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Kālīghāt, the landing stage sacred to Kālī on the old course of the river Ganga at Calcutta, is regarded as an important seat of the Goddess (mahāpītha or śāktipītha) and is visited by thousands of pilgrims everyday. One particular feature of Bengali religiosity is a deep-seated devotion to mother goddesses. The most important public religious festivals in Bengal are connected with two goddesses, Durgā and Kālī, the goddess of war and victory and the goddess of death and regeneration, respectively. Two religious streams fuse at Kālīghāt: the non-vegetarian Śākta tradition and the vegetarian Vaisnava tradition. This chapter narrates how the priests of Kālīghāt, Kālī's most famous temple in Bengal, have been systematically Vaisnavizing her, removing as many reminders of her Tantric background as possible in their ritual regimens.

This chapter introduces the temple and the contours of the most recent modernization projects imposed upon it through the voices of devotees, renovators, temple Brahmins, and beggars at Kālīghāṭ. This material is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork. In this way, I show—rather than tell—what kinds of resonances the temple has for actors of various class backgrounds today and the kinds of modernist idioms the middle classes apply to the temple. I further situate my work in scholarly conversations, including those focused on temples, India’s middle classes, multiple modernities, notions of the “public,” and the study of colonial and contemporary Bengal.

In their English- and Bengali-language journal articles and books, middle-class Bengali Hindu authors at the turn of the twentieth century lifted Kālīghāṭ out of the realm of mythology and superstition and embedded it in the realm of linear history and rationality. They further wrote Kālīghāṭ’s ritual practices into a monolithic, non-violent form of Hinduism using rhetoric that was deeply ensconced in the then-emerging language of Hindu reformers. The work of these men in particular would be deemed incorrect or unimportant to many Hindus of their own time. Yet they set the precedent for later middle-class actors to embrace Kālīghāṭ as a symbol of Hindu identity, while also reforming it so that it might symbolize a Hindu identity that is modern.

In the mid-twentieth century, Kālīghāṭ became a site that middle-class actors could not only write about but also act upon in an official capacity. Because Kālīghāṭ was never royally patronized, East India Company and British official bodies did not take over the role of departing royal powers there as they did at other temples across India. Instead, middle-class actors took it upon themselves to modernize Kālīghāṭ’s management system in the mid-twentieth century. One Brahmin temple proprietor brought a complaint against 84 others to a district court in the 1930s, alleging that his brethren had mismanaged temple funds. Lawyers and judges at the district, state, and national levels worked to declare Kālīghāṭ a public temple and impose upon it a management committee that would be selected by educated, civically conscious Hindus in the city. This effectively removed authority from the temple’s Brahmin proprietors and put it in the hands of middle-class Hindus unaffiliated with the temple.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, middle-class men and women formed non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and filed public interest litigation suits (PILs) in order to expand temple space, knock down buildings that block views of Kālīghāṭ’s façade, and remove undesirable materials and populations from its environs. Employing the language of cleanliness and order, they worked (and continue to work) to make Kālīghāṭ a “must-see” tourist attraction. Scholarship has shown that India’s new middle classes—those produced through India’s economic liberalization policies in the 1990s—desire highly visible forms demonstrating their modernity as well as their uniqueness on the international stage of urban space. The example of Kālīghāṭ indicates how India’s new middle classes build on the work of the old middle classes to deploy the temple as emblematic of both their modernity and their Indian-ness. In so doing, they read the idioms of public space onto sacred space.

Middle-class modernizers frame their projects at Kālīghāṭ as being in the best interests of the Hindu public in Kolkata. However, so many who frequently worship at the temple or who live and work on temple grounds do not share the desire to transform the temple so that it represents Indian modernity. Lower-class men and women are successful in resisting modernizing projects because they employ tactics that make state control difficult or impossible. These include protests, the formation of political organizations, as well as obstinacy and deception. This chapter demonstrates that while middle-class actors may use the tools of civil society to gain state support for their projects, they are not guaranteed success. Even informal and non-legal tools of what Partha Chatterjee calls “political society” are effective in blocking the enactment of modernizing projects.

Modernizers work to refine the behavior and decorum of Hindus and to cleanse the goddess Kālī for bourgeois global consumption. They work together with state bodies to make Hindu temples part of the modern urban skyline and to facilitate transportation between them, creating pilgrimage circuits in their cities. Even as they are contested, such efforts are sure to affect some changes in the ways that Hinduism is practiced and in the ways India’s urban landscapes are experienced. When temples change, so does Hinduism, and so do Indian cities. In order to understand the role that Hinduism plays in modern Indian society—and the kinds of major temple-building and -renovating projects that are so ubiquitous throughout India today, from Kolkata to Chennai, Delhi, and Bangalore—scholarly attention must be trained more closely to the intertwined discourses of temples and modernity as they have developed in India from the colonial period to the present.