The tradition first, stated accurately. Then the reading this book offers, marked clearly as a reading.
The tradition. In Vaishnava tradition Kalki is the tenth and final avatar of Vishnu, expected at the close of Kaliyuga. Puranic sources — the Bhagavata and the Kalki Purana among them — describe a figure appearing when dharma has fallen to its lowest point, riding a white horse and bearing a sword, who ends an age of falsehood and inaugurates a new Satyayuga. Details vary between texts and lineages. This is traditional belief, held sincerely by many, and it is reported here as belief.
Note the structural role the figure plays in that literature. Kalki is not a punishment narrative. He is a restoration narrative — the point of the story is not the destruction but the age that follows. What is destroyed is specifically a condition: the systematic falsehood that has made ordinary decent life impossible.
The reading offered here. I am interested in Kalki as a symbol of correction — the moment when a system built on falsehood becomes unsustainable and is dismantled, and something truer is built. Read this way, Kalki names a pattern that recurs in history without requiring any supernatural machinery: the abolition of a normalised injustice, the collapse of a regime that could no longer be believed, the reform that arrives after the pretence fails.