The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kalighat and Kolkata 2018015454, 2018040622, 9780190885274, 9780190885281, 9780190885267, 9780190885298

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The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City Kālīghāt ̣ and Kolkata

Deonnie Moodie

3

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moodie, Deonnie, 1981– author. Title: The making of a modern temple and a Hindu city : Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata / Deonnie Moodie. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018015454 (print) | LCCN 2018040622 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190885274 (updf) | ISBN 9780190885281 (epub) | ISBN 9780190885267 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190885298 (online content) Subjects: LCSH: Kālīghāṭa (Temple : Kolkata, India) | Hindu temples—India—Kolkata. | Middle class—Religious life—India—Kolkata. | Kolkata (India)—Religious life and customs. Classification: LCC BL1243.76.C352 (ebook) | LCC BL1243.76.C352 K355 2018 (print) | DDC 294.5/350954147—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015454 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

This book is dedicated to all of the Kolkata-​wālās and -​wālīs who shared with me their love of Kālī and their city. Without them, this work would not have been possible.

CONTENTS

List of Figures  ix Acknowledgments  xi Notes on Translation and Transliteration  xv

Introduction: The Temples of Modern India  1

1. Reviving and Reforming Calcutta’s Hindu Past  37 2. A Religious Institution Goes Public  67 3. Sacred Space Becomes Public Space  99 4. Resisting Middle-​Class Modernizing Projects  135 Conclusion: Bourgeoisifying Hinduisms and Hindu-​izing Cities  161 Notes  171 Bibliography  189 Index  205

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FIGURES

I.1 Mūr ti of Kālī in the Inner Sanctum of Kālīghāṭ 2 I.2 Photo of Kālīghāṭ from Northeastern Corner  5 I.3 Photo of a Flower Seller Inside the Kālīghāṭ Temple Courtyard  6 I.4 A Hawker’s Stall in Front of the Temple  7 I.5 Map of Kolkata  8 I.6 Map of the Kālīghāṭ Neighborhood  9 I.7 Plan of Kālīghāṭ Temple  10 I.8 Photo of the Office Exterior of the International Foundation of Sustainable Development  16 1.1 Drawing of the Kālīghāṭ Courtyard Circa 1891 from the Western Side 39 1.2 Map of the Kālīghāṭ Neighborhood Circa 1891  40 1.3 Conjectural Map of Sutāṇuṭi, Kalikātā, and Govindapur Villages Prior to the Arrival of Job Charnock  45 1.4 Boundaries of “White Town” as Variously Defined During the Colonial Period  48 2.1 Comparison of the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee’s Composition According to High Court and Supreme Court Rulings in 1956 and 1961  93 3.1a–​e The International Foundation for Sustainable Development’s Architectural Plans for Kālīghāṭ and Its Surroundings  115

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

t was boyd wilson who first introduced me to India. For over two decades, he led groups of American undergraduates on month-​long immersion programs traversing the subcontinent. Of all the historic and sacred sites he introduced my peers and me to during the sweltering May month of 2002, Kālīghāṭ is the one that most captivated me. I have spent the ensuing decade and a half working to understand the role this site plays in the lives of those who make use of it. The book before you would not have been possible without Boyd. Anne Monius read countless drafts of my dissertation—​the work that provides the basis for this one—​and provided critical and detailed feedback at every step. She is a model advisor and mentor who has shown tireless dedication to my development as a scholar and as a person. Thank you to Brian Hatcher, who generously provided many remarks on multiple versions of my dissertation and then my book proposal. I am indebted both to him and to fellow scholar of Bengal, Rachel McDermott, for providing a great deal of support for my developing research. Thank you also to Rebecca Manring and Tony Stewart, who aided in my (and many others’) initial study of Bengali in Dhaka, and to Maya De, Protima Dutt, Prasenjit Dey, and Indrani Bhattacarya for their help and encouragement as I translated many of the Bengali works referenced here. I am also deeply indebted to Diana Eck and Michael Jackson for their support and guidance throughout the 10 years of my graduate education, and for their insightful comments on this and much of my other writing. The research for this book was funded by a generous grant from the Fulbright-​Nehru Student Research Program in 2011 and 2012. Thank you to Professor Arun Bandopadhyay of the University of Calcutta, who guided my research in Kolkata. I am also grateful to Rajshekar Basu, Uma Chattopadhyay, and Amit Dey of the University of Calcutta; Himadri Banerjee and Ruby Sain

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of Jadavpur University; Partho Datta at Delhi University; Kunal Chakrabarty at Jawaharlal Nehru University; as well as Gautum Bhadro, Partha Chatterjee, Keya Dasgupta, and Tapati Guha-​Thakurta at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, for their guidance during the period of my research. Many thanks to the historians in Kolkata who provided support and invaluable insights into my work, including Haripad Bhoumick, Debasish Bose, P. T. Nair, and Abhik Ray. Thank you also to Shevanti Narayan and Sumanta Basu at the United States–​India Educational Foundation for their help in many aspects of my work in Kolkata. Hena Basu, who has facilitated the work of many scholars of Bengal over the decades, helped me navigate many of the city’s libraries, social networks, and even its courtrooms. She collected countless newspaper articles and translated a number of works for me both while I was in Kolkata and upon my return. My thanks go to her and to the many others who connected me to resources in the city, including Ashim Mukhopadhyay at the National Library, Abhijit Bhattacarya at the library of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Saktidas Ray at the Ananda Bazar Patrika archives, Arun Kumar Roy at the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, and Anirban Das Gupta of Das Gupta & Co. Bookshop. Many of the people who were kind enough to speak with me about this project are cited in the following pages. I want to thank a few of them here specifically, not only for their help in my research, but for their friendship:  Probal Ray Choudhury and his family, Dilip Haldar and his family, Gopal Mukherjee and his family, Gora and Maitreyi Mukherjee, Arun Kumar Mukherjee, Ashok Banerjee (sevāyet), Ashok Banerjee (Government Pleader), Mridul Pathak, Partha Ghosh, Prahlad Roy Goenka, Debasish Mitra, Nayan Mitra, Anjan Mitra, Jayanta Bagchi, Pyarilal Datta, Swapan and Bhaswati Chakrabarty, Debasish Chakrabarty, Darshi and Raj Dutt, Linika, Kanta Chatterjee, Mira Kakkar, Tinku Khanna, Aloka Mitra, Mousami Rao, Sugandha Ramkumar, Rekha Gupta, B. N. Das, Laxmi and K. S. Parasuram, Ranabir Chakrabarty, Amarjit Sethi, Shanti Bhattcarya, Alok Banerjee, Ananta Charan Kar, Pallab Mitra, Molloy Ghosh, and the pāṇḍās of Kalighat, including Dipu, Gopal, and Bicchu. Finally, thank you to the women of Kālīghāṭ, especially Rina and Ashtami, for their hospitality and grace. In the transformation of this research into a book, I owe a great debt to my colleagues at the University of Oklahoma, especially Jill Hicks-​Keeton, Charles Kimball, David Vishanoff, and Mara Willard. Conversations with each of these individuals have been invaluable in reworking and fine-​tuning my ideas. Many thanks to the organizers of the American Institute of Indian Studies’ “Dissertation-​ to-​ Book Workshop” at the Annual Conference on

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South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Geraldine Forbes and Karen McNamara, among others, provided fruitful feedback on a previous version of this manuscript during that workshop in 2014. I am also grateful to Joanne Waghorne, Sanjay Joshi, and David Vishanoff for being part of a Manuscript Review Workshop hosted and funded on my behalf by the Religious Studies Program at OU under the leadership of Charles Kimball in 2016. This workshop was instrumental in helping me rethink the structure of this book and providing the necessary enthusiasm and momentum required to revise, complete, and submit the manuscript. I received further financial support for the production of this book from the Religious Studies Program, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Oklahoma. Thank you especially to Jen Waller, Scholarly Communication Coordinator at the University of Oklahoma, who assisted me in obtaining permissions for many of the figures in this work. Many of the chapters of this book first emerged as conference papers. The co-​panelists and colleagues whose questions and suggestions pushed me to refine my thinking are acknowledged in endnotes throughout this work, but let me thank here especially Emilia Bachrach, Pearl Barros, Varuni Bhatia, Joel Bordeaux, Richard Delacy, Namita Dharia, Joyce Flueckiger, George Gonzalez, Valarie Kaur, Max Mueller, Jenn Ortegren, Rowena Potts, Leela Prasad, Shil Sengupta, Tulasi Srinivas, Hamsa Stainton, Sarah Pierce Taylor, Joanne Waghorne, and Kirsten Wesselhoeft. Their fresh ideas and encouragement have provided immense intellectual sustenance over the years. Many thanks also to David Amponsah and his colleagues at the University of Missouri for inviting me to present my work as part of their Rufus Monroe & Sofie Hoegaard Paine Lecture Series and to Kristian Petersen, who publicized this research in an interview he included in the “Directions in the Study of Religion” series of Marginalia: Review of Books Podcast. Thank you to Cynthia Read and Hannah Campeanu at Oxford University Press and the anonymous reviewers who provided detailed comments on my manuscript draft. They provided insights that made this book better than it otherwise would have been. Last but certainly not least, I am grateful for the unfailing support and encouragement of my husband, David King. He has been by my side for the entirety of this project—​in Kolkata while I was conducting research, and in Cambridge and Oklahoma City while I wrote this book. He is my thought partner, travel companion, and best friend. Without him, my creations would not be what they are.

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NOTES ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

A

ll translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. For the sake of consistency, both Sanskrit and Bengali words are italicized and transliterated according to the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) conventions, unless I  quote a text in which they appear differently. In many of the works employed throughout this book, various spellings are used for the same word. The English transliteration for the Bengali word for a temple proprietor, sevāyet (েসবােযত), for example, is not standardized in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century texts. Thus, it appears variously as sevāyet, shevayet, shebait, and sebait when I quote such texts. Otherwise, I  employ “sevāyet” according to the IAST convention for transliterating its standard Bengali spelling. Those words that have entered the English language are written according to the English convention (i.e., Brahmin). Proper names are reproduced here in the way that individuals to whom I  refer self-​identify. If individuals Anglicize their names, I  employ those Anglicized versions (i.e., Gaur Das Bysack). If they have authored works in Bengali, I use IAST conventions to transliterate their names into the Latin script (i.e., Sūrjyakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy). For Indian authors who are now known widely by Anglicized versions of their names, I employ the spelling by which they are known (i.e., Baṅkim Candra Caṭṭopādhyāy is written as Bankimcandra Chatterji, and Rabīndranāth Ṭhakur as Rabindranath Tagore). Prior to 2001, the city of Kolkata was known as “Calcutta.” The village of “Kalikātā,” after which the city was named, was Anglicized as “Calcutta” under East India Company and then British colonial rule. Like many Indian cities (including Bangalore, which is now known as Bengaluru, and Bombay, now known as Mumbai), its name was changed to reflect the indigenous pronunciation of its original moniker. I follow the official name usage, employing “Calcutta” to refer to the city prior to 2001 and “Kolkata” to refer to the city after 2001.

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Introduction T h e Te mple s of Mod e rn  India

I

ndia’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once anticipated a time when dams and power plants would become the temples of modern India.1 He was not alone in envisioning the nation’s future as one in which religion would take a back seat to industry. In the intervening decades, industries have indeed flourished, but temples have not receded from the forefront of public life. This is a book about what Hindu temples do for Hindus so that they have not been abandoned in moves to modernize India but have become an integral part of modernizing projects. For many among the middle classes in particular, religion’s public forms have been transformed over the past long century into emblems that declare proudly to the world who they are, where they come from, and where they are going. Counter to Nehru’s prediction, then, the temples of modern India are in fact temples. Kālīghāṭ temple in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta)2 is an ideal site for a case study in the now widespread phenomenon by which India’s middle classes work to modernize temples. This temple, which is dedicated to the dark goddess Kālī, who accepts animal sacrifice, and is situated in a neighborhood inhabited by priests and sex workers, has been roundly critiqued by elites throughout its history for representing superstition and backwardness. This was especially true when Calcutta was the capital of the British Empire in India. Kālīghāṭ epitomized for colonialists, Orientalists, Christian missionaries, and Hindu reformers alike everything that was wrong with temple Hinduism. The most studied of Calcutta’s colonial middle classes3—​ the likes of Rammohan Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Vivekananda—​ignored or denounced Kālīghāṭ. They worked to reform Hinduism by expunging it of places like Kālīghāṭ and the practices of image worship and animal sacrifice that accompanied them. This temple still represents backwardness for many

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middle-​class Hindus who decry its rituals as superstitious, its administration disorderly, and its physical state messy and chaotic. Yet beginning in the late nineteenth century, Kālīghāṭ became the subject of major modernization projects undertaken by lesser-​known middle-​ class Hindus in the city. Those Hindus wrote history books and journal articles that worked to rationalize Kālīghāṭ’s history and bourgeoisify its Hindu practices. In the mid-​twentieth century, middle-​class men filed and adjudicated lawsuits to make this once-​private institution public and to secularize and democratize its management structure. They now form non-​ governmental organizations (NGOs) and file further lawsuits with the aim of gentrifying its physical space. For these individuals, Kālīghāṭ ought to represent Indian modernity, and they work hard to make it so. Their efforts mirror those at other temples across India from Chennai to Delhi to Bangalore.4 This temple remains important to these Hindus and others because the goddess within remains a potent force and a familiar figure in their lives. But it also remains important because the conceptual, institutional, and physical forms of this religious site are facets through which they can produce and publicize their modernity, as well as their city’s and their nation’s. In Kolkata, the distinctive black, oval form that Kālī takes at Kālīghāṭ (see Figure I.1)—​ with wide red eyes, a long golden tongue, and hands that hold a sword and

Figure I.1  Mū̄r ti of Kālī in the Inner Sanctum of Kālīghāṭ Source: Unattributed photograph purchased by author at stall near Kālīghāṭ.

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severed head—​adorns the walls of the most upscale houses to those of the most humble shops, and from the home screens of smartphones to the rearview mirrors of rickshaws. She literally permeates this city. Bengali Hindus—​ those living in the region of India that now spans the Indian state of West Bengal and the nation of Bangladesh—​call her “Mā,” meaning “mother.” Kālīghāṭ is further thought to be one of the most potent of South Asia’s 51 Śaktipīṭhs (seats of the goddess) where pieces of the goddess’s body fell in a primordial age.5 It is visited by Kālī devotees from all over the world. Since their earliest beginnings in the Indian landscape, temples have been sites where people have worked to publicly demonstrate their piety and social standing. Royal families built some of the most famous of India’s temples in the early medieval period. In constructing and renovating grand façades and patronizing opulent ritual performances, rulers legitimized their rule by demonstrating their economic prowess and their close relationship to the deities within.6 The wealthy landholders who built Kālīghāṭ in 1809, while not kings, surely demonstrated the same through that building.7 It is likely no coincidence that they initiated construction in 1799, the very same year that the East India Company’s governor general, Lord Wellesley, initiated the construction of Government House (now Raj Bhavan) just a few miles north. Devotees, too, have funded new archways, pillars, and other architectural features at this and other temples and have patronized their rituals and festivals, displaying to both Kālī and their peers their social status and devotion. Middle-​class actors do the same when they work to modernize this temple. Modernizing projects at Kālīghāṭ have three features that set them apart from pre-​modern building and renovation projects. First, they deploy modernist idioms, including rationality, democracy, order, and cleanliness. These stand in stark contrast to idioms governing changes to temples in pre-​modernity—​purity, divine power, and the valor of aristocratic lineages. This novelty is one of substance rather than form, as people always work on sites that are important to them according to the values of their historical contexts. By definition, modern idioms were not available in pre-​modern eras. Second, and similarly, the notion of the Indian nation was not available in pre-​modern eras. Beginning in the 1890s, alongside the early intimations of Indian nationalism, middle-​class actors began to fashion Kālīghāṭ as a site that would represent the unique cultural heritage of Calcutta and India—​ first to colonial powers and, now, to the world. Middle-​class actors felt that this temple could then become part of a project by which India would be perceived as modern but not Western.

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Finally, and the most novel of the three transformations, is the role that is played by middle classes at the temple today. While sometimes espousing their subjugation to the divine power that temples house, middle-​class actors also feel empowered to wield the worldly influence they have over those temples. Today, they join hands with state bodies to alter many aspects of temple life. In many ways, these men and women have taken on the role of those kings who once built grand temples and played an administrative role in them. Yet they are not kings. In fact, their class sensibilities would compel them to be troubled by the comparison. They see themselves instead as representatives of the public. They frame their modernizing efforts as “public interest” projects, self-​evidently beneficial to everyone who visits the temple. An examination of opposition to their modernization projects reveals that the middle classes do not, in fact, represent the entire public. For many devotees, as well as temple Brahmins and members of the lower classes who make use of this site, Kālīghāṭ is not in need of transformation. Nor is it primarily valuable for its ability to represent their identity. Instead, it is a site of community, commerce, and worship, in which ties are forged between human and divine figures. Nevertheless, the middle classes do exert control over temples—​at least at an official level—​through the justification that they represent the public. This signifies a dramatic shift in the place of the temple in Indian society. This argument will unfold throughout the pages of this book, but requires first an introduction to the specificities of Kālīghāṭ as well as the highly charged concepts of “modernity,” “the middle classes,” and “the public.” By way of introducing the temple and the kinds of significances it holds for individuals of many class backgrounds today, I  offer a series of vignettes taken from my fieldwork in Kolkata in 2011 and 2012. ----------------------------------------​ Following is a description of my visit to Kālīghāṭ one Saturday morning in October, 2011, with Kamala, a friend of my neighbor in the Tollygunge Phari neighborhood of Kolkata: “This is a Śaktipīṭh, you know? It is a special place of the goddess. Long, long back, goddess Kālī’s little finger fell here in this spot. There are 58 places all over India where pieces of her body fell.”8 Kamala, an IT executive in her early forties, dressed in a crisply ironed, floral sari described to me the significance of Kālīghāṭ temple as we slowly approached it in her chauffeured, air-​conditioned car. I had heard the Śaktipīṭh story many times before and would hear it many times again. The details

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always differed—​Was it one finger or a few? Was it fingers or toes? Was it Kālī’s body parts or Satī’s? Or are all goddesses really manifestations of the one goddess? Are there 58 places where her body fell, or 51, or 108? For devotees who visit Kālīghāṭ, the details of this story are not nearly as important as its truth—​ Kālī has been in that place “since time immemorial” and she is therefore immensely powerful there. She is more “jāgrata” (awake) at Kālīghāṭ than at any other temple. “There are many Kālī temples in Kolkata,” a professor of education once told me, “but if you want the real thing, you have to go to Kālīghāṭ.” Devotees come from far and wide to visit this most famous Kālī temple in the world and what is held to be the most potent pilgrimage site in Bengal. “We are all Kālī’s children,” Kamala continued. “Some people come to her for bad deeds and others come for good. But Kālī doesn’t discriminate.” Kamala visits Kālī as often as she can. On this day, she had her twelfth-​grade son in mind as she went to pray to this goddess known for her immense, undiscriminating power. According to her estimation, he had not studied nearly enough for his upcoming exams. “Typical teenager!” she quipped. The car crept along the crowded Kali Temple Road, barely wide enough for one car to squeeze through. We were only a few hundred feet away, but it was hard to make out the temple façade as it is neither very large nor very grand and has many makeshift shop stalls attached to its walls (see Figure I.2). It was a Saturday morning—​a day particularly auspicious for the goddess—​so the crowds of devotees approaching the site swelled to the thousands. They were accompanied by hawkers selling everything from purses and bangles, to

Figure I.2  Photo of Kālīghāṭ from Northeastern Corner Source: Photo taken by Ankur P. in 2017.

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Figure I.3  Photo of a Flower Seller Inside the Kālīghāṭ Temple Courtyard Source: Photo taken by author in 2009.

ritual accoutrements including coconuts and garlands of prayer beads and of Kālī’s favorite red hibiscus flowers (see Figure I.3). As we came nearer to the temple itself, pictures and physical representations of Kālī and Śiva and other members of the Hindu pantheon were being sold (see Figure I.4). Devotees purchase these images of the gods and goddesses as mementoes of their visit and as mūrtis (embodiments of deities) to install in their home shrines. The presence of the hawkers selling these products hid storefronts and restaurants (called “hotels”) selling hot, milky chai alongside jalebi and gulab jamun—​some of the sweets for which Bengal is best known. Beggars filled in the spaces between hawkers and devotees, some knocking on our window, hoping to be the beneficiaries of our generosity. Many were aged and crippled. Most were women. Pāṇḍās (male Brahmin ritual officiates and temple guides) young and old lingered, offering assistance to guide pilgrims through the temple. One pāṇḍā nodded at me, knowingly. Having visited the temple regularly for about a month before this visit with Kamala, I had come to know a few of the hundreds of pāṇḍās and beggars who work on temple grounds. I had walked along Kali Temple Road many times and knew that it would have taken us 5 minutes to walk the few blocks it took us almost 20 minutes to drive. Apart from the crowds slowing us down, much of the road in front of the temple was closed off, so that our route was circuitous. Kamala was my neighbor’s

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Figure I.4  A Hawker’s Stall in Front of the Temple Source: Photo taken by author in 2009.

friend who, upon hearing that I was interested in this famed Hindu temple, offered to bring me along next time she went to visit. “I never go to Kālīghāṭ because of the pāṇḍā problem” my neighbor had remarked, offhandedly, when we first met. She complained that pāṇḍās harassed her every time she visited the temple, demanding exorbitantly large “tips.” Kamala complained instead of the huge crowds at the temple—​“too much to manage”—​she explained. Neither of these women visited Kālīghāṭ unless they had arranged to visit with a man named Jaidev—​a “good pāṇḍā” in their words—​who could be trusted to help them navigate the crowds and to conduct pūjā (worship) in the correct ways, without extorting money from them. Kamala’s husband is an orthopedic surgeon at a nearby hospital. His division sponsors this pāṇḍā so that all surgeons and their families can visit Kālīghāṭ with his assistance. This does not provide the completely “hassle-​free” visit Kamala longs for, but it helps. We turned left on Kālīghāṭ Road in order to reach our meeting place with Jaidev (for a map of this neighborhood and its location within Kolkata, see Figures I.5 and I.6). Priests from Kālīghāṭ live on the eastern side of this road, while sex workers live on the western side in an old but still operative red light district. This is the road on which Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal, would approach the temple from her home, just a mile north. Having grown up in this neighborhood, “didi,” (elder sister) as she is known,

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Figure I.5  Map of Kolkata Source: Gai Moodie, illustrator (not to scale).

touts her humble origins as evidence of her being one with the people. Kamala pointed out Jaidev as we passed by Mother Teresa’s Home for the Sick and Dying (Nirmal Hriday) on our left. The building in which it is housed was formerly a resting house for pilgrims visiting Kālīghāṭ. In 1952, the city gave it to the famed nun to pursue her work of providing care for the dying. Nuns and mostly foreign volunteers fed and bathed those nearing the end of their lives. That work was on pause during the year of my fieldwork as the building was under internal construction. Jaidev held the car door open for us as we slid off our cool leather seats into the thick, humid air. He wore a white dhoti (traditional male garment consisting of a floor-​length cloth that is wrapped around the waist). His sacred thread indicating his Brahmin caste identity was visible through his short-​sleeved, collared shirt’s opened buttons. He handed Kamala a basket with a coconut, some red bangles, and a small piece of red and gold sari cloth. He poured water from a copper bowl into our hands so that we could purify ourselves before entering the temple grounds. We passed through the small lane in between Nirmal Hriday and the temple, which was flanked by more shop stalls.

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Figure I.6  Map of the Kālīghāṭ Neighborhood Source: Gai Moodie, illustrator (not to scale).

We sat on a bench outside a sweet shop adjoined to the temple for a few minutes while Jaidev’s assistant selected pieces of miṣṭi (sweets) to add to the basket. These would become part of Kamala’s offerings to the goddess. The smell of butchered goat meat wafted into the shop area. We were very near where goats are taken after they are sacrificed. While animal sacrifice has ceased in almost every other temple in the city, it continues here on a daily basis. Part of the first goat sacrificed to Kālī each day becomes part of her midday meal. The rest of the goat meat is either taken by the family who offered it or sold in a small meat market in the corner of the temple. This sanctified flesh is cooked and eaten as prasād (blessed food). There is a great deal of ambivalence surrounding this practice. One priest had previously assured me that Kālī does not eat the meat—​her “bhūt (ghostly attendants)” do. Most who offer sacrifices disagree. Noticing the smell, Kamala smiled politely and stated: “Some people offer animal sacrifice here. I have a different opinion about that, but jay hok (let it be)!” She performs what Jaidev calls “Vedic”—​rather than “Tantric”—​pūjā, meaning that she and her family sacrifice gourds as a substitute for goats. We left our shoes at the sweet shop and entered the temple (see Figure I.7 for a plan of the temple). There was a long, winding queue of devotees waiting

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Figure I.7  Plan of Kālīghāṭ Temple Source: Roy 1993, Map No. 2.

to enter the garbha gṛha (inner sanctum) where Kālī resides. They sometimes waited for hours to have darśan (divine visual exchange) of Kālī. Instead of waiting in that line, Jaidev led us to the front, squeezing past a very frustrated young policewoman clad in a smart gray salwar kameez (a long tunic worn over long pants). She was having a very difficult time physically holding back the crowds of devotees who also wished to skip the long line. But Jaidev was clearly known and was allowed to bring clients into the inner sanctum this way. We were close to—​but not in—​the VIP area, which is reserved for Bollywood stars, cricket champions, and heads of state. Those who are famous and Bengali must visit Kālīghāṭ when they come to the city. It turned out that Jaidev was not just a pāṇḍā, but a sevāyet (literally, “one who serves”). This means that he is a member of the Brahmin family who inherited the rights and responsibilities of worshiping Kālī at Kālīghāṭ hundreds of years ago. The temple is managed by these sevāyets—​known often by their surname, Haldar—​through a system of pālā (turns). Because there are now over 1,000 members of that family, members have as little as a few hours or as many as a few days for which they are responsible for having Kālī’s material and ritual needs met and during which they are also entitled to a share of the offerings that are made to her. This day was one of Jaidev’s pālās, so he was entitled to special privileges, including jumping the queue with devotees. Just outside the inner sanctum, a policeman in a white uniform forcefully blew his whistle to keep the darśan line moving, while men wearing dhotis and bare chests with sacred threads shouted and sometimes physically pushed people through. Devotees who had waited for hours, sweating in that long queue, had merely a moment to stop and behold Kālī, giving her their offerings and presenting to her their prayers. Bodies pushed against us on all sides as goat’s blood mingled with crushed hibiscus flowers on the soles of our feet. Within a few minutes, the darśan queue was stopped and we were pushed in front of Kālī. She was draped in multiple silk saris and garland upon garland of flowers—​mostly red, but some purple, orange, and white. Her husband, the god Śiva, lies prostrate below her feet. His presence recalls the incident in which Kālī’s dance of destruction was so powerful that it threatened to ruin the whole universe and, in order to stop her, Śiva played dead so that Kālī would step on him and come to her senses. Jaidev’s assistant held the basket and handed its contents to Kamala, one by one. Jaidev instructed her to smear yogurt, rose water, water from the Ganges River, and coconut water onto Śiva while he chanted Sanskrit mantras. I was sure I had heard that no one was allowed to touch this mūrti, though a beggar friend later told me that this was “poyshār byāpār” (a matter of money). I stood next to Kamala as she was led through this ritual and men and women threw garlands of flowers from a balcony behind us to Kālī. They had been in a shorter queue that allowed them a more limited view of the goddess through an opening in the garbha gṛha wall. Unfortunately, those of us inside the garbha

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gṛha were blocking their garlands from reaching Kālī. Most landed on our backs and heads and fell to the floor. Those throwing the garlands did not abate. They had made their offerings to the goddess and trusted her to accept them even if they did not physically reach her. Jaidev’s assistant bent down to retrieve one and placed it around my neck. He then placed pieces of miṣṭi in Kamala’s hands and told her to put them in Kālī’s right hand. He poured coconut water on Kālī’s slide-​like tongue, and Jaidev told Kamala to catch it with her mouth. She drank the water, catching the rest of it with her hands, applying it to the top of her head. Jaidev instructed me to do the same. I awkwardly caught some of the water in my hands and followed Kamala in daubing it on my head. We left Kālī and went to visit some of the shrines of other gods and goddesses who share this temple. First, we visited one of the Śiva liṅgās on the eastern side of the temple, and then the Rādhā-​Kṛṣṇa shrine. A flower seller—​ whom Kamala mistook for Jaidev’s assistant—​put a lotus flower into her hand. She offered it to Rādhā-​Kṛṣṇa and was then perturbed when the flower seller demanded payment. She was not supposed to deal with hawkers directly. Suspecting deception on the part of the flower seller, she finally relented and asked Jaidev to give him 20 rupees. I saw Singha in the distance. Singha, meaning “lion,” is surely not her actual name, but the one her friends call her because she is known to be proud and fierce when she needs to be. She had her hand outstretched before a nicely dressed man. This is a posture I assume she takes often, but one she had never knowingly let me see. We returned to the sweet shop, this time sitting inside under the fan, as we recovered from the confusion of the crowds. Kamala had apparently relayed to Jaidev that I wanted to know the “real facts” about Kālīghāṭ. She—​ like countless others I spoke with throughout the course of my research—​ had interpreted my interest in varying conceptions of the temple as an interest in its history. With the main task of pūjā complete, Jaidev’s older brother Debasis came to sit with us and launched into an explanation of the historical significance of Kālīghāṭ. He corrected Kamala’s recollection of the Śaktipīṭh story, saying that in fact it had been part of Satī’s right foot, along with the accompanying toes, that had fallen in this spot. The Bengali word “āṅguli,” which means “digit,” seems to be at the root of this confusion, not just for Kamala but for many with whom I  spoke. Debasis explained that Raja Mansingh, a Hindu general of Emperor Akbar, had established a temple in this spot many years ago when a Brahmin named Ātmārām was worshiping the goddess deep in a forest. Sellers of conch shell bracelets who lived in the area came to worship Kālī but had no pakkā (proper or permanent) temple for the purpose. As Debasis explained this history, Jaidev handed Kamala a historical pamphlet about the temple that he had earlier sent someone to find. Debasis told me this was “kichu nā” (nothing) and that instead of reading that, I  should search for the correct information

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about the temple from the National Library, in a book entitled Old Calcutta. I frequently encountered these kinds of quarrels regarding where one might find an accurate history of Kālīghāṭ, and they were often far more heated than this one. In the air-​conditioned car once again, I asked Kamala what she would do with the coconut and the flower garland she was bringing with her from her visit to Kālīghāṭ. She said she would eat the coconut as blessed food and put the flowers on items at home that needed to be blessed, including her son’s schoolbooks. In what appeared to follow as an explanation of why she engaged in these practices, as well as a defense for her mistaken version of the Śaktipīṭh story, Kamala reflected that her father used to take her to temples and ashrams when she was younger, but she never thought anything of it. “But now, later in life, these things are coming back. We people are instilled with these things, so we do them, even if we don’t know all the detailed facts.” We approached the metro station where she was dropping me off. As we parted, she lamented again about the crowds and chaos at Kālīghāṭ and said that I should visit Dakṣiṇeśvar, another famous Kālī temple on the northern side of the city, which she said had a better system of management.

-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ Prahlad Roy Goenka filed a public interest litigation (PIL) lawsuit against the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee in 2005, and then again in 2011 shortly before I visited him: “Back in Rajasthan, my whole family worships Kālī. When my father moved to Kolkata, each Tuesday he walked ten kilometers to Kālīghāṭ.” I sat with Prahlad Roy Goenka and his wife in the office of their home in the affluent Ballygunge neighborhood of Kolkata. He was dressed in a suit, and sat behind a mahogany desk, as he explained to me Kālīghāṭ’s significance both for his own family and for Hindus in general. “All Kālīs are important but Kālīghāṭ is special,” he continued, “just like there are churches all over the world but Rome is special, and there are mosques all over the world but Mecca is special. It is not that God is not in all of them or that God is different, but they are special.” Prahlad’s phone must have rung every two minutes during our hour-​long conversation, which he later told me was due to his many business ventures. He only answered it twice. When he did, he wife engaged me in small talk. Drawing her own connection to my being from America, she spoke of her family’s recent vacation to Miami and Orlando. They loved the beaches there, just as they loved the beaches in Bali and the Andaman Islands. Prahlad had filed a lawsuit against the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee—​ comprised of sevāyets and public representatives—​in 2005 alleging their mismanagement of temple funds. Before he spoke to me about that suit, he told

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me about the service work that he was involved in, particularly in cleaning the Ganges River. “For Marwaris [the ethnic group of which he is a part],9 charity is our family habit.” Then he corrected himself. “Service, actually. Not charity.” He defined service as an obligation –​something one must do, whereas charity is about going above and beyond one’s duties and taking credit for it. “In the [Bhagavad] Gītā, we believe everything is done by God, so individuals cannot take credit.” Turning to Kālīghāṭ, he explained what he saw as the problem: “On important days, pālās are worth millions of rupees, so sevāyets sell their pālās. Now there are anti-​social elements because the new pālā owners have to collect more money than they paid for the pālā, and they extort devotees to do that.” He described sevāyets as behaving like investors rather than Kālī’s caretakers. Their concern was for profits rather than the goddess. He couched this discussion of sevāyets’ “money-​mindedness” within a wider critique of commercialism in many Hindu forms in recent years, including yoga and Tantra. The court bench adjudicating Prahlad’s case in 2006 sided with him and ordered the Temple Committee to increase security measures so that the temple income could be properly collected. In this suit and its judgment, there was considerable slippage between the terms “pāṇḍā” and “sevāyet.”10 Judges seemed not to distinguish between these groups of Brahmins, implying that both contribute to the avaricious atmosphere of the temple. The court also ruled that the temple’s income be allocated toward transforming the temple space into one that is comfortable for pilgrims. This meant cleaning the temple and also allowing the construction of a tourist center and hotel that had been proposed by the International Foundation for Sustainable Development (IFSD). Six years after the Calcutta High Court ruled in favor of Prahlad’s suit, the vast majority of its demands had not been met. Prahlad filed another suit in 2011 alleging that the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee was in contempt of court. That suit was ongoing when I conducted my fieldwork.

-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ I met with Gopal Mukherjee, sevāyet and acting secretary of the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee, on the day of his pālā. We had arranged to meet in the morning, but his many duties had detained him. We met in the afternoon instead, in his sweet shop that faced the temple. “This temple is so important that pūjāris (Brahmin priests) from all over India must come to touch Mā’s feet.” He explained to me that other temples in the area—​including Dakṣiṇeśvar and Tārāpīṭh—​are important, but Kālīghāṭ is a “Mahāpīṭh” (a great seat of the goddess) and therefore more important. “At Kālīghāṭ, her body is actually here, and it is always here.”

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Gopal then verbally led me through the rituals and procedures that occupy him from 4:30 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. when it is his day to manage the temple. “At 4:30, there is Moṅgal Arati. Then at 5:30, Nitya Pūjā where Kālī is offered flowers as well as mounds of uncooked rice and fruit in odd quantities [three, five, or seven]. Before noon, one goat must be sacrificed. Some meat from that goat, as well as its head, would be offered as part of Kālī’s meal. When her food is given, the temple is closed from about 1:30 until 4:30, depending on the crowds. The poor who gather around Kālīghāṭ are fed at that time too. At 6:30 p.m., Sandhyā Ārati is done. A dessert of sweets, milk, and fried bread is offered to the goddess with the door closed. Again at 7 p.m. the doors are opened to the public, and at 10:30 p.m., a new sari is given to Kālī, along with flower garlands, another ārati, and then the temple is closed.” He did not personally perform the rituals or cook the food that Kālī was to be offered. Nor did he control the crowds that thronged to Kālī’s garbha gṛha all day long. But he did pay for, and manage, the services of the pūjāris, miśras (dressers), and cooks that were required to see to all of Kālī’s needs. He also paid for the ritual accouterment from oil to ghee to flowers and all of the food—​including food that would feed over 600 people in the daily Daridranārāyāṇ service in which the poor are honored and fed as forms of Viṣṇu. I acknowledged that this was a huge financial commitment. He surmised that this would cost up to 25,000 rupees (about $500),11 though some of that would come from donations. In return for this service and financial outlay, he would receive half of the monetary offerings that devotees made to Kālī. The rest would go to the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee. As we were finishing our conversation, Gopal’s wife and teenaged daughters drove up to the sweet shop in a white ambassador car. The girls attended a private English-​medium high school in the city that had just been let out. Knowing this was a big day for their father, they had come by to wish him well.

-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ Mridul Pathak is a self-​styled philanthropreneur who has garnered state tourist monies to fund his plans to renovate the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood. I met with him in early 2012: “This is a catalyst organization,” Mridul Pathak explained, referring to the International Foundation for Sustainable Development (IFSD), an NGO he founded in order to clean up Kālīghāṭ and its surrounding neighborhood. “It compels other Indian organizations and the Indian government to make changes.” We sat in the IFSD office, about a five-​minute walk from the temple itself, nibbling arrowroot biscuits and drinking chai out of porcelain teacups while a window air-​conditioning unit blasted cold air at us.

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Figure I.8  Photo of the Office Exterior of the International Foundation of Sustainable Development Source: Photo taken by Yuri Awanohara on January 18, 2011.

The IFSD building is painted with a beautiful, brightly colored mural. The semi-​abstract design of people, trees, and flowers has a rustic, artisan feel to it (see Figure I.8).

Mridul laid out before me a 20-​by-​30 inch, 100-​page, spiral-​bound notebook with his plans for the temple and neighborhood. He is a retired Indian government employee who once worked on development projects in Uganda and Nigeria. He now splits his time between a home in Kolkata and an apartment in New York City where his wife is a doctor. Due to his previous development work, he knew whom to call to get architectural plans drawn, budgets calculated, and glossy color prints made and presented to the right government offices. He had already successfully persuaded the Union government (India’s central government) to invest 50  million rupees (about $1,000,000) in his proj­ect to develop Kālīghāṭ. “Kālī doesn’t care if you make it clean or not,” he explained. “But she definitely cares if you have tried to do something.” The front page of his book of plans features a picture of Kālī and a quote by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore: “I’ve seen the whole world but not the dew drop on the grass in front of me.” For Mridul, Kālīghāṭ is one such dewdrop. “Bengalis move all over the world, but they do not care for their own neighborhood.” They suffer, he said, from “Macaulay syndrome.” He credits the colonial officer Thomas Babington

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Macaulay, who once advocated English education for all Indians, with making Indians ashamed of their vast cultural and spiritual wealth. “People have enough money to clean up the Writer’s Building and Victoria Memorial (British-​designed buildings in Kolkata), but not Kālīghāṭ. They are of a colonial mindset. People today will proudly take you to the Muslim Taj Mahal and Victoria Memorial, but they will not take you proudly to Kālīghāṭ. The pride is not there. But this is the original Calcutta—​not Park Street or the ‘center’ as it is seen. 300 years before the British, this area existed.” Mridul feels that it is a moral responsibility incumbent upon all Indians to work to improve their country—​especially the cultural monuments that signify its unique heritage. That is what he aims to do at Kālīghāṭ. “What other neighborhood in the world has this sort of richness? We have the oldest Greek church in Asia, Mother Teresa’s, which is a Muslim-​architecture building, Keratolah (a cremation ground), a gurdwara, a red light district, and a community of traditional artisans, all with Kālīghāṭ at the center.” He wants to revive this multicultural space so that its appearance matches the international importance he feels it has. He has plans to pave the entire area surrounding the temple with red bricks, “just like in front of Buckingham Palace.” Beggars and hawkers would be gone. Goods would be sold from kiosks with a traditional Bengali āṭcālā roof design.12 There would be a vegetarian restaurant, parking lot, and hotel for tourists. That was the hotel that the court bench on Prahlad’s case had ordered the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee to build in 2006.

-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ I visited with Asha frequently throughout the period of my research. She lives on Kālīghāṭ’s grounds and begs for a living: I visited Asha one afternoon when the temple was closed for Kālī’s midday meal. The slats of wood placed upon a platform of bricks just outside the temple wall that serve as a bed for her and her six-​year-​old son, Abhijit, had been transformed into a workspace. She was joined by other women, including Singha, who live on temple grounds and earn a living by begging from temple visitors. These women are not technically related, but they might as well be. They care for one another’s children and borrow and lend money to each other with great frequency. On this afternoon they were taking a break from begging and working together to cut out pictures of Bollywood stars from old newspapers. They teased one another in Bengali, saying things like, “You like that one?! But look at his clothes! This one looks much better.” Asha showed me with pride that she had styled Abhijit’s hair like that of Jon Abraham—​ her personal favorite. Abhijit hid behind his young mother’s dupatta (scarf). “Bhoy pācche” (Is he afraid?), I asked. “Bhoy na. Lojja” (Not afraid. Shy), Asha responded with a smile and a pat on Abhijit’s head. They stuck the cutouts onto

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the lamppost next to Asha’s platform. This lamppost that was designed to provide light to temple visitors and workers came to serve as a canvas upon which Asha could personalize the otherwise very public space in which she lived. On another visit, I  saw Asha speaking to a pāṇḍā on the steps of the nāṭmandir (raised, enclosed platform) facing Kālī’s garbha gṛha. The High Court bench—​continuing its adjudication of Prahlad’s suit—​had just ordered that pāṇḍās and beggars be banned from temple grounds. “Not all pāṇḍās are bad,” the pāṇḍā explained as he held up his hand to me with his fingers outstretched. “Just like there are five fingers and they are all different—​it’s the same with pāṇḍās. And many people live on Kālī, not just us.” As Asha and I walked away to get tea, she also expressed fear of what would happen if—​as she put it—​the “sarkār” (government) took over the temple. Referring to her pāṇḍā friend, she remarked, “Pāṇḍāra ek dine 800, 1000 ṭākā pācche. O thik hobe. Kintu āmrā śudhu 200 ṭākā pācche. Jodi sarkār āmāder ucced korā dey, tāhole āmāder ki hobe?” (Pāṇḍās get 800–​1,000 rupees [about $16–​20] in one day. They will be fine. But we only make 200 [about $4]. If the government kicks us out, then what will happen to us?) Trying to comfort her, I said that this lawsuit had been going on since 2005 and not much had happened since. She seemed slightly relieved and agreed that probably nothing would come of it.

-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ These vignettes reveal that Kālīghāṭ is not losing its importance in modern India. Kālī’s presence and power remain vital components in the lives of all of these individuals. This site’s reputation as one of immense power due to the physical presence of the goddess has not lost support. Kālīghāṭ is as crowded and bustling as it has always been. And people continue to negotiate facets of temple life as vehemently as they always have. These vignettes also reveal that Hindus of different class backgrounds conceptualize and inhabit Kālīghāṭ in very different ways. Kamala wants to drive to the temple and park her car there. She wants to walk through its grounds with ease and some peace and quiet. She does not want to wait in line to have darśan of Kālī. Once she gets to Kālī, she wants to be able to spend a few minutes with her—​not the few seconds that other devotees currently have. She would prefer if there were no animal sacrifice. Prahlad and Mridul envision the temple as a site that should be free from the priestly acquisition of wealth and from populations that harass visitors. Mridul in particular wants this site to represent to the world what is good and valuable about India—​its heritage and multiculturalism—​and to do that, it must be made clean and architecturally grand. These views directly impinge upon the lives and livelihoods of Jaidev, Gopal, and Asha, who earn a living at Kālīghāṭ. The latter benefit greatly from the large crowds at the temple. Jaidev and Gopal furthermore feel it is

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their divinely given right and responsibility to care for Kālī in the ways they currently do. Asha has never known another life than the one she has begging at Kālīghāṭ. She was born to a beggar woman there, just as her son was. These varied conceptions about what the temple ought to look and feel like, and how it ought to be managed, are present at temples throughout India. The practice of modernizing temples through reducing the authority—​and thereby wealth—​of Brahmins in them has been ongoing since the late eighteenth century.13 The default assumption in India today is that unless a temple is inside a person’s home or there is evidence that it was founded as a private endowment, it is public.14 The public—​either through state bodies or as individual citizens—​have the right and even the responsibility to determine what goes on at Hindu temples. State bodies and laypeople now exert a great deal of influence over many aspects of temple life throughout India, including their appearance. This can take the form of greater funding for traditional renovations including rebuilding gateways and staging kumbhābhiṣekam (rededication) rituals (Fuller 2003, 4–​10;Younger 1995, 149). It can also take the form of projects more akin to gentrification. In Chennai, for example, wealthy Hindus living in India and abroad work to remove trash and “encroachments” of beggars and hawkers from temple grounds. At Māruṇḍeśvara, an elite voluntary organization frames their renovation efforts as protecting Chennai’s heritage while simultaneously transforming the temple into a multi-​use space, conducive not only for worship, but for “evening strolls and morning power walks” as well (Hancock 2008, 100). At Kolavizhi, neighborhood residents and wealthy businessmen, including at least one non-​resident Indian living in New  York City, frame their renovation project as a community venture that is part of keeping the neighborhood clean (Waghorne 2004, 129). Such projects transform temple spaces in ways that discipline the behavior of its visitors in particular directions—​toward quiet and calm and keeping to oneself. While Hindu temples have traditionally been sites of hustle and bustle, those at the helm of these renovation projects want to change that.15 The Akṣardhām temple complex in Delhi is an example of a new temple that was built with the same aims in mind. The complex’s massive 100-​ acre grounds are highly surveyed, with security guards and metal detectors prohibiting undesirable materials and populations from entering. Visitors are encouraged to keep their voices low and prohibit their children from running around while the grounds are kept immaculately clean (Brosius 2010, 230–​1). It is indeed a major tourist attraction, heralded as a marker of both spiritual and economic progress in the nation’s capital (Brosius 2010,

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149). Grand pathways lead visitors from the central shrine dedicated to the Swaminarayan sect’s founder to an IMAX movie theater, animatronics exhibition detailing India’s history, food court, and gift shop (Singh 2010, 52). The ISKCON temple in Bangalore, while smaller, has some of the same features, with a shiny class façade and halls of shops selling books, souvenirs, ritual accouterment, and fast food (Mukerji and Basu 2015, 50–​2). The Krishna Leela theme park currently being built right outside the city promises much of the same but on a far grander scale (Benjamin 2015, 101). Constructed in the 1990s and early 2000s, these sites achieve from the ground up what modernizers wish to achieve through temple renovations in Kolkata and Chennai. Scholars have attributed these building and renovation projects to India’s middle-​ class citizens, who bring their class values to bear on temples. Waghorne aptly uses the terms “gentrification” and “bourgeoisification” to describe these renovation efforts, as they each necessitate the removal of populations to make room for the kinds of spaces middle-​class groups want to frequent (2004).16 Like gentrification projects everywhere, the needs of people of various class backgrounds are weighed against one another (Waghorne 2004, 131). In these cases, the poor’s needs for a place to live and sell their goods are weighed against the middle classes’ needs for the preservation of heritage and a place to spend leisure time. In these ways of framing the temple, the language of secular public space is being mapped onto sacred space (Hancock 2008, 117). Gone are concerns for purity and the goddess’s efficacy. They are replaced by ideas about what the modern Indian city ought to look and feel like and how it compares with other cities. A modern temple would symbolize a modern city and modern nation to the world. Thus, temples become part of the creation of a distinctly Indian modernity. With this book I want to draw attention both to the contested nature of these projects and to their historical antecedents. These are only the most recent movements by which middle-​class Hindus have worked upon temples in order to cultivate and demonstrate their modernity. They rely upon historical and legal discourses produced by Europeans and middle-​class Indians in late colonial and post-​colonial India. In Chapter  1 of this book, for example, I demonstrate that British historical discourse regarding the origins of Calcutta in the mid-​nineteenth century compelled Bengali authors to forward Kālīghāṭ as an emblem of the Bengali and Hindu heritage of the city. The use of temples as emblems of Hindu identity and the Indian nation today very much relies upon and revives that line of thinking. In the second chapter, I  show that the reading of the secular legal language of “public” onto the temple in the mid-​twentieth century is what makes it possible for

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temples to be subject to state and middle-​class control. The gentrification of temples would be unimaginable without this move. Before returning to a description of the contents of each chapter, I  turn now to the scholarly conversations upon which I rely throughout the book and in which this case study on Kālīghāṭ intervenes.

