Dakshineswar Kali

The Mother here is Bhavatarini, she who carries her children across the ocean of worldly existence — and Bengal calls her by that name, not the temple's. Within a year of the consecration Ramkumar died, and the worship passed to his younger brother Gadadhar — Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa — who remained at Dakshineswar some thirty years. Priestly routine gave way in him to a longing not consoled until, before that image, he knew the Divine Mother's living presence; and under the Panchavati, the grove of five trees raised at his own hands, he took up one path after another — Tantra, Vaishnava bhakti, the Vedanta taught him by Totapuri, the ways of Islam and of Christ — and from that came his teaching that as many faiths, so many paths to God.

His room in the north-western corner of the courtyard, its semicircular verandah facing the river, is kept as he left it; here the young men who became his monastic disciples first sat with him, Narendranath among them — Swami Vivekananda. Sri Sarada Devi lived in a small ground-floor room of the nahabat, the music tower by the river, and on the night of Phalaharini Kali Puja Sri Ramakrishna worshipped her as the Divine Mother herself. Both rooms are shrines today, and the order that grew from those years keeps its headquarters at Belur Math, on the far bank in sight of Dakshineswar and reached by the ferry from the temple's ghat.

Kali Puja is kept three times in the year — Ratanti in Magh, Phalaharini in Jyeshtha, and Dipanwita on the Kartik new-moon night of Diwali, when the courtyard becomes a sea of lamps — while Snana Yatra, the tithi on which the Mother was installed, remains the temple's founding day.

Dakshineswar stands on the eastern bank of the Hooghly just north of Kolkata: the great nineteenth-century Kali temple of Bengal, hallowed less by antiquity than by the life lived within it.

Its founder was Rani Rashmoni of Janbazar, a Mahishya zamindar's widow who ran her estates herself and gave Calcutta some of its best-known Ganga ghats. Setting out on pilgrimage to Kashi, she was turned back — so tradition holds — by a dream in which the Mother bade her go no farther, but install her image in a temple on the Ganga's bank and arrange for worship there.

She bought the land in 1847, and the building took eight years and some nine lakh rupees. On 31 May 1855, the Snana Yatra day, the image of Sri Sri Jagadishwari Kalimata Thakurani was installed, a lakh of brahmins invited to the consecration. Because the Rani was not brahmin-born, learned opinion had hesitated over who might make the offering; the endowment was dedicated to her family guru, and Ramkumar Chattopadhyay of Kamarpukur took the office of first priest. Rashmoni settled a zamindari on the temple for its upkeep and passed away in February 1861; the Debottar Estate she endowed holds it still.

The temple is a navaratna — the nine-spired form of later Bengal building — three-storeyed and south-facing on a high plinth, about fourteen metres square and rising more than thirty, its nine shikharas set over the upper two storeys. In the garbhagriha the Mother stands upon the breast of the reclining Shiva, both borne on a thousand-petalled lotus of silver, with a nat-mandir before the sanctum.

Along the river front runs a row of twelve identical east-facing Shiva temples in the aat-chala manner of Bengal, the bathing ghats set between them; to the north-east stands the Radha-Krishna temple, Radhakanta, where Vishnu is served as Krishna with Radha in small silver images. Fourteen temples in all stand in a compound of some twenty-five acres, with the Panchavati and the panchamundi seat.