УДК 82131:292 THE STYLISTIC STRATEGIES OF TWO TEXTS DEDICATED TO THE GODDESS KALI: THE CONTRASTED POINTS OF VIEW OF THE ELITE AND THE SUBALTERNS Michel Naumann University of Cergy Cergy University, 33 bld Port, Cergy, France, 95000 michelnaumann.naumann@gmail.com The article studies the contrasted religious perceptions of the Goddess Kali by the elite and the subalterns in Bengal. <...> It deals with this subject through the stylistic features of two texts and brings about two different visions of religion, the orthodox and the heterodox. <...> Key words: elite and subalterns, verticality and horizontality, Kali, Bengal, urban and rural, prosopopoeia and contrafision. <...> INTRODUCTION For the Europeans and North-Americans, Kali is a strange deity because she is very different from our conventional representations of motherhood: In the West, art and poetry have been exhausted to associate all that is tender and precious with this thought of a woman-worship. <...> These lines from Margaret Noble, an Irish visitor in India, who converted to Hinduism under the name of Sister Nivedita and became a Kali devotee in the late XIX century and the early XX century, evoke Italian paintings of the Virgin and also Russian icons even though they stress the religious meaning of the mother-son relation more than the purely human relation. <...> Kali is very different from Western representations of the mother: In the East, the accepted symbol is of a woman nude, with flowing hair, so dark a blue that she seems in colour to be black, four-handed — two hands in the act of blessing, and two holding a knife and bleeding head respectively, — garlanded with skulls, and dancing, with protruding tongue, on the prostrate figure of a man all white with ashes [6. <...> Sister Nivedita was converted to Hinduism by the philosopher and mystic Vivekananda. <...> She has written a short text in which the Goddess calls her devotees and gives them advice to help them reach the 15 Вестник РУДН, серия Теория языка. <...> My intention in this article is to oppose the stylistic strategy of this kind of text and its verticality to the horizontal features of the relations between Kali and her devotees in a text coming from rural mystics of Bengal, men and women who struggled against the colonial State, the upper castes and the landowners to survive and whose revolutionary spirit could not accept any faith which didn’t spring from grass-root level. <...> I will <...>