India’s Modernities and the Middle Classes Who Publicize Them The European Enlightenment produced a new set of values that was taken up and carried by Europeans to the many parts of the globe they colonized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those values have transformed cultures around the world ever since, producing multiple forms, both within Europe and elsewhere.17 Modern values rest on an empiricist epistemology and the belief that the social order is not divinely ordained but can be engineered by the work of individuals.18 They include scientific rationality, egalitarianism, popular sovereignty, and civic engagement. They often carry with them certain social forms, including the press and the public sphere. The values of modernity have not been fully realized anywhere, and yet they shape the values of cultures most everywhere today (see Appadurai 1996; Joshi 2011). That aspirations of modernity are global does not imply that they are universal (Gaonkar 2001). The circulation of ideas does not mean their replication, nor could it. These aspirations are always embedded in pre-​ existing cultural forms, which means their expression will always and everywhere be “fractured,” to use Joshi’s term. As an example, early moderns in Europe espoused human equality as a modern ideal and yet were deeply steeped in a patriarchal system (Taylor 2004, 146–​7). In the same way, as middle-​class  Indians in colonial India pursued modernity, that modernity was imbued with the religious, gender, and caste distinctions of their time (Joshi 2011). Moreover, in the Indian project of modernity, replication was not the goal. The fact that modern ideals were introduced to India through the context of colonialism meant that they were accompanied by an assumed distinction between British and Indian civilizations. Indian modernity was produced alongside the project of proving that Indian civilization—​while different—​was equal or superior to Britons’. In other words, the project of becoming modern in India was deeply inflected by the project of propagating a proud cultural identity that was distinctly Indian. Early Indian modernists, for example, did not by and large reject their religion and adopt the Christianity that their rulers claimed was the pinnacle of modern religiosity. Instead, Hindus applied modern values to the

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reformation of their own religions. For some, as with Rammohan Roy and his Brahmo Sabha, that meant rejecting Hindu temple worship with its inherent use of divine images and multiple deities and instead engaging in rational discussions about the one, universal, divine (see Hatcher 2008; Kopf 1979; Salmond 2004). For others, as with Vivekananda and his followers, it meant espousing a monolithic version of ancient Hinduism, engaging in charitable works, and, from time to time, worshiping divine beings including Kālī (see Basu 2002; Sarkar 1993).19 The mapping of modern values onto Hindu temples is yet another way in which Hindus fashion a distinctive modernity. The members of India’s middle classes I examine in this work are deeply embedded in colonial and postcolonial discourses of modernity, and they publicize those ideas through their access to technologies of societal intervention. It is with these specific qualities in mind that I employ the category “middle class.” I do not abide by a Marxist model of class, which posits that individuals belong to self-​conscious class groups according to their relationship to the means of economic production. Rather, I rely on Bourdieu’s (1984, 1985, 1987) work that takes class to be a theoretical rather than a real category, finding it intellectually productive to speak of society as stratified according to individuals’ levels of multiple forms of capital—​economic, cultural, social, and symbolic—​that is to say that men and women who occupy a similar social space share similar experiences of socialization. Those experiences are immensely powerful in shaping who they are, what they want, and what they do. While the men and women discussed in these pages do share a similar economic status in that they are predominantly salaried professionals, what is more influential to their outlooks and behaviors is the fact that they acquired those salaried professions by way of their upper-​caste status, access to westernized education, English-​language skills, and relatively privileged social networks. According to these social and cultural goods, India’s middle classes are reared to value higher education, a global outlook, and modern forms.20 Their members do not all value each of these things in the same way or to the same extent. I pluralize the term to indicate their highly diverse, unstable, and evolving nature. However, I argue that Bourdieu’s concept of class helps us gain purchase on why a certain subset of Kolkata’s citizens work to modernize Kalighat. A brief synopsis of the origins of the middle classes in India and the historical circumstances of their differentiation is necessary here. A middle class emerged when Indian men took up positions in the colonial government in the nineteenth century. They derived mostly from the top three Hindu castes and ashraf Muslims (those of foreign descent, indicating their elevated status over Indians who converted to Islam) (see Pernau 2013) and had the cultural

22 

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and financial resources to acquire an English education. Partha Chatterjee (1993, 37) has famously referred to this class of individuals as an elite that was simultaneously subaltern. Middle-​class groups remained subordinate to British colonial powers, and yet they were well educated in westernized institutions and had salaried, professional jobs, giving them a kind of authority and social status that most of their Indian compatriots lacked. They were thus “middling” both in their political and economic positions, standing in between their colonial overlords and the Indian masses. Societal organization by class rather than caste implied the ability for an individual to move from one social location to another on the basis of merit, education, and money, rather than birth alone. It also meant, however, that one’s social position was not stable. It had to be established and re-​established through public display (see Joshi 2001; Liechty 2002). In the region of Bengal, individuals in this group were known as bhadralok, the Bengali term for “gentlemen,” signaling their refinement and urbanity.21 The bhadralok were typically Hindu and born in one of the upper castes, which in Bengal includes Kāyasthas and Baidyas alongside Brahmins, Kṣatriyas, and Vaiśyas. By and large, while Muslims comprised a large minority in Calcutta, they were not counted among the middle classes there (Banerjee 1989, 27).22 The bhadralok are said to have ushered in a “Bengali Renaissance,” setting the terms for cultural progress in art, history, literature, and religion, making Calcutta the cultural capital of India (Kopf 1969). As elites shut out of official domains of power, this is the class of men who produced India’s public sphere—​that cultural space for debate that could be engaged by people who had never met before in order to critique state power.23 Sanjay Joshi has defined members of the colonial middle class as those characterized by their “cultural entrepreneurialism” (2001, 2), meaning that they engaged the resources to which they had access in order to write and publish books and articles, organize public campaigns, and file lawsuits. In this way, they could circulate their ideas, performing and propagating their cultural values.24 Through these public sphere projects, India’s colonial middle classes were also able to distinguish themselves from British colonialists and work to remove them from power. It is one of the ironic qualities of middle-​class modernity—​in India as in Europe and the rest of the world—​that the modern ideal of human equality is coupled with the middle-​class necessity of unending distinction between themselves and others. In many cases, as in India, this produces the performance of a moral superiority over the old aristocracy through the values of hard work, thrift, and voluntary civic engagement and a cultural superiority over the masses as demonstrated through genteel manners, refined

Introduction 

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dress, cleanliness, and punctuality. Espousing the value of egalitarianism is in fact one of the ways in wich middle-​class individuals demonstrate both moral and cultural superiority over those other groups. This was the claim that Britons made vis-​à-​vis Indians, thereby justifying their rule of India as a “civilizing mission”; it was also the claim made by middle-​class Indians vis-​à-​ vis the rest of Indian society, thereby justifying their own rule of independent India in the twentieth century.25 The differences between the “old” middle classes of the colonial era and the “new” middle classes of the era of India’s economic liberalization in the 1990s have been the subject of much scholarship (see Fernandes 2006; Khilnani 1999). In the wake of India’s Independence, her new government was peopled by middle-​class Indians. At that time, poverty was seen as the most crushing of the nation’s social problems, and the solution was sought in socialist policies designed to distribute what were felt to be India’s ample natural resources and labor. After centuries of indirect and direct colonial rule, India’s new leaders did not have an appetite for forging close economic ties with other nations. Rather, the state was isolationist and focused on India’s rural lands and populations as the sources of both its current problems and its future promise. By the 1970s and ’80s, as it became clear that those policies were not raising the economic status of most Indians, trust in the state and its priorities waned among all classes of Indian society. The poor increasingly engaged in electoral politics as a way to assert their power in the democratic state, creating their own class-​and caste-​based political parties. The middle classes, too, turned away from the ruling Indian National Congress party, favoring instead the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its affiliates. Many among the middle classes formed their own NGOs in order to work autonomously from, or even against, the state (Ray and Katzenstein 2005). They still focused their efforts on eradicating poverty in many cases, but they sought to take power into their own hands. Meanwhile, those among the middle classes with economic means often moved out of the country, seeking educational, professional, and economic opportunities abroad in Europe, America, Australia, and the Middle East. India’s isolationist economic policies did not allow these middle-​class citizens to participate in global cultures in the ways they desired. Middle-​class citizens proposed that liberalizing India’s economy would more effectively eradicate poverty, though poverty was no longer their main concern. Instead, their concern was that India would be left behind the global economic order. Under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, the Congress-​led government initiated liberalizing reforms in 1991. Those reforms have continued and broadened in the ensuing decade and a half,

24 

| Introduction

particularly under the leadership of the BJP and its affiliates. India’s new middle classes are thus more globally and materially oriented, concerned with keeping up with international standards of gross domestic product (GDP), consumer goods, global brands, and world-​class cities. They are also more variegated. Their upper and lower echelons comprise quite different cultures. For example, there are members of old middle classes employed in government posts who are unable to uphold their former standard of living due to inflation and feel they are being squeezed out of new professional opportunities that require different skills (e.g., jobs in the information technology industry; Ganguly-​Scrase and Scrase 2009). There are formerly lower-​class individuals who are now able to acquire some hallmarks of middle-​class status—​perhaps a technical education and some collection of consumer goods. Yet their tastes, modes of bodily comportment, and religious practices prevent their peers from being convinced that they are really middle class (Ortegren 2016). And then there are those who live in rural areas and acquire their wealth from industries like farming but who do not share the same culture as city dwellers (Jeffrey 2010). The new middle-​class individuals who seek to reform Kālīghāṭ are instead part of an urban and upper middle class with access to higher education, lucrative professions, a wide range of consumer goods, global travel, and networks that allow them to work closely with state powers to achieve their aims. As Fuller and Narasimhan (2014, 19)  point out, this upper middle class resembles the nation’s elite in many ways. By examining the modernist proclivities of middle-​ class actors’ work on the temple, including Prahlad and Mridul’s, I do not in turn argue that Jaidev, Gopal, and Asha are unmodern or somehow backward. While they do not work to modernize the temple, they do in fact espouse modernist aspirations in other parts of their lives.26 For example, pāṇḍās do not want their children to have the same occupations as themselves. They want their children to get an education and perhaps even go to college. Many sevāyets’ children, including Gopal’s, attend English-​medium schools and speak of living abroad someday. Some of Asha’s friends are saving money so that they might rent apartments in pakkā buildings. They want their children to achieve a better lifestyle than their own. These pursuits of economic development and higher education are thoroughly modern and perhaps signify the deepening of these values in Indian society since the 1990s.27 For Jaidev, Gopal, and Asha, then, the temple is a means to an end—​a way to make money to achieve or sustain a middle-​class life. For Prahlad and Mridul, the temple is an end in and of itself. For them, Kālīghāṭ is a form upon which they can establish and enact their own modernity, and India’s.

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Temples and Their Publics India’s middle classes have, since the nineteenth century, claimed to represent the Indian public. Then, as now, this is an elite that claims an “everyman” status (Baviskar and Ray 2011). At Kālīghāṭ, too, they see themselves as doing for the temple what is self-​evidently good for all Hindus. They see their representative power as justifying their control over temple affairs. Prahlad’s lawsuit, for example, was filed in the name of public interest. He did not claim in his suit that he had been individually wronged by the temple’s administrative body. He argued instead that temple Brahmins’ accumulation of wealth constitutes a grievance to the Hindu public more generally. Similarly, Mridul calls his NGO a “catalyst organization” that does not only reflect his own interests but the interests of a far-​reaching public. Middle-​class men and women do not, of course, represent the whole Hindu public, or even the whole Hindu public in Kolkata, as Gopal and Asha’s narratives demonstrate. There are, in fact, all kinds of publics that form around Kālīghāṭ. I  take Reddy and Zavos’s notion of “temple publics” to be instructive here. They argue that communities that form around temples in the modern era are “publics” in the Habermasian sense, that they operate in a sphere that is neither private nor state-​controlled and produce “horizontal alignments exceeding the locality” of the temple (Reddy and Zavos 2009, 244). Those alignments include caste, national, and religious identities. Kālīghāṭ produces all sorts of publics, many of which are overlapping. A Śakta (goddess-​worshiping) public debates what kinds of rites ought to take place at this Kālī temple. A devotional public compares and contrasts the potency of this form of Kālī versus those at other Śaktipīṭhs in South Asia. A tourist public takes impressions of this site to their home countries and shares them with others who have visited it. An animal affairs public debates animal sacrifice at Kālīghāṭ alongside the treatment of animals elsewhere in the city, nation, and world. These publics raise many different kinds of questions and concerns about the temple. Prahlad, Mridul, Kamala, and many others among my interlocutors in Kolkata are part of a public of middle-​class modernity. By expressing frustration regarding Kālīghāṭ’s crowds, for example, Kamala and my neighbor assert their privilege in otherwise not having to deal with crowds in their day to day lives (they do not often find themselves riding buses or shopping at the bazaar). As teachers and doctors and historians expressed their disdain to me throughout my fieldwork, saying that Kālīghāṭ is “so dirty” with a shake of her heads and a furrowing of their brows, they were expressing modernist

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concerns while announcing their penchant for cleanliness. And when newspapers publish reports of the ongoing lawsuit at Kālīghāṭ, decrying the mess and crowds of hawkers on Kalighat Temple Road, they too participate in this public of middle-​class modernity.28 By way of their educational backgrounds and social networks, it is this public that has access to courts and state boards. It is in fact members of this public that sit on those very state bodies. This public—​which is to say, this narrow segment of the broader Indian public—​has gradually extended its authority over Kālīghāṭ over the past century. As I will outline in Chapter 2, the Calcutta High Court and then the Supreme Court of India declared this temple to be a public institution in the mid-​twentieth century. This legal designation of “public” is quite the opposite of Habermas’s public because it officially subjects the temple to the state’s control. It is a reflection of India’s courts first “defining” and then “regulating” notions of the public (Scott and Ingram 2015, 366). Through state support for Mridul and Prahlad’s projects, among others’, Kālīghāṭ’s multiple publics are conflated through this legal designation because they are represented by a narrow segment of the population.

Modernizing a Uniquely Bengali Temple Bearing in mind both the exceptionalism and universalism to which scholars of Bengal are alternately prone, the specifically Bengali nature of the evolution of Kālīghāṭ’s modernization I am tracing requires some reflection. As I have proposed throughout this Introduction, efforts to modernize Kālīghāṭ parallel those at other Hindu temples across India, and this study can therefore shed light on those pan-​Indic projects. However, all modernizing projects draw upon their localized contexts, and the peculiarities of Bengal and Calcutta have shaped both the choice of Kālīghāṭ as the focus of middle-​ class attention as well as the nature and timing of middle-​class modernization projects. It would be difficult to imagine, for example, that a Kālī temple anywhere else in India would be written into a history of reformed Hinduism in the colonial era, or that middle-​class Indians (rather than Britons) would be the ones to impose a non-​Brahmin system of management on a temple of Kālīghāṭ’s importance. These aspects of Kālīghāṭ’s modernization reflect the specific religious proclivities of Bengal and the colonial history of Calcutta. Goddess worship—​and particularly Kālī worship—​is deeply rooted in Bengal. There, men and women across caste and class spectra worship Kālī as a powerful warrior and as a mother. Kālī is the pre-​eminent goddess of

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power in the Hindu pantheon, known in Tantric and Purāṇic literature as fierce, bloodthirsty, and always victorious over her foes.29 She was incorporated into Tantric ritual in Bengal sometime in the first half of the second millennium ce as evidenced by the proliferation of Sanskrit texts that describe her worship (McDermott 2011, 163–​5). To vastly oversimplify an immense subject, Tantric ritual includes the use of impure substances including blood and sexual fluids in order to propitiate Tantric deities who grant unequaled power. There are left-​handed versions of Tantra (the left hand being impure) in which those impure substances are used—​and even consumed—​literally, and there are right-​handed versions in which those substances are instead imagined as part of meditative visualization practices. Both are purposefully unorthodox, as they work to overcome the duality between purity and impurity set up by Vedic texts.30 Kālī’s fierce iconic form at Kālīghāṭ adorned with severed body parts points to this temple’s Tantric roots. So does the method that animal sacrifice takes there. Whereas in Vedic forms of sacrifice animals are suffocated outside the ritual enclosure, in Tantric forms blood is shed and collected as a divinely powerful substance (Doniger 2009, 436–​7). Kālī’s Tantric past is one that many Bengali Hindus would like to forget, including one of Kālīghāṭ’s priests, who explained to me that animal sacrifice at that temple is “Vedic” rather than Tantric and that Kālī does not consume the sacrificed meat there anyway because that particular Kālī is Vaiṣṇavī and therefore vegetarian. Sanjukta Gupta has written an excellent piece on the various Vaiṣṇava alterations this goddess has undergone at Kālīghāṭ, from her donning a Vaiṣṇava marking on her forehead to her worship as Lakṣmī during the annual celebration of Kālī Pūjā (Gupta 2003, 65–​6). This has to do, in part, with the Vaiṣṇava orientation of the Haldar family in whose care Kālī is entrusted, which will be discussed further in Chapter  1. Yet Vaiṣṇavizing the goddess is also a way of distancing Kālī from her Tantric roots and transforming her into a bhakti (devotional) goddess. Most of those who worship Kālī at Kālīghāṭ are completely unaware of the Vaiṣṇava reformation the goddess there has undergone. They do not know they are worshiping a form of the goddess associated with Viṣṇu, but they do not consider themselves Tantrikas either. They are, instead, bhaktas (devotees) who worship Kālī as mother. This transformation of Kālī into a Vaiṣṇava and bhakti goddess requires some further explanation. Even while the anti-​brahminical forms of Tantra have long been sought after by South Asians for the real power they can affect in the world, they have also been widely critiqued for their purposefully anti-​orthodox practices. As such, Tantric forms have been amended at various historical moments over millenia so that they might appeal to broader audiences (see White 2003).

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In the tenth century, for example, the Trika Kaula sect emerged, in which Abhinavagupta (among others) intellectualized and internalized left-​handed Tantric practices (Sanderson 1985). Shortly thereafter, the Śrīvidyā sect also set forth a system in which ritual was dematerialized such that ritual action became “a kind of knowing” (Sanderson 1995, 46). By that time, the Śaiva Siddhānta had already “deodorised” Tantra to a great extent, not by intellectualizing it, but by establishing Śiva as a deity whose grace would be sought through rituals akin to their non-​Tantric counterparts (Sanderson 1985, 203). All of these moves made Tantra both palatable and accessible to householders.31 Within the context of colonial Bengal, Sir John Woodroffe and his Bengali and Tibetan collaborators mysticized Tantra for an English-​ educated middle class. In their works (written under pseudonym Arthur Avalon), Tantra was described as a monistic and mystical tradition that aligned well with Western philosophy and science (Taylor 2001). 32 The bhakti-​zation of Kālī worship in Bengal is one more example of a process whereby Tantra has been cleaned up or refined to appeal to a wider audience. Rachel McDermott has traced this process closely. She writes of the dramatic shift Kālī worship in this region underwent in the sixteenth century whereby her Tantric aspects were sublimated into aspects more acceptable to a householder audience. At that time, wealthy rājās and zamindars in Bengal began to patronize festivals, temples, and new genres of vernacular texts dedicated to Kālī (McDermott 2011, 165–​73).33 They were eager to associate themselves with her power in the face of both Mughal and European incursions. These men patronized the work of poets such as Rāmprasād Sen and Kamalākānta Bhaṭṭācārya, who infused their poetry to Kālī with a devotional flavor akin to that of bhakti poetry (McDermott 2000, 2001). Such poetry had been composed and dedicated to the god Kṛṣṇa in this area since the fifteenth century and was characterized by “sweetness and emotionalism” (McDermott 2001, 170). The new Śakti poetry paid homage to Kālī’s Tantric characteristics but was also infused with the notion of prati-​vātsalya, or the love of a child for his or her mother (McDermott 2001, 170). Varuni Bhatia (2017) has written about the way in which bhakti was associated with Vaiṣṇavism in the nineteenth century to the extent that the Bengali bhadralok sought to recover what they despaired was a loss of this devotional attitude through a loss of memory about Vaiṣṇava figures such as Caitanya. Whether the new Śakti poetry was composed in such a way that it would compete with or simply incorporate contemporaneous Vaiṣṇava forms is unclear. Either way, in Bengal the Tantric goddess Kālī became a bhakti goddess through these Vaiṣṇava-​esque poems. She became not just as a goddess of

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power but a goddess of love, and specifically motherly love. Kālī gained widespread devotion among people of many caste backgrounds. She became a goddess who could be worshiped not just in folk or secretive practices, but in temples and public festivals. This sense of adoration Bengalis feel for Kālī is echoed in the words of a wealthy Bengali retiree who relayed to me, “I tell you this, every Bengali has a soft feeling for Kālīghāṭ. When we pass by on the road or by metro, we do this (touching his hand to his head and then his heart/​chest in an act of reverence) and we don’t even know why. It is involuntary.” This puts Bengali Śaktism at odds in many ways with other Indian bhakti traditions, about which much has been written (Hawley [2015] traces much of this work). The famous fifteenth-​and sixteenth-​century north Indian bhaktas like Tulsidas and Kabir shunned the goddess worshipers in their midst because they engaged in Tantric rituals involving blood and sex and were typically low caste. Even Kabir who castigated both Brahmanical orthodoxy and caste distinctions denounced Śaktas (Pauwels 2010). As Patton Burchett has argued, such castigations may have been a way of discrediting the authority and efficacy of Tantric ritual in favor of the bhaktas’ own soteriological methods (Burchett 2013). But in Bengal, the situation is quite different. First, Śaktas are not only low caste but also high caste, and thus notions of Hindu orthodoxy in Bengal are derived from Śakta traditions (Bordeaux 2014). Second, devotional and Tantric forms of goddess worship there overlap a great deal (McDaniel 2004).34 There are certainly highly specialized Tantric ritualists who worship the goddess using secretive and subversive practices, but Tantric goddesses like Kālī have now been subsumed under a bhakti canopy. Today, Kālī is feted with the same kind of pageantry as other non-​Tantric goddesses, albeit always with references to her ferocious power. In the following chapters, as I outline the intellectual, organizational, and aesthetic reformations Kolkata’s middle-​class citizens impose upon Kālīghāṭ, we are witness to one more instance of the transformation of a Tantric site and a Tantric goddess so that they are palatable to broader audience. A new set of idioms—​this time, modernist —​make Kālī and Kālīghāṭ more palatable to a globalized elite. There is a particularly close relationship between the goddess Kālī and Kolkata. A  city resident who self-​identified as a non-​religious Hindu remarked to me during my fieldwork, “This goddess belongs to Bengalis,” while his friend followed with, “Not just to Bengalis but to Kolkata—​we have this phrase, you know—​Jai Kālī, Kolkatawālī (Victory to Kālī, she who is of Kolkata).” This special connection is directly tied to Kālīghāṭ. In a region

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so steeped in goddess worship, Kālīghāṭ is literally a seat of the goddess—​ a Śaktipīṭh—​as Kamala and countless others conveyed to me. It is said to hold the toes of the primordial goddess’s body that are so powerful that a person who once opened the box within which they are kept in Kālīghāṭ’s inner sanctum was immediately and irreparably blinded. The temple holds a svayaṃbhū (self-​created) mūrti that was found naturally formed in nature. This form reinforces the notion that no human being chose this site as one where Kālī would be worshiped; she selected it herself. Kālīghāṭ’s identification with Calcutta is due especially to Calcutta’s colonial history. As I  will continue to explicate in Chapter  1, this site’s pre-​ existence on the land that would become Calcutta meant that it could be taken up as an emblem of Bengali and Hindu identity at a time when Britons were claiming that Calcutta was an essentially British city. Kālīghāṭ could simultaneously stand for the primordial power of a mother goddess and a political symbol of Hindu presence. So while there are many other very popular Kālī temples throughout Kolkata, none has become so deeply wedded to the story of the city as has Kālīghāṭ. The fact that Calcutta was the center of bhadralok culture in the nineteenth century also deeply influenced the kinds of modernizing projects that middle-​class actors would take up at that time. As the capital of the British Empire in India, Calcutta was one of the major centers of English education, where Indians were being trained in European science and literature alongside British and Roman history and law (Banerjee 1989, 42). It was also one of the major centers of the newly emerging discipline of scientific history in India beginning in the 1880s (Chakrabarty 2015, 39). The authors I  discuss in Chapter 1 were in the midst of the likes of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rajendralal Mitra, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and Jadunath Sarkar. Their interest in history—​in a modern and scientific sense—​had much to do with the cultural nationalism that was central to the creation of the Indian nation. Writers of history were aware that the choice of historical narratives one told conveyed quite different portrayals of people and their cultures. As Bankimchandra once famously argued, “the lion is always shown as being defeated . . . because it was man who painted the picture” (Kaviraj 1995, 109). Writing one’s own story is an act of political power. In nineteenth-​century India, this act was nowhere more important than at the centers of colonial domination. Colonial-​era Hindu reform and revival movements were also particularly influential in urban centers like Calcutta, where values shaped through cultural exchange were applied to religion. The writers I discuss were thus also in the midst of bhadralok Hindu reformers and revivalists who sought to reshape the history, beliefs, and practices of Hinduism so that they aligned

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with their newly found values. English education, Indian historical projects, and Hindu reform and revival movements certainly existed in other major cities in India during the colonial era, but Calcutta was a particularly powerful hub of each of these. To provide a sense of how these aspects of Kālīghāṭ and its modernization are uniquely Bengali, it is useful to compare them to the projects Joanne Waghorne discusses in her expansive work on temples in Chennai. First, goddess temples did not become part of middle-​class modernization efforts there until the late twentieth century when their reigning deities, typically worshiped by lower-​caste groups, could be swept up in a characteristically Tamil form of anti-​Brahmin politics (Waghorne 2004, 150–​ 63). The goddess Kālī’s appeal to a broad spectrum of Hindus in Bengal, and her special connection to Calcutta through Kālīghāṭ, made this site ripe for the attention of the middle classes, even in the nineteenth century. Second, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, temples in the commercial city of Chennai (then Madras) were modern insofar as they were built and rebuilt according to new models (Waghorne 2004, 35–​128). Some temples included specific and multiple deities to satisfy Hindu migrants of many stripes. Others were constructed as stand-​ins for temples in migrants’ homelands. They were built on land of the builders’ choosing, rather than land already demarcated as sacred. Former elites also reconstructed ancient temples but domesticated gods as they did so. The fact that the men I examine in Chapter 1 modernized through writing rather than building very much reflects the unique environment that nineteenth-​century Calcutta provided them. The relative lack of involvement of British officials in the Hindu temples of the Bengal presidency also affected how and when Kālīghāṭ would be modernized institutionally.35 In once-​ royal temples where Hindu kings had been relied upon as regular patrons of temples and arbiters in ritual officiates’ disputes, Mughal and then British official bodies stepped in to fill that role once they came to rule the lands on which the temples sat. This ensured that temples would continue to run as they always had, generally pleasing the Hindus who frequented them and also providing good will and financial income to those official bodies. Such arrangements were most frequent in the Madras presidency where royal temples were many (see Appadurai 1981; Fuller 1984, 112–​34; Price 2008, 106–​31; Presler 1987). There, district collectors also further stepped in to manage—​or appoint managers to—​temples where previous managers had passed away or where there were disputes regarding succession. In the Bengal presidency, with the exceptions of Baidyanāth Temple in Deoghar and Jagannāth in Puri, there was neither

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the cause nor appetite for such involvement.36 Kālīghāṭ, for example, was neither founded nor ever controlled by royal powers. The family of Brahmin priests who managed it privately did not request the intervention of the East India Company when it arrived. This was a point much appreciated by British officials in that locale who favored an agenda of non-​interference in Indian religious institutions (Presler 1987, 7).37 If a wealthy patron had ever built Kālīghāṭ, that patron had not been relied upon for its financial welfare or management. In 1809, when the Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family completed their construction of a new Kālīghāṭ Temple building, the Brahmin managers ensured that those patrons did not have any authority in temple affairs.38 So while the management of other major temples throughout India had been put under the government’s charge as early as the eighteenth century, Brahmins reigned at Kālīghāṭ until middle-​class modernizers took action in the twentieth century. The impulse to cleanse and monumentalize the temple that is evident in Prahlad and Mridul’s projects is not specific to Calcutta or to Bengal. Some of Mridul’s plans call for the use of “Bengali-​style architecture,” and he certainly has in mind to make Hindu architecture more prominent than British architecture in the city, but otherwise, his use of the temple as an icon, and the gentrification he and Prahlad work toward, are not at all particular to this city or region. Nor is middle-​class control of temples through state bodies and the nation’s courts. Some of the specificities of resistances against contemporary middle-​class modernizing projects that I outlined above and elaborate upon in Chapter  4 are shaped by the politics of local parties including the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Trinimool Congress. But the fact that middle-​class projects face resistance is not limited to Bengal either. So while the roots and development of Kālīghāṭ’s modernization have very much been shaped by its Bengali context, the trend to modernize—​and the forms that modernization take today, in post-​1990s India—​is much more pan-​Indic.

Overview of the Volume The chapters of this book are organized both chronologically and thematically as I trace the evolution of modernizing projects that have been carried out upon Kālīghāṭ by various segments of the middle classes. In Chapter 1, I argue that this site was first modernized in the intellectual space of history writing in the late nineteenth century. When British authors began to write histories of Calcutta, they claimed that the city was built by and for their compatriots, beginning in 1690 when Job Charnok landed on its

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banks. Bengali Hindus who had the requisite educational background and access to publishers directly countered these narratives in their own books and journal articles detailing the city’s history. They employed the most authoritative mode of knowledge production of their time—​modernist history, replete with references to ancient and modern texts in multiple languages, accompanied by footnotes. They lifted Kālīghāṭ out of the realm of mythology and superstition and embedded it into the realm of linear history and rationality, pointing to Kālī’s presence at Kālīghāṭ as proof of the Hindu origins of the city, and showing that Calcutta had for centuries, if not millennia, been a thriving Hindu area peopled by valorous and pious Hindus before any Briton stepped foot on her soil. European cultures of history writing, in which India’s middle classes were deeply engaged, thus significantly altered the role that the temple could play in Indian society. Through this genre and the kinds of commitments it espoused, the temple was ripe to be taken up as an emblem of Hindu identity in both a political and religious sense. These Bengali writers furthermore wrote Kālīghāṭ into a history of a unified and universal Hindu tradition dating back to the Vedas. These were hallmarks of the Hindu reform and revival movements of the nineteenth century, even while most reformers and revivalists eschewed temples and the rituals that accompanied them. While most of the abundant scholarship on Calcutta’s bhadralok has focused on that predominant middle-​class culture, I offer evidence here that there was another middle-​class culture that was developing in late-​nineteenth-​century Calcutta—​one that took up and transformed the temple into something that adhered fully to modern Hindu forms. These writers’ works would be deemed incorrect or unimportant to many Hindus of their own context. Yet they set the precedent for later efforts to reform Kālīghāṭ so that it might become emblematic not only of Hindus but of modern Hinduism. In Chapter 2, I turn to the mid-​twentieth century, when changes in laws in Bengal pertaining to religious and charitable endowments allowed middle-​ class Hindus to reform the institutional structure of the temple. One sevāyet brought a complaint against 84 other sevāyets to a district court in the 1930s, alleging that his brethren had mismanaged temple funds. 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. Court documents reveal that neither of these moves reflected the sevāyet plaintiff’s objectives but relied on the judges’ selective application of the legal language of “the public” to this religious institution. Drawing on the copious scholarship on temple

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management (most of which focuses on the state of Tamil Nadu), as well as recent scholarship on the state’s regulation of the public in India, I argue that it is through this language that temples became subject not only to state control but also to the middle-​class values held by India’s state officials. Judges of the Kālīghāṭ case declared that Brahmins who inherited their position by birth and made money from their roles as religious officials could not be entrusted with ensuring financial order at the temple. Dissatisfaction regarding the wealth of Brahmins who managed Hindu temples had been growing among the middle classes for at least a century by this time. This wealth—​accumulated as it was through devotees’ offerings to the goddess—​ was deemed evidence of corruption, and as constitutive of a grievance to the Hindu public. Through their positions, judges were able to bring that critique to bear upon the traditional structure of the temple institution. Chapters 3 and 4 bring this discussion to the turn of the twenty-​first century and continue the set of conversations initiated by the vignettes in this Introduction regarding efforts to clean up the physical space of Kālīghāṭ. By the 1990s, Kālīghāṭ had already been well established as an emblem of Hindu and Indian identity and had been made a public institution. To these facets of its modernization were added new visions of the temple as a public space within the city and new visions of urban India in which the city represents the Indian nation on an international stage. In Chapter  3, I examine how middle-​class men and women seek to expand temple space, knock down buildings that block its view, and remove undesirable materials and populations in order to make it both grand and clean along modernist aesthetic lines. They want it to be a “must-​see” tourist attraction that people from all over the world visit when they come to India. Forming NGOs and filing PILs, they glean state support for these projects. State bodies share with those at the helm of these projects an interest in creating of these sites world-​class monuments—​tributes to an Indian nation that can be modern and uniquely Indian at the same time. I  argue here that transnational conversations regarding the world-​class city thus shape the forms of Hinduism authorized for India’s urban spaces, as well as the renewed material forms that middle-​class Hinduisms take. The modernizing projects outlined in Chapters 1 through 3 are forwarded by Kolkata’s educated and powerful citizens. Those citizens frame their projects at Kālīghāṭ as being in the best interest of the Hindu public. They work to modernize Kālīghāṭ from a distance—​through books, courts, and state tourism boards. However, for so many who frequently worship at the temple, or who live and work on temple grounds, the desire to modernize the temple is not shared. In Chapter  4, I  draw primarily on ethnographic

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research to demonstrate that the temple does very different things for men and women of different class backgrounds. Analyzing their conceptions and use of the temple within scholarly conversations on political society in contemporary India, I show that lower-​class groups are successful in resisting modernizing projects because they employ tactics that make state control difficult or impossible. Pāṇḍās unionize to assert their hereditary right to work at the temple. Sevāyets drag their feet when court orders are delivered. Beggars engage in sheer savvy and subterfuge. Through their success, I argue that they too play a central role in shaping the forms of Hinduism that will take place in India’s urban spaces. In a short Conclusion to this book, I  reflect on the consequences of modernization projects on Hindu forms and practices as well as India’s cities. Modernizers work to refine the behavior and decorum of Hindus and 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 each chapter, I take stock of what this study reveals about the evolution of middle-​class forms of Hinduism in India and the role those forms play in constructions of India’s modernities. In each historical moment I  examine, it becomes clear that temples are central to the ways in which Hindus construct themselves, their cities, and their nation in the modern world. Whether they reject, protect, or reform temples, the kinds of ideas they enact and publicize about temples reveal their visions of who they are. I argue that scholarly attention must be turned toward the intertwined discourses of temples and modernity as they have developed from the colonial period to the present if we are to understand the kinds of major temple building and renovation projects taking place across India today—​the kinds of projects that have proven Nehru’s prediction about the nature of modern India’s temples to be mistaken.

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1 Reviving and Reforming Calcutta’s Hindu Past

A

gainst British claims that Calcutta was a commercial city founded and developed by Britons, Bengali Hindu men at the turn of the twentieth century declared that this city had in fact been founded by devotees of Kālī who discovered her mūrti (embodied form) on its sacred soil hundreds, if not thousands, of years before. Sūrjyakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy, Gaur Das Bysack, Prāṇkṛṣṇa Datta, and Atul Kṛṣṇa Ray wrote historical articles and books featuring Kālīghāṭ as the foundation of the city—​a site to which pious and valorous Hindus had flocked for centuries—​thus making Calcutta great before any Englishman stepped foot on its soil. These middle-​ class authors created of Kālīghāṭ an emblem of the city, its Hindu population, and Hinduism itself. Yet such claims about the city were not rooted in a valorization of religion or tradition over modernity. Unlike other Bengalis of their time, for example, these authors did not decry the greed and swindling that was often said to accompany the particular trading culture imported to this area by Europeans.1 Nor did they critique the new forms of culture that the bhadralok had adopted and adapted from Europeans. Rather, they argued that the peoples and practices that had converged on Kālīghāṭ for centuries had always adhered to modernist values. While many of their bhadralok peers denounced Kālīghāṭ’s religiosity for signifying a corrupted form of Hinduism, these authors forwarded Kālīghāṭ as a site the religiosity of which was in line with a universal and monolithic form of Hinduism dating back to the Vedas and whose ritual officiates did not engage in violent rituals. In arguing that modernity had always been present in the Hindu practices of this icon of Bengali culture in the colonial capital, they began the process of modernizing Kālīghāṭ that continues up to the present day.

37

Modernity carries with it a particular ambivalence toward that which is old. On the one hand, newness is lauded. As Britons wrote histories of Calcutta, they congratulated themselves for bringing civilization to its primitive past. On the other hand, history is fetishized. Throughout the nineteenth century, British and Indian scholars sought to recover a pure Vedic tradition—​a “golden age” of the Vedas—​that they claimed had been corrupted in the periods in which Purāṇic and Tantric literature was composed.2 What was old could only be redeemed if it reflected the values of modernity. In the case of the Vedic tradition, what was recovered was not its ancientness per se but its alleged monotheism and peaceful spirituality. The Purāṇic and Tantric traditions were rejected because they were said to have introduced polytheism, temple worship, and animal sacrifice—​ideas and practices denigrated in modern times.3 In the same way, the Bengali authors I examine in this chapter simultaneously revived Kālīghāṭ and Calcutta’s ancient pasts, while making them conform to modern ideals. Theirs was not a narrative in which Britons ruined all that was good about Calcutta. Nor was it a narrative in which Britons brought civilization to a primitive society. Instead, these men presented Calcutta as a city in which a colonial order replaced a Hindu order that was proud, valorous, and compatible with modern values in its own right. Caṭṭopādhyāy, Bysack, Datta, and Ray’s works gather evidence of the temple’s foundation in human time, which is itself a modern project. The traditional authority on which the power of the temple once rested relied on it standing outside human time. The mūrti of Kālī at the center of this temple is svayaṃbhū (self-​created), meaning it was not created by humans as other mūrtis are. It is said that Kālī has thus always resided in this place, making her even more powerful at Kālīghāṭ than at other temples. Yet these authors did not write sthalapurāṇas (literally, “old stories about a place”)—​a genre of Sanskrit literature that provides the mythological origins of a religious site and its subsequent claim to sanctity.4 Nor did they compose devotional or ritualistic texts about it. Instead, they wrote in the genre of modern scientific history and in vernacular prose. They provided a rationalist treatment of the past, eschewing myth (to a certain extent) as well as cyclic time (see Chakrabarty 2015; Kumkum Chatterjee 2009; Kaviraj 1995; Mali 2003). They wielded evidence from primary and secondary sources—​including maps, tax documents, and family trees—​to provide proof for their arguments (see Chatterjee 2012, 242). They thus made their knowledge about Kālīghāṭ and Calcutta modern too (for an illustration and map from Caṭṭopādhyāy’s 1891 work, see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The 1890s and the early years of the 1900s mark the most fruitful decades for the production of histories of Calcutta.5 At this point, bhadralok culture

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Figure 1.1  Drawing of the Kālīghāṭ Courtyard Circa 1891 from the Western Side Source: Caṭt ̣opādhyāy 1986, 64–​5.

was in full form and nationalist sentiment was gaining momentum. Kālīghāṭ had been mentioned in written works countless times before, but in 1891 two works appeared that took Kālīghāṭ as their primary object of historical focus. The first was “Kalighat and Calcutta,” an article written by Gaur Das Bysack appearing in The Calcutta Review, an English-​language periodical published in London, Boston, and Calcutta. The second was the Bengali-​language, self-​published book Kālīkṣetra Dīpikā (A Commentary on the Land of Kālī) written by Sūrjyakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy. These two works insert Kālīghāṭ into the genre of modern history, proving its preeminent place in the proud indigenous history of this city. A decade later in 1901, Bengali authors began to write histories of Calcutta.6 Kālīghāṭ featured prominently in their works regarding what was significant about this city’s past. Between 1901 and 1903, the Bengali journal Navyabhārat published a series of articles by Prāṇkṛṣṇa Datta entitled “Kalikātār Itivṛtta” (The History of Calcutta). At the behest of the colonial government, A.  K. Ray wrote a report on the 1901 Census of Calcutta (published in 1902), which comprised a history of the city, entitled A Short History of Calcutta. These four authors by no means comprise an exhaustive list of those writing about Calcutta and Kālīghāṭ at the turn of the twentieth century, but in them we see groundbreaking cultural projects that are significantly different from the public productions of this city and temple that

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Figure 1.2  Map of the Kālīghāṭ Neighborhood Circa 1891 Source: Caṭt ̣opādhyāy 1986, 72–​3.

preceded them and that set the stage for later productions of the same. Their projects were not identical, and I  highlight major points of divergence below. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I  treat predominantly three distinctive moves that these authors shared. First, they framed the story of Calcutta as a story of sacred soil with Kālī at the center. Second, they reclaimed the political past of Calcutta by writing about Hindus converging on Kālīghāṭ for centuries, if not millennia. Finally, they highlighted those aspects of Kālīghāṭ’s origins and development that adhered to reformist Hindu values.

The Bengali Bhadralok and Their Religious Orientations For readers who are familiar with scholarship on colonial Bengal and its middle classes, the assertions made above will sound strange. Nowhere in such scholarship has this temple been mentioned as playing a role in bhadralok culture or anti-​ colonial movements. The most famous of the bhadralok, known for their modernizing efforts, largely ignored this most famous center of Hindu worship in their midst. Hindu reformers including Rammohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore in the early to mid-​nineteenth century rejected temple worship and created groups like the Brahmo Samaj and Tattvabodhinī Sabhā in which they would gather weekly to reflect on the nature of Brahman (see Hatcher 2008; Kopf 1979). Members of those groups eschewed what they saw as empty ritualism taking place at temples, by which Hindus would worship material forms of multiple divine figures through priests who had gained their religious power hereditarily. They took up the Orientalist narrative that the non-​dualism (which they read as monotheism) of the late Vedic age, as reflected in the Upaniṣads, comprised the original and pure form of the one true Hindu religion. They rejected what was contained in the Purāṇas and Tantras and the ritual forms—​including temple worship—​that accompanied them, as degradations of that religion.7 In Bengal, Tantra was further marred by its ties both to Hindu orthodoxy and to nefarious and secretive practices, which most bhadralok actors were keen to reject.8 For most bhadralok Hindu reformers, a place like Kālīghāṭ was irredeemable. By the late nineteenth century—​the time when our authors composed their histories of Calcutta and Kālīghāṭ—​these bhadralok attitudes toward temples had not changed much. Keshab Chandra Sen formed the Nava Vidhan (New Dispensation) in order to revive some of the devotional Hindu forms that earlier reformers like Roy and Tagore had scorned, including songs, festivals,

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and pilgrimages (see Damen 1983; Sen 1938). But Sen, too, rejected temples as well as Tantra and its associated ferocious deities like Kālī. Even Vivekananda, whose guru Ramakrishna was a devotee of Kālī and priest of the Dakṣiṇeśvar temple, reframed his guru’s legacy as one of non-​dualist spirituality (Sarkar 1993, 50).9 He too rejected temple worship, never mentioning Kālīghāṭ in his written works and likely never visiting this site as an adult.10 Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore showed their disdain for Kālīghāṭ by critiquing the practice of animal sacrifice (Chatterji 2003 [1888]; Tagore 1961 [1890], 125–​48), yet their works never mention this site directly. It is difficult to discern the meaning of this silence. Perhaps these men were interested in protecting notions of the goddess that were already part of an anti-​colonial nationalist discourse—​particularly Bankimchandra Chatterjee, who coined the nationalist slogan, “Vande Mātaram” (I bow to the mother).11 Or perhaps through their silence, these men expressed some deference to this sacred locale that their Śakta family members no doubt frequented. The most prominent of Calcutta’s middle classes in the nineteenth century could not embrace Kālīghāṭ, but they also felt they could not publicly condemn it. In many ways, Caṭṭopādhyāy, Bysack, Datta, and Ray’s projects would appear at odds with those of their bhadralok peers. Yet an examination of their backgrounds indicate that they were absolutely part of Calcutta’s educated middle classes. The use rather than rejection of Kālīghāṭ in their modernizing projects must be taken into account as scholars work to understand the place of Hindu religious forms in colonial middle-​class cultural projects. Bysack and Datta were both part of wealthy Vaiṣṇava (those who worship Viṣṇu) Vaiśya (upper-​caste merchant) families who were early inhabitants of Calcutta.12 Bysack attended Hindu College, was a member of—​and had previously published articles for—​the Asiatic Society, worked as a civil servant for the British administration, and was nominated to the Calcutta Corporation in 1870 (McGuire 1983, 254). He was also a close friend of famed writer Michael Madhusudhan Dutt.13 The journal in which Datta’s work appeared was affiliated with the Brahmo Samaj, though Datta himself may have broken away to join Nava Vidhan by the time of his article’s composition (Datta 1991 [1901], 374).14 Ray was a member of the Śākta (one who worships goddess/​es) Brahmin Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family who were once zamindars (landholders) of this area. It is perhaps this positioning and his connections with other prominent Bengalis that persuaded the deputy chairman of the Calcutta Corporation to request that Ray write this history as a report on the 1901 census (Ray 1982 [1902]). Sūrjyakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy was a Śaiva (one who worships Śiva) Brahmin whose family had lived in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood for “three to four generations,” by his own account

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(1891, iii). As such, he was likely a descendent of the proprietors of the temple, though he does not make that claim specifically in his work. Bysack and Ray, writing in English, clearly had access to English education and worked closely with the British administration. While Datta and Caṭṭopādhyāy wrote in Bengali, they employed the highly Sanskritized form of the vernacular in use among the bhadralok of their time. They also demonstrated familiarity with English sources. These men had cultural capital that placed them at an advantage over their Indian peers. Attention to these men and their projects can thus nuance our understanding of the multiple ways in which the bhadralok sought to reform religion in the colonial era. But how do we think about this middle class as opposed to others? Why did they write about the temple in very different ways than their class peers? Many scholars have pointed to the heterogeneity of Calcutta’s colonial middle classes. Tithi Bhattacarya goes so far as to argue that the bhadralok was in fact comprised of not one socioeconomic class but two—​a “landed rentier” class and a “petty bourgeoisie” class, according to the Marxist model (2005, 63). Yet scholars largely agree that individuals in this segment of society—​whether one refers to them as one class or not—​ shared a common set of modern values including civic engagement, rationality, and order. The modernities they produced would differ from one another, yet they would arise from a common pool of pre-​existing cultural forms and a shared outlook based on a new set of values (see Joshi 2001). The differences between Hindu reform and revival movements briefly outlined above provide a useful case in point. Both of these movements extolled Hindu forms and practices, even as they reformulated them in slightly different modernist registers. Perhaps even more notably, as Jason Fuller (2009) has argued, both movements appropriated rational modes of discourse and modern technologies, including books, periodicals, and maps, to propagate their revised versions of Hinduism. Through those forms, their voices—​and not those in the centers of religious orthodoxy—​became the voices authorized to publicly represent Hinduism (Fuller 2009, 162). This is precisely the dynamic at play in the Bengali histories of Calcutta and Kālīghāṭ outlined in this chapter. Authors of these works, too, simultaneously embraced a prominent Hindu form—​a temple—​in their midst, while reformulating it according to modernist values, making its founders and priests peaceful and its Hindu forms Vedic. And they, too, engaged modern technologies to publicize their reformulations. In each of these ways, our authors’ projects closely resembled those of their class peers. However, they saw something in Kālīghāṭ that the more well-​known among the bhadralok did not. It was a material artifact through

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which these men could revive Calcutta’s Hindu past. While they shared the city with a sizable Muslim population along with adherents of many other religions, it was colonialists’ claims to the city that most arrested them. They created explicitly anti-​colonialist portraits of the center of colonial power, using the very same language of the colonizers. Kālīghāṭ formed the center of this nationalist project. Despite their bold assertions, these men’s projects remained marginal at their time. Indeed, temples would not become central to dominant and well-​publicized middle-​class modernizing projects in many parts of India until the post-​Independence period. Yet these works offer a compelling model for thinking about how and why temples came to be icons of Hindu peoples and religion and the land on which they reside. They also set a strong precedent for the modernizing projects that would continue to take place at Kālīghāṭ for at least the next long century.

