The True Story of Kaliyuga

The Long Winter and the Twilight of the Titans in India and Rome

Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, and Mahesh or Shiva destroys. That’s the generally accepted profile of the Hindu pantheon’s supreme trinity. Kalki breaks this template. As the tenth Vishnu incarnate, he departs from the norm and assumes the role of the ultimate destroyer of worlds. Kalki represents regeneration—end of old decay and start of a new, “ideal” world order. But why? Why does Vishnu get the job traditionally meant for Shiva? The clues lie in Kalki’s genesis. The deity makes its debut in Garuda Purana, one of the Maha Puranas. The work introduced Kalki as a Vishnu avatar who came into the world riding a pristine white stallion named Devadatta to “chastise the wrongdoers.” In some iterations, he doesn’t stop at just that and goes further to “reboot the world,” so to speak.

Garuda, like much of the Puranic corpus, is a product of Late Antiquity. Also like most other Maha Puranas, it was the work of not one but multiple successive authors. Scholarly consensus places it between the fourth and eleventh centuries. The reference to Kalki can be narrowed down further to around mid-sixth century because one verse introduces him as the prophesied son of Vishnugupta, the last known Gupta ruler whose reign came to an end in 550 AD.

So, it would seem something crazy happened toward the middle of the first millennium that triggered imaginations of a divine intervention of a most violent kind. And for some reason, this had to be Vishnu and not Shiva. What happened? One clue can be found in the decline of the Guptas that coincided with the emergence of Kalki, but there’s a whole lot more. The story of Kalki, and the consequent start of Kaliyuga or Indian Dark Ages, is nothing short of an international thriller with plotlines connecting places like China and Rome. This story has catastrophic wars, an even more catastrophic plague, three volcanoes, and a whole lot of religion. Now, there are two ways to start this story, with Rome or with China. No, the story of Kalki does not begin in India. We’ll start with China—northwestern China to be more precise. Some 2,200 years ago. First some geography. Following people and their actions becomes easier once we comprehend their geography.