Rangda, "widow", is the demon queen of Balinese tradition, depicted with long wild hair, pendulous breasts, protruding tongue and fangs, and long claw-like fingernails, ruling over the leyak, shape-shifting practitioners of black magic in Balinese folk belief, and serving as the Barong's counterpart and opponent in Bali's central ritual drama of balanced cosmic forces. Rather than a figure of unambiguous evil to be simply defeated, Rangda occupies a genuinely ambivalent place within Balinese Hinduism: some interpretations connect her directly to Durga in her fierce aspect, meaning the same destructive, dangerous power she represents is also, viewed correctly, a legitimate and necessary divine force rather than pure malevolence, consistent with the wider Hindu pattern in which fierce goddesses are understood as expressions of the same ultimate divinity as their gentler forms rather than as separate evil beings.
The figure is popularly connected in Balinese oral tradition to Calonarang, a legendary widow-sorceress whose story, dramatised in the Calonarang dance-drama, provides much of the narrative context audiences bring to a Rangda performance even when the specific Barong dance being staged does not retell her story directly.