Stories of the City Before diving into the histories written by Caṭṭopādhyāy, Bysack, Datta, and Ray, I  want to provide here some of the prominent characteristics of the kinds of historical narratives that these authors were working beside and often against—​most notably, British histories of Calcutta. To be sure, there was a lot that historians of all backgrounds agreed upon. Our four historians as well as some of the most famous among British historians of Calcutta, including James Long, H. J. Rainey, C. R. Wilson, and H. E. A. Cotton all shared the following rough sketch of pre-​colonial Calcutta. First, they agreed that in 1690, Job Charnock—​an administrator of the East India Company—​set up a factory in the village of Sutāṇuti, one of the three villages that would later comprise Calcutta. They also agreed on some of the circumstances leading up to that. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, the Portuguese settled in the town of Hooghly and had a trading outpost in Betor on the western side of the Hooghly River quite close to what would become Calcutta. The Bysack and Seṭh families engaged in trade with the Portuguese, setting up a cotton market in the village of Sutāṇuṭi and residing in the village of Govindapur. In the seventeenth century, Bengal was ruled by the Mughal emperor in Delhi, who allowed various trading companies to rent this land. Members of the Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family were the zamindars of this area at the time of the Portuguese and English settlements. It was from this family that Emperor Aurangzeb allowed the East India Company to purchase zamindari rights to the villages of Sutāṇuṭi, Kalikātā, and Govindapur in 1698. Thus, it was agreed that the villages that would become the city of Calcutta were peopled, if only sparsely, and even had some commercial activity prior to

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Figure 1.3  Conjectural Map of Sutāṇuṭi, Kalikātā, and Govindapur Villages Prior to the Arrival of Job Charnock Source: Ray 1982, backmatter.

1690. Note in Figure 1.3 that the village of Kālīghāṭ lay to the south of the three villages that comprised the official city of Calcutta. It was not included within the city’s boundaries until 1888. As to the presence of a shrine to Kālī in this area, historians agreed that the temple that then stood in the neighborhood of Kālīghāṭ was built in 1809 by the Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family and that that temple had replaced another that had preceded the arrival of Job Charnock. It had been well known to Britons and Bengalis by the late eighteenth century.15 J. Z. Holwell, once governor of Bengal, mentions the temple as early as 1766 (1779, 130), and the eighteenth-​century Gaṅgābhaktitaraṅgiṇī describes Kālīghāṭ in some detail (Mukhopādhyāy 1868). Some historians further cite Kālīghāṭ’s mention in Bengali-​language Maṅgalkāvya literature to show that Kālīghāṭ had existed since the fifteenth or sixteenth century. However, in some versions of these stories, the words Kālīghāṭ and Kalikātā appear, which calls both of those references into question. The village of Kalikātā was not nearly as well known or significant as others mentioned in these texts, so it is likely

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that where both names appear, they were added to the manuscripts at a later date.16 The history of this temple in particular is thus mired in discrepancies. Britons began to formulate narratives of Calcutta’s past in the mid-​ nineteenth century, predominantly for the stated purpose of informing foreign visitors to their city of what might be useful and interesting. They did not begin to compose full-​scale histories of the city until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Cotton 1907; Long 1852, 1860; Handbook to Calcutta 1875; Rainey 1876; Wilson 1895). They, along with Indians writing in Persian as well as Bengali and other vernacular languages, had previously written about India’s and Bengal’s past.17 They had also written about Calcutta’s present through first-​hand accounts of their lives there. But until the mid-​nineteenth century they had not yet begun to compose narratives that told the story of the city’s origins. Discerning origins is a highly political project that was either unnecessary or unimportant prior to the creation of this city as the capital of the British Empire in India in 1858. To read British authors’ histories of Calcutta in the nineteenth century is to read a history of a city founded by Job Charnock in 1690 that was transformed by his successors into a wealthy, cosmopolitan center of international trade. While their stories differ in some details, generally speaking they provide a narrative of a grand and civilized city of wide avenues and imposing British architecture, including the High Court, Town Hall, and Imperial Library. Its inhabitants live in spacious garden mansions, frequent European-​only clubs, and host lavish dinner parties. An 1864 guidebook describes Calcutta as “one of the largest and most splendid cities of Asia,” which “presents at a distance a striking appearance, and on landing the magnificence of the buildings commands the admiration of all strangers” (Illustrated Handbook, Preface, 1–​2). Another presents the city as “the Capital of British India, the seat of the Supreme Government, of the Metropolitan and a University, Emporium of Bengal, and without doubt the most important City in all Asia, well-​known under the proud designation of the ‘City of Palaces” (Rainey 1876, 5).18 This moniker is taken from the title of a poem written in 1824 by James Atkinson, a British scholar of Persian. In that poem, Atkinson compares Calcutta to Rome—​a city of “conquest” and “dazzling splendors.” For him, Calcutta was Britain’s Rome:  “A wonder, formed like an island on the main; Amidst a sea of pagans.” Later British historians would further emphasize the glory of their countrymen in making Calcutta great. H. E. A. Cotton, a barrister and member of the Calcutta Corporation, famously wrote, “it can never be forgotten that Charnock, and Charnock alone, founded Calcutta” (1907, 9). Cotton lauds early British administrators and military officers like Robert Clive and Charles Watson for their courageousness and magnanimity in

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defeating Mughal and French forces to capture Calcutta (1907, 55–​65). He further remarks, “She [Calcutta] is the creation of the West. The ideals and the civilization of the West are luring her on: and the spirit of advancement is abroad” (1907, 197). In British narratives, this city of grand buildings and wide boulevards is the Calcutta that matters. The large homes of wealthy Armenian, Portuguese, and Bengali merchants in then-​“Black Town” are noted in some of these texts, as they exemplify the wealth produced in this international center of trade. However, most of what lay outside of the European-​inhabited “White Town” is described as overcrowded, smelly, and disorganized. Cotton remarks: “Ten minutes’ walk from Dalhousie Square will land the seeker after sensation in a labyrinth of narrow unpaved winding lanes, polluted with odours that put those of Cologne to shame and swarming with humanity” (1907, 196). (See Figure 1.4 for an illustration of the boundary between “White Town” and “Black Town,” as defined by various Europeans in the late-​eighteenth and early-​nineteenth centuries.) Similarly, the pre-​European history of Calcutta is described in these texts as a kind of wasteland—​“a place of mists, alligators and wild boars” (Long 1852, 154), consisting of “a few squalid huts in the mean village of Sutāṇuṭi, on the marshy banks of the Hugli” (Rainey 1876, 151). C. R. Wilson writes of the benefits of the English settlement in such an environment because it was there, isolated from all centers of political power, that the English could withdraw in order to gather their military strength and “preserve their own national characteristics” (1895, 217). According to these stories, in Calcutta, the East India Company had only to contend with a few uncivilized natives, including those who frequented Kālīghāṭ. An 1882 guidebook explains that before Charnock arrived, “The temple of Kalighat probably stood for centuries, when the Ganges itself, some miles wide, laved its walls, when human blood streamed on its altars, and when Thugs, before proceeding on their expeditions, made their devoirs to Kali” (Hand-​Book to Calcutta 1882, 35).19 It was a widely circulated idea at this time that human sacrifice had once taken place at Kālīghāṭ and that the animal sacrifice that continued to take place there exemplified Hindus’ eager shedding of blood. Cotton calls Kālī, who encouraged and even required that practice, the “grim goddess of the city” (1907, i). Stories of native depravity contributed a great deal to the narrative of British progress and power. The direr a portrait of the pre-​European past of this place, the greater the British accomplishments appeared, and the more legitimate colonial rule would appear. Britons could then laud themselves for bringing civilization and progress to a place sorely in need of both.

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Figure 1.4  Boundaries of “White Town” as Variously Defined During the Colonial Period Source: Chattopadhyay 2005, 78.

Thus, marsh, squalor, and human sacrifice marked their characterizations of pre-​European Calcutta. Kālīghāṭ was a convenient marker of that characterization. The notion that this temple stood before the arrival of Europeans was not contested, but it was framed very differently by Britons than by the Bengali authors I examine.

Calcutta’s Sacred Soil Swati Chattopadhyay wrote in 2005, “In a nutshell, the body of knowledge we have inherited and dub the ‘urban history of Calcutta’ is an imperial history. It is a narrative of heroic British efforts to build a city in the marshes of Bengal, in the face of native hostility, amid festering jungles and tropical heat” (2005, 7). We need only look to Sūrjyakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy, Gaur Das Bysack, Prāṇkṛṣṇa Datta, and Atul Kṛṣṇa Ray to find a very different narrative of Calcutta’s past that is anything but imperial. These Bengali authors dispute greatly Wilson’s opinion that “The real history of Calcutta begins with the coming of the Europeans” (1895, 131, emphasis added).20 In their works, Kālīghāṭ is critical in providing a counter-​history that directly challenges British narratives of the city and its essential character. In these Bengali narratives, Kālīghāṭ not only is older than the British city but forms its foundation. It is therefore not something to be erased with the new, but something upon which the new relies as its very source and substructure.21 These works shed light on how this site came to be an icon of Hindu identity and, consequently, in need of modernizing so that it could represent Hindus well according to the values of the writers’ social-​cultural milieu. Just as Britons told a particular story of Calcutta, with emphasis—​and perhaps elaboration—​on the favorable qualities of their predecessors, Bengalis told a particular story about the city and this temple too. They highlighted certain figures and characteristics in their pasts—​perhaps even inserted them—​making the temple represent Hindus and Hinduism in the best possible light. As will become clear, there is such variation in the stories these authors tell that it would be quite difficult to determine which are empirically true. Yet the veracity of the following stories is not my concern here. Instead, I am interested in how these four authors framed their stories of Calcutta and Kālīghāṭ in ways that were completely different than those stories that had previously been published. Prāṇkṛṣṇa Datta and A.  K. Ray begin their histories of the city with a chapter on geology.22 This marks a completely new point of departure for historical writing on Calcutta. Europeans had previously published studies of

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their excavations of Calcutta’s soil, and Datta and Ray cite them (Datta 1901, 4–​5; Ray 1902, 3–​4).23 However, no European historian deemed this an important part of Calcutta’s story. Cotton, for example, merely remarks upon these excavations to explain that this shifting soil was responsible for the “unequal sinking and alarming cracks” that commonly afflicted the city’s large buildings (1907, 260). Cotton was not concerned with geography as much as the fate of Calcutta’s grand architecture. Datta and Ray, on the other hand, used scientific findings on geography to uncover where Calcutta’s soil originated and when humans likely first inhabited this land. Their conclusions remained fairly inconclusive. Both agreed that southern Bengal had been alternately elevated and submerged under the Bay of Bengal through natural changes in sea level and that alluvial deposits had gradually raised Calcutta to be humanly habitable. Datta does not proffer a date on this, while Ray writes only that this was not yet complete by the seventh century ce (1902, 8). Both authors write that the silt that forms the foundation of Calcutta—​and Bengal more broadly—​ was transported to the region by the Ganges River. Datta further traces the origins of that silt to the Himalayas (1901, 1–​2). By beginning with geology, Datta and Ray are able to demonstrate their proficiency with scientific data while simultaneously placing Calcutta within the context of nature—​of oceans, mountains, and rivers—​and not only the context of human power. Diana Eck, among others, has written about Hindu understandings of geography in India that imbue nature with sanctity (see Eck 2012). The Ganges is considered a goddess, while the Himalayas are home to Dakṣa, Satī, and Śiva of the Śaktipīṭh narrative. For both Ray and Datta, Calcutta’s soil was transported by the sacred river. For Datta, that soil is the very same as that inhabited by gods and goddesses. Datta and Ray immediately follow their chapters on geology with chapters on Kālīghāṭ.24 Neither author feels the need to justify this transition. Its status as the foundation of Calcutta is taken to be so obvious that it requires no further clarification. Datta writes that Satī’s toes fell to this land on the edge of the Ganges River after Dakṣa’s sacrifice. At that point, mūrtis of Kālī and Nakuleśvara (a manifestation of Śiva) appeared but were not discovered for a very long time (1901, 12). Ray has two chapters focused specifically on Kālīghāṭ in which he establishes that Calcutta actually sits on Kālīkṣetra—​the land of Kālī. In fact, he writes that this comprises the origin of the name “Calcutta.” For this fact, he relies on a Sanskrit text entitled Pīṭhamālā. Here, Kālīkṣetra is described as a triangular region stretching from Bahula to Dakṣiṇeśvar and extending two miles from the Ganges, with the “primeval gods of the Hindu trinity—​Brahma, Vishnu and Siva—​at its three angles, with the goddess Kali

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at its centre” (1902, 11). For Ray too, then, Calcutta sits on sacred land—​only that land had been made sacred by the presence of Hindu gods and its primary goddess—​Kālī. Throughout his work, Ray continually refers to events in Calcutta as taking place “on the soil of Kalikshetra” (Ray 1902, 42, 55, 197, and 220). Ray is explicit in the anti-​British nature of this statement. He explains, “In 1687 the English were mere squatters on the soil of Kalikshetra” (55, emphasis added). The notion that Calcutta sits on Kālīkṣetra was widespread at Ray’s time. A  decade earlier, Caṭṭopādhyāy’s work on Kālīghāṭ had indeed been entitled Kālīkṣetra Dīpikā or A Commentary on Kālīkṣetra. Like Ray, Caṭṭopādhyāy cites the Pīṭhamālā to describe this kṣetra, locating Kālīghāṭ at the center of that sacred land (1891, 24). Ray is also explicitly drawing on an earlier work published by Pudma Nav Ghosal in the English-​language journal, Indian Antiquary. The article is short enough to reproduce here in its entirety: Calcutta is a place known from remote antiquity. The ancient Hindus called it by the name of Kalikshetra. It extended from Bahula to Dakhinashar. Bahula is modern Bahala, and the site of Dakhinashar still exists. According to the Puráṇas a portion of the mangled corpse of Sati or Kali fell somewhere within that boundary; whence the place was called Kalikshetra. Calcutta is a corruption of Kalikshetra. In the time of Balál Sen it was assigned to the descendants of Sera. (Ghosal 1873, 370)25

Note that in 1873, Ghosal did not specifically mention Kālīghāṭ. His reference to the “mangled corpse of Sati” would have made it clear that he was referring to Kālīghāṭ, but his task was not to explain the significance of that temple. Instead, he was showing that Calcutta stood on sacred soil. Those two tasks had merged between the time he wrote that article and the time of our authors’ works. The formulation of Kālī lying at the center of a kṣetra is noteworthy given the way in which this term has historically been deployed in Sanskrit literature. As Sontheimer writes, kṣetra literally means “field” or “area” and refers to “inhabited, well-​settled space with regular plough agriculture” (1987, 358).26 It is often juxtaposed with the vana or āraṇya, which refers to “ ‘wild space’, ‘forest’ or jungle which harbours the ‘hermitage’, the tribals, the saṃnyāsī and the āśrama,” where normal rules of society are not enforced (Sontheimer, 358). The vana is home to cremation grounds where Śiva and Kālī typically reside. When towns are built, these deities stand at the borderline between vana and kṣetra to protect the kṣetra. In Sanskrit literature, landscapes are demarcated by

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this fundamental dichotomy. While it is the case that Kālīghāṭ once stood on the outskirts of the three villages (Sutāṇuṭi, Kalikātā, and Govindapur) that would become the city of Calcutta, in Ray, Datta, and Caṭṭopādhyāy’s narratives, Kālī is located at the center of the kṣetra and not on its outskirts. Furthermore, as we see in the next section, each of our authors located the discovery of Kālī’s mūrti in specifically uninhabited terrain that very much adheres to the “vana” landscape of which Sontheimer writes. Our authors were thus inverting the Brahminical norm. Their kṣetra is not marked by human settlement and agriculture. It is civilized even though it is forested and uninhabited because Kālī is present, as are her worshipers. Bysack is the only one of our four authors who does not explicitly write of Calcutta sitting on sacred soil. However, he begins his article by stating that his interest in the history of Kālīghāṭ is to determine whether or not it could be placed on a map of Āryāvarta (the land of the Āryans) to be published by members of the Asiatic Society in the Bengali-​language Encyclopedia, “Visíva Kosha” (Bysack 1891, 305).27 So he, too, sought to place this site within a sacred geography of sorts. Placing Kālīghāṭ within the geography of Āryāvarta would be accompanied by a different kind of prestige, as that landscape was part of the Orientalist fantasy of the pure religion of the Āryans (see Kopf 1969, 22–​42; Trautmann 1997). In the end, Bysack could only date Kālīghāṭ back to the fifteenth century, which did not allow him to place it on that map. However, the inquiry itself indicates his interest in putting Calcutta—​quite literally—​on a map that extended far earlier than British presence. It also demonstrates his engagement in modernist historical projects more broadly. Our authors thus generally began their histories of Calcutta by positioning this city on sacred soil and a sacred landscape. Central to that positioning was the goddess Kālī—​and not just any Kālī, but the she whose mūrti is housed in Kālīghāṭ temple.

Calcutta’s Hindu Civilization In these writings, the discovery of Kālī’s mūrti and the beginning of her worship mark the foundation of Calcutta’s human history. These authors argue that Kālī is the reason people first came to this place, and because of her, pious and valorous Hindus have been congregating there for centuries. They embed Kālīghāṭ into a proud political history of Bengal—​a history from which it had previously been excluded.

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The details of our authors’ accounts vary widely. They do not agree on when the Kālī mūrti was found, dating that event to anywhere between the second century ce and sixteenth century ce. They do not agree on who first found it, nor where, locating that event to anywhere from Posta Bazaar in northern Calcutta, to Govindapur, to the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood where it stands today. The most thorough textual analysis cannot compensate for undated and varying versions of manuscripts. Our authors were also supplementing their textual analyses with local legends that had been passed down from generation to generation and clearly differed from family to family. At many points, these authors inserted their own ancestors into their histories—​as founders, patrons, or priests of Kālīghāṭ. Those points in particular vary from one story to the next, often contradicting one another. Despite these differences, each author shares the view that humans had gathered on the soil of Calcutta for centuries before Europeans arrived, and they had done so because Kālī was present on this land in the temple of Kālīghāṭ. I  present each author’s version of the narrative one by one, beginning with Caṭṭopādhyāy, who dates Kālīghāṭ’s founding back the farthest in time, and therefore provides the richest history of this site and its surroundings. Caṭṭopādhyāy writes that Kālī’s mūrti first appeared when Satī’s toes fell to the earth, as reported in the Pīṭhamālā and the Cūḍāmaṇi Tantra (1891, 25). To determine when that mūrti and those toes were discovered by humans, he mines many Sanskrit and Bengali texts. He laments that the Manusaṃhitā, Rāmāyaṇa, and Mahābhārata fail to mention Kālīghāṭ (1891, 29). But that does not mean that Kālī’s mūrti had not yet been discovered when those texts were composed. It only means that Kālī’s mūrti was still in a deeply forested area, known only to a few ascetics who worshiped her there. We know, he writes, that in descriptions of Vijaya Siṅgha’s journey through southern Bengal in 543 bce, no city name is mentioned. Thus, he concludes that prior to that date, Kālīghāṭ was unknown (31). Kālī’s mūrti was definitely established by the time the Purāṇas and Tantras were composed, because Kālīkṣetra and Kālīpiṭhā (which he takes to be clear references to Kālīghāṭ) are mentioned in many of them (32). Unfortunately, Caṭṭopādhyāy does not provide citations for the specific Purāṇas and Tantras of which he writes. He reasons, however, that Kālī’s mūrti must have been found sometime in between 543 bce and the time that the Purāṇas and Tantras were composed. Earlier in his work, he had established that Purāṇic and Tantric forms of Hinduism spread after the time of the Vedas. He is either unconcerned or unaware that specific references to a Kālī in this site may not have appeared in any Tantric or Purāṇic text until the eighteenth century (Sircar 1948, 23–​4).

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Instead, he associates Kālīkṣetra and Kālīpiṭhā with this vague and generous period in the development of Indian literature. He concludes from his analysis that Kālīghāṭ had been discovered “anyūna dvisahaśra batsar pūrbbe” (at least 2,000 years ago) (Caṭṭopādhyāy 1891, 26). Caṭṭopādhyāy then writes a history of Hindu Bengal around Kālīghāṭ in the intervening 2,000  years. He writes that the Buddhist Pāla kings gave land to Brahmins who were aware of Kālīkṣetra and worshiped Kālī there deep in the forest (1891, 32).28 It was at that time that Kālīkṣetra came to be known as Kālīghāṭ because Hindu Vaiśya traders came to Kālīghāṭ by boat, stopping at a ghāṭ (landing steps).29 He writes of Adisur importing Brahmins to this area in the eleventh century30 and of Hindu religion being widely propagated by the Sen dynasty in the twelfth century (34–​6). “Śunte pāoyā jāy” (It is heard), he continues, that during Vallal Sen’s reign, many people visited Kālīkṣetra in order to bathe in the Ganges to remove their sins (34).31 With this, he writes, brahmacārīs (pious ascetics) began to run Hindu maṭhas (monasteries) in this area. He writes that while the Tantric Kāpālika sect had been influential in this region throughout its history, their influence decreased due to the Hindu saint Caitanya spreading Vaiṣṇavism, which promoted bhakti (devotion) (36, 50).32 Under this influence, brahmacārīs and saṃnyāsīs came to worship at Kālīghāṭ. Muslims and Englishmen feature in this narrative only in very small part in order to provide evidence for the dating of certain events. There are two significant moments in the text in which foreign rulers do influence Kālīghāṭ, and that influence comes in the form of deference to the Brahmin proprietors (who, at that time, also served as priests) of the temple—​the Hāldār family, which is possibly the author’s own. The Nawab Alivardhi Khan is credited with having given the Hāldārs their title from Hāvildār—​ or “military in charge”—​likening the Hāldārs to the military personnel in charge of a fort (Caṭṭopādhyāy 1891, 59). The military language referred not only to the Hāldārs’ reign at Kālīghāṭ but also to Kālī as the goddess of power in battle. Caṭṭopādhyāy writes that this was done “Hindudiger santoṣārtha” (for the satisfaction of Hindus) in this area. Furthermore, the British are credited with maintaining the tax-​free status of the neighborhood of Kālīghāṭ after they became zamindars and then rulers of this area (73–​4). Other than the two examples provided above, Muslims and Britons had not, by his account, held any sway over what had gone on at this temple throughout its history. Ray dates the human history of this site back to the twelfth century. He reasons that during the reign of the Buddhist kings in this area when Brahminism was in decline, Brahmins began to incorporate non-​ Vedic

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deities into their pantheon, including Kālī (1902, 12). “It is a matter of history,” he writes, that the king Adisur imported Brahmins to Bengal between the seventh and ninth centuries, but Adisur does not mention Kālī, or Tantra more broadly. Rather, Ray writes, such religious forms did not take root in this region until the reign of Vallal Sen. At that time, Kālīkṣetra had a Brahmin proprietor—​likely Sisa Ganguli (an ancestor of the author’s), but had not maintained much popularity. Ray writes that Kālīghāṭ and Calcutta were both mentioned as distinct sites in the Manasāmaṅgal of the late-​fifteenth century, but only in passing; they were also mentioned in the Candīmaṅgal and another work by Khemānanda in the late-​sixteenth century. By the mid-​ eighteenth century, Kālīghāṭ had attained a place of great ceremony in the Gaṅgābhaktitaraṅgiṇī. Thus, Ray concludes that Kālīghāṭ existed and was inhabited in the twelfth century but was largely unknown until the eighteenth century. To explain how Kālīghāṭ and Calcutta’s prominence increased in the intervening period, Ray turns to a tradition that is corroborated by the Samvandhanirṇayana, a seventeenth-​century Sanskrit genealogy of Bengali families. According to this tradition, Lakṣmikanta (also Ray’s ancestor) was the “owner of the goddess Kālī,” and the son of a famous guru of whom the emperor Jahangir’s deputy in this region, Raja Mansingh, was a student. After having attained Mansingh’s favor, he became a mazumdar (collector) with “Pargana Calcutta, amongst others, allotted to his jagir [landholdings]” (Ray, 1902, 21). Under Lakṣmikanta’s care, Ray writes, both Kālīghāṭ and Calcutta became prosperous. Lakṣmikanta and his descendants were responsible for the installation of many of the temples in the villages of Kālīkṣetra, villages which were “holy spots coming to be known not for their population, industry or wealth, but for their idols” (24–​5). As Ray moves on to his chapter entitled “The British Advent,” he writes of a Calcutta already thriving and prosperous under the care of its Hindu landholders. Their previous efforts to build temples, cultivate the jungle, and build landing ghāṭs and roads attracted “orthodox Hindus of the higher classes” to settle this region (1902, 23).33 He also credits the priests of Kālīghāṭ for assisting in this. It is important to Ray not only that the area of Calcutta was inhabited and developed as far back as the fifteenth century but that it was inhabited and developed by a particular kind of people—​orthodox, high-​caste Hindus. It was due to the presence of these righteous people, Ray argues, that by the time the British arrived in Bengal, this area was well developed commercially, religiously, and socially. Ray concludes, “With a powerful zamindar’s cutchery and a Hindu sanctuary in its centre, and having a number of gods and goddesses around to attract pilgrims, Calcutta, founded

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on the banks of the sacred Bhagirathi (the modern Hooghly), had in it all the elements which go to make a Hindu town great” (1902, 29). Bysack is far more conservative than Caṭṭopādhyāy or Ray in his dating of the discovery of Kālī’s mūrti and the foundation of Kālīghāṭ. He dates these events to the mid-​fifteenth century based on textual analysis supported by traditions. In his article, he examines various Purāṇas and Upapurāṇas but cannot find mention of a Kālī in this spot in any reputable Purāṇic text—​ not even in the Kālikā or Bhāgavata Purāṇas. There is a “Bhavishya” Purāṇa, he reports, that mentions a Kālī on the shores of Govindapur, but that text is not available in its entirety or in reliable form (Bysack 1891, 316). Bysack laments that authoritative Tantras do not mention a Kālī in this locale, while those of “less repute” and relatively late dates of composition do—​including the “Mahá Nila” and “Chudámani” Tantras (307). The first reliable textual source he finds is Kavikaṅkaṇ Mukunda’s late-​fifteenth century Bengali work, Caṇḍīmaṅgal (310). However, he is aware of two different manuscripts of this text, one in which Kālīghāṭ and the village Kalikātā appear, and one in which they do not (309–​10). Thus, even this textual reference is suspect, in Bysack’s opinion. He turns to what he calls two separate “traditions” in order to validate the somewhat precarious textual proof he had found. There is a tradition, he writes, that a Brahmin daśanāmī (a member of one of the ascetic orders said to have been initiated by Śaṅkara; see Clark 2006), named “Jangal Gir,” was the first to discover Kālī’s black stone mūrti in the soil of Govindapur in the fifteenth century (Bysack 1891, 311–​13). The second tradition is that the Seṭh (he transcribes this surname as “Sett”) and Bysack families, the latter of which he was a member, first patronized the worship of Kālī “in her first obscure abode” (315). Those families, he writes, are said to have settled in Govindapur approximately 425 years ago. Since he was writing in 1891, this would place Kālīghāṭ’s early patronage to around the mid-​fifteenth century. These three points of evidence corroborate one another, making Bysack confident in his mid-​fifteenth-​century date. For Bysack, Calcutta’s past was not peopled by Vallal Sen’s Brahmins or the likes of Caitanya. Instead, it was peopled by his own ancestors, whom he claims were the first civilized inhabitants of this land (Bysack 1891, 327).34 It was they who cleared the forest of Govindapur, built homes, excavated water tanks, and established a cloth market there (314). They were the ones who were present when Kālī’s mūrti was discovered, and who first patronized her worship. After that, he writes, a pilgrimage path was made so that the many people who had heard of this “Pithasthán” would be able to visit it (317). And in the seventeenth century, the Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family built Kālī a

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home in her current locale after they acquired zamindari of this area, being as they were Śaktas. Bysack maintains, then, that pilgrims did not gather on this land, and Kālī worship did not flourish, until his family had arrived in Govindapur. Datta is the least interested of our authors in dating precisely when Kālīghāṭ was founded. He relies on Bysack’s textual references, writing that the Mahānīl Tantra mentions Guhya Kālī and that the Bhabiṣyā Upapurāṇa mentions a Kālī in Govindapur (Datta 1901, 16). He reasons, as Caṭṭopādhyāy did, that textual references do not mark when Kālī’s mūrti was first discovered and worshiped but, instead, when that worship had become well known. Perhaps, he writes, the mūrti of Kālī was found in the sixteenth century, but it was likely discovered before that, in ancient times as well. He had already demonstrated through his geological analysis that Calcutta sits on land that is vulnerable to rising and sinking sea levels. It is therefore quite possible, he reasons, that the mūrti disappeared and was rediscovered multiple times. The histories and fates of the temple and city rest on the same land (Datta 1901, 18).35 With this ambiguity regarding the date of Kālī’s discovery, Datta’s portrait of Calcutta before the British is rather less focused on Kālīghāṭ than our other historians. However, he does write of a land that was inhabited by pious and valorous Hindus. He writes that Adisur and each of the Hindu kings of Bengal after him were Śāktas. During their reign, many of the Buddhist temples in Bengal became Śākta and Śiva temples (Datta 1901, 9–​ 10). Wealthy families emigrated to southern Bengal and erected Śiva temples and established mūrtis of the Daśamahāvidyā (10). By the fifteenth century, hundreds of Hindu temples had been established along the Bhāgīrathī and Sarasvatī Rivers. It was at that time, he concludes, that some Brahmin (which Brahmin is unclear) had found the mūrti of Kālī, eventually establishing Kālīghāṭ—​though not for the first time. In both the style and content of each of these projects, we can see their authors inserting Kālīghāṭ into a historical narrative that differs greatly from those of Europeans. Caṭṭopādhyāy, Ray, Bysack, and Datta all place Kālīghāṭ firmly into a history of Calcutta that—​while differing in many details—​ extends beyond the British presence and leaves these colonial overlords with a much more subdued role to play in the city’s history and heritage. While for Britons Job Charnock’s arrival is the city’s defining moment, for our authors this event played only a small and secondary role in Calcutta’s formation, if it played a role at all. After Datta’s chapters on geology and Kālīghāṭ, he focuses the rest of his work on “prācīn paribār” (illustrious families) of Calcutta and their “prācīn ācār byabahār” (old customs), not paying any heed

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to British presence or influence (Datta 1901, 49–​104, 105–​68). Bysack and Caṭṭopādhyāy treat Britons only tangentially, while Ray provides more detail. For our authors, British traders and European settlers were a part of Calcutta’s story, but they did not comprise the character of the city. Kālī’s presence in Kālīghāṭ comprises for them a much more appropriate marker of what this city is really about. There is one more remarkable feature of these narratives that must be elaborated upon before proceeding. Caṭṭopādhyāy and Bysack explicitly expose foreign misunderstandings of the temple in their narratives. Caṭṭopādhyāy writes in his preface that his purpose in writing this book is to set straight conflicting stories about Kālīghāṭ’s origins that were in circulation at his time. He writes that “mahānubhab” (high-​minded) Europeans and Americans express interest in the temple and publish rumors and conflicting stories about it as if they were historical facts (1891, iii). He, on the other hand, had gathered many “aitihāsik vṛttanta” (historical facts) from his own first-​hand knowledge. As such, he was able to correct the rumors about Kālīghāṭ that were propagated by these foreigners. Bysack further exposes foreigners’ role in spreading the false rumor that the name “Calcutta” derived from the name of the goddess Kālī. After admitting the intimate connection between Kālī and Calcutta—​referring to Kālī as the “guardian deity of our city,” known as “Kalkuttáwáli” (Bysack 1891, 323)—​ Bysack writes: No Hindu, not even the most ignorant, will corrupt, in hasty utterance, much less in writing, the name of such a universally worshipped deity as Káli into Kali or Kol. The derivation of Calcutta, therefore, from Kálighát or Kálikshetra, &c., as generally accepted, is philologically, and from a Hindu religious point of view, impossible. (322)

He explains that Nawab Muhabbat Khan wrote in 1806 that some portion of Calcutta’s land was dedicated to the service of Kālī at Kālīghāṭ (Bysack 1891, 311). This idea was picked up in the 1841 Bengal and Agra Annual Guide and Gazetteer, which recorded that Calcutta was dedicated to the goddess “Calee,” from which it derived its name (322).36 A decade later, Major Ralph Smyth wrote that Calcutta’s villages included Sutāṇuṭi, Govindapur, and Kaleeghatta (rather than Kolikātā) (1891). It was these men who forwarded this false notion of Calcutta’s etymology that Bengalis—​including Caṭṭopādhyāy and Ray—​had since adopted. In both Caṭṭopādhyāy and Bysack’s narratives, then, Kālīghāṭ emerges as a site over which foreigners wielded neither power nor knowledge.

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Kālīghāṭ’s Modern Hinduism As our authors established Kālīghāṭ as the foundation of Calcutta and an emblem of Bengali Hindus, they simultaneously worked to clean up the elements of its theology and rituals that were so heavily critiqued by their peers. Just as they wrote kings, zamindars, and peaceful ascetics into Kālīghāṭ’s history, our authors also wrote Kālīghāṭ into a history of Hinduism that marked it as a continuation—​and not a degradation—​of Vedic Hinduism. They simultaneously downplayed the practice of animal sacrifice at this site. In both of these moves, Kālīghāṭ’s Hinduism was reformed. Caṭṭopādhyāy spends the first two chapters of his work tracing Kālī worship back to the Vedas. The Vedas, he writes, were the first manifestation of “hindudharma (the Hindu religion)” in India (1891, 1). In these texts, one formless God is worshipped, although sometimes by many names. He quotes a passage from the Ṛg Veda, alongside Max Müller’s Ancient Sanskrit Literature, to bolster this claim (2). There are many other scholars he might have chosen to cite on this point, including other Bengali Brahmins, or even the famed non-​dualist philosopher, Śaṅkara, but he chooses to cite Max Müller, thus appealing to an authority outside of Hinduism. This perhaps makes him seem more objective, but also shows his familiarity with European scholarship. Hinduism, however, has not remained a monotheistic religion, according to Caṭṭopādhyāy. He writes that in the Manusaṃhitā, Brahmā worship was primary, but with the Purāṇas and Tantras, Brahmā pūjā “lop hoyāche” (disappeared) and in its place the worship of Viṣṇu, Śiva, and his Śakti became predominant (4). In time, he writes, instead of pouring oblations into a fire as they did during the Vedic period, people began to make offerings to an image (3). Here, the worship of many gods through material forms is presented as a self-​evident and logical evolution of Vedic religion. There is a more primordial argument that Caṭṭopādhyāy makes that takes this point beyond historical evolution. He cites various creation stories in Purāṇas and Tantras which refer to Brahmā, Śiva, and Kṛṣṇa worshipping Śakti (Caṭṭopādhyāy 1891, 15). This proves, for Caṭṭopādhyāy, that goddess worship has been taking place since the very beginning of time. Datta, too, historicizes goddess worship, tracing it back to the Āryans. He writes that the practice of worshipping mūrtis of the goddess arose naturally from the worship of the Vedic god Agni (Datta 1901, 9–​10). Significantly, Datta actually writes of Hinduism as a monotheistic religion dedicated to a creator God (Sraṣṭā) that is known by many different names (8–​9). The Āryans of the Vedic age, he explains, worshiped that creator by pouring oblations into

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a fire, while at the time of the Upaniṣads, they began to worship that creator in their minds (8). He then writes that for many people, such worship was dissatisfactory, so they began to describe the creator through different metaphors, using different names like Viṣṇu, Śiva, or simply Mā. This is how he explains the existence of various “sāmpradāya” (sects). He writes that mūrtis were developed to satisfy devotees even further. The Śaktism forwarded in the Tantras and which is patronized at Kālīghāṭ is one such sect within Hinduism. For both Caṭṭopādhyāy and Datta, these discourses on the long durée of the Hindu religion provide the starting point for their discussion of Kālīghāṭ. They felt it necessary to establish this lineage before delving into the details of Kālīghāṭ’s history. They established first and foremost that this temple was aligned with the same Hinduism as that which their respectable contemporaries lauded. Ray and Caṭṭopādhyāy’s assertion that Kālīghat lies at the center of a “kṣetra,” as discussed above, also indicates a universalizing tendency. This formulation connects Kālī to what Ray refers to as “the three primeval gods of the Hindu trinity” (1902, 11) and “the three most ancient and most reliable Hindu Gods” (14). While he maintains that Kālī was a “newcomer” to this Brahminical pantheon, he also writes that by the fifteenth century, Kālī was worshiped by “the highest Hindus in the land” (25). And by the eighteenth century when the Gaṅgābhaktitaraṅgiṇī was composed, he writes: “Kalighat is described as a wonderful place where Brahmins chant hymns, while the worship of the goddess, accompanied by the ‘Homa’ ceremony, is celebrated with much pomp and sacrifice” (19). The homa ceremony is one that Brahmins performed during the Vedic age by pouring oblations into a fire. Bysack is, once again, our outlier. He is not explicitly concerned with molding Kālīghāṭ’s story to conform to an ancient form of Hinduism. He does, however, attribute the finding of Kālī’s mūrti to Jangal Giri, “one of the Dasanánamis” (Bysack 1891, 311). “Giri” (literally “hill”) is one of the 10 names given to initiates in the Daśanāmī order (Daśanāmī means “10 names”) (Clark 2006, 3–​4). He does not elaborate on the theology of the Daśanāmīs, but Bysack’s audience would have been familiar with the sect’s association with the Advaita (non-​dualist) Vedāntin, Śaṅkarācārya. The Daśanāmīs wandered the country covered in ash, performing rituals to Śiva and Śakti (Clark 2006, 81–​103). They thus resembled Tantrikas to an extent, presenting a mixture of respectable Advaitan theology, the power of Śiva and Śakti, and the sanctity attached to the idea of wandering saṃnyāsīs. Jangal Giri’s presence in Bysack’s narrative ties Kālīghāṭ to a

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form of non-​dualistic Hinduism that was more respectable in Bysack’s context than Tantra. While there is no evidence that human sacrifice had ever occurred at Kālīghāṭ,37 both Caṭṭopādhyāy and Ray—​our Śākta Brahmins—​consent to the notion that it did, while rejecting that practice as part of either a non-​ Hindu past or a blip in an otherwise pristine narrative of Hindu history. Ray writes that the human sacrifice that once took place there was a relic of an aboriginal past, perpetrated by uncivilized tribal groups rather than Hindus per se (1902, 14). Those groups used to worship her privately in the midst of a thick jungle until those “highest Hindus in the land” took up Tantric Hinduism and began to worship Kālī at Kālīghāṭ (25). Caṭṭopādhyāy claims the human sacrifices were, in fact, carried out by Hindus. Those Hindus, however, comprised a small sect known as the Kāpālika Tantrikas, who were violent and “proud in body” (Caṭṭopādhyāy 1891, 50).38 Caṭṭopādhyāy writes that it was under the influence of Caitanya that their influence over Kālīghāṭ was subdued (35–​6). The Kāpālikas are thus presented as a rare exception to the norm. Animal sacrifice, on the other hand, certainly did take place at the time these works were written. We are told in these texts that it is a ritual prescription of the temple that at least one goat must be sacrificed each day so that Kālī can be fed some of its meat during her midday meal. Ray is curiously silent on this issue—​not commenting on who performs this practice or why. Bysack denounces it entirely, distancing his Vaiṣṇava ancestors from this particular practice by writing that while they patronized Kālī’s worship, they did not sacrifice animals to her (1891, 315 fn). Under their patronage, he writes, Kālī’s temple was a mere “wretched hut,” not because his ancestors could not afford a pakkā (proper or permanent) temple, but because “their rigid faith in Vaishnavism forbade their taking part in a worship thoroughly Tantric in its rites, and in which the sacrifice of animal life is a sine qua non” (315). Citing great unease with violence, Bysack points to the Vaiṣṇava proscription of sacrifice as evidence of this sect’s superiority to Śaktism. There is an irony to Bysack’s declaration because the Hāldār family who runs the temple is also Vaiṣṇava.39 Caṭṭopādhyāy in particular plays up the Vaiṣṇava elements of Kālīghāṭ. He writes that its first sevāyet, Bhuvaneśvari Cakravartī Kulbrahmacārī, was a Śākta who was able to grasp Kālī directly while engaged in yoga and meditation (1891, 52). However, he writes, we know that Bhuvaneśvari was “not hostile” to Viṣṇu because he collected śālagrāms (stones that are aniconic forms of Viṣṇu), which are still present in the temple today (57). He had one daughter whom he wed to Bhavānīdās Cakravartī, a Vaiṣṇava. Bhavānīdās,

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when he became proprietor of this temple, performed Kālī’s pūjā personally through jap (recitation of the divine name) homa, and vegetal offerings. He did not perform animal sacrifice, except once per year on Navamī (the ninth day) during Durgā Pūjā (80). Caṭṭopādhyāy writes that only pilgrims perform animal sacrifice. Datta, too, writes that the Hāldārs were Vaiṣṇava and did not perform animal sacrifice, except for once a year:  “They only sacrifice one goat on Mahāṣṭamī day [the eight day of Durgā Pūjā]. Daily, innumerable goats and buffalo are sacrificed—​they are given by pilgrims (jātrīdiger pradatta)” (1901, 21). So while the temple was Tantric in origin, and while it remains a Śākta temple, for Caṭṭopādhyāy and Datta, that is only part of its story. It is characterized by non-​violent forms of worship due to its proprietors’ Vaiṣṇavism. Caṭṭopādhyāy goes further in emphasizing the Vaiṣṇava features of Kālīghāṭ by writing Caitanya into its past. Caitanya lived in the sixteenth century and is taken by his devotees to be an incarnation of Kṛṣṇa. His devotional movement was experiencing a revival in Bengal in the late nineteenth century, even though he does not figure in any of the other writings considered here.40 As Caṭṭopādhyāy recounts the lineage of the Hāldār family, he tells us that Bhavānīdās’s grandfather was Chaṇḍībar Cakravartī, who lived during the time of the binding agreement of Devībar (we are not told who this is) in 1509—​the same year, Caṭṭopādhyāy writes, that Caitanya took saṃnyās (1891, 54). Under the auspices of providing the reader with corroborating dates of events, Caṭṭopādhyāy takes this opportunity to write a long description of Caitanya’s qualities, including his fair complexion, possession of good form, and his eradication of malice, drunkenness and caste distinction. We are also told of the effect that his propagation of the Vaiṣṇava religion had on decreasing the influence of tamasic (those associated with tamas [darkness or inertia], the third of the three guṇas [qualities] in Hindu traditions) precepts including human sacrifice, as well as the tyranny of Kāpālikas, in many areas (54–​5). Caitanya’s non-​violent and devotional proclivities had improved the entire region, including Kālīghāṭ, according to Caṭṭopādhyāy. Falling somewhere in between the famous Hindu reformists and revivalists of their time, our authors each promoted a unified Hinduism that was Vedic in origin and Vaiṣṇava in practice. These authors worked to ascribe modern forms of Hinduism to Kālīghāṭ, which would mark it as respectable among their middle-​class peers. Kālīghāṭ could, then, become a proud emblem not only of the Hindu people on a Hindu land but also of the Hindu religion. This is the thrust of Bengali histories of Calcutta that continued to be composed in the early twentieth century. Harisādhan Mukhopādhyāy’s

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much-​ acclaimed and much-​ cited 1915 work, Kalikātā Sekāler O Ekāler (Calcutta Then and Now), provides good evidence of this.41 His trajectory from geology to Kālīghāṭ to the arrival of the British closely resembles Ray’s, and he explicitly cites Bysack, Caṭṭopādhyāy, and Ray’s works in this treatment of Calcutta and Kālīghāṭ. He in fact provides a far more thorough treatment of the history of pious Bengali Hindus in this area than the authors discussed here.42

Alternative Narratives and Non-​narratives Britons and Bengalis clearly present alternative narratives of Calcutta and Kālīghāṭ’s history. Yet so far I  have painted a portrait of these histories as comprising two opposing ends of a spectrum. The story is not quite that simple. First, these writers drew upon one another’s work and knowledge. For example, Wilson, in his 1895 Early Annals of the English in Bengal, relies heavily on Bysack’s article as well as “the tradition according to Babu Surjakumar Chatterji,” for information on the pre-​European history of the city (Wilson 1895, 130). Ray specifically thanks “Professor C. R. Wilson” in his preface and relies on his work a great deal throughout his text. He even cites Wilson’s version of the Śaktipīṭh legend that Wilson had in fact acquired from Bysack (Ray 1902, 10 fn 1). So there is a great deal of intertextuality at work here, indicating once again that certain facts regarding Calcutta’s history were shared, even while they were framed very differently. Furthermore, not all Britons and Bengalis fell to the expected ends of the spectrum. There was at least one British convert to Kālī who felt warmly toward Kālīghāṭ. The Irish Śakta, Nivedita, gave a speech there in 1899, in which she called it “the refuge of pious souls in need, sorrow and thanksgiving, and their last thought in the hour of death” (Nivedita 1967, 444).43 And there were other Bengalis who shared with most Britons the feeling that Kālīghāṭ was a blot on Calcutta’s landscape, rather than something to be proud of. Shib Chunder Bose writes of Kālīghāṭ in 1881, “It is painful to reflect that notwithstanding the progress of enlightenment in the great centre of Indian civilization, people still cling to the adoration of a blood-​thirsty goddess” (147). Govind Chunder Dutt—​a convert to Christianity—​lamented the “grim idolatry” that continued to reign over India, the worst example of which was Kālī at Kālīghāṭ—​“that goddess dread, reeking with blood and wine” (1870, 192). There were other bhadralok writers still who fell somewhere in between—​including much of the “chaos-​leads-​to-​order narrative”44 that was

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characteristic of British narratives, and yet not deriding its religion in the ways that British historians as well as Bose and Dutt did. In a Bengali-​language guidebook written in 1890, Upendranāth Mukhopādhyāy writes of Calcutta as “bhārater sarbotkṛṭṣa mahānagar” (the greatest city in India), attributing its development from swamp to majesty to the “suśāsan” (good governance) and “byabsā” (business activities) of the English (i, iv).45 However, his work also prominently features the neighborhoods inhabited by “deśīya” (native) peoples. He further writes of Kālīghāṭ as a site of great devotion, popular throughout history, where people used to come into the depths of the jungle in order to worship the goddess “prāner āśāy jolāñjalī dibā” (offering handfuls of water) (iv). This is a far cry from the descriptions of Kālīghāṭ as a site of human sacrifice and the dreaded cult of the Thugs. Similarly, in 1905, Binaya Krishna Deb wrote the English-​ language book, The Early History and Growth of Calcutta. Deb, too, begins his work by characterizing Calcutta as a city of progress: “Its metamorphosis from a small collection of villages in the midst of a swampy land has been characterised as unprecedented” (1905, 1). He in fact employs entirely British written records for his account of Calcutta. However, Deb writes that “Kalighat or Kalikshetra, is reckoned by Hindus as one of the holiest places of worship in Hindustan. . . . From remote times, vows have been made here for the attainment of objects, and it is on record that in many instances the objects have been realised” (63). While Deb characterizes Calcutta as a city of British glories, he does not ignore the power and fame that Hindus attributed to Kālīghāṭ. It is difficult to discern what kinds of narratives the city’s lower-​class Hindu and Muslim citizens told about the history of Calcutta and Kālīghāṭ. We do not have access to their stories because—​by and large—​in Calcutta they did not have access to education, writing, and publishing houses. My guess is that such a history was not of much concern to them. Critiques of bhadralok culture are ubiquitous in the artwork composed by the communities of low-​ caste Hindu and Muslims patuas (artisans) who were based in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood at this time (see Banerjee 1989, 130–​7). Images of bhadralok men being bossed around by women and carousing with prostitutes are evidence of the harsh critiques these artisans had of what they felt to be the Western influences reflected in bhadralok culture. We might imagine that for them, as well as for temple priests, beggars, and the sex workers who lived in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood, this was a site of life and livelihood, just as it is for non-​elites now. They may have taken a certain pride in the existence of this Śaktipīṭh in their midst. But these men and women were likely not interested in questions about who founded Calcutta or whether or not Kālī was

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a Vedic goddess. They were also likely not interested in a modern scientific history of Kālīghāṭ. Even while middle-​class writers’ histories varied a great deal, they espoused a set of questions and values, and performed a form of knowledge, that very much distinguished them from their Indian peers.

