A Living Goddess Worshipped Nightly in Bengal

Kali remains an actively worshipped goddess today, most intensely in the Indian state of West Bengal, where she is honored each year on Kali Puja, observed on the same new moon night that the rest of India celebrates as Diwali, when Bengali households and temples light lamps for her rather than, or alongside, the more widely known festival of Lakshmi. Kalighat Temple in Kolkata, one of the most visited Shakta pilgrimage sites in India, stands at the center of her worship in the city that is itself said to take its name from the goddess, and Dakshineswar Kali Temple on the Hooghly river carries a further, more personal significance: it was there in the nineteenth century that the mystic Ramakrishna, one of modern Hinduism's most influential devotional teachers, spent decades in intense meditation and worship before her image, describing his relationship to Kali in terms of direct maternal intimacy rather than distant reverence, and his teaching there shaped how large numbers of later Hindus, in India and abroad, have come to approach her. Bengali devotional poetry addressed to Kali, a tradition running from earlier poets through Ramakrishna's own circle, consistently frames her ferocity as inseparable from tenderness, a mother whose destructive power is exercised on her children's behalf rather than against them.