Kalighat

For the people of Bengal, Kalighat is Kali's own city-shrine — the heart of the Shakta devotion that runs so deep through the region, and never busier than at Kali Puja on the night of Diwali. The temple draws an unceasing stream of pilgrims, and its lanes of flower- and offering-sellers are a world in themselves.

In the sanctum the goddess is a striking image carved of black touchstone, three-eyed, with four hands and a long golden tongue, her arms sheathed in silver — a form quite unlike the painted clay Kalis of the festival pandals. Kalighat also gave its name to the Kalighat pat, the bold folk-paintings once sold to pilgrims here and now prized far beyond Bengal.

Worship here is unceasing and intimate: the day moves through the morning and evening aartis and the offering of bhog, and on set occasions a goat is sacrificed in the traditional Shakta manner. The temple stands within a dense quarter of shrines and bathing tanks, and its steady crowds — swelling enormously at Kali Puja and Durga Puja — make it one of the living centres of Bengali devotion. For many in the city, a visit to the Mother of Kalighat marks every important turn of life.

Kalighat is the great Kali temple of Kolkata, standing in the south of the city on the Adi Ganga, the old channel of the Hooghly. It is among the oldest and most visited shrines of Bengal, and is counted among the Shakti Peethas — in eastern tradition one of the four Adi Peethas, the primal seats of the Goddess.

By the Shakti Peetha tradition it is here that the toes of Sati's right foot fell, and the goddess is worshipped as Dakshina Kali, the benevolent Kali who faces south; her Bhairava is Nakuleshwar, whose Shiva shrine stands within the precinct. The site is named in texts as old as the fifteenth-century Manasa-mangal, though the present temple was raised much later.

That present structure was completed in 1809, after some eleven years' building, under the patronage of the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family of Barisha — the old landholders of the villages that grew into Calcutta. The city's very name, Kolkata or Calcutta, is widely held to descend from Kalighat, the ghat sacred to Kali.

The temple is built in the aat-chala manner of Bengal — the 'eight-roofed' village-temple form written large — a square shrine rising to a curved, gabled roof and a truncated dome, in brick and plaster rather than the carved stone of the south.

Around the central shrine cluster the Nakuleshwar Shiva temple, a sacred tank, and the halls where offerings are made; the whole is hemmed in by the dense old neighbourhood that has grown around one of the busiest places of worship in the country. It is a temple of devotion and crowds rather than of grand scale.