Wrestling with Histories Today In 1990, Calcutta celebrated its 300-​ year anniversary, thereby making 1690—​the year that Job Charnock set up a factory in this locale for the East India Company—​the official date of the city’s origins. It would appear that our Bengali historians’ narratives had not been internalized by the broader population, even a century after they had been composed. However, in the same year, numerous historians published anniversary volumes critiquing this dating of the city’s origins, drawing on our turn-​of-​the-​twentieth-​century historians and their treatment of Kālīghāṭ. These historians interlaced the colonial and indigenous legacies of the city. Pratapaditya Pal, for example, in his Changing Visions, Lasting Images: Calcutta Through 300 years, writes: “No matter how many statues of British imperialists are removed from public places and replaced with those of Indian heroes (or occasionally of other foreigners), the fact remains that the three major cities of India—​Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras—​are creations of the British” (1990, vii). Yet, just a few pages later, he writes, “Job Charnock may have been responsible for he foundation of the city, but its most ancient inhabitant is the goddess Kālī” (xii). For Pal, Kālī was the earliest inhabitant of this place, and yet the British created Calcutta. Not only that, but the British helped Kālīghāṭ become the major pilgrimage site it is today. Pal writes that Kālī was deep in a jungle when the British arrived, but the British built roads to make it safe for pilgrims to visit her. The contestation of the city’s 300th birthday in 1990 culminated in a public interest litigation (PIL) suit that was brought to the Calcutta High Court in 2003 by descendants of the Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family. They questioned whether the city had a founder or a founding date at all. By the time of this suit, Calcutta’s name had already been changed to “Kolkata” in order to shed some of the colonial legacy of the city. The new name more closely resembled the indigenous pronunciation of Kalikātā—​the village from which the city got its Anglicized name. The court appealed to local university professors who declared that “the famous shrine of Kalighat” and a “flourishing cloth market” proved that “Kalikata before the coming of the English was an important place” (Sabarna Roychowdhury Paribar

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v. The State of West Bengal and Ors).46 So even while some city historians, including the prolific P.  T. Nair, reject the assertion that Kālīghāṭ forms the foundation of Calcutta, it appears that this notion began to gain a wider following toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-​first.47 Sūrjyakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy, Gaur Das Bysack, Prāṇkṛṣṇa Datta, and Atul Kṛṣṇa Ray opened up the possibility for Kālīghāṭ to become emblematic of Calcutta and its Hindu population and religion. In order to be a proud emblem, it had to be modernized. Thus, they also began the process by which Kālīghāṭ’s Hinduism would be reformed to adhere to a Vedic and non-​violent form. Their works were marginal at their time, and yet would be cited in later modernization efforts, including those discussed in the next chapter. There, and in the following chapter, I demonstrate how middle-​class efforts to modernize the temple changed when tools beyond books and periodicals became available. Whereas these four historians had the means to work on Kālīghāṭ conceptually, later modernizers had the means to work on the temple institutionally and physically.

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2 A Religious Institution Goes Public

T

hrough their adjudication of lawsuits at the district, state, and national levels, Indian judges worked to modernize Kālīghāṭ’s system of management between 1941 and 1961.1 They were critical of clerical wealth and Brahmins’ acquisition of their priestly roles through hereditary means rather than merit. They saw these as evidence of a backward and corrupt system in need of reform. Through their declaration that Kālīghāṭ was a “public” temple, judges wrested control of its resources from sevāyets (Brahmin proprietors; literally “those who serve” the deity) and bestowed it upon men and women who shared their middle-​class standing and modernist outlook. Whereas temple Brahmins felt subject to Kālī alone, Kālīghāṭ’s new managers would be subject to the authority of the courts. This changed the very function of the temple in the eyes of the law. Where Kālīghāṭ’s purpose had once been to ensure Kālī’s propitiation so that she remained efficacious, through these twentieth-​century lawsuits, Kālīghāṭ became a site whose purpose was to serve the public and their needs. This shift in the legal domain did not immediately or universally alter devotees’ perspectives of the temple, but its effects continue to be borne out today as middle-​class men and women engage in public interest litigation to enact their will upon the temple. The idea that “public interest” ought to be brought to bear upon Kālīghāṭ first became salient in the twentieth-​century rulings examined in this chapter. In anticipation of this argument, I provide here a brief outline of these rulings. In 1937, Harendra Nath Haldar, a prospective sevāyet, approached the District Court of 24 Parganas on behalf of the goddess Kālī. He beseeched the authorities to protect the goddess’s belongings from her other sevāyets who were stealing her wealth, jewels, and land. He argued that “the shebaits are not entitled to enjoy the surplus of [temple] profits or any part

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of it on their own accounts” (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 5).2 He requested that the court impose a scheme of management upon the temple to ensure that Kālī’s sevāyets did not abuse their proximity to her wealth by retaining it for their own profit. Eighty-​four sevāyets appeared as defendants in this suit. They argued that their role as sevāyets did indeed entitle them to enjoy Kālī’s excess wealth for their own profit. The inheritance of their roles meant that Kālī had entrusted her care to them, allowing them full access to her assets. H. N. Haldar disagreed, and so did the District Court judge, Gyanendra Mohon Chatterjee. In his 1941 ruling, he called for the creation of a scheme of management to curtail the sevāyets’ claims to temple wealth. He also ruled—​without prompting from either the plaintiff or defendants in the suit—​that Kālīghāṭ was a public temple. Based on a lengthy consideration of historical texts (including Caṭṭopādhyāy’s Kālīkṣetra Dīpikā, examined in the previous chapter), Justice Chatterjee declared that Kālīghāṭ was of too great importance historically and religiously to be managed by a private family. He ruled that Kālīghāṭ was a public institution and, as such, “Outsiders should be represented in the scheme of management” (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 120). He did not specify who those outsiders ought to be or how they ought to be chosen. “Public,” then, was not the language of the petitioner in this case, but was the language of the court. In 1949, the same District Court approved a scheme of management that the sevāyets proposed, even though that scheme allowed only sevāyets to comprise its management committee. In 1955, Kālī—​this time represented by her friend Manik Lal Mukherjee—​appealed that decision, claiming that no sevāyets should be part of Kālīghāṭ’s management now that the temple had been deemed a public institution. The Calcutta High Court conceded in 1956 that sevāyets ought not comprise the entirety of Kālīghāṭ’s management structure but maintained that they should continue to be involved. Justice Ramaprosad Mookerjee and his bench created the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee that would include six representatives of the public alongside twelve sevāyets. Thus, “outsiders” were indeed present, comprising one third of the Temple Committee, but sevāyets would still comprise a majority of the governing body. The representatives of the public were to be selected by the District Judge, the Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University, the Executive Body of the Chamber of Commerce, the Calcutta Corporation, the Bharat Sevāśram Saṅgha (a Hindu charitable organization), and one jointly nominated by three Sanskrit educational institutions in the city. They further had to be educated Hindus who had either passed the school Final Examination or the state-​recognized Sanskrit Title Examination (Banerjee v. Mukherjee 1956,

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16–​18). There is no indication in the court documents of how the High Court bench decided that these individuals would have a better sense of how Kālī’s money ought to be spent than Kālīghāṭ’s hereditary sevāyets. Justice Mookerjee further ordered the temple’s excess funds to be allocated toward religious, educational, and spiritual ends—​all of which were held to comprise the public’s interest. The court in this case thus determined not only that the temple was public but who ought to represent that public and what constituted that public’s needs. Kālī and her friend were still not satisfied. They appealed the High Court’s judgment in the Supreme Court of India in 1960. The Chief Justice, Bhuvaneswar Prasad Sinha, along with four other judges on the national court bench, ruled in 1961 that sevāyets were still overrepresented in the High Court’s scheme and that the previously assigned public representatives ought to comprise the majority of the Temple Committee. There would still be six public representatives on the Committee, but only five sevāyets (Kalimata v.  Mukherjee 1961, 53). Those public representatives would be chosen in a similar fashion as was outlined by the High Court. To sum up: in 1941, the temple became public, and “outsiders” would be involved in temple management; in 1956, the public would comprise one-​ third of the Temple Committee; and finally, in 1961, the public would comprise over half of it. That is the ruling that stands to this day.

Modernizing Temple Management Many temples in India today have been declared public institutions either directly by the state or through the judiciary’s adjudication of lawsuits such as these. That demarcation removes control over the temple’s financial affairs from the Brahmins who formerly managed them and places it in the hands of state or state-​appointed bodies. This shift began in the late eighteenth century under East India Company rule and has continued throughout colonial rule and in independent India. It reflects an evolving attitude toward religious institutions that is steeped in modernist critiques of temple Brahmins’ accumulation of wealth, according to a particularly Protestant Christian and Hindu Reformist model of the purpose of a religious institution and its ritual officiates. For British lawmakers, as well as British and Indian judges, religion and economy were separate spheres of human activity, so that religious officiates were not allowed to benefit monetarily from their positions. In independent India, lawmakers and judges continue this legacy, preferring when there is an option to envelop temples under the rubric “public.” Moves

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to further sever religion and economic interests (even while that severance means state intervention) are moves to modernize temple management according to values that had not been applied to temples prior to the eighteenth century. Scholarship on the modernization of temple management has mostly centered on the state of Tamil Nadu (see Appadurai 1981; Fuller 1984; Presler 1987; Price 2008, 106–​31). There, prior to the arrival of the British, the deities whom temples housed were thought to enact sovereignty, and the kings and zamindars who endowed temples were thought to share in that sovereignty. Together, the king and deity oversaw a redistributive process whereby donations made to the deity were redistributed as honors to donors, priests, and devotees (see Appadurai 1981, 20–​ 62; Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976). Under British rule, however, the notion of shared political and divine sovereignty was dissolved, and the state’s involvement in the temple became merely administrative. Employing the idioms of “protection” and “efficiency,” state bodies including the Board of Revenue, Hindu Religious Endowments Board, and the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment Board incorporated temples into a bureaucratic system whereby their financial (dubbed secular) aspects were ruled according to uniform and universal rules—​thus “protecting” the redistributive process “efficiently.” Brahmins retained their right to perform ritual functions but lost claims to temple wealth. One aspect that this scholarship has noted but not fully explored is that what was being protected by these state bodies was not the temple’s redistributive process as it stood, but the needs of the public as defined by the state (Appadurai 1981, 57; Presler 1987, 3). The courts’ intervention in Kālīghāṭ’s management differs from state bodies’ interventions in Tamil temples. At Kālīghāṭ, judges worked through the court system to put in place a representative body to manage the temple during the decades in which the colonial state was being replaced by an independent Indian state. This arrangement was—​at least in its framing—​ more democratic than imperialist. Yet its effects are similar in that control of temple affairs has been removed from its former authorities and placed under the control of a managing body created by an external governing entity. That managing body’s charge is to ensure the protection and comfort not only (or not even) of divine figures, but of the public.3 These similarities point to the ongoing legacy of colonial law and attitudes that continue to influence the ways in which religious institutions are conceptualized in Indian society today. With this chapter, I bring the conversation regarding temple modernization to Kālīghāṭ in Bengal and make three distinct interventions in it.

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First, I  draw attention to the role of judges as modernizers. In Bengal, state intervention in temple affairs was not universal but necessitated a deliberate instigation by a petitioner and lawyer as well as a particular interpretation of the religious institution by a judge within colonial law—​or, after independence, colonial-​influenced law. Kālīghāṭ’s Brahmin sevāyets held exclusive authority over that temple right up until the time of these lawsuits. The judges themselves may not have thought of their role on court benches as being that of modernization. They were by definition middle class, as they required advanced legal education in the English language. They were thoroughly enmeshed in westernized institutions in India’s urban centers and were leaders in Indian public life.4 Each of the judges in these cases were furthermore upper-​caste Hindus. However, they did not necessarily see their role in the court as anything but enforcing laws they did not create. For example, I demonstrate in this chapter that judges were compelled to frame temples as endowments, and sevāyets as trustees, because that was the established legal mechanism by which they were able to hear and adjudicate suits pertaining to those institutions. They were also compelled to use the language of “public” and “private” to classify temples as endowments, even though that language did not abide by the traditional logic of the temple. However, the judges in the case of Kālīghāṭ did have the option to maintain that the temple was a private endowment such that its Brahmin proprietors would maintain their authority over it. In fact, that would have been the most obvious outcome of the original suit instituted by Kālī via H.  N. Haldar. The Indian judge in that initial case had to enlist an unusual set of legal machinations to declare Kālīghāṭ public. Later, judges in the higher courts would be more explicit than Justice Chatterjee in their condemnation of Brahmin behavior in their rulings. Many scholars have noted the reformist tendencies of India’s courts (see, e.g., Acevedo 2013; Berti et al. 2015). Furthermore, the copious literature on judicial activism in India indicates that judges’ interpretations of law differ a great deal depending on their outlooks (see Deva 2010; Sathe 2002).5 I argue that we ought to pay attention to those outlooks when we consider judges’ treatment of Hindu temples. Indian judges shared in, and co-​constructed with their British colleagues, a discourse of religious reform (Scott 2016) as well as an assent to the sovereignty of reason as espoused by the courts (Gilmartin 2015). H. N. Haldar’s position presents an opportunity to reflect on the class location of Kālīghāṭ’s sevāyets. Most of the sevāyets opposed the changes introduced by the courts, defending their caste and familial positions according to a traditional social order—​an order that was not socially engineered but that was divinely ordained. They argued that they owned temple property and their

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right to earn money from it, according to the will of Kālī. There was nothing modern about this view. H. N. Haldar’s complaints about Kālīghāṭ’s sevāyets, on the other hand, reflect the same kind of modern middle-​class sentiment as that expressed by the judges even though he was a prospective sevāyet raised in a sevāyet family, presumably in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood. As Brahmins, sevāyets were (and still are) eligible for entry into Calcutta’s middle classes. However, as priests trained in Sanskrit rituals and mantras to propitiate the goddess, and who are interested in protecting the traditional system of the temple, they do not necessarily value the kind of prestige that middle-​class status promises in all circumstances. However, that is not to say that many of them are not middle class. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of Kālīghāṭ’s sevāyets did in fact acquire Western-​style education and became writers, bankers, and teachers, placing them among Calcutta’s growing middle classes. As the temple’s wealth increased due to its location in the capital city, and as each individual sevāyet’s responsibilities took less of their time, some used their greater income and leisure time to enter educational institutions and obtain professional employment outside their work at the temple. H. N. Haldar, for example, wrote and spoke English and had connections to lawyers who were willing to offer their services to him at a low rate.6 Some of the other sevāyets likely sent their children to English-​medium schools. Regardless of their class positions, and regardless of how modern their values were in other arenas, when they defended their hereditary rights as Brahmins in the Haldar family and their privileges ordained by Kālī, they were not enacting a middle-​class status because such rights and privileges are precisely the values that modernizers eschewed. Class status is not something one simply has, but something one performs in certain contexts. Thus, with the crucial exception of H.  N. Haldar, this set of cases was one in which middle-​class judges sought to modernize the temple system over and against the vast majority of sevāyets who wanted to maintain their traditional roles at the temple. My second intervention in scholarship on temple changes in the modern era is a focus on the legal designation of “public.” Drawing on recent scholarship on the definition and regulation of notions of the public by the Indian state, and particularly its courts, I argue that the court benches’ use of this language to legally frame Hindu temples was a way for courts to assert their authority within them (see Freitag 1991; Scott and Ingram 2015).7 It not only justified their removal of the temple’s traditional authorities but also allowed them to determine the public services toward which excess temple funds would be allocated—​charity and religious propagation. The temple funds were to be redistributed not, then, to its caretakers and donors but to certain

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segments of the public that the courts selected. The High Court judges further selected educational and civic elites in the city to appoint representatives of the public to sit on the temple’s management committee. Those representatives would likely share the judges’ values that deemed their presence at the temple necessary. Furthermore, they were part of an elite culture that held detached reason to be sovereign and sought to use that reason to reform what it saw as irrational and corrupt religion (see Gilmartin 2015, 377–​8). As non-​sevāyets, the public representatives would be removed from the pecuniary and hereditary interests that they felt held temple Brahmins in a regressive social pattern. I do not argue that judges and the men they selected to Kālīghāṭ’s management committee agreed on all aspects of temple administration. Their similar class positions do not imply a unity in their opinions. Yet I want to draw attention to the fact that the judges only deemed a certain kind of person as suited to the task of representing the public. Court benches then elided the multiplicity of Indian publics, reifying the notion that there is a singular and unitary Indian public on whose behalf the courts act (see Mah 2000). The designation of this temple as “public” appealed to a democratic ideal when it in fact replaced the rule of one elite—​Brahmin sevāyets—​with another—​an educated middle class. Finally, I  argue—​counter to Appadurai’s (1981) well-​known argument—​ that the management system the courts imposed upon Kālīghāṭ did in fact effect a change in the temple as a cultural institution. While Appadurai and others pay close attention to the continuities in the temple’s redistributive process under various governmental arrangements, I  draw attention to whom and what that redistributive process is thought to be in service of. If the redistributive process was once in the service of human and divine actors who were in relationship with one another through offerings and honors, the temple’s legal designation as a public institution shifted the purpose of that redistribution to be in service of the public’s needs.8 Accordingly, over time, attitudes toward the temple have shifted from a site where the divine exercises her authority to one upon which the Hindu public (or at least an elite segment thereof) can exercise its authority. The temple is still a site where, according to devotees, the goddess must be pleased and where people commune with her. But it is now also a site where members of the public must be pleased. If they are not, they can beseech the courts to ensure that temple management heeds their desires. While the case of Kālīghāṭ is certainly unique vis-​à-​vis the scholarship regarding South Indian temples, I wonder whether state control of those temples’ management systems also altered their cultural function. There, state bodies presume to represent the public and are charged with protecting the public nature of temples as trusts.

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In each of these cases, the application of the modern logic that a temple is a public entity legally changes the temple’s purpose. In service of these three distinct interventions, in the next section I outline the logic by which Kālīghāṭ has traditionally functioned. I  then turn to shifting attitudes toward temple Brahmins among middle-​class actors in late colonial India, particularly Calcutta. I further chart the development of the laws that came to govern temples in India and that restrict Brahmins’ power within them. These provide the necessary framework for returning to the details of the twentieth-​century lawsuits and investigating the use of the term “public” in altering the legal purpose of the temple.

Temple Logics In this section I outline the logic by which Hindu temples functioned before and/​or outside of government intervention in order to set them apart from the logic of the courts. As I do so, I use the present tense to highlight the fact that traditional logics are still operative to some extent in the present day, even if not within the official bounds of the law. Temples are homes to divine beings who are physically embodied in mūrtis. The divine beings residing in temples interact with devotees, exercise power, and enact sovereignty. They require special care so that they remain satisfied and therefore efficacious in that locale. Various groups of Brahmin priests carry out that special care, which includes daily rituals of propitiation, feedings, and cleanings. If this is done well, then ordinary devotees can commune with gods and goddesses in temples and request their grace and power as and when they are needed. Apart from engaging in visual exchange with the divine in a practice called darśan, worshipers also bring material gifts to gods and goddesses, including flowers, sweets, coins, rupee notes, and silver and gold ornaments.9 Offerings are made through an intermediary Brahmin priest. The deity blesses the offerings, and some portion of that or a different offering is given back to the devotee as a token of divine blessing. The rest of the offering is then distributed to the Brahmins and temple staff, and sometimes to other devotees. The volume of offerings means that temples of any size or importance play a huge role in the economy, providing food, income, and housing to thousands (see Stein 1960). It also means they are deeply intertwined with politics. Formerly, kings and zamindars aligned themselves with various religious institutions in their domains by building and patronizing temples and, along with wealthy merchants, offering lavish gifts of gold as well as rooms,

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ghāṭs (steps leading to a river), and further additions to temple structures (Branfoot 2013). Descendants of the former zamindars of the Calcutta area who built the current temple, along with Hindu politicians, continue to associate themselves with the temple in smaller ways, by offering prayers there or erecting gates and plaques nearby.10 Visits to Kālī at Kālīghāṭ furthermore assure movie stars and cricket players of an enhanced public image.11 The first sevāyet of Kālīghāṭ was its first householder priest, Bhavānīdās Cakravartī, who lived sometime in the seventeenth century.12 He had one grandson through his first wife, and four from his second. After he passed away, those five male grandsons each became sevāyets of Kālīghāṭ, and they managed the temple in turns, known as pālā (literally “turn,” though some sevāyets described them to me using the English word “shares”). They divided the year among themselves so that each one had the full responsibility and benefits of temple worship on certain days.13 This meant that they provided all of the ritual accoutrements necessary for worship and either performed or hired someone else to perform the necessary rituals to Kālī.14 They then received the full surplus of temple income for the period of time for which they bore these responsibilities, after having paid the cooks, cleaners, other priests, and temple staff. Each of the five grandsons received six days of each month, and they also split the remaining five days a year. That gave each sevāyet 73 days total per year as their pālā. As they had sons and daughters (females do inherit pālās), each individual sevāyet had fewer and fewer days. Today, some of the lineages of those original five sevāyets are comprised of hundreds of people so that individual family members may only receive one day or even just a few hours a year as their pālā. It is unclear exactly how much income sevāyets receive through this system. Christian missionaries in the early nineteenth century reported that the temple income was very large, though they may have been exaggerating. For these Protestant men, the flagrant manner in which money was offered to mūrtis and displayed in temples constituted an inappropriate intertwining of money and religion. William Ward describes individual donors as giving 4,000 to 25,000 rupees worth of offerings at a time to Kālī at Kālīghāṭ and the daily income of the temple being “astonishingly numerous,” consisting of over 600 pounds of rice, over 100 pounds of sweets, 75 of sugar, along with large amounts of flour, milk, ghee, vegetables, plantains, goat meat, and often lavish jewelry (1822, 121–​3).15 In 1839, another missionary describes devotees throwing offerings into “a large heap of money—​ copper, and silver, and gold” guarded by a Brahmin who stood next to it and handed out flowers (Duff 1839, 177–​8). In 1891, Sūrjyakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy listed large donations of jewelry, small shrines, and architectural features that had been

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given to Kālī at Kālīghāṭ, along with their donors (1891, 78–​84, 89–​91). Today, the matter of sevāyets’ income is widely discussed in Calcutta’s courts and newspapers, and sevāyets are loath to admit to a particular figure. Some estimate that the temple’s daily income ranges from anywhere between 60,000 to 500,000 rupees.16 A temple’s wealth has not traditionally been deemed problematic for Hindu devotees (Derrett 1999, 487–​8). In fact, the wealthier the temple, the more powerful the deity within is thought to be. Furthermore, it is understood that Brahmins receive much of the wealth that a temple accrues. Devotees make offerings to the deity in order to impress him or her. Once the gift has been received by the deity, and the impression made, the spiritual consequences have been incurred and the final resting place of the majority of that gift is of no great concern to devotees (Derrett 1999, 486; Sontheimer 1965, 56). Many told me during my fieldwork (without disapproval) that when the money they offered to Kālī was received by her, the priests probably took it for themselves afterwards. This is how they make their living, after all. Devotees became upset when priests took offerings away from them before they actually got to offer them to Kālī. But once the offering was made, they were well aware that the money or items went to the Brahmins. Similarly, throughout my fieldwork I observed men and women making offerings of money to the Adi Ganga River that flows nearby Kālīghāṭ. Young boys with large magnets on the ends of ropes would fish out that money and keep it. In those instances, too, devotees remarked unabashedly that it must be the wish of the goddess Gaṅgā to give these poor boys money with the offerings she received.

A New Regime for Temple Brahmins In 1880, the Bengali satirist Durgācaraṇ Rāy proclaimed that Kālī was freezing. Every time a nice piece of clothing was offered to her, a sevāyet would yell “My pālā, my pālā!” and take it away from her (Rāy 1880, 417). In his book, Devgaṇer Marrtye Āgaman, the gods Brahmā, Varuṇ, Indra, and Nārāyaṇ travel on a steam train from Haridwar to Calcutta. As they step off the tram that brings them to the neighborhood of Kālīghāṭ, they are immediately harassed by pāṇḍās who want to be their guides (415). Varuṇ calls them liars and accuses them of wanting to cheat devotees out of the money that they would give to Kālī for pūjā. When they enter the temple, they see the wife of a sevāyet openly breastfeeding. She tells them her husband entrusted her to safeguard the incoming offerings while he went to open up a shop

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(416). In the inner sanctum, Kālī cries out to the gods, telling them that she is merely the earning doll (upārjaner putul) to this family of insects who is sucking her blood (cuṣe cuṣe rakta khācche) (417). Rāy was not alone in his assessment of sevāyets’ avarice. The next year, Shib Chunder Bose depicted Kālīghāṭ as “the private domicile of the priests, [that] presents an uninterrupted scene of bacchanalian revelry, which is unspeakably abominable” (1881, 146). Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the most prominent of Calcutta’s reformers and revivalists, including Rammohan Roy and Keshab Chunder Sen, critiqued Brahmins as purveyors of superstition whose greed for material wealth superseded their interest in divine truths. They further accused Brahmins of hiding those truths from devotees by maintaining that only those with Sanskrit training could access sacred scriptures (Scott 2016, 85–​118).17 While there is a long-​ standing trope in pre-​modern Sanskrit literature critiquing temple Brahmins and their wealth, that critique rested on the logic that Brahmins ought only receive wealth from honorable, high-​caste individuals. As temple Brahmins received money from all manner of people, they were considered to comprise a lower rung of the Brahmin hierarchy (see Davis 2001, 11–​18; Heesterman 1973, 155; von Stietencron 2005, 58–​9). Colonial-​era critiques of temple Brahmins were quite different. In a tract attributed to Roy, it is stated: “these Pundits derive much profit from their [householders] worshipping images, whereas they derive none from the worship of the supreme God; for all the presents made unto the images, as jewels, clothes, &c. . . . all these things are for the profit of these men” (Dialogue 1820, 123; quoted in Derrett 1999, 487).18 The critique was not about constant contact with low-​caste Hindus, but about profiting from superstitious practices when one ought to be focused on truth. Nor was the critique about the acquisition of wealth in general. Roy and his compatriots argued, in fact, that worldly engagement was necessary for the welfare of humankind, but that money should be earned through hard work. They also argued that if one’s passions were unrestrained, then delusion—​rather than liberation—​would result (Hatcher 2007, 309–​11). J. Barton Scott’s (2016) recent work expertly demonstrates that these kinds of critiques of priests were produced jointly by Hindu reformers and nationalists, Protestant missionaries, and British historians and administrators. These groups critiqued priests for claiming to stand outside mundane power, subject to god/​s alone. Hindu reformers’ critiques of Hindu priests furthermore mirror many of the Protestant critiques of Catholic priests during and after the Protestant Reformation. Freeing Hindus from the unjustified and oppressive rule of priests was indeed part of the so-​called “civilizing mission” of British rule, just as the cultivation of a Hindu culture

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of worldly asceticism detached from temple worship and its priests was one of the aims of Hindu reformers and nationalists. Both goals hinged on the necessity of removing authority from temple Brahmins who were dubbed unworthy of religious authority or Hindus’ deference. Negative attitudes toward priests were amplified by the frequency with which temple Brahmins appeared in British courts, accused of greed or licentiousness or both. The Maharaj libel case is one of the most famous of these cases (see Scott 2015). The Elokeshi scandal in Bengal is another (see Sarkar 2001, 53–​94).19 In the early 1870s, a priest at Tarakeswar Temple outside Calcutta allegedly seduced and then raped a middle-​class housewife named Elokeshi while her husband was away in the city working for the British government. When that husband returned from Calcutta and decapitated his wife in a fit of jealousy, Bengalis’ sympathies fell to him, calling for his term of life imprisonment to be lessened, while calling for an extension of the priest’s three-​year term. Throughout the trial of the husband and the priest, the Hooghly Sessions court was so overwhelmed by people wanting to view the unfolding spectacle that they began to charge an admissions fee (Sarkar 2001, 74). The impious priest of Tarakeswar was among the most popular subjects of derision in both the paintings composed by artisans in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood and the woodcut prints made from them that were published in north Calcutta’s Battala book stalls. Dramas, newspaper articles, editorials, and songs further depicted these events, propelling them into the consciousness of most all Bengalis, not just the elite. For decades, it was the scandal about which everyone knew and had an opinion, and for the most part that opinion included condemnation of the priest. Across India, Brahmin groups brought suits against one another to court, using language that would be most convincing to that setting, including “embezzlement” and “corruption” (Appadurai 1981, 111–​13). By the time of Kālī and H. N. Haldar’s lawsuit, a number of legal disputes between Kālīghāṭ’s Brahmins had been adjudicated in the courts. In 1903, one of Kālīghāṭ’s sevāyets prosecuted a pāṇḍā for accompanying and then fondling prostitutes in the temple’s inner sanctum while drunk (Emperor v. Banerji 1903).20 That suit was dismissed because the courts could find no Śāstric prohibition of prostitutes or alcohol at temples. But it generated newspaper reports of the debasing practices of priests regarding “wine and women.”21 Kālīghāṭ’s sevāyets also took one another to court over the allocation of pālās and the right to sell pālās (Debi v. Haldar 1915; Haldar v. Sircar 1933; Ram v. Haldar 1852).22 Court rulings dubbed sevāyets’ “misappropriation” of pālās as reflective of their “beneficiary interest” in temple funds, which constituted “public mischief” in their eyes (Debi v. Haldar 1915). In at least one case, a dispute

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between two sevāyet claimants to a pālā did not make it to the court because it threatened a “disturbance” that required immediate police action.23 The Deputy Magistrate of Alipore ordered 13 police officers to ensure that neither claimant received the pālā that day and that it went to a third party. Judges and newspapers portrayed Kālīghāṭ’s Brahmins as inappropriately oriented toward the pleasures of the flesh and prone to the passion and violence those pleasures inflame. The circulation of these scandals and disputes involving temple Brahmins both reflected and contributed to a new way of thinking about religious institutions and the officials who exercised authority in them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the value of worldly asceticism and critiques of the priesthood circulated publicly in the nineteenth century, Brahmins found themselves operating in an entirely new regime of sovereignty that abided by a new religious sensibility. To some extent, temple Brahmins subjected themselves to that new regime through their use of the courts (Gilmartin 2015, 377; Price 2008, 116). While Brahmins saw themselves as subject to divine sovereignty alone, a human who recognized and shared in that sovereignty was necessary to arbitrate various interpretations of divine will, and to enforce one. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British courts were the source of human sovereignty to which Brahmins could appeal. Those courts, however, neither recognized nor shared in divine sovereignty. Nor did they recognize Brahmins as holding authority based upon that sovereignty.

Brahmins and Temples Under Colonial Law Company and colonial law pertaining to religious institutions was deeply influenced by negative attitudes toward Brahmin proprietors and priests. Lawmakers and judges—​both British and Indian—​took it as a matter of fact that devotees’ offerings to gods in temples were made in the name of general “pious use” (Tambekar v. Govindram 1887; cited in Sontheimer 1965, 44).24 As such, Brahmins’ personal use of temple wealth could only be seen as a disregard for the intentions of the devotees making the offerings. Judges found Brahmin claims to ownership of offerings “obnoxious to religious precepts and purposes” (Ayyangar v. Kasturi 1916; cited in Derrett 1999, 490) and did not hide their disdain for Brahmins squandering those offerings “in waste or profligacy” (Tambekar v. Govindram 1887; cited in Sontheimer 1965, 44). Courts promised to bring modern law and order to institutions ensnared in Brahmin conflict and corrupted by their greed (see also Presler 1987, 36–​56).

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Laws pertaining to Hindu temples were further shaped by a complex arrangement in which Britons sought to rule Indians in religious and personal matters according to their own religious laws, but within an English court system imbued with Western ways of framing disputes.25 Conflicts between Brahmin groups regarding the distribution of temple honors, for example, were framed in this system as disputes over property. Furthermore, courts required the presentation of written evidence and convincing arguments according to the dictates of the Śāstras. Where those written sources were absent or silent, Hindu custom could be appealed to, but the courts maintained the right to abolish those customs if and when those customs were disagreeable to good conscience and reason (Derrett 1999, 295; Presler 1987, 59–​60; see also Mani 1998). The courts’ assumptions about what constituted good conscience and reason were often at odds with those of the individuals pleading their cases. Regarding Hindu temples, extant scriptures did not agree on a general set of laws, so judges were constantly adjudicating disputes according to what was presented to them as custom. Laws pertaining to Hindu institutions were thus largely created by judges (Mukherjea 1952, 3). Judges then referred to one another’s rulings for precedent so that the law they administered would be uniform and universal—​also according to the dictates of the English legal system. Temples were read as endowments or trusts, defined primarily by the ownership of property dedicated for a particular purpose. According to English law, a trust constitutes three parties:  a donor, a beneficiary, and a trustee (Birla 2009, 68). The donor might be a particular family or royal figure who founded the temple, or it might include all devotees who make offerings at temples. The beneficiary of the temple trust is the deity to whom the temple is dedicated. Even while the Śāstras prohibited the notion, courts ruled that Hindu deities had “juristic personality” according to Hindu custom, which holds that the mūrti constitutes a divine embodiment.26 The deity can own property in the way that a minor can own property, even while he or she requires a guardian to manage it. Temples are therefore understood as trusts endowed to a god (“debbotar” in Bengali and in much of the legal scholarship on this subject). A trust’s trustees are the Brahmins who manage the temple’s finances. In the case of Kālīghāṭ, they are the sevāyets. The trustees must manage the debbotar according to its original purpose, just as an infant’s manager would manage his or her estate (Bhattacarya 1893, 609). Trustees do not own its income and cannot sell it. The trust model abided by an entirely different logic than that which traditionally governed the temple, and it posed a number of legal and cultural quandaries. First, it reduced the deity to a property owner, disregarding his

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or her sovereignty over a wide range of issues, including the behavior of the temple’s Brahmins. Moreover, the deity’s Brahmin caretakers were reduced to financial managers. Most problematically, the trust model required knowl­ edge of the trust’s original purpose as stated by its original donor. In some cases, the original donor had inscribed his or her purposes into the temple walls. However, for most temples that predated British rule, no evidence of an original donation existed. Even if it did, donation did not require an explanation of a donor’s intent (Birla 2009, 81). At Kālīghāṭ, if there was an original donor, that figure was lost to history by the time of these disputes. The zamindars who rebuilt the temple in 1809 had not originally founded the temple, and the sevāyets reminded them frequently that they would not play an authoritative role in the life of the temple. The sevāyets in these twentieth-​ century lawsuits claimed that the original purpose of Kālīghāṭ was to serve the goddess. Since Kālī had entrusted them with the sole responsibility of serving her, they saw themselves as adequately fulfilling the temple’s purpose. For the courts, this was insufficient. Brahmin priests were not donors and therefore could not determine the purpose of the temple as a trust, no matter how much they claimed to be doing the work a deity had set out for them. According to colonial law, trusts were deemed either public or private according to their purpose or, in the absence of written evidence of its purpose, according to who utilized them. If an individual founded a temple as a site of worship for his or her family alone, then it was considered private. If a temple’s founder was unknown, and if Hindus in general worshiped there, then it was considered public. This division is quite alien to traditional temple logics whereby all temples are dedicated to god/​s for the purpose of their care and propitiation (Derrett 1999, 491). The designation “public” had particularly far-​reaching consequences. Company and colonial state bodies and courts saw their role as protecting the public. They also saw the Indian public as standing in need of their reforms (see Scott and Ingram 2015, 367).27 By declaring a Hindu temple public, the state brought that temple under its control. The state would protect public interest there and ensure its finances were allocated toward the public good, as and however they defined it. Temples could thus be reformed according to the courts’ notions of what the temple ought to be. Many scholars have noted the ways in which Western notions of the “public” do not necessarily map well onto Indian society (Freitag 1991, 1–​14; Scott and Ingram 2015). There is no exact cognate for public in Indian languages, so that the word was transplanted onto various aspects of Indian life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often generating major

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transformations to Indian society (Sarkar 2001, 62). Dipesh Chakrabarty (1991), for example, demonstrates that the demarcation of outside space as “public space” that ought to be clean and orderly runs counter to indigenous ideas of outside space as that which is both exciting and dangerous precisely because it is neither clean nor orderly in those terms’ modernist senses.28 Both colonialists and nationalists agreed that bringing order to the streets would bring modernity to Indian society via state regulation. In the same way, India’s courts sought to bring modernity to India’s religious institutions via state regulation by demarcating those institutions as “public.” What is so remarkable about this is that state regulation is brought in these cases to religion—​a realm that, in modernity, is supposed to lie outside the state. In most cases, if Indian groups successfully make the argument that a particular practice is “religious,” then that practice becomes free from state control (see Adcock 2014). But religious institutions in India have again and again been opened up to state intervention, precisely because they are religious and therefore important to a wide swathe of the population and not just a singular individual or family. A series of legislation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries increased the power of courts to remove temple Brahmins’ authority (see Appadurai 1981, 166–​76). That legislation also increased the power of individual members of the public to hold temple Brahmins accountable to their demands. Bengal Regulation 19 of 1810 and Madras Regulation 7 of 1817 laid out the rights of the British government to “prevent and redress abuses in management” in any public endowment, including religious endowments (Iyer 1905, 327). Where Brahmins were accused of using the income from endowments for their own personal use, the East India Company declared its essential role in maintaining endowments “according to the real intent and will of the grantor” (Iyer 1905, 154).29 The Religious Endowments Act of 1863 removed much of the power of state bodies in an attempt to withdraw from native religious institutions, while it increased the power of courts to regulate temples on an as-​needed basis.30 That Act further allowed any “interested persons” to “sue before the Civil Court the trustee, manager, or superintendent of such mosque, temple or religious establishment or the member of any committee appointed under this Act, for any misfeasance, breach of trust or neglect of duty” (Section 14). Interested persons included anyone “having a right of attendance, or having been in the habit of attending, at the performance of the worship or service . . . or of partaking in the benefit of any distribution of alms” at a religious institution (Section 15). In other words, any Hindu who had—​or could have—​visited a temple was entitled to approach the court and accuse particular individuals involved in its management of breach of trust.

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Section 539 was added to the Civil Procedure Code in 1887 so that the Advocate General, or two or more individuals with a direct interest in a trust who had obtained his permission, could bring a suit to the court to, among other things, institute a scheme for that trust’s management. In 1908, the right of “interested persons” to approach the court both to accuse individuals of breaching the trust and to urge the institution of a scheme of management was expanded again. Section 92 reads: In the case of any alleged breach of any express or constructive trust created for public purposes of a charitable or religious nature . . . the Advocate-​General, or two or more persons having an interest in the trust and having obtained the [leave of the Court] may institute a suit, whether contentious or not, in the principal Civil Court of original jurisdiction or in any other Court empowered in that behalf by the State Government.

That suit could ask for the removal or appointment of trustees, and it could also ask for the settling of a scheme of management for the temple. This gives great powers to both public persons and to court benches. If members of the Hindu public approached the courts and the courts decided to hear their pleas, it opened the possibility for court intervention in the particulars of a temple’s management. If they did not, temples would continue to be managed as they had been. Let us return now to the details of the lawsuits pertaining to Kālīghāṭ and examine how these legal provisions and accompanying religious discourse were brought to bear on that temple.

