the 1990s have enabled young, urban Hindus who are fully at home with the English language to engage and recreate Hindu narratives to reflect their life worlds, incorporating story elements from outside of Hinduism that have shaped their self-understanding and have become part of their religious lexicon. This kind of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is entangled with economic neo-liberalism, which grants writers like Missal access to new markets and new audiences. Thus, telling and selling become one another’s means and ends: one “tells” in order to sell, but selling enables one to tell the story in one’s own way. This selling/telling dynamic is especially advantageous here given that Kalki is a relatively unimportant deity in the larger Hindu pantheon; few readers of Missal’s books will be familiar with the story as the Kalki Purāṇa recounts it and hence will not mount religious objections to its retelling. Missal’s narrative aesthetic of “mixing and matching,” to borrow a phrase from Vineeta Sinha, both challenges and reinforces dominant Hindu nationalist discourses that have shaped the political landscape over the last two decades in India. The Kalki Trilogy reinvents Kalki as a hero or superhero in the mold of the Western media that have shaped his books, thereby embracing Western influences and values. As an English language product of print capitalism, the trilogy’s imagined community of reading consumers pushes beyond traditional Hindu boundaries. But Missal’s Kalki serves the Hindu state in eliminating the forces of adharma, which include anything that might threaten “traditional” Hindu notions of order and compliance.