Kālīghāṭ Goes Public By the time of the suits regarding Kālīghāṭ, all of the legal apparatus was in place for the courts to declare Kālīghāṭ a public temple and to impose upon it a scheme of management. That is essentially what happened. Yet an examination of the details of these suits shows that this outcome was not an inevitable result of a process set into motion by the claims of the original plaintiff, but one that was propelled by the judges hearing his and later plaintiffs’ cases. Had H.  N. Haldar claimed that Kālīghāṭ was a public temple, or should be declared as one, he would have been justified in approaching the court under section 92 of the Civil Procedure Code (hereafter, Section 92) as outlined above. He did not. Instead, he approached the court under Order 1, Rule 8 of the same Code, which states, “One person may sue or defend on behalf of all in same interest.” His claim was that he shared Kālī’s interests

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and therefore could sue on her behalf the sevāyets who were harming her. He did not claim that Kālīghāṭ was a public shrine, and his lawyer expressed explicitly that they had no objection to leaving the temple’s management with the sevāyets, as long as those sevāyets were brought “under [the] Court’s direction” (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 120). It was the sevāyet defendants who raised Section 92, claiming that Section would bar the suit from proceeding unless Kālīghāṭ was found to be a private temple. If the temple were private, then a person with private interests in the temple could bring a suit against them. If it were public, then only a person acting on behalf of the public could bring a suit against them (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 55). Both Kālī and her prospective sevāyet would be disqualified in this regard because they both separately held private interests in the temple. The sevāyets hoped that this would give cause for the judge to dismiss the case. Their claim pertaining to Section 92 produced a 35-​page response by Justice Gyanendra Mohon Chatterjee. He ruled that Kālī did have the right to sue her sevāyets because the temple was hers, according to her juristic personhood as well as the legal provisions of debbotar (land endowed to a deity) property. All parties argued, then, that Section 92 did not apply to the suit, but the judge ruled that the non-​application of that Section did not bar the suit from proceeding (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 58). Even while H. N. Haldar represented Kālī and not the public, the concerns he raised in his suit were interested in both. On the first point, he argued that the temple and its income belonged to the goddess rather than the sevāyets; that the sevāyets were not using Kālī’s income to correctly perform sevā pūjā; that a scheme of management ought to be put in place; and that sevāyets ought to keep accounts of the temple’s income and expenditures. On the second, he argued that the sevāyets were extorting pilgrims for offerings and pocketing that money rather than using it for either Kālī’s needs or for the convenience of pilgrims (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 3–​6). Thus, the terms of the suit were in favor of both Kālī and the public and against the sevāyets and their dominion over the temple’s resources. Justice Chatterjee’s ruling that the temple and its surrounding land was debbotar was quite straightforward. Sixteen of the 84 sevāyet defendants included in their written statements that Kālīghāṭ is a pīṭhasthān and place of great pilgrimage, which the judge took as evidence that it constituted debbotar land. Thirteen more claimed that Kālīghāṭ and its surrounding prop­ erty (give or take certain small plots of land) was debbotar, but of a private nature. Forty-​two claimed it was brahmottar (land endowed to Brahmins) for their private use upon the condition that they perform sevā pūjā to the deity within. The judge opposed that position and ruled that land used for sevā

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pūjā was by definition debbotar—​a decision that rested on much legal precedent (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 26–​7). The judge states in his ruling that the public or private nature of the debbotar was not one of the key issues in this suit because the plaintiff and defendants were not in disagreement regarding it. However, he insists that he must take this up in order to provide a ruling on the plaintiff’s charges. His language is revealing: As some of the defendants themselves admitted Kālīghāṭ to be a pīṭhasthān in their written statement as such it cannot but be a public shrine and debbotar. . . . Thus the nature and character of the debbotar need also be decided for a correct decision of this and other issues in the case as was urged on behalf of the defendants. So, I propose to decide it. (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 30)

The sevāyets are blamed for bringing this matter to the fore, even as they are to be marginalized by his ruling on it. Thus begins his 35-​page excursus on the nature of Kālīghāṭ’s endowment (that is, whether it was to be considered public or private). If there had been proof of an original donor’s intentions in allocating land for Kālī and her worship in this locale, the nature of the trust would have been easy to identify. However, like so many temples across India, such proof either never existed or was lost by the time such matters were discussed in courts of law. In the absence of proof, Justice Chatterjee’s argument for Kālīghāṭ’s public nature is based almost entirely on the same methods and sources as the historical documents I examined in the previous chapter regarding Kālīghāṭ and Calcutta’s history. He lists myth, legend, tradition, and historical accounts as the four reputable sources from which evidence of Kālīghāṭ’s nature could be determined—​if not directly, then by cross-​referencing these sources (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 30). He cites a number of secondary historical documents, including specifically the Kālīkṣetra Dīpikā by Sūrjyakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy and Viśvakoṣ—​ a Bengali encyclopedia to which Gaur Das Bysack was a contributor. He further cites Kālīghāṭ Itivṛtta (a history composed in 1925 by one of the defendants in this case), Kālīghāṭ Dwīpikā (also composed by a sevāyet), Śabdakalpadrum (another Bengali encyclopedia), A Statistical Account of Bengal, and the 1914 District Gazetteer of the 24 Parganas (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 32–​7).31 His analysis of these texts is a fascinating demonstration of the properties of proof that were necessitated in both historical and legal discourses at the time. It is also a fascinating demonstration of the modernist notion that scientific objectivity supersedes the claims of

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both mythology and Brahmins. History is once again the foundation upon which the temple is modernized. The judge recounts the story of Kālīghāṭ as a pīṭhasthān. He notes that there are some discrepancies as to stories about where the four toes of Satī’s right foot are actually located, but that generally speaking, Kālīghāṭ’s sanctity derives from it being one of the 51 pīṭhas that houses Satī’s toes (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 31).32 The plaintiff and defendants in this case, along with a purohit of Kālīghāṭ, all agree on this matter, and the textual evidence corroborates it (37). While the defendants insist that a pīṭhasthān can be private, and while they provide many stories regarding their own ancestors first worshiping Kālī at Kālīghāṭ, the judge cites legal specialist Raghunandan’s Śrāddha Tattvam, which states that “Punna tirtha” are legally ownerless (aśvāminaḥ). The defendants had further produced no legal precedent for finding a pīṭhasthān to be private. The judge states: It is against the cardinal principles of Hindu law in which all pithasthan and Mahatirthas are recognised as public shrine and public place for worship for the Hindu of all castes and creeds. . . . It is the religious belief of the Hindus and it is not a matter to be rejected as a mythalogy [sic] and no court should test the sincerity of this religious belief. (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 38–​9)

No matter who first founded the temple or began worshiping Kālī’s mūrti there, they were “incapable of holding its endowed properties as being their personal properties” according to Justice Chatterjee’s assessment (39). He appears to argue that even if evidence of an original endowment had existed, it would be invalid in the case of a temple corresponding to a Śaktipīṭh. The judge then spends a great deal of time providing evidence for the public’s use of the temple. Non-​sevāyets constructed the temple and added many architectural features to it over time (Kalimata v.  Banerjee 1941, 45–​ 6, 54). Those included resting houses for pilgrims built on land owned by the Calcutta Corporation (54).33 The Alipore Municipality had further cleared mud from the pond of Kālīghāṭ in 1887, and the temple and its land had been exempted from taxes as far back as 1855 (48). There had also been many interactions between the sevāyets and outside bodies regarding temple activities.34 The fact that poor people and ascetics were fed at the temple indicated to the judge that it was a charitable and therefore public institution (53). There is some precedent for Justice Chatterjee’s claim. Jogendranath Bhattacharya had already argued in his Commentaries on the Hindu Law in 1893 that the most famous shrines in India—​and he included Kālīghāṭ by name on this list—​were public (603; cited in Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 54). In

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1914, when a dispute about the sale of pālās at Kālīghāṭ reached the Calcutta High Court, the judge assumed the public nature of Kālīghāṭ (Debi v. Haldar 1915; cited in Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 54). That judge ruled that the sale of pālās by sevāyets was unlawful because “no custom can validate an act which is clearly against public policy. The offerings made by Hindus to a public shrine constitute a public trust, in which the trustee can never have any beneficiary interest” (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 54). While neither of those citations comprised an official declaration, Justice Chatterjee mentions both of these sources as providing further evidence in support of his judgment. The sevāyets’ defense in this matter is that an endowment to a divine being can be private. Their use of the term “private” was also the language of the court but comes closer to the notion that the Brahmins’ management of Kālī’s assets was a matter between her and themselves and no court or devotee had a right to share in that authority. One defendant, Upendranāth Mukhopādhyāy, likely in anticipation of this lawsuit, wrote in his Kālīghāṭ Itivṛtta (A History of Kālīghāṭ) in 1925 that Kālī herself had pleaded with her early ascetic caretakers to hand her care over to householders. In this book, Kālī laments that she had faced many hardships under the care of ascetics, whereas her worship would be known to the world under the care of householders (59).35 In Mukhopādhyāy’s account, it was through the sevāyet family’s work that Kālī now had all that she needed, and all that had made her famous. If Kālī had trusted them with her care, then everyone else ought to as well. Mukhopādhyāy, as well as the rest of the sevāyets in this suit, argued that as servants of the debbotar, they were entitled to do with Kālī’s excess income “in accordance with long standing rule, usage and custom prevailing from time immemorial” (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 9). That custom included that the jewels, clothes, coins, etc. that were bestowed upon Kālī were the pālādars’ own property. However, they also defended their care of Kālī, claiming that they were not neglecting their duties or extorting money from pilgrims. They insisted that they had in fact removed inconveniences to pilgrims and deposited excess funds in a bank with proper accounts. While the sevāyets lost the battle regarding the debbotar’s nature, Justice Chatterjee agreed with them that they ought to be able to live and maintain themselves on some portion of Kālī’s income. He ruled, however, that the arrangement by which they kept the entirety of Kālī’s surplus income was detrimental to the purposes of the endowment, as it provided a “source of oppression to the public and pilgrims and lead[s] to disastrous results” (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 83). He did not offer an appropriate amount for the sevāyets’ income, but suggested that half of the surplus might be reasonable. He then suggested that the other half should go toward the endowment (121). On the

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matter of Kālī’s needs, too, Justice Chatterjee sided for the most part with the defendants. He argued that Kālī’s pūjā was being performed by competent priests in the correct ways and that some of the rituals the plaintiff claimed were mandatory were in fact not (90–​1). He did rule that not enough money was being spent on nitya pūjā (daily worship rituals performed at the temple) and that on some days the rice offering was not made at the correct time. He ordered the sevāyets to amend those practices accordingly. The issues upon which the judge ruled mostly in the plaintiff’s favor were those pertaining to the needs of pilgrims at the temple. Where the sale of pālā was argued by the defendants to be customary, the judge ruled that, in fact, that practice was only instituted about 50 years prior and that “such transfer of pālās to highest bidders and speculators leads to evil consequences and exaction of monies from pilgrims and it causes much hardships and oppressions to pilgrims and inconvenience to their darśan and pūjā of the deity and it is unreasonable and cannot, therefore be recognized” (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 97). Furthermore, the plaintiff’s suggestion that some sevāyets were collecting gate fees was deemed inappropriate at a public temple because it was oppressive to pilgrims (103–​6). He further ruled that pāṇḍās (here referred to as “Sathi brahmins” meaning “Brahmins who accompany”) who were not licensed ought not be permitted to guide pilgrims because they may engage in extortion (111). To make the temple less crowded for pilgrims, Justice Chatterjee recommended the expansion of the temple compound and the addition of more doors, as well as the removal of shop stalls (106). Justice Chatterjee urged that the framing of a scheme of management of Kālīghāṭ was necessary to ensure that the mismanagement of the temple was corrected. He ordered that “outsiders” would be present in a new management system and that the scheme would be framed “in consultation of both parties” after ascertaining the precise properties of the temple (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 119–​20). He did not specify who the outsiders would be, but presumably they would represent the public, or at least the pilgrims, whose interests he sought to protect. He would not allow the scheme to come under the supervision of the court as H. N. Haldar and Kālī had pleaded because that would “make the Court practically the superintendent of the institution which should be avoided” (120). Six years after this suit was heard, an appeal by the sevāyet defendants questioning the District Court’s ability to declare Kālīghāṭ public took this case to the Calcutta High Court. By that time, H. N. Haldar had passed away so Kālī was a ward of the state, represented by the court’s Deputy Registrar and defended by Mr. Chandrasekhar Sen, a Senior Government Pleader, among other lawyers. In that suit, Justice Sir Rupendra Coomar Mitter upheld the

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lower court’s ruling regarding the public nature of the temple. He dismissed all of the case law that sevāyets presented regarding the many similar temples across India that judges had deemed private (Banerjee v. Kalimata 1949, 15, 21).36 Justice Mitter ruled that sevāyets were not entitled to ownership of Kālī’s property as they claimed, going so far as to refer to them as rapacious: “In our opinion, rapacity of the shebaits cannot make the temple a private one, if it is otherwise established to be a public one” (19). He further cited examples of “responsible persons” having recorded complaints about sevāyets’ mismanagement of Kālīghāṭ, including Justice Ramaprosad Mookerjee and the British Indian Association (20). Justice Mitter made the same arguments according to the same historical texts as Justice Chatterjee had employed, but added a source that deserves close attention. He translated a quote referring to Kālīghāṭ as a Śaktipīṭh from the medieval Sanskrit Devibhāgavata Purāṇa that Caṭṭopādhyāy had included in his 1891 Kālīkṣetra Dīpikā: “The limb when it touched the earth became at once converted into stone for the welfare of the public in general” (18; underlining in Mitter’s original judgment.).37 The corresponding Sanskrit text, as recorded by Cāṭṭopādhyāy, reads “sarvve lokānāṁ hitahehave,” which would more accurately be translated as “for the benefit of all people.” Mitter used this quote as proof that Kālīghāṭ was a public temple. It would be difficult to argue that among the pre-​modern interpretations of the Devibhāgavata Purāṇa was one in which this particular phrase was used to call Brahmins’ service of goddesses into question. It is far more likely that this phrase referred to the great sanctity of pīṭhasthāns. Justice Mitter’s translation of Sanskrit textual evidence in this case transformed its meaning into the legal language of the courts. Having upheld the lower court’s judgment regarding Kālīghāṭ’s public nature, Mitter further declared that the creation of a scheme of management “from the public point of view seems to us to be of great urgency” (Banerjee v. Kalimata 1949, 23). He ordered the sevāyets to create the scheme “in the interest of the deity” and if that were not possible, a new suit should be filed, framed according to Section 92 of the Civil Procedure Code. He argued that while the original suit had not been filed under Section 92, now that the temple had been determined to be public, the application of that law was appropriate.

Representing the Public and Its Purposes At the end of the same year as Justice Mitter’s ruling, five sevāyets, accepting that Kālīghāṭ was public and that Section 92 of the Civil Procedure Code would therefore be applied, created a scheme of management under that law and

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brought it to the District Court (Banerjee v. Mukherjee 1956). Perhaps they felt that their own acceptance and use of Section 92 at that point gave them the best chance of maintaining some control over the contours of Kālīghāṭ’s management, even while their private ownership of the temple and its income had been denied. Their scheme included a management committee comprised of sevāyets alone, and allocated the full excess of the temple’s income for the sevāyets (7, 10). While that arrangement diverged significantly from Justice Chatterjee’s original recommendation, the District Judge presiding over the sevāyets’ presentation in 1949 accepted it.38 However, the deity’s next friend, now Manik Lal Mukherjee, appealed to the Calcutta High Court, pleading that sevāyets should be excluded from temple management altogether (8). The High Court judge hearing this appeal in 1956 was Rama Prosad Mookerjee. This is the same judge whom Justice Mitter, in the previous suit, referred to as one of the “responsible persons” who complained about the sevāyets’ mismanagement of Kālīghāṭ (Banerjee v. Mukherjee 1956, 8). Justice Mookerjee ruled that Kālī’s appeal via Manik Lal Mukherjee was “extreme,” but conceded that sevāyets alone could not comprise the entirety of the management committee, and nor could they maintain the entirety of Kālī’s income. He ruled that sevāyets could keep only one half of the temple’s cash income, along with up to 10 tolās (a unit of measurement equal to 10 grams) of silver offerings, up to 20 rupees worth of textile offerings, up to 20 rupees worth of brass, as well as bell metal utensils and food offerings (27–​8). Sevāyets were not entitled to keep any gold or jewelry offerings, nor offerings that became part of Kālī’s body (including items like the gold tongue and four arms affixed to her today). Justice Mookerjee ordered the creation of two managing bodies: the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee (KTC) and the Executive Committee of the Council of Shebaits (ECCS). The latter would be subordinate to the former. Members of each had to have matriculated, passed the School Final Examination, or passed a state-​recognized Sanskrit Title Examination (Banerjee v.  Mukherjee 1956, 16, 18). The qualifications for taking care of the goddess’s—​and now, the public’s—​needs included formal Western-​style schooling, rather than the knowledge of Kālī and her temple that had been passed down among Brahmins for generation upon generation. Schooling in a traditional Sanskrit tol or by one’s father or guru would not do unless sevāyets had also either received a westernized education or could pass an examination created and administered by Calcutta’s Sanskrit College, an institution that had been central to Calcutta’s colonial bhadralok culture (McGuire 1983, 26).39 The KTC would be comprised of 18 people:  12 sevāyets elected by the sevāyets (one from each of the 5 branches of the Haldar family and 7 from any

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branch) and 6 members of the Hindu public to be appointed by the leaders of educational and civic bodies listed in the initial pages of this chapter (see also Figure 2.1). The executive bodies of the Bharat Chamber of Commerce, Bharat Sevasram Sangha, and Calcutta Corporation were ordered to appoint a Hindu from within those very groups. Regarding how the court chose these leaders, the judge simply states that their selection is “self explanatory” (Banerjee v. Mukherjee 1956, 9). He writes that various sections of the public who worship at Kālīghāṭ had been “brought in” to ensure various opinions were represented on the KTC, but does not specify who they were or what it means that they were “brought in.” It is unclear if people in each of these institutions approached the courts to request inclusion in this committee. It is also unclear whether other individuals or institutions came forth to request inclusion and were denied. There is no mention of gathering public opinion or holding public elections. It appears that the judge and his bench selected individuals they felt would best represent public opinion. Yet the public opinion these men would represent would be somewhat limited by the fact that these were educational and civic elites. As laid out in the Introduction, it was precisely these elites—​members of the middle classes—​who thought of themselves as those most competent to represent the public. They had social and cultural resources most of their Indian peers lacked, and they used those resources to speak on behalf of Indians in general. These are the men whom judges selected to appoint the KTC’s public representatives. And these men would no doubt appoint men to the KTC they knew and trusted. So the KTC’s public representatives would not only be educated themselves, as required by the scheme, they would also be men who were either civic elites or were well connected to those who were. They further had to have a sense of civic responsibility, as KTC positions were not compensated. Justice Mookerjee did not make provisions for appointed individuals who did not want this role or who were negligent in their duties. It was assumed that the selected men would heartily take up this task for the good of the public. While the ECCS would still be responsible for sevā pūjā and allocating pālās, and also preparing a budget, their decisions on each of those matters would be subject to KTC approval (Banerjee v. Mukherjee 1956, 13–​16).40 The KTC would be responsible for ensuring that each sevāyet only received their allocated share of Kālī’s income each day. With the half of Kālī’s cash income they received, the KTC would pay the wages of temple employees, including cooks, priests, and guards, among others, and would be responsible for the maintenance, preservation, and improvement of the temple endowment (28). It was furthermore their job to secure “the health, comfort, convenience and benefit of the pilgrims including lighting and sanitary arrangement”

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(29). Their role was both to manage money and to see that the public’s needs were met. If there were money left over, it could be used for “other religious and charitable objects which may include propagation of Hindu culture, development of Hindu Religious Education, Kirtan, Religious discourses, etc.” (29–​30). Hindu education and discourses were assumed to comprise public goods, even while their selection did not stem from the prompting of any petitioner, nor any particular Hindu text, custom, or consensus. The notion that these comprised more appropriate uses for Kālī’s money than Brahmins’ benefit reflected modernist visions of the Hindu temple—​a public and religious institution that exists for the benefit of the public and for religion and that cannot also be a political or an economic institution or one in which the goddess allows for the material benefit of one family.41 The scheme outlined by Justice Mookerjee introduced public representatives to Kālīghāṭ’s management, but sevāyets still comprised a majority of the KTC. Kālī, represented by her next friend Manik Lal Mukherjee once again, appealed this suit in the Supreme Court of India. Together, they alleged that the scheme created by the High Court still gave sevāyets too much power and money. They sought to remove sevāyets entirely from Kālīghāṭ’s management and to further reduce the remuneration that the High Court judge allowed them. Manik Lal Mukherjee argued that the sevāyets were not real sevāyets, because that role could only be held by ascetics (Kalimata v. Mukherjee 1961, 52). The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Bhuvaneswar Prasad Sinha, upheld the lower court’s ruling that sevāyets ought to be represented in Kālīghāṭ’s management (55). He argued that they were in fact real sevāyets, highlighting the unique and important role that sevāyets play at this and other temples. He also argued that the Calcutta High Court had been in a better position to determine the appropriate compensation for sevāyets, given their proximity to the temple. However, Chief Justice Sinha agreed with the petitioner that sevāyets were overrepresented in the KTC. While he left the ECCS intact, his judgment states: “In our view the majority of the members of the committee should be from outside the body of shebaits” (Kalimata v. Mukherjee 1961, 53, emphasis added). According to his judgment, the six Hindu public representatives on the KTC would remain, but the number of sevāyets would be reduced from 12 to 5, making public representatives the majority (53–​4). Those representatives were slightly altered, giving the District Judge only one appointment (while also giving him higher powers), the Vice-​Chancellor of Calcutta University one full appointment, and the heads of the Sanskrit educational institution and Bengali literary society a joint appointment. The changes are marked in italics in Figure 2.1.

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Thus, a suit first instituted by Kālī in 1937 seeking the court’s protection of her and her devotees’ interests became cause for a major legal intervention by which non-​sevāyet public representatives would be entrusted to protect

1956 Composition of the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee (provided by the Calcutta High Court) 12 sevāyets -​one elected from each of Bhavānīdās Cakrabartī’s lineages, and seven elected from any branch 6 Hindu members to be selected by the following:

1961 Composition of the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee (provided by the Supreme Court of India) 5 sevāyets -​one elected from each of Bhavānīdās Cakrabartī’s lineages 6 Hindu members to be selected by the following:

(1, 2) Two by the District Judge of the twenty-​four Parganas

(1) One by the District Judge of the twenty-​four Parganas who will also be the Chairman of the Managing Committee and have a casting vote in addition to the right to vote

(3) Executive Body of the Chamber of Commerce (who must be a member of the Chamber)

(2) Executive Body of the Chamber of Commerce (who must be a member of the Chamber)

(4) Executive Body of the Bharat Sevāśram Sangha on Rashbehari Avenue, Calcutta (who must be a member of the Sangha)

(3) Executive Body of the Bharat Sevāsram Sangha on Rashbehari Avenue, Calcutta (requirement of membership unclear)

(5) The Calcutta Corporation (who must be a member of the Corporation)

(4) The Calcutta Corporation (requirement of membership unclear)

(6) One Hindu member to be selected jointly by: (i) President, Bangiya Sanskriti Siksha Parishad, Calcutta (ii) Principal, Government Sanskrit College, Calcutta (iii) Vice Chancellor, Calcutta University (If at the time of selection one of them is not available the other two may make the selection)

(5) One Hindu member to be selected jointly by: (i) President, Bangiya Sanskriti Siksha Parishad, Calcutta (ii) Principal, Government Sanskrit College, Calcutta (6) Vice Chancellor, Calcutta University

Figure 2.1  Comparison of the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee’s Composition According to High Court and Supreme Court Rulings in 1956 and 1961 Sources: Banerjee v. Mukherjee 1956, 17–​18; Kalimata v. Mukherjee 1961, 52.

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devotees’ interests at Kālīghāṭ by 1961. While the judges in each of these suits refused to have the courts oversee the temple’s management as originally requested by Kālī via her friend H. N. Haldar, they appointed people to Kālīghāṭ’s management who likely shared their view of the temple. That view infused the interpretation of religious institutions according to colonial law with middle-​class disdain for wealthy clerics as well as trust in the authority of individuals with westernized educations over and above those whose authority was based on caste and heritage. It was a view that deemed a particular kind of public presence in temple affairs necessary. The sevāyets’ authority over temple affairs was reduced in each of these rulings. They insisted that the temple was their domain, based on Kālī’s appointment of their ancestor to her care centuries ago, and their ongoing management of Kālīghāṭ’s resources. The courts, however, favored a different history—​a history of the site as a pīṭhasthān that had attracted Hindus from all over India for centuries. That history justified their declaration that Kālīghāṭ was public.

Brahmins and Temples in Independent India The final two lawsuits in particular mirror the trend throughout India by which state intervention in temple affairs, which began under colonial rule, only increased after India’s independence. In 1957, a landmark Supreme Court ruling argued that most, if not all, temples were public. The judge in that case dismissed the idea that a deity could actually enjoy devotees’ offerings and argued that the purpose of those offerings, instead, was to benefit devotees: Thus according to the texts, the gods have no beneficial enjoyment of the properties and they can be described as their owners only in a figurative sense (gaunartha), and the true purpose of a gift of properties to the idol is not to confer any benefit on God, but to acquire spiritual benefit by providing opportunities and facilities for those who desire to worship. . . . When once it is understood that the true beneficiaries of religious endowments are not the idols but the worshippers, and the purpose of the endowments is the maintenance of that worship for the benefit of the worshippers, the question whether an endowment is private or public presents no difficulty. (Deoki Nandan v. Murlidhar 1957; cited in Sontheimer 1965, 54)

The texts to which the justice refers are the Śāstras—​the same texts that disallowed the deity’s juristic personality (see Bhattacharya 1893, 601; Davis 2010, 200–​6). So while the notion that a deity has juristic personality was

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upheld in the colonial era on the basis of Hindu custom, the corresponding Hindu custom of belief that a deity can enjoy property was dismissed after India’s independence in favor of textual proscriptions against the same. According to Indian law, then, endowments to gods are endowments whose fundamental purpose is to provide a service to the public. What is god’s is the public’s, and the needs of god/​s give way to the needs of the public. That ruling in many ways foresaw the opinion of the Hindu Religious Endowments Commission, created by the Government of India in 1960 in order to assess which Hindu religious endowments ought to be public, and how public endowments ought to be managed. Their report, published in 1962, recommended that all temples be declared public endowments, unless there was explicit evidence to the contrary.42 That Report further criticized the Supreme Court and the judiciary in general for protecting certain religious leaders. It advocated deeper governmental involvement in selecting and overseeing temple leadership. In a modern democracy, the reign of unelected officials at temples was simply inappropriate, in their view—​especially as the Commission found that most did not adequately know Sanskrit or the correct ritual formulas. The Commission also recommended that public temples’ excess income be spent toward restoring the physical condition of temples, fostering religious and Sanskrit education, and funding public speeches on religion and mythology (Derrett 1999, 502). That Commission was comprised of three retired judges, two advocates, a retired Commissioner from the HRE Board of Madras, and the head of an Indian organization of sadhus. Its chairman was C.  P. Ramaswami Aiyar, one of the retired judges, who was a Tamil Hindu reformer involved in both the Theosophical Society and the local wing of the Indian National Congress (Fuller 1984, 154). Reformist and nationalist in spirit, he and many others like him advocated the state’s closer entanglement in religious affairs so that religious institutions could be reformed. All of these sentiments, laws, and judgments by India’s public officials were being expressed during the period in which the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court of India were deciding Kālīghāṭ’s fate. West Bengal is one of the states with the least governmental intervention in temple affairs, as it has no official Act akin to Tamil Nadu’s Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act of 1959, which placed full responsibility in the government to represent the interests of the public at Hindu temples. In fact, the Hindu Religious Endowments Commission, cited above, criticized Bengal in particular for the same. However, the details of the cases examined above demonstrate that there, too, the Indian government—​through its courts—​exercises

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a great deal of control over temples even when there is no direct government body in charge. Since the 1960s, courts have been even more stringent in their declaration of temples as public. Even when there is explicit documentation that a temple is private, if the temple has been used by people outside of that private group, it is deemed public. Even when lower courts rule that the use of a temple by members of the public does not make it public, those rulings are overruled by higher courts.43 And even when there is copious secondary evidence deeming the temples of a particular religious denomination to be entirely private, the courts rule that they are public.44 Sections 25 and 26 of the Constitution of India, which came into effect in 1950, guarantee the right of religious freedom, and the right to found and administer religious institutions, to all Indians. Both sections, however, allow state bodies and courts to intervene in temple affairs when they find that “public order, morality and health,” however broadly they choose to define those, have been violated.45 Regardless of temple tradition or denominational prescriptions, for example, the Untouchability Offences Act of 1955 allowed entry to all Hindus of any caste status into public temples, as a matter of public morality (Galanter 1964). Where temple Brahmins were found guilty of mismanagement, for the sake of public order, the state could intervene whether the temple was private or public.46 The longevity of policies designed to bring religious institutions under state control, and the increasing proclivity of the judiciary to bring temples under that control, demonstrates the extent to which India’s new rulers agree with the notion that those institutions are in need of both protection and reform. To that sentiment has been added the notion that temples represent the Indian people, as evidenced by Tamil Nadu state officials’ declarations in the Madras Legislative Assembly Debates of 1949. There, Indian National Congress member and chief minister of what was then still called the Madras presidency, O. P. Ramaswamy Reddiyar, proclaimed: The regulation of Hindu temples and maths [monasteries] is the regulation of the community’s life and conduct; the revival of our temples is the revival of our people. . . If we do not make our temples a positive force, radiating a healthy, progressive, social and cultural outlook, we will be playing into the hands of the surging Godless crowd. (Madras Legislative Assembly Debates, February 10, 1949, vol. XVII, 973; quoted in Appadurai 1981, 57, emphasis added).

The reformist and revivalist spirit of this sentiment is clear. Temples must be reformed in order to make them a positive force in Indian society. Those

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debates also entailed the expression of the view that while there may have been concerns about a foreign government overseeing India’s temples under colonial rule, intervention by an independent Indian state was both justified and necessary. If a site is emblematic of the Indian people, then it is in the public interest that it represents them well. And only government oversight could guarantee that, or so the reasoning went. According to C.  J. Fuller (2015), it is taken as a matter of fact by most Hindus in Tamil Nadu that the state must be involved in temple management, even while its priests resent the intrusion and do not recognize their power. As one temple priest in the late 1970s relayed to Fuller—​a British anthropologist—​“our flag went down with yours in 1947” (Fuller 1984, 128). Across India, temple Brahmins resist state incursions into their affairs. They battle reformers and government officials in the courts.47 They ignore devotees’ demands and express less dedication to their work (Fuller 1984, 131–​3). It seems that only where they have acted in accordance with state urgings has their situation improved.48 While legally the sevāyets lost their battle for authority over Kālīghāṭ, unofficially they still enact a great deal of control there. This is mainly because the public representatives on the KTC are not actively involved in its affairs. I do not have good evidence to indicate whether or not those representatives affected any changes in the immediate aftermath of the 1961 Supreme Court ruling. But today, these representatives do not show up to meetings because they are either uninterested in temple affairs, too busy with their own otherwise important work, or fed up with the sevāyets who are widely held to run the show, even though they are supposed to comprise the minority of the Committee (I elaborate on this point further in Chapter 4). As one retired lawyer of the Alipore District Court told me, “The courts have the bark, but not the bite.” In other words, court orders are passed all the time that are practically ineffectual because there is no willingness to punish individuals who defy them. In this case, there is no clear enforcing entity either. As sevāyets continue their control of Kālīghāṭ, they continue to incur the reputation that they are greedy and corrupt. Their image has not much improved since the mid-​twentieth-​century lawsuits and has in fact probably declined even further. It would be difficult to argue, as Appadurai (1981) did over 35  years ago, that the temple has not undergone a shift as a cultural entity in the modern period. He argues that while the structure determining how temples were managed shifted under the colonial regime, the temple’s main deity remains sovereign. The state may have overtaken the role of kings, he argues, but since kings were only ever caretakers of the deity’s

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wealth and the process of that wealth’s distribution, the cultural function of the temple as home of the divine sovereign has not changed. I imagine he would make the same claim about Kālīghāṭ, even though the temple was never royally patronized. The proclamation of Kālīghāṭ as public probably affected the key authoritative relations of the temple in less dramatic ways than official British bodies, and it did not disrupt the exchange of resources and services at the temple. However, even if we accept Appadurai’s narrow definition of “culture” here, if sovereignty denotes supreme power, it is quite clear that Kālī no longer has that at Kālīghāṭ. While Kālīghāṭ is her home and she owns the temple’s assets, she is also subject to a state and court that do not assent to the notion that she has power—​they only assent to the notion that some people believe she has power.49 Increasingly, even the façade of protecting her interests falls out of modernizers’ language. It is certainly nowhere to be found in these twentieth-​century lawsuits, nor in the court proceedings of the twenty-​first-​century lawsuits examined in the next chapter. Instead, the language is of legal rights to income and of pilgrims’ convenience. Judges speak of reducing chaos, enhancing devotees’ security, and the general “public good.” Nary a word is spoken of Kālī and her needs. Whether they appeal to or act within the official powers of the state, it appears that a Hindu public, as represented by middle-​class modernizers, comprise the new sovereign at Kālīghāṭ.

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3 Sacred Space Becomes Public Space

I

n this chapter1 I  return to the modernizing projects of some of the individuals I introduced in the opening chapter of this book, including two upper-​middle-​class Kolkata residents, Mridul Pathak and Prahlad Roy Goenka.2 At the turn of the twenty-​first century, these and other middle-​class activists created non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) and filed public interest litigation suits (PILs) with the aim of compelling state bodies and courts to facilitate the cleansing of Kālīghāṭ’s physical space and the renovation and monumentalization of its external structure. Combining the rhetoric of nineteenth-​century historians who made Kālīghāṭ an emblem of the Hindu heritage of the city, as well as twentieth-​century judges who made this temple a public institution, these middle-​class citizens see Kālīghāṭ as both. They add to these the notion that the temple is a public space. Accordingly, they bring modernist notions of cleanliness and dirt to the space of the temple, just as they do to secular spaces and monuments throughout Kolkata.3 They frame the temple as a site that could be an emblem of modern Kolkata and India but is not quite there yet. It must, in their estimation, be refashioned into a grand, clean, physical structure, without the hustle and bustle of daily life. By and large, these activists have been successful in gaining state support for their projects. Courts share the view that the temple is in need of cleansing for the safety and convenience of the public, while tourism bodies are eager to revamp not only Kālīghāṭ but a number of temples and heritage sites in the city, so that Kolkata attracts more visitors. I provide here a brief synopsis of these projects before analyzing them in further detail later in the chapter. In 1997, Kolkata-​and New  York–​based Bengali retiree, Mridul Pathak, created an NGO called The International Foundation for Sustainable Development (IFSD). This NGO would launch an “urban renewal

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programme” for the Kālīghāṭ area (Kalighat for the 21st Century 1997). Among Pathak’s concerns were Kālīghāṭ’s “ugly skyline,” the absence of tourist amenities, a lack of “control over beggars,” and the prevalence of “harassment by local pandas” (10–​12). Overall, he claimed, Kālīghāṭ “leaves the foreigners with a bad impression of the city.”4 The Telegraph reported in 2003 that Pathak wanted Kālīghāṭ to be made “clean, beautiful, and disciplined.”5 He created plans for the temple grounds that included the construction of an arcade and plaza, pakkā (proper or permanent) stalls from which goods would be sold, as well as restrooms and an administrative building that would house a visitors’ complex. He also proposed a river cruise along the Adi Ganga and Hooghly, beginning at Kālīghāṭ and ending at Dakṣiṇeśvar Temple on the northern side of the city. While he does not seek foreign funding for the IFSD presently, in the beginning, Pathak sought support from non-​resident Indians (NRIs) living in the United States who were interested in promoting their cultural heritage. Partha Ghosh, a Bengali Boston-​and Tokyo-​based entrepreneur, was one such NRI. Ghosh, like Pathak, wants to remake Kālīghāṭ into a beautiful heritage site in contrast to what he refers to as the “mess” it is in now. As he puts it, he would like to “bring self-​discipline and cleanliness to self-​expression” (Ghosh 2009b). When he visits Kālīghāṭ, he wants to find peace rather than chaos and the cries of hawkers. He wants to “restore Kolkata to its rightful position on the global map with the relevance it deserves.” Within a few years, the IFSD and The Boston Project (TBP) gained financial and administrative support for their Kālīghāṭ Redevelopment Project from the Union Tourism Ministry, the West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation, and the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation. In 2005 and 2011, Pathak and Ghosh’s efforts to turn Kālīghāṭ into a heritage site were complemented by city residents’ appeals to the judiciary on behalf of the public.6 Prahlad Roy Goenka, a wealthy Marwari businessman, filed a PIL against the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee in the Calcutta High Court in 2005 (Goenka v.  Union of India 2006). In 2011, Surabhi Bose—​a Bengali woman who had created an NGO, the Shree Charitable Trust, for the purpose—​filed a similar PIL (Bose v. Union of India 2013). These city residents argued in court that temple Brahmins’ continued malfeasance resulted in their not maintaining a clean temple and orderly system of worship, which was a clear violation of the interests of the public and even of their fundamental rights according to the Indian constitution. Goenka’s and Bose’s suits are not so much about heritage or about what kind of an impression the temple makes on outsiders. These individuals do not express the same concern with grand façades and tourism circuits. Instead, these suits are about

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the litigants’ own experience of visiting the temple. Yet their complaints about Kālīghāṭ’s physical state mirror Pathak and Ghosh’s in many ways. Goenka and Bose describe the temple as messy, dirty, and cramped, and they beseech the Court to force the Temple Committee to clean it up along modernist lines. These individuals have been successful in convincing the bench of the Calcutta High Court to mandate Kālīghāṭ’s physical cleansing. The Court ruled that the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee remove waste, beggars, hawkers, pāṇḍās, and the sight of blood from temple spaces. They also ruled that the Temple Committee must curb the corruption of sevāyets and allow the building projects initiated by the IFSD to be completed. Pathak, Ghosh, Goenka, and Bose’s projects reflect the expectations and priorities of the upper echelons of India’s new middle classes that gave rise to India’s economic liberalization policies in the 1990s and that have strengthened in their wake. Like the middle-​class actors I examined in the previous two chapters, they are upper caste and well educated. But they are also relatively wealthy and well traveled. They are not writers and public officials, but businesspeople and entrepreneurs. Some work and live in different parts of the world. Their frames of reference regarding what kinds of spaces they want to see and inhabit are shaped by their own bodily experiences frequenting spaces like shopping malls, high-​end restaurants, and cultural monuments everywhere from London to Tokyo. Their ideas regarding Kolkata’s reputation and Kālīghāṭ’s potential role in addressing that reputation are shaped by the same. These activists feel that if the temple were modernized, it could broadcast to the world what is distinctive about their city’s and their nation’s culture. Kālīghāṭ could then take its place among skyscrapers and bridges in the modern, yet uniquely Indian, Kolkata skyline. These activists furthermore have access to increasingly powerful technologies of societal intervention, including the NGO and PIL. They feel it is their right as well as their civic responsibility to use these tools to improve urban spaces according to their modernist sensibilities. Chapter 4 of this book serves as a “Part 2” to this chapter. It is there that I  consider the many resistances these middle-​class projects have faced. Temple Brahmins and lower-​class groups who make their living at the temple have successfully engaged in protest, foot-​dragging, and subterfuge in order to thwart most of the middle-​class projects I  describe here. Thus, despite the ability of the middle-​class activists to engage the official resources of the state, they will not necessarily determine the future of Kālīghāṭ. That future relies on negotiations among groups of people who read multiple needs onto the temple and who employ many different modes of societal intervention.

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I also examine in the next chapter a range of opinions held by other middle-​ class actors. Not all who share this socioeconomic status share the same vision of what the temple ought to look and feel like and the role it ought to play in twenty-​first-​century Kolkata. However, these other middle-​class voices are silent in public debates, neither actively supporting nor resisting activists’ efforts, and they are therefore left out of public conversations regarding the temple’s future.

Modern Dirt One might expect that concerns about “dirt” at a Hindu temple would revolve around concerns for ritual purity. Purity is a central religious ideal in much Hindu thought and practice (see Dumont 1970; Srinivas 1952). Impure substances (shoes and tobacco, for example) are thought to threaten the sanctity of religious sites and the efficacy of the deity or deities within. Accordingly, certain materials are prohibited from temple spaces. Those materials differ according to region and sect. For example, whereas blood in general is prohibited from most Hindu temples throughout India, at temples with Tantric roots like Kālīghāṭ, the blood of sacrificed animals is considered an auspicious and powerful substance and is therefore not only permissible but required.7 Prior to the late twentieth century, some sevāyets did raise concerns in official settings about the presence of impure substances at Kālīghāṭ. This was the case in two of the lawsuits cited in Chapter 2. In 1903, a sevāyet, Hari Dass Haldar, filed a lawsuit against a pāṇḍā who had allegedly entered the temple with a prostitute and under the influence of alcohol. He claimed that this constituted a defilement of the temple (Emperor v. Banerji 1903, ii). Similarly, in H. N. Haldar’s 1937 suit against the temple’s sevāyets, he complained that the presence of the following items at Kālīghāṭ were a “violation of the purity and sanctity of the temple”: “shoes, dogs, no washing, pigeon stool, females of loose character, low castes touching deity, urine, wine, tea, rotten food, pollution of Kali Kundu [Kālī’s pond], pan, cigarettes, food remnants, goat’s heads, blood” (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941, 111).8 Upendranāth Mukhopādhyāy‘s 1925 history of the temple helps us understand why Hindus might express concern about the presence of these kinds of materials. He lamented there that the water in the pond adjoining Kālīghāṭ was “nitānta apariṣkār” (completely unclean) (55). Specifying why this was a problem, he writes that despite its uncleanliness, “kuṇḍe bhaktibhar snānkariyā biphal-​ manorath haiyāchen baliyā śunā jāy nā” (it is not heard of that a devotee who bathes in

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the lake has not had their wishes fulfilled) (55). The concern, then, was that dirt might result in the loss of the pond’s efficacy to fulfill devotees’ wishes. He concluded, however, that it had not. It is possible that these sevāyets filed their lawsuits because they simply did not want the specified items or people at the temple and only raised the issue of purity in order to persuade the courts in the most convincing language they could. The courts were compelled to rule on these temple cases according to their interpretation of Śāstric injunctions. Nevertheless, the plaintiffs cited “purity” as their complaint. Today, however, what is at stake in complaints about dirt at Kālīghāṭ is not purity or Kālī’s satisfaction, ability, or desire to answer the prayers of devotees. Rather, it is a particular kind of experience of the temple and the impression the temple leaves with visitors. Some of the materials in twenty-​first-​century complaints about dirt are similar to those in earlier complaints, including shoes, “no washing,” and certain populations. However, today, activists are concerned not that the presence of those materials and populations produces impurity but that it exhibits disorder, decay, and a lack of “discipline”9—​the kind of dirt that the middle classes do not want in the spaces they inhabit and do not want outsiders to see. For example, in the twenty-​first century, activists are not complaining about low-​caste people and women of loose moral character but about poor people who bother temple visitors. Moves to rid the temple of beggars, pāṇḍās, and hawkers are not about removing impurities from temple grounds but about envisioning the temple as a quiet, contemplative place of retreat. To borrow Joanne Waghorne’s phrase, there is a “middle-​ class sensibility” at work here, wherein the temple is envisioned as a place where religion can be “enacted in an atmosphere where the worshiper can ‘hear myself think’ ” (2004, 148). These desires necessitate the imposition of one aesthetic over other groups’ rights to worship, work, and interact with one another in the ways that they desire. This is the same sensibility that middle-​class activists bring to public spaces throughout the city. At the same time that they strive to remove hawkers and beggars from Kālīghāṭ, for example, they work to remove the same populations from Kolkata’s sidewalks and parks (see Dell and Ghose 2009). And while efforts are made to protect the temple walls and get rid of haphazard additions that have been made to it, moves are also made to preserve and protect the exteriors of other heritage sites in the city, including the Victoria Memorial and New Market.10 The efforts of Pathak, Ghosh, Goenka, and Bose, then, reflect a re-​imagining of the temple as a public space that ought to adhere to the modernist spatial practices of other public spaces in the city.

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Modernist notions of public space were introduced to Calcutta, as to cities in much of the world, through the colonial encounter in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sudipta Kaviraj have argued, traditional Indian conceptions of cleanliness and public spaces differed a great deal from Victorian norms (Chakrabarty 1991; Kaviraj 1997).11 While the insides of homes were kept fastidiously clean, the outside was seen as a place where such rules were not operative. Instead, the outside was space “not amenable to control,” so that “the garbage produced from this obsessive house-​cleaning would be dumped on a mound right in front of the house” (Kaviraj 1997, 98–​9). There was no contradiction—​the inside must be clean, and the outside need not be. Similarly, the home was a site of security and the outside, of danger and excitement (Chakrabarty 1991, 27). Colonialism brought a new sense of the outside—​of space between homes—​ as public or civic space that was in need of constant control. Where Indians saw a place where it was perfectly appropriate to throw garbage and other contaminants they did not want in their homes, colonialists saw shared civic space that was being made dirty and disorderly by Indians. While the Bengali bhadralok were excluded from frequenting—​let alone controlling—​the areas of the colonial city inhabited by Britons, they were eager to reform the public spaces of what was then “black town” or “native town.” Partha Chatterjee writes that those spaces hosted a rough and bawdy public culture of pantomime, satirical singing, and liquor consumption that the middle classes worked to eradicate in the second half of the nineteenth century. The latter wanted to “create a new moral order of genteel civility, cleansed of the coarseness and vulgarity of the popular culture of the streets and the marketplace” (Partha Chatterjee 2009, 273). As the city became an industrial hub, and as the need for domestic servants arose among the elite, migrant workers from rural areas moved to the city, living in makeshift housing (Datta 2012, 211). Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and resulting “unwholesome air” were blamed for an assortment of urban ills, including cholera epidemics (Datta 2012, 20). Alongside colonial administrators, the bhadralok used the rhetoric of health and security to clean and regulate public spaces (Chakrabarty 1991, 28). These modernist notions of cleanliness, however, were not brought to bear on the temple until the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries. It was not until that moment that the middle classes began to think about the temple as a public site over which they ought to exert some control. And it was not until that moment that the most dominant members of the middle classes began to see the temple as a physical emblem worthy of representing them on the global stage of the city.

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India’s New Middle Classes and Their Urban Aspirations Between the time of the twentieth-​century lawsuits discussed in the previous chapter and the activists’ projects I examine here, the political and economic landscape of India had shifted in ways that propelled the embedding and reviving of visible Hindu forms on India’s urban landscape. It was in the intervening decades that India’s old middle classes gave way to her new middle classes. As outlined in the Introduction, the state-​led development projects focusing on rural development in the wake of India’s Independence increasingly led to frustration among the middle classes of India’s younger generations who saw the state’s policies as retrogressive and as harmful to both Indian culture and the economy (see Deshpande 1997; Fernandes 2006, 1–​28). By the 1990s, India’s middle classes had thrown their support behind neoliberal economic policies. They advocated for a market-​based economy that encouraged private investment, limited the bureaucracy involved in starting and running businesses, and reduced barriers to trade with other nations. They argued that such policies would ensure that India was not left behind in the global economic order. As Leela Fernandes (2006) has observed, not all of India’s middle classes actually benefit from the kinds of market-​based reforms government bodies have instituted in the past few decades. It is the elite among them—​ entrepreneurs, business managers, and information technology professionals who travel all over the world for both work and leisure and to visit their family members who have emigrated—​who benefit most.12 They comprise a new upper middle class, to which the activists I examine in this chapter belong. The benefit to those among what Jennifer Ortegren (2016) calls the “aspiring middle classes” is less clear. Nonetheless, Fernandes argues that the new middle class “represents the promise of a new national model of development, one with a global outlook that will allow [India] . . . to successfully compete with the advanced industrialized countries” (2006, xxvii, emphasis added). The promise is not only one of individual social mobility but also the mobility of the Indian economy vis-​à-​vis other national economies. It is necessarily global in scope and orientation. While national attention turned away from cities for the few decades after India’s Independence, in this new Indian moment of global trade and foreign investment, cities are once again in the spotlight. There is an image of the city as a place with endless possibilities for education, paid labor, and consumption that circulates among most Indians, including those not living in cities (Khilnani 1999, 12). Furthermore, as Partha Chatterjee (2004) notes, the 1990s saw a surge in media circulation of images of post-​industrial

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cities centered on finance rather than manufacturing. He describes the post-​industrial city as one “characterized by a central business district with advanced transport and telecommunication facilities and office space,” accommodating service industries including “advertising, accounting, legal services, [and] banking” (143). This kind of city caters to foreign investment and the “managerial and technocratic elite” around whom the corresponding global economy revolves (144). India in the 1990s, then, saw the convergence of the globally oriented economic desires of the upper echelons of the middle classes and this new image of the global city. This convergence was further fostered by the middle classes’ ever-​increasing access to international travel. As Smitha Radhakrishnan helpful puts it, they comprise a “transnational” class (2011, 17). Their ideas about what a city ought to look and feel like—​and what kinds of cultural monuments it ought to have—​are deeply shaped by their international experiences. India’s new upper middle classes seek to make India’s urban spaces match a “globally circulating urban aesthetic,” displaying to the world that India has arrived, while simultaneously displaying to their peers that they have world-​class sensibilities (Brosius 2010, xxii). They create gated living communities to segregate themselves from the city’s poor (Srivastava 2014, 419–​ 24). They clean up city sidewalks and parks. And they erect grand, quiet, clean cultural complexes where they can enjoy leisure time, once again segregated from the city’s poor, and demonstrating—​even teaching their urban peers—​how one ought to behave in a world-​class city (Brosius 2010, 161–​268). The new upper middle classes are particularly concerned with the preservation and renovation of heritage sites. Hancock notes that in the post-​economic liberalization era in Chennai, both state and elite civic groups have worked to develop a “heritage-​conscious cityscape” replete with museums, memorials, and historic districts (2008, 12). She argues that this portends for some a “branding” of the city that attracts investors and tourists. For others, this is about a kind of nostalgia. As she puts it: “the transition to a neoliberal political economy has invited mourning for what it has eliminated” (Hancock 2008, 12). Whether one’s mindset is oriented toward branding or nostalgia—​and I  see both at play at Kālīghāṭ—​both views share the goal of highlighting what makes an Indian city different and in some ways better than other modern, post-​ industrial cities in the world. The creation of heritage sites through the selection, renovation, and museumification of homes, religious sites, and even colonial buildings is a major avenue for producing and celebrating that difference. Against this backdrop, Hindu temples can serve as both a conceptual vessel to

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imagine what is unique about Indian cities and a material structure through which to communicate that uniqueness. NGOs and PILs are increasingly the tools of choice when it comes to pursuing neoliberal agendas in urban spaces, including the renovation of temples and other heritage sites.13 These are particularly effective at gaining state support because they make claims regarding the public good. NGOs have long been vehicles for social change in India, as they have throughout the world. They have been employed especially to aid marginalized populations, either in tandem with, or in opposition to, state bodies.14 NGOs in general have the reputation of being “value-​driven,” “community-​based,” and effective drivers of social change (Kudva 2005, 236). There is thus a kind of moral high ground—​a sense of self-​sacrifice for the greater good—​that accompanies NGO work. NGOs have proliferated since the 1990s, and they work ever more closely with the state. As Ray and Katzenstein argue, “Economic liberalization has been accompanied by the massive NGO-​ification of civil society,” often crowding out other forms of societal intervention (2005, 9). The poor and marginalized are often recipients of NGO care, but they are not usually part of the founding or management of those organizations (Kilby 2011, 6). Instead, NGOs are founded and managed by the middle classes that have the time, knowledge, money, and social connections required to successfully do so. As such, while many NGOs are focused on issues such as poverty alleviation, gender equality, or animal rights, others are aimed at gentrifying projects that are in fact detrimental to the marginalized. Chatterjee observes: In metropolis after Indian metropolis, organized civic groups have come forward to demand from the administration and the judiciary that laws and regulations for the proper use of land, public spaces, and thoroughfares be formulated and strictly adhered to in order to improve the quality of life of citizens. Everywhere the dominant cry seems to be to rid the city of encroachers and polluters and, as it were, to give the city back to its proper citizens. (2004, 140)

I do not wish here to minimize the improvements that NGOs have achieved in Indian society. However, I do want to point out that NGOs are founded and operated by individuals whose class locations help shape their agendas. The PIL is a form of legal intervention created by the Supreme Court of India in the late 1970s.15 It was specifically created as an avenue for upholding civil liberties for all Indian citizens, but especially its poor who were unable to approach the courts themselves (Bhuwania 2014, 322). A PIL removes the

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necessity of locus standi, so that anyone can approach the court on behalf of “public interest,” rather than needing to claim that an injustice has been committed against him or her individually. The aim was to allow publicly minded individuals to approach the courts in order to seek the welfare of the oppressed—​particularly their fundamental rights, as outlined in the constitution (Deva 2010, 58–​60). The court bench would decide whether or not public interest was being violated and, accordingly, whether or not to adjudicate the case at hand. Technicalities and bureaucracy would be removed, as the courts provided swift justice to those who needed it most. Just like the NGO, PILs are filed for the most part by middle-​class citizens due to the time, knowledge, and social connections that they require. While in the early years of PIL, cases were typically filed on behalf of child laborers, prisoners, women, and other disenfranchised populations, since the 1990s, PILs are increasingly being filed in the name of good governance and the right to a clean environment (Deva 2010, 62).16 Awadhendra Sharan (2014) has argued convincingly that while “pollution” was the idiom by which the colonial state controlled Indian cities, “environment”—​an umbrella term that encompasses claims regarding everything from air and water pollution to the existence of slums—​is the one by which the neoliberal state justifies its regulation of urban spaces in India today. Furthermore, since the 1990s, PILs are being filed by specialized NGOs and lawyers. The Shree Charitable Trust I examine in this chapter is one example of an NGO created with the explicit purpose of filing a PIL. That PIL does not deal with the welfare of the poor. Surabhi Bose and the others at the helm of the Shree Charitable Trust feel themselves to be the ones disenfranchised by greedy and negligent temple Brahmins and by irritating hawkers and beggars who inhibit their right to worship Kālī in a clean environment. They also claim that their own safety and security is at risk because of slippery floors created by a lack of cleaning and because of pickpockets. The PIL has been critiqued in recent years for fostering judicial activism (see Bhuwania 2014; Deva 2010; Sathe 2002). Pravin Parekh, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, explained in a recent presentation at Harvard Law School that any petitioner can initiate a PIL by an action as simple as sending a postcard to the Supreme Court. In such instances, the Chief Justice assigns a Government Pleader (state lawyer) to investigate the case if he or she deems the issue to be one of public interest (Parekh 2013). Furthermore, a Supreme Court judge can personally file a PIL if he or she becomes aware of an injustice through, for example, a television news report. I argued in the previous chapter that judges share with middle-​class actors a particular background and set of values vis-​à-​vis Indian society. As the

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acceptable scope of PIL widens, the likelihood of court support for middle-​ class interests increases (Deva 2010, 63).

Kālīghāṭ and the Urban Aspirations of Kolkata’s New Upper Middle Classes The impulse among the new middle classes to cleanse and monumentalize urban spaces is particularly fraught in Kolkata. The city that was dubbed the “City of Palaces” in the nineteenth century took on the moniker “Urban Disaster” by 1990 (Mitra 1990; see also Racine 1986; Rai 1989, 8). Manimanjari Mitra writes that Calcutta’s growth in the twentieth century was characterized by “the retrogressive process of ruralization rather than systematic progressive urbanization” (1990, xiv). Immigrants from West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Orissa sought work and housing in the city as a result of the stagnant growth and opportunities in rural areas (Racine 1986, 76). Furthermore, Calcutta became home to millions of refugees from East Pakistan after India’s partition, and then again during Bangladesh’s war of Independence (Racine 1986, 75). Between 1946 and 1971, 4 million refugees flooded into West Bengal from what is now Bangladesh—​many of them to the city of Calcutta (Roy 2003, 30). Sudipta Kaviraj’s (1997) article on public space in this city takes Deshapriya Park as a case study in the ways in which the middle classes have lost control over Calcutta’s public spaces in the ensuing decades. The Calcutta municipality constructed this park in a middle-​class neighborhood in the early twentieth century.17 The park increased the property value of the homes surrounding it and provided a space for homeowners to walk, gossip with one another, and occasionally play cricket. Kaviraj notes that when the park was first established, rickshaw-​pullers and others from the lower classes would occasionally stop there for some shade, but it was generally understood—​ both by them and the middle classes—​that they did not belong there (Kaviraj 1997, 101). With the multiple waves of refugees coming to the city in the decades following Independence, this park became “the collective property of the poor” (107). The poor began to eat, sleep, and set up shops in the park, hanging their laundry to dry on the bust of Deshapriya, affixing makeshift shelters to the wrought iron fence, throwing their litter in piles on the periphery. For them, the park was public space in the sense that it was “merely an empty, valueless negative of the private”—​space not owned by anybody, and that was therefore open for anybody’s use for any purpose (105). What was once the leisure ground for the neighborhood’s middle classes became

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something more akin to a refugee camp. Not surprisingly, the middle classes were frustrated with the loss of a space they once claimed as their own and the subsequent loss of property value for their homes.18 In a second example, migration has resulted in Calcutta’s sidewalks being filled with hawkers setting up makeshift shops. Estimates place the number of hawkers working on Calcutta’s sidewalks today at around 150,000 (Dell and Ghose 2009, 18). While providing goods and services vital to the economy, hawkers are seen by many as a “source of harassment” as well as “aesthetic pollution” (Dell and Ghose 2009, 28). Streets overrun with hawkers give the appearance that governing bodies cannot control either the informal sector of business or the city’s infrastructure. This is a concern for investors and an outrage for middle-​class citizens. Beginning in the 1950s, there have been major municipal government efforts to rid the city’s sidewalk of these hawkers, all of which have proven to be only temporarily effective (Bandyopadhyay 2009, 116).19 In the 1990s the state’s then-​ruling party (the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI(M)) launched more sweeping and brutal campaigns against hawkers than any other party had before. During what was dubbed “Operation Sunshine” in 1996, police tore down all illegal stalls and passed a new law declaring “any form of unauthorised occupation of streets and pavements by hawkers a cognisable and non-​bailable offence” (Bandyopadhyay 2009, 118). On the first night of the operation, 1,640 hawker stalls were demolished and 102 hawkers were arrested in the neighborhood of Shyambazar alone (Dell and Ghose 2009, 30). In the ensuing raids, more than 7,000 hawkers were displaced from two other areas—​Hatibagan and Gariahat (Dell and Ghose 2009, 30).20 Operation Sunshine was widely supported by the urban middle classes. The raids were characterized locally as a “return to a bhadralok Calcutta” (Roy 2003, 11). An NGO formed in 1990 called People United for Better Living in Calcutta (PUBLIC) expressed their support for these efforts, remarking that the hawkers’ presence meant that pedestrians could no longer walk on sidewalks and that municipal authorities could not access drains and other public property because of this encroachment on public space (Dell and Ghose 2009, 95). The presence of hawkers, it was argued, impinged on other city residents’ ability to inhabit the city in the ways that they desired. Many middle-​class residents I spoke with throughout my fieldwork in 2011 and 2012 were particularly concerned with the prospect of their children leaving Kolkata if they found cities in other parts of the world subject to tighter controls and therefore more amenable to their lifestyles. If Kolkata is a messy place where it is difficult to move around, conduct business, or have infrastructure needs met, my conversation partners decried, why would their

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children stay there? They continually expressed the desire to change the city for the better so that the next generation could enjoy a higher quality of life. The middle classes have exerted enormous pressure on ruling political parties in West Bengal to engage in gentrifying projects in the city. The CPI(M) won the assembly election in West Bengal in 1977 and held on to power, relatively unchallenged, until 2011. In the beginning they were focused on poverty alleviation and the development of rural areas. However, middle-​class pressure soon changed the CPI(M)’s focus. By the 1990s, they too had launched a new economic policy and were committed to transforming Kolkata into a city that would attract foreign investment. Their plans included bourgeois housing complexes and public–​private partnerships in the city’s public spaces that would strengthen West Bengal’s economic standing (Roy 2003, 155). The CPI(M)’s main challenger, Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress Party, initially sided with squatters and hawkers, filing PILs on their behalf, and joining them in protest movements (Roy 2003, 167). Yet when Banerjee became chief minister of West Bengal in 2011, she showed her support for transforming the city into a place that would attract multinational business ventures and foreign tourists. She vowed to turn Kolkata into London and began painting sidewalks and medians in blue and white, adding three-​posted lamps to the city’s streets, and planning to bring in double-​decker buses for tourist circuits.21 In 2012, she met with Hillary Clinton to discuss, among other things, U.S. investment in West Bengal. She has since traveled the world seeking investment from foreign companies. As recently as 2016, Banerjee addressed a group of German companies in Munich, including BMW, encouraging them to create an “auto hub” in her state.22 Attracting foreign investment is particularly difficult in West Bengal. The economic issues that have accompanied Kolkata’s development over the past 50 years have attracted some “bad press”—​to put it mildly—​from foreigners (Hutnyk 1996, vii).23 Mother Teresa made “Calcutta” a global household name through her service to the “poorest of the poor” there (Chawla 1992, 67). While helping many of the city’s citizens, she and her sisters have also contributed greatly to the reputation of Kolkata as a “poor man’s city” (Chaudhuri 1990, xvi). She began the work of the Missionaries of Charity in the 1940s and ’50s in the midst of the Bengal famine and the partition of India. At that time, Calcutta was a place where people were literally dying in the streets. That legacy remains, even while the dying are gone. Dominique Lapierre’s (1985) bestselling book, City of Joy, echoed the notion that Calcutta was a city in need of a foreign savior. In that fictional account, a Polish priest and an American doctor provide medical care to

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slum-​dwellers in an enclave known as Anandanagar (city of joy). The title is intended to be ironic, as this is a story of Westerners constantly amazed by the resilience of those who are perceived to have no reason for joy at all. These are among the images that many aid workers from Western countries have, as they flock to the city in droves to help the poor. As Hutnyk’s work elucidates, Kolkata has become a destination for “alternative travel and charity work” (1996, x). The connection between the city and the temple of Kālīghāṭ, as well as the goddess Kālī, has been noted by foreigners for whom this connection is a fearful one. These outsiders connect their images of the city with Kālī’s frightening countenance. Drawing on the common misconception that Calcutta’s name was derived from Kālīghāṭ or Kālīkṣetra, Lapierre opens his introduction to Raghu Rai’s photography book on Calcutta thusly: “Ah Calcutta, you are named after the goddess Kali, the symbol of fear and death” (1989, 8). Geoffrey Moorhouse similarly writes in the introduction to his book on the city, “The very name of Calcutta is derived from a symbol of fear and evil. . . . Calcutta, indeed, is a mighty terrible and frightening place today” (1971, 5–​6). If Kolkata has suffered from bad press, then the neighborhood of Kālīghāṭ has suffered from worse. Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying and Destitute is located directly next to Kālīghāṭ Temple.24 The streets surrounding Kālīghāṭ are some of the public spaces most affected by immigration to the city. One study reported that in 1973, there were 3,000 beggars living in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood alone (Chaudhuri 1987, 13). Furthermore, as a pilgrimage site, Kālīghāṭ attracts thousands of people who seek either charity or income from items and services sold to those who visit it. Kālīghāṭ is also home to a significant red light district, with sex workers attracting customers from among Kālī’s devotees, many of whom are single men traveling far from home for work or pleasure.25 Respectable men and women were warned in the early twentieth century against traveling to the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood alone, as “vicious characters of every description are to be met there, especially women of ill-​fame” (Lethbridge 1913, 40–​1; cited in Datta 2012, 177).26 I was similarly warned by many of my middle-​class interlocutors not to go to Kālīghāṭ alone, especially at night, because it was filled with Tantric bairāgīs and yoginīs (renunciants) who could cast spells on me. When I  met with Mridul Pathak in his Kālīghāṭ office, he spoke confidently about his ability to walk anywhere in the neighborhood at any time of night because he was a person of great importance. The implication was that not just anybody could do that. Kālīghāṭ Temple, dedicated to Kālī, at the heart of the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood, has therefore been particularly tainted by the talk of dirt and disaster in

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Kolkata. The trope that this site is an emblem of the city’s backwardness that was prevalent in nineteenth-​century British histories seems to have made a comeback. The projects discussed in this chapter seek to address that trope anew. And now, it is not only Kolkata-​based Bengalis who feel they have a stake in this project, but also migrants who have come to Kolkata from other parts of India and Bengalis living in other parts of the world.

Making Heritage Mridul Pathak was born and raised in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood. After retiring from the Indian civil service, where he worked on development projects in India as well as Uganda and Nigeria, Pathak has engaged in a number of philanthropic endeavors. He refers to himself as a “Philanthro-​preneur,” who is dedicated to what he calls the “6Es—​Enterprise, Environment, Energy, Entertainment, Education, and E-​Commerce” (“Profile:  NRI Entrepreneur Mridul Pathak” 2012).27 He leads initiatives to bring Australian investment in coal and gas to eastern India, to manufacture eco-​friendly jute-​ fiber products, to found an Indian school in Nigeria, and to organize the annual North American Bengali Conference. With the same organizational prowess and dedication to cultural endeavors, he has turned his attention to Kālīghāṭ. His “Scope of Work” for the Kalighat Renovation Project includes the following features: • Census & public enlightenment including provision of giant screens and exclusive internet portal, e-​pūjā system • Construction of a G + 4 storied visitors complex with provision of tourist amenities • Open/​covered walk-​track to Kālī Temple • Dredging of Adi Ganga up to river Hooghly point on one side and connecting to Piyali river on the other side • Redevelopment of the river bank including demolition of shanties and construction of lodging facilities using community participation • Beautification of existing façade • Provision of traditional craftsman centre (clay modeling and patuas [scroll painters]) • Modernization of security system and darshan in the temple area • Improvement of existing water supply system around the area and introduction of footbath around the temple complex for the pilgrims • Improvement of sewerage system

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• Improvement of waste management system • Environment management with emphasis on urban eco-​aesthetics • Provision of eco-​sensitive lighting system around the complex • Completion & collation of all plans into the existing master plan • The façade on S.P. Mukherjee Road of the area with a gate as landmark • Creation of an arcade from S.P. Mukherjee Road up to the temple so that visitors’ view is restricted within and not attracted to the buildings outside; the arcade will act like a visual barrier • Creation of a plaza complex with the temple up to Adi Ganga from the main gate extending through the ground floor (5 meters in height) of a six storied building on the land between Adi Ganga and Kalighat Road • Proposal for an eight storied (24 meters) building with ground floor of 5 meters height on Kalighat Road, creating a huge façade facing the plaza of the temple complex • Provision of all facilities for performing rituals on the bank of Adi Ganga • Renovation, addition and alteration of the temple itself by providing new structure, decoration, etc. where permissible • Renovation of the existing water body • Landscaping • Clean existing scum, filth and slummy environment of the temple area and the ghat • Rehabilitate existing street vendors and street stalls • Remove and rehabilitate stalls directly attached to the inside and outside of the temple compound walls and areas • Incorporate spiritual axes, numbers and diagrams in new configuration of design elements brought into the proposed scheme • Consider night aesthetic as important design element • Use of a red vertical shaft of laser beam emanating from the main temple area to visually announce the temple’s location from any part of Kolkata against the night sky • Possible creation of a supervising body of public and private sector to take charge of operation and maintenance. (Kalighat for the 21st Century 1997,  11–​13) This scope of work speaks the language of grandeur, order, and high technology (see Figures 3.1a–​e). Suggestions of public–​private partnerships and unabashed references to the removal of hawkers and their stalls all hearken to the post-​1990s bourgeois notions of public space supported by government bodies across the nation. With multi-​storied buildings and large plazas,

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Figures 3.1a-E  The International Foundation for Sustainable Development’s Architectural Plans for Kālīghāṭ and Its Surroundings Source: Provided by Mridul Pathak (see Pathak 1997).

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Figures 3.1a-E  continued

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Figures 3.1a-E  continued

this would be a monumental temple. And with a vertical laser beam visually announcing the temple throughout the city and an e-​pūjā (worship) system displayed on giant screens, this would be a digital—​even futuristic—​temple. Pathak later mentioned to me in conversation that he would like to introduce cash cards to be used for all purchases, just like the ones used in the food court at the nearby South City Mall (Pathak 2012b). He maintained that this would be a much more orderly and efficient system than the current one in which devotees and shopkeepers barter and exchange cash. The IFSD website reads:  “Through investments in core infrastructure, tourist facilities and community based enterprise, the project aims to improve the lives of local residents and create access for global citizens to a rich piece of Indian heritage.”28 The project, then, is both about middle-​class aims to clean up public spaces for their own use and about presenting a clean and modern image of India to the world. Regarding the first aim, Pathak is one of my many conversation partners who compared Kālīghāṭ to Dakṣiṇeśvar where families spread out on the wide banks of the Hooghly river, purchasing food from the food court, picnicking under the shade of trees, and perhaps feeding the monkeys that are brought in from the suburbs to entertain visitors. This, he argues, is the kind of place that people like him want to spend time.

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Pertaining to the second aim, Pathak is a world traveler who is well aware of the global reputation of his hometown. It carries the impression of being a poor city while, he insists, Kolkata has enough money and resources to be grand and beautiful—​a place people would want to show off to their family and friends visiting from other countries. Yet he does not want to replicate the grandeur of the colonial city. Far from it. During my conversations with him, he referred a number of times to the white marble domed Victoria Memorial built by the Viceroy of India in the early-​twentieth century to commemorate the Queen of England. Today, that building is the most immaculately cared-​for historic building in Kolkata. Its expansive lawns are watered and cut regularly so that they are bright green and a perfect inch in height. Its white marble façade is kept as white as the Taj Mahal and is illuminated at night with multicolored lights. It now houses a museum of the city, which includes famous nineteenth-​century portraits and landscapes painted by European artists. Queen Victoria is cast in bronze, sitting on a throne directly in front of the building. Pathak attributes this attention to the Victoria Memorial to his co-​citizens’ “Macaulayism.” “Hats off,” he says, to this colonial officer who made Indians ashamed of their own culture and laud colonial culture instead. Bengalis do not realize, he insists, that “300 years before the British, this area [Kālīghāṭ] existed. This is the original Kolkata. . . . This is the heart of Kolkata” (Pathak 2012a). Like the authors examined in Chapter 1 of this book, for Pathak, Kālīghāṭ signifies the origin of the city. It is proof that the city belongs to Bengalis and not to Britons. Bengalis’ subsequent neglect of Kālīghāṭ but attention to the Victoria Memorial, then, is evidence of their lack of cultural pride. While he berates Bengalis for this, he also feels that if Kālīghāṭ were to be cleansed and monumetalized according to his plan, then Bengalis might begin to see it in the way that he does. They might begin to recognize the cultural treasure that has been under their noses their whole lives. Only then might foreign visitors also be able to appreciate Kolkata’s rich and glorious indigenous history. Partha Ghosh was moved to assist in the IFSD’s efforts after giving a lecture at the annual North American Bengali Conference in Boston in 2001. When I  met him at a Starbucks in Boston in 2009, he relayed to me that he had been asked to give a presentation on business during that conference due to his experience in founding a global strategic and policy consulting firm in Tokyo. But he said that when he thought of global business strategies, India did not come to mind. So instead, he chose to give a presentation on the Bengali Renaissance—​including what he called that movement’s “stars,” like Rammohan Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Swami Vivekananda. After the presentation, audience members came together to talk about how Bengali heritage could be revived. The Boston Project was

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formed with the “Kalighat Redevelopment Project” as its first initiative. The fact that the leaders of the Bengali Renaissance whom Ghosh named eschewed temple worship did not pose a problem for TBP’s members. They saw those men and Kālīghāṭ as self-​evident and mutually coherent emblems of Bengali identity. Ghosh has degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Indian Institute of Technology (widely referred to as the MIT of India), as do many of the other members of TBP’s board of directors. They all run businesses and provide consulting services for companies on every continent. A poster child for neoliberal economic policies, Ghosh’s website states that he has “served heads of state in more than half a dozen countries on strategic and policy issues related to deregulation of industries, privatization, globalization, energy (Hydrocarbon and Renewable) and socio-​ economic advancement.”29 TBP’s explicit aim is to “bring about bottom-​up socio-​economic revitalization in emerging nations.”30 It seeks support from “people who migrated from less privileged regions to more advanced” to address the disparities between rich and poor nations.31 In other words, it is predominantly focused on fostering opportunities for Indians living in America to give back to their home country. In 2002, it began an initiative whereby money from NRIs, mostly in the United States, would fund a Bank of Bengal that would lend money to Bengali entrepreneurs—​an initiative that the CPI(M) and its ministers encouraged.32 In 2006, it launched an entrepreneurship competition, seeking applications from Indians wishing to start businesses in West Bengal.33 Based on what was then MIT’s 50K (now 100K) competition, the TBP would give the winner 50,000 rupees to fund their project, as well as mentorship in starting a business from TBP members and a flight to Houston to present their winning business plan to the North American Bengali Conference. Given this emphasis on fostering economic initiatives in the state of West Bengal, the fact that Kālīghāṭ’s redevelopment was the first and primary proj­ ect in which TBP was involved in its early years might seem odd. However, for TBP’s members, the goals of economic development and heritage are intertwined. Their website frames the “Kalighat Redevelopment Project” as one that would begin by fostering NRIs’ appreciation of their cultural roots, thus “ignit[ing] sparks of inspiration which could unleash the forces of development.”34 Developing heritage is the first step toward developing the economy, TBP reasons, because it is not until Bengalis harness cultural pride that they will be compelled to contribute to Bengal’s economic development. While the IFSD’s book of plans includes a quote from Rabindranath Tagore on the front cover (see Introduction, page  16), TBP’s brochure includes a

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quote from Swami Vivekananda: “Our real awakening . . . takes place when we dedicate our life to an exalted ideal” (Ghosh 2009a). Pathak and Ghosh’s emphasis on the Bengali Renaissance and its leaders is telling. It hearkens back to bhadralok Calcutta in which literary achievements and religious reforms abounded. These men argue that such an age of elite cultural accomplishment must be returned to, but with a new and neoliberal twist. It is still an elite kind of reform for which they argue—​one that would benefit the middle classes over both the poor and temple Brahmins. It is also still a proj­ ect with a global audience. However, while Tagore and Vivekananda had mostly British colonialists as their interlocutors, Pathak and Ghosh have the entire globe in mind. They are all too familiar with Kolkata’s international reputation of poverty and dirt. When they look at Kālīghāṭ, they compare it with other global monuments and heritage sites. Whereas leaders of the Bengali Renaissance in the nineteenth century eschewed temple worship, Pathak and Ghosh argue that temples ought to be sites of cultural pride. After all, they are physical emblems that announce to the world what a city has to offer. In this neoliberal moment, then, the focus of attention becomes the temple’s material form. Pathak and Ghosh were successful in garnering state support for their proj­ ect. In 2002, the IFSD and TBP signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation Limited to carry out its renovation plans.35 Two years later, the Union Tourism Ministry, which had launched its “Incredible India” campaign in 2002 to lure foreign tourism, allocating large funds toward the redevelopment and renovation of many cultural sites, joined in funding the IFSD plans.36 The project was to be executed through the authority of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and the West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation (WBTDC).37 These state bodies were eager to support such projects because doing so would bring tourist money into the state. Kālīghāṭ is already a major tourist and pilgrim destination, attracting an estimated 50,000 visitors a year. If it were made into the “clean, dream, piety point”38 these plans envisioned, then perhaps Kālīghāṭ would attract more numerous and more wealthy tourists who would stay at hotels, eat at restaurants, buy gifts, and visit other tourist attractions throughout the city.

Cleaning the Temple Prahlad Roy Goenka filed his initial PIL in 2005. When I met with him in his home in 2011, he expressed to me that his main concern about Kālīghāṭ was the sevāyets’ corruption and commercial interests in the temple. Despite the creation of the Temple Committee by the Supreme Court of India in 1961, the

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reputation of the temple as a site of Brahmin corruption had not improved in subsequent years. Sevāyets are still thought to exert an inordinate amount of power over the Committee, even though they are supposed to comprise its minority. Goenka explained that public representatives on the Committee rarely show up to meetings, both because of lack of interest as well as because of sevāyets’ bullying. In his PIL, Goenka argued that the sevāyets’ corruption resulted in an unclean and unsafe temple for devotees. He argued that the sevāyets ought to use the temple’s income to keep the temple clean at all times and ensure that devotees are not harassed by beggars and pāṇḍās. The High Court bench agreed with Goenka’s assessment. The Chief Justice went to the temple to investigate the matter personally, reporting: “I had a horrible experience when I went to the temple a few days ago. My feet sank into mounds of mud. Why don’t the authorities clean the temple properly?”39 In 2006, the Court issued the following directives to the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee: • The inner sanctum of the temple must be kept “absolutely clean” • Devotees will make their offerings of both flowers and money in specified boxes • The Committee will oversee the replacement of marble and stone passages in the temple • Water taps shall be installed • Animal sacrifice and the subsequent skinning of those animals may not take place in public view • Police presence at the temple will be increased • Nobody may enter the temple precincts with footwear • All people entering the temple must be screened by security personnel • No beggars may enter the temple precincts • The Committee will make sure no devotees are harassed by pāṇḍās • The petitioner’s offer to install security cameras in the inner sanctum of the temple is encouraged but is to be left to the Committee and the police • Construction of the administrative building proposed by the IFSD must begin • The Committee must allow the repairs and development work of the West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation which has allotted three crore rupees to the purpose • The Committee will resolve financial disputes among temple proprietors. (Goenka v. Union of India 2006)

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The aesthetics of these orders are clear. Temple visitors are not to be exposed visually to dirt or blood, and they are not to be exposed physically to harassment by pāṇḍās. Temple visitors are to see only cleanliness and order, and they are to be left completely alone. Temple visitors and workers are furthermore subject to surveillance, and certain populations including beggars are to be excluded from the temple space. The judge also ruled that the Committee must allow the IFSD’s renovation plans for Kālīghāṭ to be executed by the WBTDC. Up until then, even though state and local bodies had approved the plans and the Union Tourism Ministry had provided funding to implement them, the Temple Committee refused to allow work to commence. In conversation with me, Goenka expressed that he did not have a particular desire for the IFSD’s plans to move forward. Pathak also expressed to me that he did not have any connection to Goenka. Yet their goals were indeed complementary, and the Court bench decided to combine the two projects. For over five years the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee refused to follow the court’s orders. I highlight the nature of those resistances in the next chapter, but here let me recall the sentiment of my lawyer friend to which I referred in the previous chapter:  courts may have bark, but they do not have bite. They can pass orders, but they rely on other bodies, including the police, to enforce them. Two years after the 2006 ruling, a sevāyet approached the High Court beseeching their help in curbing the corrupt activities of his co-​sevāyets at the temple, alleging that they were still allowing one another to sell their pālās to outsiders.40 He also maintained that the Temple Committee failed to cease pāṇḍās’ harassment of visitors and to attend to the physical state of the temple. In the same year, the Union Tourism Ministry threatened to pull its funding of the IFSD’s project, as over 80  percent of the work had not yet been completed due to hawkers’ refusal to vacate the spaces surrounding the temple.41 By 2009, the only improvements that had been made were the installation of the cameras Goenka had personally donated, and the beginning of the construction of a tourist hotel a few blocks away from the temple. In 2011, Goenka filed another suit, alleging that the Temple Committee was in contempt of court. He merged that suit with Surabhi Bose’s PIL, filed earlier the same year (Bose v.  Union of India 2013). The Court heard these cases periodically between June 2011 and May 2013. I attended some of the hearings that occurred during the period of my research in late 2011 and early 2012.42 The High Court assigned Government Pleader Ashok Banerjee to investigate the matter. Banerjee reported that the temple atmosphere was “vitiated” and “gradually getting destroyed because of lack of maintenance,”

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adding, “some architectural change is needed for the proper development of the premises.”43 During the hearings, I  stood in the corner of the cavernous, colonial-​era courtroom with members of the press, straining to hear the judges and lawyers negotiate this case over the whir of the fans and movements of over 100 petitioners, defendants, lawyers, and observers. Each time a hearing ceased and Banerjee exited the courtroom, he stopped to make loud proclamations while the press gathered around him to record his words. It was on one such occasion that he made this declaration: “Like the temple in Dakshineswar, the Kalighat temple, too, will be made an ideal place of worship.”44 Clearly very adept at public speaking and handling the press, Banerjee also appeared to be very passionate about the project of cleaning up Kālīghāṭ. I met with Banerjee after a hearing on November 30, 2011, in his office at the courthouse. Sitting around an old desk with musty stacks of paper files surrounding us, Banerjee and another lawyer in the case, Mr. Sen, offered me tea and in the most urgent of tones spoke about the necessity of cleaning up Kālīghāṭ. Referring to his previous statement, which he had repeated in court that day, I asked Banerjee to explain what constituted an “ideal place of worship.” He smiled and chuckled to himself, as if to suggest that mine was an ignorant question with an obvious answer—​so obvious that it required no clarification. With an incredulous furrow of his brow, he replied to me while looking to Mr. Sen for support, “There must be peace, discipline, and, well—​a proper environment.” “Yes,” Mr. Sen added, “and a proper environment means a queue so that everyone has the opportunity for darśan but also security so if a VIP comes and his security is in danger they must not wait in the queue, so it’s a complicated matter.” Order and security were forwarded as self-​evident reasons for the transformation of Kālīghāṭ’s physical environment. Banerjee continued, referring to Justice J. N. Patel, “The Chief Justice has a good desire to do something here, even though he is not a man of this soil. He comes from the western part of India. When he arrived in Kolkata, his family told him to visit Kālīghāṭ before he sits on the bench, and he did, so he is invested in this.” I remarked that I could see he was deeply invested in this case too. “Of course,” he replied, “Why not? I have a real soft spot for this temple.” He explained that five years before, Dakṣiṇeśvar was worse than Kālīghāṭ, so he went there to improve it. In that case, no one filed a PIL. Banerjee said he simply went to the temple’s leadership and demanded that a certain scheme be followed or else there would be a lawsuit.45 He handed me a copy of an 11-​point document describing the changes he claims to have made there:

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• Regular election of trustees • Surveillance of temple income • Introduction of two different boxes for money: 1 for priests’ honoraria and 1 for God’s praṇāmīs (offerings) • Installation of close circuit cameras around the complex and inside the garbha gṛha • Appointment of a professional security agency and metal detectors • Widening of roads leading to the temple • Separation and containment the number of food and pūjā shops • Installation of drinking water and toilet facilities • Construction of a car park • Protection of the greenery around the temple • Restoration of dilapidated historical areas, including those “having memories of” Ramakrishna (a temple priest), Sarada Devi (his wife), and Rani Rashmoni (the temple’s founder).46 This document was, for him, a blueprint for what needed to happen at Kālīghāṭ. Banerjee also added that there is no need for pāṇḍās at Kālīghāṭ—​ something that was never as much of an issue at Dakṣiṇeśvar. He also expressed that sevāyets were not managing their responsibilities and that the public members of the Temple Committee ought to fulfill their obligations. Remembering that the District Judge of the 24 Parganas is supposed to be the chairman of the Temple Committee, I  asked if anyone was trying to hold him responsible for not ensuring that the Court’s 2006 orders were followed. Both lawyers replied quickly with a shake of their heads that they could not do that because he was probably very busy. It is his responsibility, they said, to assign someone else to manage the Committee, but no one could hold him personally responsible. The same was true for the rest of the public representatives. I have not been able to speak directly with Surabhi Bose, despite trying to find her through both Banerjee and members of the press during the period of my fieldwork and despite my many attempts to communicate with her through contacts at her Shree Charitable Trust since my return. Unlike Goenka, she did not regularly attend PIL hearings, so I did not meet her at the courthouse. Neither Banerjee nor Sen spoke of her during our conversation back in 2011. In my field notes on the day of that meeting, I questioned whether Bose was really a major player in this case or whether she was someone who simply represented a project that this Government Pleader, and perhaps this Chief Justice, were interested in pursuing. Yet the website of the Shree Charitable Trust is full of passionate invective regarding

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Kālīghāṭ’s physical state. It enjoins citizens to “Join the Kalighat Cleanliness Movement,” and to defend their rights as Indian citizens to worship Kālī in a clean temple: Religious sentiments are not our weakness, they are our FUNDAMENTAL Rights. So why should we stakeholders silently suffer the unclean temple? Time has come to join in the movement—​a movement started by devotees Surabhi Bose, Samir Bose and Pramiti Bose in form of Public Interest Litigation to seek a clean temple and a humane system of offering worship to the Goddess. (shreecharitabletrust.org/​kalighat-​temple.html, accessed January 31, 2014)

Article 25 of the Indian constitution guarantees citizens the right to “freely profess, practice, and propagate religion subject to public order, morality and health.” This NGO argues that such a right to freely practice religion includes the right to do so in a clean environment with a “humane” (read: disciplined) system of offering. The protection of that right, they argue, is necessarily a matter of public interest. To provide a visual image of the problem, the website provides a list of instances of uncleanliness in and around Kālīghāṭ: • The laneful of litter consisting of tobacco stains, kitchen waste, rotten flowers, plastic bags, paper plates and the clutter of make-​shift stalls selling puja items kind of prepare one for what to be expected inside the temple. • The small Garbha Griha or Sanctum Sanctorum, where the deity of the Goddess is placed, is a picture of chaos and mess. Inside the cramped room with only one door for entry and exit, devotees jostle in the queue to offer puja, flowers and other offerings are abruptly thrown at the deity, those scatter all over the floor and are trampled making the floor extremely slippery and unclean. • The hazardous situation poses a serious threat to the safety of the devotees. • There’s no system of periodical cleaning of the sanctum sanctorum during the day. • No system of hand collecting flowers and offerings from the devotees and returning the same as Proshad after the Puja. (shreecharitabletrust. org/​kalighat-​temple.html, accessed January 31, 2014) Litter, plastic bags, the remnants of flowers offered to the goddess that end up on the floor of the temple, and the makeshift stalls that sell those flowers

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and other items for pūjā—​these are the materials that the Trust insists threaten the “safety and security” of devotees and their right to practice their religion freely. Multiple other groups, including the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and the State of West Bengal—​both governmental bodies—​filed their own petitions in conjunction with Goenka’s and Bose’s PILs (reflected in Bose v. Union of India 2013). The Municipal Corporation complained that the temple was unclean and the conditions of the premises “deplorable,” especially due to the many hawkers’ stalls that had been erected over many years. They further complained that the IFSD’s plans had not yet been completed. The State of West Bengal also complained about hawkers’ stalls and added that pāṇḍās should not be allowed to operate at the temple. They called for a restriction on cars being parked near the temple, hourly cleaning of the garbha gṛha, daily accounting of temple funds, and the installation of sanitation facilities as well as collection boxes and closed circuit cameras. Once again, these requests were about the security of devotees and the aesthetics of the temple space. In 2013, the Calcutta High Court issued a full, 40-​page order. This order essentially repeated the 2006 order, but with far more detail. Regarding the collection and reporting of temple income, for example, the Court ordered that offerings be made to two separate sets of sealed boxes made by Godrej or a similarly reliable brand—​one for offerings to the priests and another for offerings to Kālī; an individual nominated by the District Judge would be present each day when the boxes were opened and their contents accounted for, and the same would be recorded on a video camera, which would feed directly to a television screen in the Kalighat Police Station; a computerized account system would be employed by temple staff to maintain daily figures; the balance of the temple’s daily income would be deposited in the State Bank of India, Kalighat Branch, the following day; and daily accounts would be submitted to the District Judge. Regarding the relocation of hawkers, the Court ordered that no selling of sweets or flowers would take place within the temple complex. Nor would any cooking be done inside except for the cooking of Kālī’s bhog (food offering) in sanctioned kitchens that would now have modernized cooking and firefighting equipment. The Court’s previous rulings regarding the exclusion of pāṇḍās and beggars from the temple premises were maintained. The Temple Committee was further ordered to purchase “modern apparatus” within a month of the Court’s order for the proper cleaning of the temple, to hire more cleaners within six weeks, and to ensure that the garbha gṛha was cleansed thoroughly every hour within three months. On the issue of completing the redevelopment plans, the Court ordered the creation of a new 10-​member “Development Committee” that would

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oversee the completion of that project. It would be comprised of the District Judge of the South 24 Parganas, the Principal Secretary of the West Bengal Tourism Department, the Kolkata Commissioner of Police, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (the order does not specify which member of the KMC), Chief Executive Officer of the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority, Secretary of the West Bengal Irrigation Department, Collector and District Magistrate of the South 24 Parganas, a nominee of the Indian Department of Tourism, and two members of the Temple Committee to be nominated by the Committee’s president. The Court ordered that body to form and initiate the redevelopment of Kālīghāṭ according to many of the plans set forth by IFSD within three months of their order. In this ruling, as in previous rulings, the Court sided with middle-​class modernizers to order that the temple’s aesthetic state be improved—​that its appearance would be cleansed and monumentalized and orderly worship processes would be implemented so that the atmosphere would be quieter and calmer. They deemed the surveillance of sevāyets, particularly in their collection and redistribution of temple funds, an integral part of that aesthetic improvement, because it is only through proper accounting that the large sums of money that flow into the temple daily can be allocated toward those aesthetic ends. Keeping money out of the hands of the sevāyets in the twenty-​first century is thus not only about a squeamishness regarding the intertwining of religion and money as it was in the mid-​twentieth-​century court cases examined in the previous chapter, but about ensuring the modernization of the look and feel of Kālīghāṭ. The Court’s demand that the IFSD’s plans be carried out by government bodies actively links each of the projects of Pathak, Ghosh, Goenka, and Bose together. Cleaning the temple and turning it into a heritage tourist site are now combined into one court-​ mandated, government-​supported decree.

The Ideal Middle-​Class Temple These four activists’ efforts to modernize Kālīghāṭ give us a snapshot of what comprises an “ideal place of worship” for the upper echelons of India’s new middle classes: clean and quiet heritage sites. Yet these activists, along with a far wider swathe of Kolkata’s middle classes with whom I spoke, also want this temple to retain the sense of awesome power Kālī holds, as well as what they call bhāv—​the kind of sentiment or feeling one has when in the presence of the divine. For all of the talk and official declarations about Kālīghāṭ as a public space, other public spaces in the city lack these qualities entirely,

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while Kālīghāṭ has an abundance of them. It is unclear whether moves to transform this temple into a clean and quiet space will have the effect of removing precisely those qualities that make it so special. The profound silence in these activists’ work regarding animal sacrifice may be an indication of this. It is widely said that the daily performance of sacrifice has been stopped at all other temples within the city limits, even while some do allow for sacrifice on one day during the annual festival of Durgā Pūjā. But while there have been many protests against the practice by animal rights activists, and while the High Court mandated the concealment of the practice at Kālīghāṭ, no one involved in these lawsuits or renovation projects has made any serious attempts to eradicate it.47 My middle-​class conversation partners (including Kamala, described in the Introduction) disapproved of the practice and said they would not perform it themselves, but they tolerated other peoples’ performance of it. Some rumored that their middle-​class friends and neighbors performed the practice in secret by, for example, sending their maids or cooks to Kālīghāṭ to sacrifice a goat for the family.48 As discussed in the Introduction, the Tantric aspects of Kālī and her earthly abodes in Bengal have been cleansed for centuries through the twinned processes of Vaiṣṇaviztaion and bhakti-​zation. In the twenty-​first century, her home is now being cleansed for a globalized elite. And yet it appears that the Tantric elements that lend this goddess her immense power are not to be erased. So what should Kālīghāṭ look and feel like? The temple against which it is most often compared is another Kālī temple—​Dakṣiṇeśvar. It is quite large and spacious and is situated on the broad Hooghly River. Cleaning crews are constantly sweeping the temple grounds, while police officers keep beggars outside the temple gates and ensure that there are no pāṇḍās operating there. There are wooden queue markers erected to keep devotees in a single-​file line as they take darśan. The gardens in which Ramakrishna meditated are regularly pruned and watered, and they provide space for families to spread out and picnic. Directly across the Hooghly River, Vivekananda founded Belur Maṭh, the headquarters of the Ramakrishna Mission, in honor of his guru. That, too, is spacious and has large lawns. It is a popular day-​long excursion from the city center to visit Belur Maṭh and then take a boat ride across the river to Dakṣiṇeśvar, or vice versa. These are places where families can come and spend an entire day, free from the hassles of city life. Very interestingly, the beggars with whom I interacted at Kālīghāṭ also said that they enjoyed Dakṣiṇeśvar very much. It is difficult for them to get there, requiring a very long bus ride, but many had visited at some point in their lives—​not as beggars, but as visitors—​and said that they had enjoyed its “elākā” (area/​ surroundings).

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I asked a number of my middle-​class interlocutors if the Birla Temple was another appropriate model for what Kālīghāṭ could be. The resounding answer was:  “No!” The Birla Temple is dedicated to Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa and is located in southern Kolkata in the Ballygunge neighborhood. The Birla family, comprised of wealthy industrialists, built this and many other temples throughout India. It does not have the large plot of land that Dakṣiṇeśvar does, but it is made of white marble and is kept immaculately clean, as devotees are not allowed to bring any flowers or food items into the temple. One resident of Kolkata’s South City upscale apartments remarked, “A place like the Birla Temple is very clean, but we have no feeling there.” Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh was offered by some as an example of a temple that had a good system of line management, so that there was no harassment as pilgrims stand in the darśan queue. One professor at a nearby business school remarked to me that Jagganāth in Orissa is very powerful, but the pāṇḍās there are so bothersome that it is not enjoyable to visit. No one suggested Akṣardhām—​the new massive temple complex in Delhi that features a museum, IMAX theatre, and musical fountain alongside the central temple dedicated to Swāminārāyaṇ—​ as an ideal place of worship. No food or flowers are allowed inside that complex either, except for purchases made at the food court. To sum up these sentiments:  Kālīghāṭ and Jagganāth are powerful but chaotic; the Birla Temple and Akṣardhām are too clean and therefore lack bhāv; Dakṣiṇeśvar and Tirupati are clean, orderly, and enjoyable. The consensus among the middle classes seems to be that clean and orderly are good, but there is such a thing as too clean. Some materials have to be let in, including offerings for the deities, and some people have to be kept out, including beggars and pāṇḍās. This begs the question:  If Kālīghāṭ is made too clean, will it continue to produce the same religious feelings in visitors? Phrased another way, to what extent does a middle-​class aesthetic of public space preclude some of the very elements that set the sacred space of temples apart from all others? An anonymously authored opinion piece in The Telegraph posed the question about Kālīghāṭ in the following way, “How does one bring certain public spaces up to modern, and not merely local, standards of hygiene and safety without destroying what is distinctive about the place, its atmosphere, its traditional function and significance?”49 Uddalak Mukherjee expressed a similar sentiment in another opinion piece “What makes Kālīghāṭ unique is not only the montage it offers of disparate elements but also the harmony that binds them. . . . Institutional attempts to sanitize Kālīghāṭ cannot rob it of its mystical, often schizophrenic, allure.”50 While I was presenting some of this research at an academic conference in Kochi, one Bengali observer suggested to me that the chaotic feeling

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one gets when visiting Kālīghāṭ creates the feeling that something powerful is happening there. Abiding by a Mary Douglas-​esque view of dirt, he suggested that the crowds, noise, and blood make it feel like a potent place. Douglas theorizes, “The danger which is risked by boundary transgression is power. Those vulnerable margins and those attacking forces which threaten to destroy good order represent the powers inhering in the cosmos. Ritual which can harness these for good is harnessing power indeed” (1966, 199). According to this theory, those items or people who occupy the margins of the temple system, and who disrupt the “public order” the courts are trying to achieve, are precisely what lend Kālīghāṭ its power. The wife of the man who made this suggestion balked at the idea that slippery floors and harassing pāṇḍās comprise part of the power of this temple, as did some of my other interlocutors in Kolkata. However, suggestions that the Birla Temple is too clean might suggest that the presence of some forms of dirt and disorder lend temples a certain religious feeling. Kālīghāṭ’s dirt also indicates that it has been in existence for a very long time. It denotes accumulated use by pilgrims and accumulated blessings bestowed by the goddess. It thus demonstrates both age and power. The ultra-​clean Birla Temple was completed in 1996, and Akṣardhām in 2005, whereas the apparently ideal Dakṣiṇeśvar Temple dates back to 1855. There appears to be a correlation between age and power—​if not the age of the temple structure, then certainly the age of the mūrti within. It may be that the idea that Kālīghāṭ is ancient is well enough established that its physical appearance can take any form and it will still be considered extremely powerful. However, it may well be that Kālīghāṭ’s dirt will never be fully excoriated, as doing so would remove some of the site’s potency.

Hinduism’s Material Forms in Post–​Economic Liberalization India The last few decades have seen a major shift in the kinds of Hindu forms and practices upon which India’s middle classes focus their attention. Scholars observed the beginning of these shifts in a special issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies published in 2001.51 The new middle classes concentrate on aspects of Hinduism that the older middle classes—​with their meditative, austere, and anti-​ ritualistic proclivities—​ eschewed. They are not rejecting temples and Tantric deities for the sake of connecting with the intangible Brahman in a modified version of monotheism. Instead, they are interested in accessing direct power through local gods and traditions

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and showcasing that access through public display. They do not see these traditions as sources of embarrassment but as sources of real power. Yet they reframe these rituals, temples, and gods in ways that make them respectable and that highlight their transformative capabilities. For example, in that 2001 special issue, Timothy Lubin writes of a middle-​class revival of Vedic ritual that is justified by the claim that it is “scientific” in nature. Philip Lutgendorf examines a revised middle-​class mythology that transforms the strong but somewhat daft monkey god Hanumān into a god of power. And Joanne Waghorne shows that the middle classes gentrify temple spaces and festivals they formerly shunned. Lutgendorf and Waghorne in particular argue that middle-​class actors who worship Hanumān in a new Tantric form, and who gentrify the temples of fierce Tantric goddesses, are eager to access those deities’ quick power because of their own ever-​unstable socioeconomic positions (see also Lutgendorf 2007 and Waghorne 2004). In other words, the anxiety produced by class society compels their middle-​class interlocutors to focus their attention on powerful deities. Following that logic, it might be surmised that my middle-​class interlocutors focus on Kālīghāṭ with the primary goal of accessing Kālī’s power. To be sure, that is part of the reason. They believe that Kālī is immensely powerful and feel very closely connected to this goddess with whom they have communed since their early childhood. Yet my interlocutors do not express the same kind of anxiety as Lutgendorf’s and Waghorne’s. They do not feel unsure of their status, their wealth, or their social and political connections. They are confidently and firmly middle-​class citizens, as they are in the upper realms of that classification. Their anxiety is about losing control of Kolkata’s public spaces and the resulting global status of this city. They feel themselves to be uniquely positioned to make an impact on how the world both experiences and perceives this place. They therefore take up the form of Kālīghāṭ that has become closely intertwined with Bengali identity since the nineteenth century, and they work to modernize it as best they can. The materiality of that form is key because it enables a visual and public display of their values and aspirations. Simultaneously, there is a kind of merging of older and newer middle-​ class Hinduisms at work in efforts to transform Kālīghāṭ. Pathak and Ghosh recall the great Vedantin Vivekananda, and the Brahmo Samaji Rabindranath Tagore. They see that kind of nineteenth-​century bhadralok culture as consonant with Kālīghāṭ. Similarly, figures like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda who were never associated with Kālīghāṭ, and whom the nineteenth-​century authors I examined in Chapter 1 never mentioned, are written into histories of Kālīghāṭ today.52 In the twenty-​first century, Bengalis see these saints and gurus and Hindu temples as self-​evidently

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representing their Bengali heritage. These are not disparate forms of Hinduism or separate aspects of middle-​class culture for them. Meanwhile, Goenka spoke with me at great length about his personal yoga and meditation practices. He practices these alongside his worship of Kālī at Kālīghāṭ. So it is not that old middle-​class Hindu forms have disappeared, but those forms are now incorporated into, and practiced alongside of, much more material and visible Hindu forms. India’s Independence saw some increased attention to temple sites, as nationalists in some regions posited temples as representations of the Indian nation. In one famous example, lawyer and nationalist K. M. Munshi initiated a movement by which the government of India funded the renovation of Somnātha temple in Gujurat in 1951. The temple had been contested by Hindu and Muslim communities for centuries and sat on land that had almost been allocated to Pakistan during the partition of India (Davis 1997). Munshi, however, envisioned this site as a symbol of the Indian nation and convinced others of the same. The president of India presided over its installation ceremony, even as the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, objected (Davis 1997, 219). The renovation of Somnātha was largely heralded as a revival of Hindu religious sentiment that accompanied the project of nation building. In the 1990s, it became the starting point for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Rath Yatra—​a march to Ayodhya to build a Hindu temple where a mosque had been built on top of what was allegedly the god Rāma’s birthplace. By that time, Somnātha had clearly become a powerful symbol of India, particularly its Hindu heritage over and against its Muslim heritage. Today, across India, the rise of the BJP’s popularity has coincided with a greater prevalence of—​and a decreased self-​ consciousness around—​Hindu forms in Indian public life. The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu nationalist organization with strong ties to the BJP, builds temples across much of northern India and demolishes mosques that were previously built on top of temples (Davis 2005).53 This is particularly true in the state of Gujurat, a BJP stronghold, where temples small and large have proliferated since the 1990s, many becoming museums of Indian heritage that erase non-​Hindu presence and culture from the region’s history (see Ghassem-​Fachandi 2015; Jain 2009). As I witnessed middle-​class activists reviving and renovating the Hindu temple of Kālīghāṭ, I  wondered whether these were part of that same Hindutva impulse. At the time of Independence, West Bengal did not have a K. M. Munshi or O. P. Ramaswamy Reddiyar (see page 96). In that state, temples continued to be largely ignored by middle-​class citizens, except insofar as their institutional reform was concerned. Today, the BJP finds little political support in West Bengal, and I doubt that the BJP and its affiliates

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would encourage the renovation of a temple dedicated to the Tantric goddess Kālī where she accepts animal sacrifice. If they did, they would certainly move to eradicate that practice. Cultural pride is clearly at stake in efforts to renovate Kālīghāṭ—​particularly in Pathak and Ghosh’s rhetoric. But this seems to me a different kind of pride than that of anti-​Muslim Hindutva movements. This is not about Hindu domination over Muslims and Christians, or about the right to have a prominent Hindu monument in public space over other groups’ right to the same. Pathak indeed claims that he wants to revamp the entire neighborhood as a multicultural area with Christian, Muslim, and Sikh sites. He is far more concerned with Kolkata’s colonial legacy than its non-​Hindu legacy or the presence of non-​Hindus in the city today. There is certainly a level of defensiveness in my interlocutors’ rhetoric—​a sense that “The world thinks India is poor in wealth and culture, but we’ll show them we aren’t.” However, this is not the same kind of defensiveness as that expressed by right-​wing Hindutva proponents who assert that “India is in danger of losing its Hindu heritage because of Muslim incursions.” Renovators’ cultural pride, then, is an outward-​facing cosmopolitanism that values cultural difference rather than an inward-​facing nationalism that promotes Hindu culture over all others. As Hancock notes, heritage discourses often intersect with those of Hindutva, but they are not reducible to it (2008, 84). Nonetheless, nationalism and cosmopolitanism both require the promotion of a unique form of national culture. In this case, that form is Hindu. The promotion of Kālīghāṭ as the emblem of Kolkata’s heritage declares to the world that Kolkata is a culturally Hindu city. So while nationalism and cosmopolitanism are distinct, they are also inseparable. The most striking change I observe in efforts to modernize Kālīghāṭ’s physical space is that by which the temple has become a site of not only middle-​class attention but middle-​class control. Middle-​class actors today feel it is their right and even their civic responsibility to reform the temple space, whereas the middle-​class actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have held no such notion. I wrote in the previous chapter that the Hindu public had replaced the sovereignty of Kālī at Kālīghāṭ. In the twenty-​first century, middle-​class citizens increasingly join hands with courts and state bodies to speak and act on behalf of that public. It appears that a transformation set in motion by those twentieth-​ century lawsuits has been completed in the past two decades. Kālīghāṭ has now officially shifted from Kālī’s kṣetra (land or arena) to the middle classes’ kṣetra. However, just as middle-​class control of the city’s sidewalks has not been satisfactory in their eyes, neither has their control of Kālīghāṭ

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Temple. It took years for the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee to comply with just a few of the Calcutta High Court’s 2006 orders, and months after the Court’s 2013 orders, newspaper reports indicated that those were not being followed either.54 Meanwhile, pāṇḍās and beggars continue to pervade the temple space, and hawkers continue to sell their wares in and around the temple. Kālīghāṭ’s reputation continues to be one of dirt and chaos.55 It is clear that while the middle classes exercise dominion over Kālīghāṭ’s physical spaces on an official level, that dominion is incomplete in reality. In the next chapter I  turn to how and why temple Brahmins and lower-​class actors who make their living in and around Kālīghāṭ have resisted middle-​class modernizing projects, thereby demonstrating that they exercise a great deal of power in determining the future of this site, just as they do other public spaces in the city.

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4 Resisting Middle-​Class Modernizing Projects

T

hus far, I have told a story of middle-​class Hindus working to modernize Kālīghāṭ through various means, including scholarly books, courts of law, and non-​governmental organizations (NGOs).1 The work of these individuals has come to dominate discourse about Kālīghāṭ in the public sphere. Yet I  have also alluded to a diverse array of visions of Kālīghāṭ throughout this book, including those of Hindu reformers and revivalists in Chapter  1 and sevāyets in Chapter  2. Those differing visions mean that few of the efforts to modernize this temple have come to fruition. Despite late-​nineteenth-​century bhadralok disdain for the practice, for example, animal sacrifice continues to take place at the temple daily. Despite multiple mid-​twentieth-​century court rulings mandating otherwise, Kālīghāṭ continues—​for all intents and purposes—​to be managed by sevāyets. And despite all of the government support for NGOs and public interest litigation suits (PILs) aimed at cleansing the temple in the early twenty-​first century, Kālīghāṭ continues to be described in the media today as messy and chaotic. In this chapter I consider more closely visions of Kālīghāṭ held by those who do not aim to modernize it. These help us understand why modernization projects have not been fully realized and also what role the temple plays in the lives of those who hold alternate visions. During my fieldwork in Kolkata, I  became acquainted with many individuals and groups who did not share the modernizers’ visions, including pāṇḍās and hawkers who organize to demand their right to earn a living at this public temple; beggars who improvise in order to evade court and police orders that make their presence illegal; sevāyets who drag their feet when court orders are passed because they reject the state’s incursions into what they feel is their domain; and other devotees who are simply unconcerned

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with the temple’s ability to represent the modern and are therefore silent in public debates.2 Through their stories, it becomes clear that temples are vitally important to the lives of many groups of people for many different reasons. The urge to clean temples along modernist lines and employ them as emblems of the modern Indian city and nation is only one. Another is to earn a good living so that one’s children can access a quality education and achieve economic mobility. Another is to uphold Kālī’s desires rather than let the state dictate what is best for her. Yet another is the desire to foster a close relationship to Kālī through frequent and close contact. These different ways of understanding and instrumentalizing Kālīghāṭ are not unmodern. Each imagines the temple as playing a different ideal role in their lives and in the modern world. The more invasive modernizing projects have become, the more vehement are resistances to them. Modernizing projects increasingly aim to restructure the temple as an institution and a space such that thousands of people’s lives and ways of interacting with Kālī threaten to be upended. In the twenty-​first century in particular, human populations are dubbed part of the “dirt” that is inappropriate to the temple space. More subtly, the grandiose façades that modernizers envision for the temple work to communicate to devotees who among them is welcome and who is not (see Zukin 1995, 1–​48). While renovations are pursued in the name of “public good” and “public interest,” they in fact result in a transformation of the temple into a space that is set apart for an elite middle class and those who emulate their behaviors. Yet while middle-​class modernizers wield a great deal of influence in their accumulation of official support for their projects, they are not the final arbiters when it comes to changing the physical space of the temple.

Political Society and Secularism at a Public Hindu Temple There are two dominant axes on which resistances to modernization projects at Kālīghāṭ turn. The first is the authority to determine what takes place in India’s public spaces (this is resisted by pāṇḍās, hawkers, and beggars in particular). The second is the authority to determine what takes place in India’s religious institutions (this is resisted by sevāyets and devotees in particular). The state, predominantly through its courts, has determined that it ought to have the authority to determine both when it comes to the now-​public religious institution of Kālīghāṭ. In this section I consider some of the tools available to the many groups and individuals who oppose such an arrangement.

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One ideal espoused by modern democracies everywhere is that all citizens bear equal rights and are full and equal participants in civil society. In reality, this ideal is never fully realized (see Asad 2003, 4–​5; Chatterjee 2011, 1–​26). The world over, citizens of democratic nation-​states are separated by privileges of wealth, class, and education. Describing this division in India in particular, Partha Chatterjee employs the terms “citizens” and “populations.” The former, through their privileges, employ the tools of civil society, including voluntary organizations, NGOs, and the press, in order to address and engage the formal institutions of the state.3 They have been the primary focus of this book thus far. “Populations,” on the other hand, do not realistically have access to those tools. They are instead divided into quantifiable groups (those below the poverty line, squatters’ colonies, etc.) that are then subject to the control and welfare of the state and civil society (Chatterjee 2004, 27–​51). Yet the sovereignty of the democratic state rests on the idea of popular sovereignty. Pragmatically, populations comprise vote banks that are crucial to the success of politicians. Referring to Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay (1988), Jeffrey Witsoe writes, “Although it can be asked whether the ‘subaltern can speak’ within dominant discourses, she can, and most certainly does, vote” (2013, 15). Populations can thus make demands—​even illegal ones—​that are heeded. They therefore operate not on the terrain of “civil society” but on what Chatterjee dubs “political society.” Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) has shown that popular mobilization that flouts the laws of the state is rooted in anti-​colonial nationalist movements of the twentieth century. Gandhi and Nehru explicitly advocated the breaking of unjust laws imposed by rulers whose sovereignty they did not accept. Once India gained independence and became a democratic nation-​state, Nehru and others deemed such behavior unbefitting, arguing that popular sovereignty had already been achieved and need not be fought for any longer. However, to put this in Chatterjee’s terms, theirs was a view from civil society. A view from political society is that the independent state is not dissimilar to the colonial state in that neither grants populations full citizenship. Mass collective action is the means by which populations hold the state accountable to their demands and to the promise of popular sovereignty. As a result, “Disorder in public and every day life—​a culture of disrespect for the law, in other words—​has come to be a major ingredient of Indian democracy” (Chakrabarty 2007, 56). Beggars and hawkers who live and work illegally in Kolkata’s public spaces, including at Kālīghāṭ, are examples of populations who operate on the terrain of political society. In the previous chapter I outlined the technologies of societal intervention, the NGO and PIL, which were designed specifically so

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that middle-​class citizens could represent the poor through official channels. This was deemed necessary because it was (and still is) widely acknowledged that the poor could not represent themselves. I also pointed out that, since the 1990s, middle-​class citizens have taken up the NGO and PIL to pursue goals that explicitly work against the interests of those populations. Without being able to speak for themselves in an official capacity, populations are subject to the changing whims, not only of the law, but of India’s “culturally equipped” citizens (Chatterjee 2004, 41). This is why beggars and hawkers, along with pāṇḍās whose work and presence at Kālīghāṭ is constantly being deemed illegal by the courts, organize and continue to occupy temple space. In a post-​1990s moment, appeals to the state’s obligation to provide populations welfare no longer hold sway, as citizens more often think of the poor as obstacles to their “civil society-​type” perspectives and ambitions (Menon 2010, 16).4 Populations can no longer rely on a moral appeal, and instead increasingly engage in the technique of physical obstruction through protests, sit-​ins, and gheraoing (surrounding) state officials. The workings of political society are nowhere more visible than in India’s urban spaces, where the coexistence of slums and skyscrapers make the inequalities between inhabitants impossible to ignore (see Holston and Appadurai 1996). The poor must fight to negotiate their lives and livelihoods in the new post-​industrial globalized metropolis ruled by a managerial-​ technocratic elite (Chatterjee 2004, 143–​4). They band together, at times aligning themselves with powerful members of political parties, threatening to switch allegiances if they are not allowed to set up makeshift housing in public spaces, illegally tap the electricity grid, or wash their clothes in lakes and rivers (Chaterjee 2004, 53–​78).5 Elites are irate at their persistent presence and yet rely heavily on their cheap labor. In this context, Chatterjee wonders:  “Will political society provide the instruments for negotiating a controlled transition to a new urban regime or will it explode into anarchic resistance” (145)? The same question might be asked of Kālīghāṭ. Elites envision this site as a potential marker of the world-​class city. Low-​class laborers and beggars resist that vision at Kālīghāṭ just as they do throughout the city. Will those resistances lead to an amicable solution in which multiple parties’ needs are met? Or will they lead to further divisions?6 The state’s own designation of the temple as public has in many ways lent legitimacy to resistances. In 2012, I  spoke with Anjan Mitra in the office of his architectural firm in Kolkata. At that time, he was the director of the West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation and one of the chief architects of Kālīghāṭ’s renovation. Among the many reasons he cited for the delay of that project, he offered this insight: “Kālīghāṭ is

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public. Therefore everyone owns it but nobody owns it.” If the temple were private property, he contends, it would be easier to transform it because the only party weighing in would be its owners. No doubt this was the case at Akṣardhām in Delhi—​parts of whose construction Mitra also oversaw—​which was constructed in record time. Now that Kālīghāṭ is public, however, everyone wants his or her say in what goes on there. Heeding any one of those proposals excludes the proposals of others. The desires of modernizers, devotees, sevāyets, pāṇḍās, hawkers, and beggars all push up against one another at Kālīghāṭ. The state, then, is in a bind. Through their own designation, the courts have given themselves the authority to intervene in temple life, while simultaneously making such intervention more difficult. The temple space is now plagued with the same contestations as every other public space in the city. Resistance to modernization projects come not only from those who are shut out of civil society but from those who reject the secular state’s authority at this religious institution. Kālīghāṭ is, after all, not only a public space. It is also a sacred space that is home to the goddess Kālī, in which people engage in powerful rituals. As outlined in Chapter 2, India’s particular form of secularism guarantees the non-​establishment of religion, but it also gives the state the right to reform religion when religious practices violate other goals of the modern state (see also Acevedo 2013). The state is therefore heavily invested in religious matters, particularly in the administration of religious institutions and the implementation of religious law (see Rajan and Needham 2007). Those who framed India’s constitution were, after all, middle-​class modernizers who were eager to reform religious values they saw as backward (Menon 2007, 130–​3). In the name of equality, for example, the Untouchability Offences Act of 1955 made it illegal to exclude untouchables from entering places of public worship, thus violating the religious principle of purity upon which many temples across India were organized (Galanter 1964). Similarly, in the name of separating money from religion, the courts imposed a new management system upon most temples throughout India, thus violating the religious system by which a deity’s appointees redistributed offerings made to him or her. Religious authorities and certain religious practitioners were always likely to oppose such moves.7 At temples in particular, where the divine has always reigned supreme, many reject the secular state’s claim to exercise authority. Once again the state’s modernizing goals do not necessarily align with the goals of most of the Indian populace. I have already demonstrated that sevāyets rejected the authority of the state to impose a new system of management on Kālīghāṭ. Many continue

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to reject that. Furthermore, in the twenty-​first century, as the state works to modernize Kālīghāṭ’s physical space, its actions inevitably impinge upon the rituals taking place in that space. Below, I outline how the court’s recent rulings affect rituals of animal sacrifice and darśan in particular. In these cases, devotees also oppose the state’s right to interrupt the ways in which they engage with Kālī in the name of reform. Their resistances highlight the extent to which many Indians reject the particular configuration of state–​ temple relations inherent in the Indian state’s form of secularism.

Laborers Organize One of the most common explanations as to why modernization projects have not been fully realized at Kālīghāṭ is that there are too many “vested interests” in the temple. Mitra (2012) offered this explanation as to why renovation work at Kālīghāṭ was so difficult while it seemed to proceed much more smoothly at other temples, including Dakṣiṇeśvar: “Dakṣiṇeśvar does not command the connections and resources that Kālīghāṭ does. Kālīghāṭ is the place in terms of priority.” He estimated that there are 50,000 people who depend on Kālīghāṭ for their livelihood, including sevāyets (by his count, 630 families), pāṇḍās, shop owners, hawkers, and beggars. Gopal Mukherjee, secretary of the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee, offered a similar explanation. He attributed much of the problem to the 1,000 sevāyets, 5,000 pāṇḍās, and 500 sweet shop owners who earn a living at Kālīghāṭ (2011a). These numbers are of course approximations, but they demonstrate that Kālīghāṭ is the center of a thriving economy that benefits thousands of people. Devotees purchase all manner of ritual accouterment, souvenirs, and snacks from a wide range of stalls and shops, pay keepers to mind the shoes that they must remove before entering the temple, and give generously to beggars. Once they get inside the temple, devotees’ tips and offerings provide the wages of a wide array of ritual officiates from sevāyets and pāṇḍās to purohits, miśrās, and sacrificers. Each of these individuals has an interest in maintaining his or her ability to earn a living in this economy. To use Mukherjee’s words, they “depend on Kālī for their survival” (2011a). In turn, the satisfaction of Kālī and her devotees depends in large part on these individuals and the goods and services they offer. Besides sevāyets, it is the pāṇḍās, hawkers, and beggars who attract the most criticism from modernizers for creating a chaotic atmosphere at Kālīghāṭ and for stalling or preventing their renovation efforts. They do not hold official positions at the temple, but instead, are informal laborers. Pāṇḍās, also

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referred to as “sāthī Brahmins” (companion Brahmins), belong to a class of priests separate from the sevāyets and the purohits (those Brahmins in charge of daily worship). They are male Brahmin ritual officiates and temple guides who greet devotees as they arrive at the temple and guide them through a series of rituals before the temple deities. They then accept an offering of money from those devotees. Over the years, this has become an increasingly popular occupation, with hundreds of pāṇḍās ranging from teenagers to men in their sixties crowding around the temple and the streets leading up to it day and night, trying to attract customers. Whereas the role of the sevāyet can be quite lucrative and even prestigious, the role of the pāṇḍā is neither. Pāṇḍās I got to know during my fieldwork reported that they earned somewhere between 500 and 700 rupees (approximately $10–​14) for a 10-​hour workday. When I met with a group of three pāṇḍās ranging from age 40 to 60 through their union’s leader in 2011, I asked them if their sons would follow in their footsteps and become pāṇḍās themselves. They each responded that they hoped their sons would go to university and pursue different professions. They said their work was good, but hard. When I asked them who would do this work in the future, if not their descendants, they laughed at the question, replying that there would always be people willing to do this job. They implied that this was the case not because the job was held in high esteem, but because there would always be desperate people looking for work. When speaking with some of the beggars at Kālīghāṭ about their sons’ future careers, many responded that they would become pāṇḍās. Pāṇḍās are supposed to be Brahmin because of the rituals they perform at the temple with devotees, yet many of the beggars and their sons were of lower-​caste and even Muslim descent. In the interview with the three older pāṇḍās, one introduced himself to me as having the last name “Singh.”8 His friend interrupted him immediately, saying, “Na, Pāṇḍā habe (No, it must be Pāṇḍā).” Singh is a surname that indicates a non-​Brahmin—​ and potentially non-​Hindu—​status, so the other pāṇḍā was insisting that he identify himself with a surname indicating his right to be a pāṇḍā. In the 1990s, reports of pickpocketing, chain-​snatching, and the physical assault of female devotees were rampant and were blamed on the pāṇḍās.9 Newspaper reports regarding the ongoing lawsuits today continue to be filled with complaints against harassing pāṇḍās. My neighbor in Kolkata who appeared in the Introduction was just one of the many devotees who reported to me that they do not visit Kālīghāṭ anymore because of the “pāṇḍā problem.” One city resident recounted to me a story in which he was being guided through Sanskrit mantras in front of Kālī by one pāṇḍā and in the middle of the mantra, the pāṇḍā mentioned that he would dedicate 1,000

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rupees (approximately $20) to the goddess.10 In this tradition, when a devotee says something in the presence of a deity, he or she must see it through, and pledging money to the goddess means giving that money to the pāṇḍā. Numerous of my friends who have visited the temple from other parts of the world have been guided by pāṇḍās to the secluded pond next to the temple and pressured into “donating” 1,000 to 5,000 rupees to them. Demands for a “hassle-​free” visit to Kālīghāṭ led to the announcement by the Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee (KTC) in 1993 that it would work with the police to keep “bhuyo pāṇḍā ebañg pāṇḍāder durbyabahār” (fake [i.e., non-​ Brahmin] and misbehaving [i.e., thieving] pāṇḍās) out of Kālīghāṭ by issuing identity cards to legitimate pāṇḍās and allowing them alone to enter the inner sanctum.11 Yet the problem persisted and was one of the many complaints lodged by Prahlad Roy Goenka in his PIL. The High Court ruled in 2006 that no pāṇḍā would be allowed inside the inner sanctum of Kālīghāṭ at all. They would be allowed to guide pilgrims and perform rituals for them, but not within the inner sanctum (Goenka v. Union of India 2006). That order was not followed for long, so again in 2011, the High Court ruled that no pāṇḍās would be allowed inside the inner sanctum. The Temple Committee would select purohits to perform pūjās, give them identity cards, and allow a maximum of two inside the inner sanctum daily.12 Many pāṇḍās have formed unions to demand from the state their collective right to earn a living at Kālīghāṭ. Approximately 550 pāṇḍās belong to the Kālīghāṭ Kālīmandir Brahman Sahakarmī Saṅgaṭhan (Kālīghāṭ Kālī Temple Companion Brahmin Organization), and another 600 to 700 belong to the Sāthī Brahmin Saṅgaṭhan (Companion Brahmin Organization). Moloy Ghosh is the chairman of the latter organization. When I met with him in his home in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood in October 2011, he explained to me that the Sāthī Brahmin Saṅgaṭhan came about in the 1960s. At that time, Ghosh explained, sevāyets were making the claim that Kālīghāṭ was a private temple and that only pāṇḍās whom they selected would be allowed to work as temple guides at Kālīghāṭ. Most of the pāṇḍās who earned a living there had not been selected by the sevāyets and so opposed this idea. They were vindicated when the Supreme Court confirmed Kālīghāṭ’s status as a public temple. Ghosh remarked, “This is a democracy. They [sevāyets] don’t own Kālīghāṭ so they can’t stop the pāṇḍās from doing their work there.” If the temple is public, he reasoned, then pāṇḍās have just as much of a right to earn money there as anybody else. Such is the freedom and equality to which he believes democracy entitles them. In the early 2000s, when pāṇḍās were facing more accusations of harassment, they approached Ghosh, a former Communist Party of India

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(Marxist) employee known for his skills in community organization. He was particularly well known for his work with the poor, including children from the neighborhood’s red light district. Ghosh said he would help the pāṇḍās on the condition that they stop harassing and pressuring pilgrims into giving them exorbitant sums of money. They agreed, and Ghosh has been representing them ever since. In 2006, Ghosh led the Sāthī Brahmin Saṅgaṭhan’s protest against the Calcutta High Court’s orders that they could not enter Kālīghāṭ’s inner sanctum.13 Ghosh threatened to take the issue to the Human Rights Commission if their right to work at the temple was curtailed. “We cannot be denied our right to survive,” he is reported to have said.14 After the court’s orders in 2011, Krishna Tiwari, executive member of the Kālīghāṭ Kālīmandir Brahman Sahakarmī Saṅgaṭhan, pleaded with the court to allow pāṇḍās in their organization to wear identity cards so that they could continue to work responsibly. “Otherwise, we cannot survive,” he pleaded. His compatriot added, “This order will finish us. We survive on the meager donations we receive from devotees.”15 While Ghosh earlier mentioned democracy, these comments reveal that what is at stake is the democratic right to earn enough money to survive. It is with this rhetoric that union leaders attempt to hold the state accountable for what they see as the state’s obligation to the poor. Yet their success has not relied on the ability of that rhetoric to persuade the courts. The courts, after all, continue try to reduce the number of pāṇḍās and declare their presence in parts of the temple illegal. Pāṇḍās’ success in resisting court orders has relied instead on the fact that they are organized into these unions with hundreds of members whose physical presence on temple grounds is overwhelming to authorities. To remove them would require physical force that no executing body has yet decided it is willing to impose. I will return to this point below. Today, pāṇḍās enter the temple premises and garbha gṛha at will. Ghosh was dismissive of many of the sevāyets I mentioned I had met with. He said that they did not even realize the differences between the pāṇḍās at Kālīghāṭ. Besides those who are organized into these two groups, there are many others who are completely unaffiliated, showing up to the temple in white dhotis, pretending to be pāṇḍās, and who are therefore not responsible to anybody. Those pāṇḍās give the rest a bad name, he declared. The sheer number of pāṇḍās means that each can claim that others cause problems, and not themselves. Hawkers, too, protect their right to work on streets leading to the temple by forming unions and by their immense physical presence. While there is an official “Kalighat Refugee Hawkers’ Corner” at the intersection of

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Shyamprasad Mukherjee Road and Kali Temple Road, hawkers also line Kali Temple Road all the way up to the temple, narrowing the street and blocking the shops and restaurants on either side. They have affixed makeshift stalls to the exterior of the temple walls and occupy streets on all sides of the temple. They sell flowers, sweets, sacred threads, brass and plastic mūrtis, religious pamphlets, and a wide array of other ritual items and souvenirs. Many hawkers and their families have worked there for decades, if not generations. Their refusal to move from temple grounds is one of the biggest barriers that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation cited in their inability to carry out renovation plans at Kālīghāṭ after the 2006 PIL ruling.16 In 2011, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was enlisted by the Calcutta High Court—​in response to Surabhi Bose’s PIL—​to advise them on whether or not the temple could be protected as an official heritage site. The ASI reported that it was unable to consider Kālīghāṭ a heritage site because even while the site was old enough, there were so many additions and enclosures—​most of them storefronts—​that had been affixed to it since its construction in 1809 that it was impossible to tell what was actually part of the original temple and what was new (Bose v. Union of India 2013). In 2013, the High Court was still imploring the state government to remove 200 stalls from the temple’s surroundings.17 Yet the police, Kolkata Municipal Corporation, and KTC each claimed that they were helpless in combatting the presence of so many hawkers. Hawkers are some of Kolkata’s most powerfully organized populations. There are hawkers unions all over the city, each working to set bribes to police and city officials so that they can occupy streets and sidewalks illegally (Bandyopadhyay 2009, 119). After Operation Sunshine in 1996, in which thousands of hawkers’ stalls on Kolkata’s sidewalks were demolished, unions worked to get hawkers back on the sidewalks within months. The aftermath of Operation Sunshine in fact produced the most powerful opposition to state restrictions on hawkers’ ability to earn a living on city streets—​the Hawker Sangram Committee. That Committee became the umbrella organization for 32 different existing hawkers’ unions and engaged in street protests to fight for hawkers’ rights (Bandyopadhyay 2009, 118–​19). They now work with the state to ensure that conflicts between hawkers are settled non-​violently and that the number of hawkers is limited to ensure profitability. In other words, the state’s attempt to eradicate hawking backfired. When police and municipal officials decry that they are powerless to remove hawkers from Kālīghāṭ’s surroundings, they surely have examples like this in mind.

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Beggars Improvise Beggars hold perhaps the most tenuous positions at Kālīghāṭ because they do not claim to offer any services to temple visitors. (While providing an outlet for devotees to demonstrate their generosity might be considered a service or a benefit, I  did not hear anyone frame the beggars’ presence in this way). Over the course of my fieldwork, I spent a great deal of time with a group of women who live on temple grounds and who beg for a living. They have carved out an existence for themselves by bribing sevāyets and police to let them sleep on certain parts of the pavement, eating free meals that are sometimes provided by donors to the temple, and getting money for supplemental food, tea, clothing, and even cinema tickets by relying on the generosity of temple visitors. They live in a tight-​knit community with other beggars, as well as pāṇḍās and shopkeepers. My closest interlocutor in this group, Asha (also featured in the Introduction), told me that she makes about 200 rupees (about $4) per day. She and her friends’ children attend a free Bengali-​medium school in the neighborhood where they are fed one meal a day. Kālīghāṭ Temple is a better place than most to beg for a living. The hundreds of beggars who live there consider it home, many having lived there for their entire lives. One day I  sat on the steps of the nāṭmandir with Asha and her friend Navami as they pointed to some of the sevāyets and pāṇḍās who walked by. Some, they said, are “pāgol” (crazy). Others drink too much. Many, they said, earn a lot of money but are never happy. They proudly juxtaposed those men to themselves who get a little money and a little food but are happy. That is not to say that they are unambitious. Navami was constantly trying to earn money, following wealthy-​looking devotees around until they relented, and eating her fill of the free food provided by temple donors. During Sarasvatī Pūjā, she made her own very small paṇḍāl (temporary shrine) so that devotees would make offerings that she could keep. Her husband worked as a sweeper at Mother Teresa’s Nirmal Hriday. The two of them spoke of plans to move themselves and their two children to Chetla, a nearby neighborhood, once they could afford to rent an apartment there. She once asked if she could visit my apartment. Asha looked at her incredulously, asking why she would want to do that. Navami replied that she wanted to see if she could get in past the guards. Asha, instead, played the long game. She did not chase devotees but let them come to her. She had a number of donors who would visit her periodically and give her a few hundred rupees at a time. When we first met,

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I engaged her in conversation about her son, and only after speaking with me for some time did she ask me for money. When it became clear that I was going to be a frequent visitor to the temple, she stopped. Each time I visited, she offered to buy me tea. She was insulted if I insisted on paying, so we switched on and off. She sat with me many long hours over many tiny cups of milky chai throughout the nine months of my fieldwork. I became one of her donors, grateful for her time and patience. When I asked Asha what her son would do for a job when he grew up, she joked and said he would come to America with me and have an “office job.” In reality, his future is uncertain. Yet she makes sure he regularly attends the neighborhood school. These women, and the others who live on temple grounds, employ the very little means they have in order to resist court orders—​namely their savvy. When court officials came to investigate PIL claims at Kālīghāṭ, word spread among the pāṇḍās and beggars, and beggars simply did not beg for the duration of their stay. In January of 2012, rumors were circulating that the High Court was going to remove beggars and any new hawkers’ stalls from the temple premises. However, they would allow all of the hawkers who had already established a shop—​either in an actual building or a makeshift stall—​to remain. When I went to visit Asha and Navami, I found that they and their friends had each created their own makeshift stalls with trinkets for pilgrims to purchase. The courtyard behind the temple was filled with these small platforms to the point that it was difficult to move in between them. The beggars had mounted their resistance. If authorities were to come, they would be pre-​existing hawkers and not beggars at all. This is the way in which they would combat the changes that were about to be imposed on them. The rumors ultimately came to nothing, and so the stalls disappeared once again. Like pāṇḍās and hawkers, beggars recognize state authority over the temple and over their lives. But while pāṇḍās and hawkers appeal to that authority, demanding from it their right to earn a living, beggars engage in deception in order to subvert it. All of these groups, moreover, bodily refuse to be removed from the spaces in and around the temple. It works because of their number. The removal of these populations would require violent physical force, which, as the example of Operation Sunshine demonstrates, is not likely to be effective for long. Furthermore, these groups comprise vital vote banks for local and state politicians. When I  asked Gopal Mukherjee why the ever-​popular chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, had not become involved in the controversy over Kālīghāṭ’s space, he replied that if she did, these groups would turn against her and support her opposition.18 She cannot afford the political backlash that cracking down on pāṇḍās, hawkers, and beggars would bring. She has used discretionary state funds

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to erect a gateway depicting all 51 Śaktipīṭhs to one of the main roads leading to Kālīghāṭ. That gateway, however, does not remove anyone’s ability to earn a living. It in fact provides work for area patuas (artisans). The state’s strategy of mandating changes to temple space on the basis of petitions from middle-​class citizens can only go so far. Declaring the presence of thousands of people illegal clearly does not guarantee cooperation but instead produces protest in multiple forms. A transformation of Kālīghāṭ requires buy-​in from more than just the modernizers.

Sevāyets Delay and Disregard Sevāyets’ authority, as well as the benefits they gain from that authority, have been chipped away by court rulings since the mid-​twentieth century, and many sevāyets fundamentally reject that trend. It is often unclear whether their opposition to state incursions is due to their belief that they alone are divinely authorized to exercise dominion over the temple or if it is due to their desire to continue earning money there as they always have. The fact remains, however, that they reject the loss of control over what used to be their exclusive domain. Yet the middle-​class culture of many sevāyets often results in an ambivalent and perplexing set of public and private responses to modernization efforts at Kālīghāṭ. Some sevāyets expressed to me exactly the same sentiments as those expressed by modernizers. One sevāyet with a considerably large pālā—​five days per year—​said that he felt that some sevāyets were greedy, even corrupt, and he had concerns about the impression Kālīghāṭ leaves on foreigners who visit Kolkata. Gopal Mukherjee, who is a sevāyet as well as the secretary of the Temple Committee, told me that he desperately wants the temple to be cleansed and made more pleasant for visitors. Yet in practice, sevāyets in general, and especially the Temple Committee, drag their feet, reluctantly concede to only a small fraction of proposed renovations, and, at times, flat out refuse to comply with court orders. While some of them may agree with the principle of modernization, as a whole, they appear to disagree with the state’s authority to pursue that principle in a domain they claim as their own. They are even more wary of the authority of NGOs or any other third-​party organization to do the same. It is important to note here that while the KTC is supposed to be comprised of five sevāyets and six representatives of the public, as mandated by the Supreme Court of India in 1961, it is, in practice, comprised of sevāyets alone. This is a widely known fact among those involved in temple administration.

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Goenka cites it in his PIL, and both Mukherjee and Ashok Banerjee (Surabhi Bose’s lawyer in the 2011 PIL) relayed this to me personally. These men explained to me that public representatives have their own jobs and are not paid to be on the KTC, so they do not show an interest in their appointed positions. Over the course of my fieldwork, I was referred by helpful friends on a number of occasions to individuals they knew who were officially public representatives on the KTC, but those individuals either did not return my calls or refused to meet with me. While there are many reasons they may have wanted to avoid this foreign researcher, I  took their silence as evidence in support of Mukherjee’s and Banerjee’s statements. As I discuss the positions of the KTC in this section, then, I am discussing the position of sevāyets elected to that Committee. In the 2011 and 2012 High Court hearings of Goenka and Bose’s PILs, the KTC’s lawyers maintained that they were trying to comply with court orders but lacked the resources to do so. Exchanges between judges and lawyers on both sides were quite heated at many points. At a hearing on November 25, 2011, Banerjee accused sevāyets of continuing to sell their pālās and of not maintaining video cameras in the temple’s inner sanctum. A  lawyer for the KTC insisted that they required police assistance to keep sevāyets in check and to maintain the cameras. Indeed, Banerjee reported at a hearing on December 9 of the same year that just a few weeks prior, he had gone to Kālīghāṭ to investigate matters for himself and found the policewoman charged with watching the feed from the video camera inside the inner sanctum asleep on the job. When the court bench requested the KTC’s financial records so that they could see how its money was being spent, the KTC delayed providing those records for months, insisting that they required more time. They eventually produced partial accounts for the year 2009. They reported that they only had 63 rupees ($1.29) in their bank account—​the minimum amount the State Bank of India requires to maintain an open savings account and the same amount the Committee reported in 2006. When that figure was read aloud, the entire courtroom burst into laughter.19 It was simply unimaginable to all present that a temple as renowned as this would be cash-​poor. However, without external oversight there was no way to determine whether or not this was an accurate depiction of temple accounts. The Temple Committee later reported that for the fiscal year of 2011/​12, the temple’s annual income had been 2 million rupees (approximately $45,000), which the Court bench also disbelieved because they felt its income must be higher (Bose v. Union of India 2013). During these exchanges, another KTC lawyer claimed that the KTC wanted Kālīghāṭ to be redeveloped according to the court’s desires but objected that

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the renovations were proceeding without even considering the KTC. When Banerjee demanded to know why most of the International Foundation for Sustainable Development’s (IFSD) plans not yet been executed, the lawyer replied with exasperation, “We are trying our best!” The lawyer claimed that the KTC was not being consulted in the renovation plans, nor was it being informed about when and how those plans would be implemented. The animosity between parties was evident in Banerjee’s goading and rhetorical reply: “So are you going to do it [the renovations] yourselves?” The result of this distrust is that while sevāyets voice their cooperation with renovation efforts in public forums, in practice they appear completely uncooperative. Mridul Pathak reported to me that the KTC supported the IFSD’s renovation plans when they were first proposed in the early 2000s. Once the construction work commenced, however, they began to resist. For example, when municipal authorities cleared the land for the administrative building that would serve as a tourist information center, which he had proposed and the Union Tourism Ministry had agreed to fund, the KTC would not allow it to be constructed even though the land was not on temple grounds but a few blocks away. At that time, Mukherjee was the assistant secretary of the KTC. He stated to The Telegraph: “We have no clue about the plans of the government. Unless we are told the details of the project, we cannot allow anyone to start the construction work.”20 Anjan Mitra reported that back in 2006, the KTC actually wanted to return the government’s money so that no changes took place in or around the temple. The KTC argued that the IFSD was only interested in making money and that the Tourism Ministry’s money should therefore be administered not through the IFSD but through the KTC. The 2013 High Court judgment indicates that the KTC had been concerned with who would own the building once it was constructed—​the IFSD, the state, or Kālī (Bose v. Union of India 2013).21 After much hand-​wringing and many further negotiations, the Tourism Ministry agreed to funnel the money neither through the IFSD or KTC but through the West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation (WBTDC) and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation to the contractor. That building was finally constructed and is now administered by the WBTDC. Regarding the physical changes the High Court mandated at the temple in response to Goenka’s lawsuit in 2006, none of those were carried out until after Goenka filed his follow-​up suit in conjunction with Surabhi Bose’s PIL. In 2012, the KTC finally allowed the WBTDC to install footbaths in the temple’s entryways and to erect a seven-​foot wall around the sacrificial arena in order to visually conceal it. Mitra reported that by 2012, only 50 of the 650 million rupees allocated by the Indian government had been spent on

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Kālīghāṭ’s renovations.22 There is clearly a disconnect between what the modernizers want and what the KTC is willing to allow. Modernizers, in turn, accuse sevāyets of corruption. So do some sevāyets, including Gopal Mukherjee. In 2011 and 2012, Mukherjee represented the KTC at each of the court hearings. When I met him at the temple on the day of his pālā, he spoke about—​among other things—​how poorly he thought the temple was run. He lamented that the administration there “avoids and ignores” orders from the court. He told me that he keeps hoping for a change at the temple, but he has been waiting for years. A month later, I went to his home for lunch upon the invitation of his wife and daughters. There, Mukherjee urged me to write a letter to the Chief Justice to express my personal desires for the temple. He said the Chief Justice would be interested to know what a visitor wants to see changed. He also told me about a list of suggestions that he and a number of lawyers involved in the PILs had created to submit to the Chief Justice in December of 2011. Most of these suggestions (Mukherjee 2011) entail the same changes that the High Court had been ordering for years: • Removing beggars from the nāṭmandir, jorbungalow, and garbha gṛha where thefts most often occur • Limiting hawkers • Installing CCTV cameras in 19 different “sensitive areas” • Requiring pūjāris to use ID card when entering garbha gṛha • Engaging the police to maintain order when disorder arises • Hiring an outside security agency so as not to rely only on police • Installing fire alarms, alongside other safety precautions • Increasing the size of temple to manage crowds • Cleaning the temple • Fixing the floor of the garbha gṛha • Cleaning the Adi Ganga • Placing a “strong sincere and retired person preferably from the administrative department” under the direction of the District Judge to properly manage and administer the temple “without having to tend to his own profession” I asked Mukherjee why these suggestions were not being followed if everyone agreed that they ought to be. Mukherjee’s response was that some sevāyets were corrupt, including one essential leader within the KTC. A number of other sevāyets expressed this sentiment to me as well—​that they were not personally corrupt but others were, and that was at least part of the reason the

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court’s orders were not being followed. As one put it, “There are bad people all over the world—​so it is here in Kālīghāṭ.” But what does corruption mean in this context? If corruption is defined as “the abuse of public office for private gain” (Sissener 2001, 23), then the accusation itself contains modernist claims about sevāyets as public office holders who ought not stand to gain financially from their positions at the temple. Those sevāyets who oppose the state’s authority to institutionally or physically shape the temple are not necessarily acting in ways they would consider corrupt. Those sevāyets who furthermore refuse to see the temple as a public institution and who therefore see no problem in profiting from temple income are not acting in ways that they would consider corrupt either. They hold the same view many temple Brahmins hold throughout the country—​that the state is in the wrong for overstepping its bounds (see, e.g., Fuller 1984, 134; Younger 1995, 147–​8). The accusation of corruption, therefore, signifies an impasse between sevāyets and state actors. One might still wonder how sevāyets can get away with blatantly refusing to heed court orders. This is in part because courts lack cooperation from executing bodies, including the police force, to carry out its orders. But it is also because the management structure of the temple disperses responsibility among approximately 1,000 sevāyets who manage the temple for a few hours or a few days per year. It is difficult to hold specific individuals accountable for issues that are ongoing at the temple. Which one of those 1,000 sevāyets, for example, is to be prosecuted for letting beggars inside the temple, for not cleaning the inner sanctum properly, or for allowing people to wear shoes? Each sevāyet can claim that the temple system proceeds in ways over which they have no control. They can therefore take advantage of Kālīghāṭ’s traditional form of dispersed governance as a strategy to gain advantage vis-​à-​vis state power.23

Devotees Persist and Protest Devotees also reject the state’s authority to intervene in temple life, if and when such intervention alters rituals taking place at Kālīghāṭ. In one example, devotees who engage in animal sacrifice refuse to allow the many facets of that practice to be visually concealed according to the mandate of the Calcutta High Court in 2006 (as outlined in the previous chapter). Sacrifice takes place on the southern side of the nāṭmandir, facing Kālī. Combined, devotees offer approximately 5 to 20 small black goats each day, and up to 100 on major festival days. Members of the Bāgdi caste perform

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the sacrifices with one quick stroke of a sacrificially consecrated knife. They then skin and prepare the carcasses to portion out meat to the devotees who offered the sacrifice and to sell in the meat market in the southwest corner of the temple. Up until 2011, there was a four-​foot-​high wall surrounding the sacrificial arena, and the skinning and preparation of carcasses took place out in the open. As a result of the PILs, in that year a seven-​foot-​high wall replaced the existing one, and a small concrete room was constructed directly next to the structure for the processing of carcasses. The aim of the courts was to visually conceal the entire procedure so that temple visitors were not forced to see the blood and flesh of sacrificed animals if they did not want to. Those devotees who engage in this practice, however, or who hold it to be an auspicious and powerful one, want full visual and even physical access to it. They want to move freely into and out of the sacrificial arena in order to offer their prayers to the sacrificial stakes where goats’ necks are later lodged for the act of sacrifice.24 They want to collect a drop or two of the potent blood to place on their foreheads, or to take home in jars of water in order to place them on the outskirts of their homes as protection. Furthermore, those who perform the skinning and preparation of the goats need adequate space for those activities. And the individual or family who offers the goats wants to look on as those activities are taking place. The new physical structures—​the higher wall and the concrete room—​are barriers to this ritual practice and the practicalities involved in it. Sacrifice continues to take place in the sacrificial arena—​the place that sits directly in front of Kālī—​so that she can receive sacrificial offerings. However, now devotees strain to see it, and they try to rush into the enclosure as soon as the sacrifice is complete to collect blood. The result is further crowding and commotion, as there is only one door through which to enter the arena. The small concrete room that was built to conceal the skinning and preparation of flesh is way too small and restrictive for all parties involved in that process. Throughout the duration of my fieldwork, I saw only one animal being skinned in that room. The rest were skinned either in front of the room or just outside the gates of the temple, about 10 feet away—​both out in the open for all to see. This provided further opportunities for devotees to collect blood after animals were dragged out of the sacrificial arena. The meat market within the temple grounds has only grown in recent years. When I first visited the temple in 2002, there was one lone man selling goat meat in that corner. Now, there is a family of 10 or more people selling meat to devotees who bring bags to the temple with the explicit purpose of purchasing the sanctified flesh.

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Flesh and blood, then, continue to be major features of the temple, despite court rulings. For those rulings to be followed, devotees and ritual practitioners would have to completely transform the ways in which they engage in this ritual that is a constituent part of Kālīghāṭ and that makes this temple unique among temples in the city. Many refuse to allow the state to dictate such a transformation. While they must work within one of the physical structures mandated by the court (the walled sacrificial arena), they refuse to work within the other (the small concrete room), and they refuse to let either restrict their access to goats and their blood. In a second example, devotees resisted an order by the High Court in April 2012 that banned devotees from entering Kālīghāṭ’s inner sanctum.25 The court argued that devotees could see Kālī from outside the inner sanctum, so there was no need for them to submit themselves to the cramped and dangerous situation of taking darśan inside. For their own safety, then, they would be banned from entering the garbha gṛha. This ruling went beyond plaintiffs’ requests and was shocking to many parties. The following day, thousands of devotees flocked to the temple—​some in protest, some who only hoped to “touch the feet of the goddess for the last time.”26 Citing the protests, the KTC appealed to the Supreme Court of India. Their lawyer argued that the ban was causing a “law and order problem,” and that it “violated the fundamental rights of the devotees.”27 The Supreme Court sided with the KTC, overturning the lower court’s ban. In this example, sevāyets and devotees joined together in their rejection of state authority at the temple. Such protests are rare, even while the courts seek to make many changes at Kālīghāṭ. Devotees protest only those orders that limit their ability to worship Kālī in the ways they desire. Orders to sweep the temple, remove beggars, and install security cameras, for example, do not inhibit the worship process for most of them. Constraining sacrifice and banning people from close access to Kālī, however, do. Some devotees attributed the High Court’s initial ban of devotees in the garbha gṛha to Kālī’s displeasure and prayed to Kālī to reverse the injunction. The Bengali-​language newspaper Bartamān featured a picture of priests performing homa in front of the temple with a sign that read: “Mā birakta je kon kārane. . . . Mā purnabibechanā karo” (Mother is upset for some reason. . . . Mother, please reconsider).28 These devotees’ mode of resistance turns the court’s authority at the temple on its head, positing that the court acts at the behest of Kālī rather than the other way around. Employing a similar logic, one of the head purohits of Kālīghāṭ had previously explained to me that animal sacrifice had not been stopped at the temple because of “māyer icchā” (the wish of the mother) (Bhaṭṭācārya 2009). He, too, attributed the results

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of legal action and inaction to Kālī’s will. For these individuals, no amount of state intervention can remove Kālī’s supreme authority over the temple. This does not mean that modernizers see their own efforts as contrary to Kālī’s will. In fact, Pathak described his work to me as “spiritual.” “Kālī doesn’t care if you make it [the temple] clean or not,” he declared, “but she definitely cares if you have tried to do something” (Pathak 2012a). He appeals to human authority to honor the goddess, whereas the aforementioned devotees and purohit appeal only to the goddess’s authority. These positions raise the question of human versus divine agency at the temple. As Leela Prasad once pushed me to consider, whose responsibility is it to take care of Kālī? Is it the sevāyets’? The devotees’? The courts’? Kālī’s? Or is it Kālī’s responsibility to look after human beings rather than the other way around (Prasad 2015)?

Devotees and Citizens Stay Silent While there are thousands of people whose lives are directly affected by the proposed changes to Kālīghāṭ, many Kolkata citizens are simply not interested in what happens at the temple, and they are therefore silent on these issues. These include individuals who do not visit it and have no stake in a vision of this temple as emblematic of anything. My Sikh neighbor as well as devotees at the gurdwārā in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood expressed to me that they are not concerned with Kālīghāṭ Temple because “that place is for Hindus.” Muslim waiters and taxi drivers I met throughout the city shared the same sentiment. Then there are countless others who were born Hindu but who do not think that religion is the future of the country, including some of the professors I met at the University of Calcutta and Globsyn Business School. These individuals share Nehru’s sentiment that there are other more important and fitting emblems of the Indian nation than temples. In this section, however, I  focus on another group—​Kālī devotees who visit Kālīghāṭ frequently but who do not care how the temple looks, or how crowded or chaotic it is. Their silence in public debates, accompanied by their continued presence at the temple, aid in the efforts of those who resist modernizing projects. I  include here accounts from two women who expressed to me that they experience a kind of peace at the temple that does not have much to do with its physical state. These two women are certainly part of India’s middle classes, though they would not fall to the upper end of this spectrum. They are housewives of a menial office worker and a mid-​level naval officer, respectively. They are not part of the managerial-​professional elite that Goenka and Pathak are. They do not aspire to be part of public

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debates regarding the state of the temple, and they are unconcerned with Kālīghāṭ’s ability to represent modern India. Their voices are therefore largely left out of these conversations, not arguing for the temple’s modernization but not actively resisting it either. They may or may not recognize the state’s authority to intervene in temple affairs. Their desire vis-​à-​vis Kālīghāṭ is only to visit Kālī as often as they can in order to achieve peace and calm in their lives. To be sure, this desire is one shared by many of the modernizers I have discussed throughout the pages of this book, but those others have decided that it is worth entering the fray of public debate and action to improve aspects of the temple. These women have not. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I  visited Kālīghāṭ with research assistant, Hena Basu. We sat at the Bhuvaneśvarī temple, which is owned by a descendent of Upendranāth Mukhopādhyāy, author of Kālīghāṭ Itivṛtta, and sits just outside the Kālīghāṭ temple walls. Hena began conversing with a Bengali woman sitting next to her in her mid-​forties, Subhra, who visits the temple every day. I could not hear most of their conversation over the din of the Saturday night crowds, but Hena relayed its contents to me later. Subhra told Hena that she was born and raised in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood and had visited the temple since she was a child. There was a period of a few years, she recalled with sadness, in which she lived in Mudiali, a neighborhood about a mile south of the temple, with her husband and his parents. She did not get along with her in-​laws, and they would not allow her to visit Kālīghāṭ. She was emotionally desperate and worried constantly about everything, including money, but could not come to visit Kālī to ease her troubles. “Bhālo hoyni” (I wasn’t well), she said. Finally, her husband gave in to her wishes. Now she lives again in Kālīghāṭ with her parents and daughter and she can visit the temple each day. She comes alone to pray. When she sees Kālī, she finds “śānti” (peace), and it helps her get through her days. Hena asked her if she had heard about the recent order to ban devotees from the inner sanctum of the temple. Subhra was unconcerned. She said that people could pray to Kālī from any place in the temple, without any need of going into the garbha gṛha. Subhra wanted to have daŕsan of Kālī that night, so we accompanied her. The line was very long, so we joined the shorter line of devotees going for darśan on the path between the nāṭmandir and garbha gṛha. Pāṇḍās standing on the edge of the garbha gṛha leaned over our heads, holding on to long cloths they had tied to the ceiling. This way, they could swing between devotees and those pāṇḍās who were closer to Kālī to receive offerings and give prasād. People crushed in all around us. A  woman ahead of us in line pleaded with a pāṇḍā to give her some holy water so

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that she could complete her worship. She did not receive any before the line of people behind her pushed her out of the way. When we got to the spot in front of Kālī, pāṇḍās shouted at one another so that the line of devotees on the platform of the garbha gṛha were pushed to either side in order for us to have a split-​second view of Kālī’s large red eyes. As our bodily resistance to the pushing and shoving from other devotees gave way, our time with Kālī was up. Hena turned to us and asked if we got to see Kālī. It would have been easy to miss her. We replied in the positive, and Subhra added with a shrug, “Ki korbe? Onek somoy bhir acche” (What to do? There is often a crowd). Returning to our bench in the Bhuvaneśvarī temple, I asked Subhra if śānti (the word she had previously used) is the way she would characterize the experience we had just had. She smiled widely and responded, “bhiṛ acche, kintu ārām acche” (There is a crowd, but there is also comfort). Hena, a Hindu who does not visit this temple often, said that she felt scared being among all of those people. But, she said, it must not bother people who experience it all the time. Subhra did not mind the physical environment or atmosphere of this place. It was only important to her that she had darśan of Kālī. I met Srimitra through my doctor in Kolkata. Dr. Rao had told me that she herself was not all that interested in religion. She was raised in a Hindu family, but when she goes to temples it is to sightsee rather than to worship. When her family members visit from out of town, she takes them to Dakṣiṇeśvar and Belur Maṭh. When they go to Puri, rather than visiting the grand temple to Jagannāth (a form of Kṛṣṇa), she would rather visit the beaches. When I  told her my interest in Kālīghāṭ, she exclaimed, “Oh, all the geriatrics in my family swear by that place!” She, however, found it to be “quite rough.” She said that she had a friend—​Srimitra—​who visited Kālīghāṭ daily, and that we should meet. Unlike Dr. Rao, Srimitra shared many of Subhra’s sentiments. She is a Tamil woman who grew up just a 10-​minute walk from Kālīghāṭ. She and her family would visit the temple twice a week throughout her childhood. Now that she is an adult with a family of her own, she again lives close to the temple and visits even more often than she did as a child. Srimitra is married and has a teenaged son but prefers to visit Kālīghāṭ alone. She calls Kālīghāṭ her “comfort place.” She seemed to struggle with exactly the phrase that she wanted to use to describe her relationship to this place but settled on this one and used it frequently throughout our conversation. Whenever she is worried or something is bothering her, she says to herself, “I will go to the temple soon” and is soothed by the thought. The background picture of her mobile phone is that of Kālī at Kālīghāṭ—​that iconic black stone with three

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large red eyes. Encountering this form of Kālī electronically morning, noon, and night is also a comfort to her. She described moving to Chennai when she got married, as that is where her husband, an officer in the navy, lived with his family. She kept a picture of Kālī at Kālīghāṭ in her new home, looking to the goddess to help her adjust to her new circumstances. In Tamil Nadu, though goddess worship is very prevalent, Srimitra’s friends and family found this image of Kālī to be frightening and its presence in the house inauspicious. They did not hesitate to express their intense disapproval of it, saying that this form of Kālī represents death and destruction and would harm her, her husband, and her son. They said that this image was only for use by Tantrikas. Her mother-​in-​ law insisted, “this is just not done by people in our family,” and demanded that she take the image down. Srimitra refused. She said she had never even considered Kālī to be frightening-​looking. She ventured a guess as to why others might see her in this way:  “I guess maybe it’s that she’s black and has a long tongue and those three eyes.” To Srimitra however, “she is Ma.” She could not understand why her husband’s family thought that Kālī would harm anybody—​she is god, after all. For 18 years she kept the image of Kālī in her new home, to the great vexation of her new family and neighbors. All the while, she said to herself, “I’ll go to the temple as soon as I get to Kolkata.” Now that she lives in Kolkata once again, she can keep her Kālī image up in her home without complaint, and she can visit her “comfort place” whenever she desires. When I asked her about the current controversy surrounding the temple, she seemed surprised that there was one. She noted that some people think it is crowded, but she goes during off-​peak hours—​at either 4:30 a.m. or 11:30 p.m. Avoiding the pāṇḍās, she simply offers a flower or ten rupees to Kālī, and is on her way again. Able to avoid the crowds, they do not pose a problem to her and her relationship with the goddess. I wish I had collected more stories like Subhra’s and Srimitra’s, because I  believe them to be quite widespread, even as they are drowned out in public conversations. When I expressed an interest in Kālīghāṭ with friends, neighbors, devotees, waitstaff, and basically everybody I met in the city, I was constantly referred to historians, sevāyets, and sometimes to those involved in the current lawsuit—​those deemed “knowledgeable” about Kālīghāṭ in the ways in which they felt a foreigner would be interested. Many middle-​ class acquaintances shared with me their view that the temple was dirty and crowded, often suggesting I  should study another temple—​ usually Dakṣiṇeśvar—​in order to understand Bengali culture, before referring me to authoritative figures. Many others, women in particular, were highly

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reluctant to share their personal sentiments regarding Kālīghāṭ with me at all. Srimitra expressed to me in the beginning of our conversation that she did not really know anything about Kālīghāṭ and did not want me to use her name (I have not) because she was only telling me her personal experience. In fact, she had considered not showing up to our arranged meeting. She felt her understanding of the temple was anecdotal and unimportant. Similarly, I think Subhra only shared what she did because Hena, another woman of her age and background, engaged her in a personal conversation. I suspect, however, that there are thousands of Srimitras and Subhras in Kolkata and across Bengal who either do not see the dirt and alleged corruption that so vexes modernizers or do not see it as a problem. Then there are those devotees who complain about the dirt at Kālīghāṭ but continue to go to the temple anyway. My neighbor’s friend, Kamala, is a good example. While she expresses great concern about the physical environment of Kālīghāṭ and strongly desires that it be cleansed, she does not enter the public debate. Rather than creating or supporting an NGO or PIL, she alters her behavior, visiting only on certain days and at certain times when she knows she can interact with her favorite pāṇḍā. I suspect that the success of resistances to modernization projects relies in part on these individuals’ refusal to involve themselves in the public controversy. In their daily and weekly visits to the temple, unencumbered by the mess and crowds, and by pāṇḍās’ protests and court restrictions on rituals, they silently pronounce that they are willing to visit Kālī in this place no matter what the cost. They thus weigh in on the controversy by voting, as it were, with their feet.

Negotiating Modernities Through Temples Because the Indian state has involved itself in the lives of temples across India, Hindus’ diverse ways of understanding what kind of importance temples hold in modern society must be enacted either through, or in resistance to, the state. In turn, the literal and figurative shape of the temple in the coming years will be determined in large part by the complex negotiations that take place between the Indian state and its citizens and populations. Nivedita Menon (2007) argues that Chatterjee’s schema of civil and political society denotes a societal division that is as much about elite and non-​ elite ideology as it is about modes of civic engagement. Populations protest state declarations that their presence and activities are illegal in part because they fundamentally disagree with a vision of the temple that makes it an

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emblem of Indian modernity. That vision sees the present physical state of the temple, as well as stereotypes of India, Kolkata, and Hinduism, as problems that need solving. Thousands of others, however, are not encumbered by the same concerns. They may be aware of the stereotypes, and they may even theoretically want the temple to be cleaner, but their daily lives and visions for their futures carry a different set of concerns. For pāṇḍās, hawkers, beggars, and many sevāyets, Kālīghāṭ is a means by which they can achieve economic and social mobility—​perhaps even a middle-​class existence—​for themselves and their children. Mr. Singh (or “Mr. Pāṇḍā”), for example, is more focused on sending his children to school and even university so that they can get office jobs than he is on whether devotees are bothered by his presence. Navami is far more concerned with acquiring adequate housing than she is with what impression visitors have when they leave the temple. Kālīghāṭ does not help them with their concerns unless they are allowed the ability to earn money there. Modernization efforts remove that ability. Similarly, sevāyets and devotees who have protested state moves at Kālīghāṭ on the grounds that the state ought not exercise authority there also fundamentally disagree with the modernizers’ ideology. They, too, may theoretically want the temple to be cleaner, but more than that, they want the temple to remain a place where Kālī’s authority is primary—​where she and her interactions with devotees are not subject to outside controls. In particular, devotees want to maintain the full sensory experience of worshiping Kālī—​to be able to see and touch her freely, and to offer animal sacrifices unencumbered. Subhra and Srimitra’s stories convey just how disruptive and unsettling it can be to the lives of devotees when their access to Kālī is cut off. Their sense of peace and centeredness is disturbed as they long for their next visit to Kālīghāṭ. For these devotees, crowds and chaos and the marring of feet with the blood of animals are small prices to pay for the ability to interact with Kālī in the ways that they desire and the ways they think she desires. Again, modernization efforts take away that ability. The use of Kālīghāṭ as a modern space and an emblem of India’s modernity is not the goal of most of the people who make use of this temple. Their vast numbers belie the claim that India’s middle classes and their modernizing goals represent the Indian public at large. While their methods differ, those who seek to thwart modernizers’ efforts are united by the fact that they do not engage the tools of civil society, and they do not claim to represent the public. They instead organize, improvise, obstruct, protest, and persist in order to voice their desires. Their interests are not heeded in official considerations of how temple life ought to proceed, and yet they are successful in thwarting official decisions about the same.

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Barring a complete eradication of Kālīghāṭ’s sevāyets, a violent expulsion of all of the people who make their living there, and a forceful police presence, the state cannot simply mandate changes that these vast numbers of dissidents oppose. To use Ranajit Guha’s (1997) phrase, the Indian state’s relationship to these groups is that of “dominance without hegemony.” In other words, the state has not successfully persuaded these groups that its goals benefit them. It can therefore only turn to coercion if it wishes to fully execute its orders.

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Conclusion B o u rge oisify in g Hin d u is ms and Hin d u -​i zin g Ci tie s

T

he emergence of an Indian middle class in the nineteenth century ushered in a new era for Hindu temples.1 In this new era, temples are central to constructions of Indian modernities. They are either rejected or reformed according to modernist precepts including nationalism, secularism, public order, and cleanliness. As Michael Meister argues, temples have always been sites of change: The temple is not simply a structure, nor of one period or even one community. It moves through time, collecting social lightning and resources. It must be repositioned constantly to survive. . . . Both temples and the communities they service continually redefine their pasts and renegotiate the present. That is what they are. (2000, 40)

In the context of early colonialism, it appeared that temples may in fact not survive, at least not in Calcutta and not among the middle classes. It appeared they may be lost to reformulations of a modern Hinduism centered on rationalistic, and then spiritual and space-​less forms. But by the late nineteenth century, erudite middle-​class men began to work upon Kālīghāṭ to transform it into a site of the modern. In nationalist and then independent India, some of India’s new rulers continued to hold out hope that they could reform temples by molding them into orderly institutions and then clean and grand heritage monuments. Temples are now integral to middle-​class visions of India’s modernity. And while some modernizers may feel subject to Kālī’s sovereignty in some way, they also see themselves as a part of an Indian constituency that is both compelled and authorized to shape the temple according to their visions (see also Reddy and Zavos 2009, 246).

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So while temples have always changed and will continue to change, we have been witnessing for the past long century a particular moment of change in which, as Bruce McCoy Owens puts it, “new kinds of questions about authenticity, identity, and comprehensibility” are posed and answered through temples (2002, 304).2 Those new kinds of questions are framed by India’s diverse and evolving middle classes, which are peopled by historians, judges, and active citizens—​among others—​who are deeply influenced by their westernized educations and the global conversations of which they are a part. Those new questions are furthermore framed within a shifting political landscape such that they are addressed through increasingly invasive modes of cultural entrepreneurialism. Middle-​class actors have, since the late nineteenth century, collectively constructed a set of conceptions about the temple—​that it is a historical site, a public site, and a potential emblem of modern Hinduism. These conceptions rely and build upon one another. Late-​nineteenth-​century authors’ scholarly emplacements of Kālīghāṭ into the history of Calcutta, for example, became legal evidence in Justices Chatterjee, Mookerjee, and Sinha’s rulings that made Kālīghāṭ a public temple in the mid-​twentieth century. In the early twenty-​first century, Pathak and Ghosh continue to share early authors’ vision of the temple as emblematic of the city and its Hindu roots. They also rely on the declaration of the temple as public in order to pursue their modernizing projects through government bodies. Goenka and Bose do the same in their legal actions on behalf of public interest. One can furthermore imagine that Caṭṭopādhyāy, Bysack, Datta, and Ray would be pleased at contemporary efforts to demonstrate that Kālīghāṭ is part of a modern India rather than a relic of superstition. One might imagine that they would also be pleased at attempts to bring order to Kālīghāṭ’s management system, though it is unclear how each might feel about Kālī’s loss of control over the temple. They would probably be in favor of concealing sacrifice, even as some—​especially Bysack—​might prefer it were eradicated altogether. In this final chapter, I  consider what this new era for Hindu temples means for Hinduism and for India’s cities and citizens. As scholarship on Hindu temples has shown, temples provide the physical, practical, and conceptual spaces to worship new gods, understand existing gods in new ways, enact new rituals, and construct new articulations of what Hinduism is (see Reddy and Zavos 2009). Changes to temples therefore not only reflect what communities want from a temple but also produce changes to Hindu forms and practices.3 Through the modernization of temples, Hindus and their behaviors are bourgeoisified, and Kālī herself is refined. Furthermore, the

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city of Kolkata and the nation of India are made more Hindu over and above other religious and non-​religious possibilities. As I  demonstrated in the previous chapter, temple modernization has not been fully realized in this new era. Modernity, after all, is a continuous, evolving, and ever-​incomplete project. Yet the dominant role that the middle classes play in the administration and alteration of temples—​both alongside and through the official institutions of the Indian state—​ has produced a very public display of a shifting set of attitudes. I outline here a set of consequences to those attitudes that may never fully transpire but that are likely to transpire partially and gradually, while slowly gaining new dimensions as India’s middle classes expand and as visions of India’s modernity continue to evolve.

Bourgeoisifying Hindu Behavior and a Hindu Goddess Hindu temples are transformative spaces. They are designed as microcosms of the universe in a series of successive stages through which the devotee moves, transformed at each point, until he or she finally reaches the center where the primary deity resides.4 Rituals of circumambulation, prayer, burning incense, and then finally seeing Kālī and being seen by her each transform the spiritual state of the devotee.5 This is how devotees like Kamala and Subhra can enter Kālīghāṭ feeling anxious about their son’s grades or a family member’s health but leave with a sense of overwhelming calm. Changes to the space and atmosphere of the temple, as well as the rituals that are performed there, produce changes to the nature of that transformative process. An e-​pūjā system, for example, is clean and efficient, but it does not require physical movement through space. Removing populations from the temple space clears it of hustle and bustle but may also remove an element of the excitement of being in a place so famous and powerful that thousands of people want to be there at once. Installing video cameras in the inner sanctum may lessen overt theft, but it also means that devotees’ worship is subject to surveillance. A fastidiously clean temple means less mess, but it also means that devotees must pay close attention to the petals that fall from their flower offerings and the remnants of their incense wrappers. The concealment of animal sacrifice frees devotees from sights of the slaughterhouse but restricts access to a ritual many find to be the most potent part of coming to Kālīghāṭ. In the modernized model, devotees are required to be quiet, constrained, and to let go of some features of their worship of Kālī in

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order to conform to middle-​class standards of decorum.6 Advocates argue that this is for the good, because it means devotees are less hassled, less distracted by the potential of slipping on debris, and less shocked by the sight of blood. Whether one approves or disapproves, a temple altered along modernist lines certainly changes the experience of devotees and the foci of their attention throughout the worship process. Furthermore, changes to the structure of the temple visually communicate who belongs there and who does not. Architecture speaks (Zukin 1995). Regardless of its officially public status, a grand edifice that is designed by and for a jet-​setting elite middle class indirectly excludes the lower classes. The modernization of Kālīghāṭ is not one in which a middle-​class culture incorporates or fosters a kind of democratic participation of men and women from high and low castes and classes, as Waghorne sees in some Chennai temples (2004, 149). Anti-​Brahmin populist parties have created a different kind of culture in the state of Tamil Nadu. Waghorne points out that attention to amman temples itself signifies an incorporation of traditionally low-​caste deities into a middle-​class culture in that state. In Bengal, however, Kālī has for at least four centuries been a goddess for both high-​and low-​caste Hindus. Kālīghāṭ’s modernization, then, abides by a much more exclusivist paradigm in which bourgeois notions of propriety are imposed upon all Hindus who make use of the temple. This notion of propriety certainly improves the transformative experience of the temple for some. One wonders, however, how much that experience can change and remain worshipful. At what point, for example, does Kālīghāṭ become a spectacle or even a kind of museum like Akṣardhām that people visit for education and entertainment, but not for the experience of intimacy with the divine? Changes to temple structures also produce changes to the ways in which the deities within are envisioned. A deity housed in a roadside shrine is likely to be seen as less significant, or even less powerful, than a deity housed in a large and grand temple complex (Derrett 1999, 488–​9). It was with the goal of aggrandizing gods, and connecting one’s power to those gods, that kings of medieval India built their grand and sprawling temple complexes. Wealthy zamindars no doubt fueled Kālīghāṭ’s rise to fame in the nineteenth century by constructing its present structure. Those who want to transform Kālīghāṭ into a grander structure today want to do the same. Said another way, they want Kālīghāṭ’s physical structure to match the power and authority they feel Kālī holds within. All lament that it presently does not. It is for this reason that almost all non-​Bengalis with whom I  speak about Kālīghāṭ—​ be they foreign or Indian—​confuse it with Dakṣiṇeśvar. National media outlets routinely confuse the two.7 The latter’s impressive building, beautiful

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surroundings, as well as Ramakrishna’s fame, mean that its international reputation far exceeds Kālīghāṭ’s. Yet all Bengalis know that Kālīghāṭ is, to quote my Kolkata-​based interlocutors, “the real thing,” and that Kālī is more “jāgrata (awake)” there than she is anywhere else in the world. This is, after all, not just any Kālī temple but the most powerful of Śaktipīṭhs. So far, Kālī of Kālīghāṭ’s local reputation has not suffered for her small and humble surroundings, but modernizers fear that might change with future generations. Giving Kālīghāṭ a monumental structure might therefore visibly spread the word that the Kālī within is of monumental significance. Yet one wonders if modernization efforts that seek to make Kālīghāṭ clean at the same time as they seek to make it grand might have a different effect on the ways Kālī is understood. If Kālīghāṭ is made squeaky clean along sparse, quiet, calming, modernist lines, then Kālī, too, is cleaned up. As discussed in Chapter 3, the presence of blood and an aura of chaos may in fact contribute to the sense of Kālī’s immense power at Kālīghāṭ, so their removal may have the unintended effect of erasing some part of Kālī’s reputation for power there. Would Kālīghāṭ become, for example, like the highly sanitized Birla temple in the nearby Ballygunge neighborhood that has no “bhāv” (religious feeling)? Would the Kālī of Kālīghāṭ become like the Kālī of Dakṣiṇeśvar—​ another Kālī in a city full of Kālīs, but in a more impressive building than most? I have already discussed at length the diminishing authority Kālī has at the temple from a legal standpoint due to changes in Kālīghāṭ’s administration according to British-​inflected secular Indian law. Would cleaning Kālīghāṭ also diminish the power Kālī is said to hold in that place? Or perhaps changes to Kālīghāṭ’s structure will not result in a net loss or gain in Hindus’ conceptions of Kālī’s power but, instead, in a different kind of harmonizing of different traits akin to what she underwent in the eighteenth century. When Bengali poets who were heavily influenced by devotional poetry began to write about Kālī not only as a goddess of power but as a goddess who exemplifies motherly love, Kālī did not lose her aura of power. Instead, she gained an aura of love (McDermott 2000, 44). The two modes were not exclusive but were made to complement one another. In this current moment of transformation, Kālī may retain her power and love while also being refined according to middle-​class sensibilities. Perhaps Kālī will come to be known as a goddess who embodies middle-​class ideals of motherhood—​someone who wants devotees to keep themselves and their surroundings tidy, wear clean clothes, and pick up after themselves. She may demand that her garbha gṛha be swept more thoroughly and shake her head in disapproval with an exclamation of “Chi chi!” (Shame! or Yuck!) when devotees offer her blood sacrifices because she would prefer freshly cut

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flowers that do not create such a mess. Perhaps she will even refuse the miṣṭi offerings that are pressed against her lips and in her hands or the coconuts broken before her feet, all of which leave a sticky residue. She could be all of these things at once. Renewed attention to temples and their physical spaces, particularly since the 1990s, signifies that the material forms of Hinduism that fell out of favor among middle-​class Hindus (though fully engaged by those outside these classes) in the early to mid-​colonial era have found favor once again. That is to say that material forms are once again central to Hindu practice, even while they are increasingly blended with the spiritual sort. A very significant aspect of this rematerialization is that temples are not being transformed such that they are merely fixed in time. That was the modernist mode of the colonial state. Under its Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1904, the colonial state was able to define temples as monuments in order to preserve examples of Indian architecture according to a classificatory scheme (Sutton 2013, 135–​66). The independent Indian state’s Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958 similarly mandates the preservation of ancient monuments of national importance. While the Calcutta High Court bench did enlist the services of the Archaeological Survey of India—​the body charged with carrying out that Act—​in 2011, citizens at the helm of modernizing projects are not interested in returning Kālīghāṭ’s structure to its original state. Pathak and his IFSD, alongside tourism bodies, instead want to see it changed significantly to include new structures, façades, and features. Modernizers, then, do not want Kālīghāṭ to become purely an emblem of Hindu heritage. They want it to be both an emblem and a site for vigorous religious activity of a particular kind. The question remains: Will this shift in middle-​class religiosity produce changes in the kinds of Hindu forms to which Hindus in general aspire? Will a middle-​class, motherly Kālī in a quiet and squeaky-​clean temple become as popular among Hindus from a wide range of backgrounds as other middle-​class Hindu forms like Vivekananda’s serene spiritualism? Or will this kind of temple go the way of the Brahmo Samaj—​elitist to the point that most Hindus are not welcomed to it and would not connect with it even if they were? Evidence from Chapter 4 indicates that Hindus of various class backgrounds—​including some among the middle classes—​will in fact produce their own forms of Hinduism that will push against modernizers’ formulations.

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Hindu-​izing Kolkata Kālīghāṭ is not the only temple in Kolkata to receive a great deal of attention from modernizers and state bodies. Municipal authorities are, in fact, busy at work facilitating middle-​class efforts to renovate and construct a number of temples across the city, especially Kālī temples, and to facilitate smooth travel between them. As discussed in the Introduction, Kālī is the patron deity of the city and central to the lives and identities of Bengali Hindus. These projects make Kālī temples centerpieces of the city, while they set aside more and more of Kolkata’s public spaces for middle-​class consumption. Dakṣiṇeśvar has received a great deal of attention from the state. In 2002, that temple’s board of trustees sought the financial assistance of the Kolkata Municipal Development Authority. They proposed to renovate and preserve the temple’s architecture, especially the room in which Ramakrishna resided when he was a priest there. They also sought to build and beautify a garden next to the temple, create a Swami Vivekananda Yoga Center, and build a parking lot and toilets nearby.8 They claimed that it was the government’s “moral responsibility” to fund this work because, in their words, Dakṣiṇeśvar is “foremost among the nations [sic] historic sites and a place of pilgrimage for men of all religions,” who visit “from all over the world” (Dakshineswar Kali Temple, n.d.). The Kolkata Municipal Development Authority acquired funds from the Union Tourism Ministry to carry out these renovations. In 2013, West Bengal’s transport minister pledged his commitment to widening the roads that lead to the temple and to relocating hawkers on those roads. He also promised to build 11 new bus shelters nearby. In his words, “The revamp is aimed at developing an approachway [sic] of international standard for the pilgrims from all across the world.”9 Part of the proposal for the renovation of Kālīghāṭ included the creation of a river cruise that would take pilgrims from there to Dakṣiṇeśvar and Belūr Maṭh. National and state tourism boards allocated funds to this project as part of their efforts to promote “pilgrimage tourism.” The Calcutta Port Trust and Public Works Department were charged with carrying out these plans.10 They would include dredging the Hooghly River and its tributary, the Adi Ganga, building jetties at each site, ridding the waterfront of “illegal encroachments,” and providing mechanized boats. Mamata Banerjee announced state plans in 2015 to develop a “tourism circuit surrounding the temple town” of Tārāpīṭh—​another Śaktipīṭh about 200 kilometers north of Kolkata—​at a cost of 98 million rupees. This includes funding for a “Baul Mela” as well as a “weekly helicopter service for tourists

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from Kolkata.”11 So while this project is not directly within the city of Kolkata, the focus is on making it accessible to those who are in the metropolis. Support for temple renovation also comes in the form of facilitation rather than outright funding and implementation. As an example, in 2002, municipal authorities cleared the land behind a roadside shrine, Lake Kālībāṛi, that was occupied by squatters. It was only after the squatters had been “rehabilitated”—​a euphemism for their removal—​that devotees could use that space to build a “pakkā” (proper, or permanent) temple, thus realizing a dream of the shrine’s founder.12 Private donors funded the temple’s construction, bringing in Rajasthani marble and Burmese teak to create a grand edifice. Because of the small size of the plot of land on which it would stand, it would be two stories high, complete with an elevator and staircases so that all devotees could reach the second floor where Kālī would reside. It would also have air-​conditioning, a library, and a study center complete with books and pamphlets to teach devotees about religion and mythology. The head architect of this redesign is the very same Anjan Mitra who led the renovation of Kālīghāṭ through the WBTDC. In a 2012 interview, he told me that devotees want the new Lake Kālībāṛi to be a unique “must-​visit” for everyone who comes to Kolkata. That is why they opted for a “modern interpretation of standard design principles of sacred Hindu structures.” The modernist aims of this temple-​building project are explicit. The project would be impossible to pursue without the state’s cooperation in removing the poor. These moves mirror those taken by other state entities across India. Meera Nanda provides a list of examples, from government bodies altering city plans to allow for the building of Akṣardhām in Delhi, to directly financing temples in Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan, to state-​sponsored pilgrimages and festivals in Punjab, Gujurat, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, and Jammu and Kashmir (2011, 134–​9). She notes that the state shares an interest in increasing temple revenue and prestige because doing so brings a great deal of wealth to the country in the form of tourism money. Nanda further argues that this symbiotic relationship between the state and religion signifies the chauvinist Hindu nationalist aims of the state and contributes to the banality of its ideology in India (139–​43). It must be noted that the Indian state is involved in efforts to revamp tourism at many different kinds of religious sites, not just Hindu. Plans to create a tourism circuit around Tārāpīṭh, for example, also include plans to develop the nearby village of Furfura Sharif, which attracts many Muslim pilgrims each year for the Urs festival of a saint whose shrine is there.13 The late chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa Jayaraman, announced plans in 2016 to fund (at the comparatively small amount of 10 million rupees) the renovation of a number of churches and

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mosques in that state.14 Yet, as Nanda observes, the amount of money and effort spent on Hindu sites is far greater. Middle-​class activists who work to modernize Kālīghāṭ certainly express the same kinds of frustrations as those that propelled Hindu nationalist parties into power in recent decades. They critique former socialist state policies that they feel favored low-​caste and non-​Hindu interests. They are tired of feeling that India is being left behind the global economic order and is not living up to international measures of success. They want to be proud of their city and country and their cultural heritage. Simultaneously, my interlocutors would be horrified at the suggestion that their efforts were somehow anti-​poor or anti-​Muslim, as they consider themselves to be both egalitarian and cosmopolitan. While it is clear that some middle-​class and state actors have explicitly Hindu nationalist aims, I  think it is more productive to examine the consequences of their actions rather than their intentions, as the latter may be hidden even to them. Just because middle-​class actors do not aim to foster cross-​communal and cross-​class disharmony does not mean that their efforts will not result in exactly that. As I have shown, the latter is precisely one of the results of modernization efforts. In terms of state actions, I find Mary Hancock’s framing of this issue to be very productive. Through the state’s promotion of Hindu sites, temples—​like museums and other sites of public memory—​become part of the state’s story of itself. They communicate the state’s own story of its origins, its values, and in what it stakes its future (Hancock 2008, 208). They showcase to the world and to India’s citizens that Hinduism comprises a major part of what is valuable about Indian culture. The state employs these sites of public memory “rhetorically: to argue and persuade, to enroll people within particular political projects and models of sovereignty, and to make certain forms of citizenship vital and desirable” (208). It cannot make Indians equate India with Hinduism, but it can—​and does—​communicate that such an equation is a valid and valuable one. Kolkata and many of India’s modern cities, including Chennai and Mumbai, were planned and organized first and foremost around commerce and administration, not religion. Unlike Madurai, Tirupati, and Trichurappali, for example, they were not constructed around a grand temple complex that imbued them with divine presence and order. In these modern cities, religion must be purposely grafted onto the landscape. Today, middle-​class actors and state bodies are actively involved in that process. They aim to alter the culture of Kolkata to make it a religious city, and one marked by Hindu heritage and identity. Kolkata’s major architectural

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structures have historically been British monuments and administrative offices like the Victoria Memorial, Town Hall, and Government House (now Raj Bhavan). They now include shopping malls like South City and Forum and the sleek business offices of IT companies. With the state’s support of temple renovations as well as their development of infrastructure to facilitate movement to and from temples, Kolkata may yet become a modern city that is simultaneously a Hindu city.

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NOTES

Introduction

1 In 1954, Nehru made a speech at the inauguration of the Bhakra Nangal Dam in Punjab in which he famously referred to dams as the temples of modern India. An exhibit commemorating this event was recently displayed in the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi:  “When the Big Dams Came Up,” The Hindu, March 20, 2015; Khilnani (1999, 61–​106) examines the justification and implications of Nehru’s view. 2  A number of Indian cities have undergone name changes since Independence, in order to reflect their indigenous pronunciations. Throughout this work, I employ “Kolkata” when referring to the city after the year of its name change in 2001. 3  The colonial middle classes comprise the segment of Indian society that acquired westernized education and came to embody the project of modernity in India. I detail further the specificities and evolution of these classes on pages 21–25. 4  I elaborate on this point later, but see, for example, Srivastava (2011, 364–​90), Brosius (2010, 161–​268), Hancock (2008, 82–​120), and Waghorne (2004). 5  In brief, the Śaktipīṭh story recounts the goddess Satī immolating herself upon hearing that her husband, Śiva, had not been invited to a sacrifice hosted by her father. Distraught, Śiva carried her body all over the world in a wild dance of destruction. Viṣṇu, in order to stop Śiva, cut pieces of that body with his cakra (a circular weapon), so that Satī’s body parts would fall. There are now Śaktipīṭhs throughout India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. See Sircar for an analysis of this story’s evolution in Sanskrit and vernacular literatures, including the varying number of pīṭhas each text claims to be in existence. Some list only four, while others list 51 or 108. Each of these are auspicious numbers in Hindu traditions (Sircar 1948). 6  On the significance of royal temple building, see Davis (1991, 6–​9), Ray (2010), Stein (1960), and Orr (2007). Orr complicates the picture of royal temple patronage, demonstrating that many temples attributed to the Cholas kings’ patronage were in fact patronized by queens and lords, even while those temples were taken up by later kings as emblematic of royal power. On the use of temples for political legitimation,

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see Davis (1997, 186–​221) and Pollock (1993). On temple renovations in particular, see Branfoot (2013) and Meister (2000). 7  Members of the Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī (often transliterated as Sabarna Roy Choudhury) family were the former zamindars of this region and constructed this temple between the years 1799 and 1809. That temple replaced an older temple, but it is unknown for how long a temple stood in this region. I examine various versions of this history in Chapter 1. 8 Ethnographic material is derived from notes I  gathered while doing fieldwork in Kolkata in 2011 and 2012. I  did not use a tape recorder for most of these interactions, so quotes are paraphrased and taken from the notes I recorded later the same day on which each of these conversations took place. To protect privacy, names have been changed, except for public figures. 9  See Hardgrove (2001) on the construction of a Marwari identity and community in colonial Calcutta. 10 While both of these are Brahmin titles, neither refers to the Brahmin priests who perform daily worship to Kālī. At Kālīghāṭ, that is conducted by male members of a Brahmin Bhaṭṭācārya family whose ancestors were hired by the sevāyets 200 years ago. 11  Throughout, monetary conversions are provided according to the approximate exchange rate during my fieldwork in 2011 and 2012: 50 rupees to $1. 12 This design resembles a thatched roof. As the name implies, it has eight corners—​a roof with four corners tops another with four corners. This is the same design employed for Kālī’s shrine within Kālīghāṭ (see McCutchion 1972, 32). 13 On this phenomenon in Tamil Nadu, see Presler (1987), Appadurai (1981), Fuller (1984), and Price (2008). In a later work, Fuller (2003) explains that the financial status of the Brahmins at Mīnākṣi Temple has in fact increased since the 1990s because priests are more respected due to their government-​sponsored Āgamic training and because middle-​class and state actors are funding more rituals. The modernization of the priesthood through scriptural training programs has thus actually increased the wealth of Brahmins at that temple. 14  The famous Naṭarāj Temple in Cidambaram and the Puṣṭimarg havelis are notable examples of “private” sites of worship in India up until very recently. See Younger (1995) and Bachrach (2015), as well as my discussion of these sites in Chapter 2. 15  In his study of recent renovations at a Jain temple in Osian, Gujurat, John Cort remarks, “Jains often proudly contrast the cleanliness of their temples with Hindu temples” (1992, 215). 16  Waghorne also notes that her middle-​class informants in some cases desire to draw in the lower classes through their temple projects, citing democratic inclusion as their aim (2004, 129–​70). I have not witnessed this same desire in Kālīghāṭ’s modernizers, though the desire to reform temple visitors is present. See also Srivastava (2011, 368–​70) on the removal of slum colonies near Akṣardhām. 17  I  agree with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2008) critique of “historicism”—​the theory which posits that modernity was fully realized in post-​ Enlightenment Europe and that all societies are working toward a modernity that resembles theirs. Scholars of multiple modernities provide useful and compelling examples of the ways in which modern values and forms are differently enacted within different

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societies. The following focus on Indian modernities in particular: Gaonkar (2001), Joshi (2001), and Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal (2002). Van der Veer (1999) has shown how the role of religion in modern society was developed simultaneously in India and England, giving tell to the lie that England had modernity first and India inherited it. 18  CharlesTaylor (2004) has outlined this modern social imaginary, focusing on European societies. 19  See also Fuller (2009) on the middle-​class values that shaped both of these types of Hindu reform and Hatcher (1999) on the continuities between these reforms. Vivekananda is known to have composed poetry to Kālī, though this part of his devotional life was not part of his public persona. 20  See Donner and De Neve (2011) for a fulsome treatment of the way class has been treated in scholarship on South Asia. I see my work as part of that continuum. 21  This is an especially well-​studied middle class given their location in the colonial capital (see Banerjee 1989; Bhattacharya 2005; Chatterjee 1993; McGuire 1983; Mukherjee 1993). 22  Banerjee speculates that colonialists suspected Muslims of loyalty to Mughal powers, thereby barring them from collaboration. 23  Habermas examines the emergence of the public sphere in the European context ([1962] 1989). For an analysis of notions of the public sphere in the Indian context, see the South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies’ two special issues: “Aspects of ‘the Public’ in Colonial South Asia” (1991) and “What Is a Public? Notes from South Asia” (2015). 24  Donner et al. (2011) provide a necessary intervention rich with ethnographic data regarding the ways that middle-​ class individuals display their class status through quotidian and domestic practices and not just public performances. 25  Fernandes and Heller provide a critique of the hegemony of the middle class in India (2006). 26 Bandyopadhyay (2004, 31–​2) notes that lower-​caste groups in the mid-​to late colonial era were not “untouched” by modernity either. They had access to modernist imaginings in the press through the tradition of reading aloud. However, he also notes that the project of modernity touched these groups differently than the bhadralok. 27  Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal (2002) and Appadurai (1996) write on the proliferation of the language of “development” in modernities across the globe. 28 The following headlines comprise a very small subset of the voluminous critiques of Kālīghāṭ that appear regularly in news media:  “Kalighat Temple Road a Squatters’ Paradise” (The Times of India, December 11, 2013); “Holy Chaos” (The Telegraph, May 9, 2013); “Criminals Thrive at Kali Abode” (The Telegraph, April 27, 2006); “Kalighat Present: Force & Fleece” (The Telegraph, June 28, 2004). 29  See Kinsley (2003) for a description of depictions of this goddess in various genres of literature. 30  Sanderson (1995, 23) points to the ways that Śaivas, including of the Trika, Krama, and Siddhānta variety, in medieval Kashmir juxtaposed their ritual worlds to those of Vedic texts. On the one hand, these individuals were orthodox insofar as they were purified by Vedic rituals, and yet they believed their Tantric texts gave them access to rituals more potent and powerful than the Vedas (see also Sanderson 1985).

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31 Furthermore, they covered over the left-​handed, antinomian practices that David Gordon White (2003) argues actually constitute most of South Asian religion. 32  I am indebted to Hamsa Stainton for consulting with me on various versions of Tantra and their transformations throughout South Asian history. 33 Note that these rājās were not kings in an imperial sense. They were landholders who were given that title by Mughals in return for their cooperation. 34  The overlap is present in Vaiṣṇava forms as well. See Dimock (1989), for example, on Vaiṣṇava forms of Tantra in Bengal. 35  See the following Parliamentary Return composed in 1845 for an overview of the varying involvement of British bodies in the affairs and management of Hindu temples in each of the presidencies, as well as a review of the regulations pertaining to those arrangements up until that time:  “Superintendence of Native Religious Institutions” (1852). 36  Jagannāth, now in the state of Orissa, is a major royal temple unlike most in Bengal. When the province of Orissa was annexed to the Bengal presidency in 1803, the Civil Commissioner of that province, as well as the Governor General of India, agreed that it would be most expedient for the government to acquiesce to the temple Brahmins’ request and advance them the “customary” annual funds for an upcoming festival, while continuing the longstanding pilgrim tax so that they might be reimbursed for that advance. This arrangement garnered great attention in England and prompted a series of reforms to initiate British withdrawal from native religious institutions (see “Superintendence of Native Religious Institutions” 1852, 115, 123). 37  In the aforementioned Parliamentary Return, Kālīghāṭ is specifically cited as illustrating a “system of united management” to which the government of India could look as an example of how to disengage from other Hindu temples (“Superintendence of Native Religious Institutions” 1852, 156). As Lata Mani (1998) has shown in her work on debates surrounding the Hindu practice of satī, noninterference was an ideal that was never achieved. However, regarding Hindu temples in Bengal, there was far less interference than elsewhere in India. 38  Disputes between the Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī and Hāldār (the sevāyets) families are intense and ongoing. See “Sabarna Family Link to Kalighat Temple” (Hindustan Times, February 18, 2012). Chapter 1

1  See Banerjee (1989) for a treatment of works produced at this time that satirized bhadralok culture. 2  Kopf (1969) provides an overview of the emergence of this ideal through both English and Indian intellectuals. 3 Orientalist Max Müller (1883), for example, provides a scathing critique of modern, urban Hinduism, even while he lauds the traditions of ancient Indians. 4  For more on this genre, see Shulman (1980). 5  James Long’s “Calcutta in the Olden Time—​Its Localities” and “Calcutta in the Olden Time—​Its People,” written in 1852 and 1860, respectively, comprise the earliest attempts to piece together a history of this city. Shortly thereafter, Calcutta guidebooks proliferated, offering brief sketches of Calcutta’s origins alongside maps and landmarks intended as guides for visitors or migrants to the city. There are both British and Bengali versions of these guidebooks, intended for very different kinds

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of visitors and migrants, and each sketching a very different vision of the city accordingly. In the wake of Calcutta being named not only a post for the East India Company but the capital of the British Empire in India in 1858, the production of these texts at this time makes sense. See Dasgupta (2009) for a study of the city maps that these and other historians produced. 6  Guidebooks to the city had been published in Bengali for a decade and a half before these works, including Dās (1884) and Mukhopādhyāy (1890). Bhabānīcaraṇ Bandyopādhyāy’s semi-​fictional work Kalikātā Kamalālaya published in 1823 might also be considered a precursor to Calcutta guidebooks. 7  As Joanne Waghorne (2004, 43) has noted, temples in the Madras Presidency in the early-​nineteenth century were “the trope for atrophy.” 8  See Urban (2003) on colonial-​era constructions of Tantra, and pp. 28–​30 of the Introduction to this volume. 9 The group of men who reformed Tantra under the pseudonym of Arthur Avalon at this time also worshiped Kālī only insofar as she was identified with Brahman (Avalon 1913; see Taylor 2001 on the identity of this group). 10  In 2006, Suman Gupta wrote that Vivekananda “could not resist the lure of Kālīghāṭ” (Kālīghāṭ mandirer ākarṣaṇ eṛāte pārenni Svāmi Vivekānanda) (106). His is the first source I can find to make this claim. Other sources prior to Gupta’s indicate that he did not visit this temple. Not only did he denounce animal sacrifice, he was also barred entry from many temples after he had traveled abroad, thus crossing the “black waters” (kālā pānī) that caused him to lose his caste purity (see, for example, Hāldār 1986, 102). Nivedita, the Irish devotee of Kālī and disciple of Vivekananda, recorded that her master opposed animal sacrifice and had never tolerated such offerings (1910, 208). Yet, as Rachel McDermott has noted, he did call for a “flood of blood” during the Pūjā season of 1901 in order to fill the enfeebled Bengalis with strength (2011, 210). 11 Yet Chatterjee’s vision for the mother that represented a future, glorious India was the golden and gracious Durgā, not the emaciated, skull-​clad Kālī who represented India’s current lack (Chatterji 1882, 150). 12 The early presence of the Bysack (often spelled Basak) and Seṭh families was—​and still is—​accepted as common knowledge (see Caṭṭopādhyāy 1891, 83–​4; Datta 1901, 34; Ray 1902, 22; Wilson 1895, 135). Datta writes that his family also arrived early to Calcutta (1901, 373) 13 Chakrabarty notes the exchange of an intimate letter between the two (2001, 141). 14  I use the original date of these authors’ compositions throughout the rest of this chapter. 15  It was rumored that East India Company officials and other Europeans made offerings to Kālī in the eighteenth century (Ward 1822, 123). Ward’s later observations of the same are recorded in Marshman’s work (1859, 157). The Hindu rājā of Nadia, Krishnacandra, is also said to have visited Kālīghāṭ before meeting with Company officials in order to bring them into the Plassey conspiracy by which Mughal and French forces were defeated in the region (Bordeaux 2015, 229–​31). 16  I  am indebted to David Curley for sharing this observation with me via an email exchange (January 16–​21, 2012). 17  Examples include al-​Faz̤l (1873 [c. 1590]), Salim (1803), Mitra (1881), and Dutt (1889). For more on this literature, see also Kumkum Chatterjee (2009).

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18  Rainey’s work was first published as a series of articles in The Englishman’s Saturday Evening Journal in anticipation of the Prince of Wales’s visit to Calcutta in 1876. 19  See also Van Woerkens’s (1995) argument that the story of the Thugs epitomized the very worst fears the British had about the populations they ruled in India. 20  For the “dim twilight of legend and poem” (131) that characterized the pre-​ European history of the city, Wilson relies on personal correspondence with Gaur Das Bysack, author of “Kalighat and Calcutta” (129–​31). 21 A  parallel might be drawn here to notions of the Āryans and Vedas in nineteenth-​century India. Transformed by Orientalists and Hindu reformers into the basis of Indian civilization, these became elements upon which everything good about India relied as its source. 22  Datta’s is entitled “Bhūtattva,” while Ray’s is entitled “Beneath the Surface.” 23  Datta cites the Calcutta Gazette of May 5, 1815, and the Asiatic Society Journal Vol. 9 of 1840, while Ray cites the Calcutta Gazette of May 5, 1815, and Blanford and Medicott’s Manual of the Geology of India, Part I, 397–​400. 24  Datta’s is entitled “Kālīghāṭ,” while Ray’s two chapters are entitled “In Legend and Poetry” and “In Tradition and Story.” 25 Note also the inclusion here of Dakṣiṇeśvar, the site of another Kālī temple (now a rival to Kālīghāṭ as I elaborate upon in Chapter 3) built in the 1850s and famous for its saint, Ramakrishna. According to the temple’s own website, prior to the establishment of the temple, the site had been the property of the Englishman, James Hastie, from whom Rāni Rāsmoni, the female Bengali Hindu founder of Dakṣiṇeśvar, bought it: “History,” Dakshineswar Kali Temple Trustees and Secretary, http://​www.dakshineswarkalitemple.org/​history.html (accessed November 30, 2017). 26  Sontheimer cites von Furer-​Haimendorf (1979, 444 ff.) and Dumont (1970, 195, fn. 96c). 27  The name of the encyclopedia is printed “Visíva Kosha.” I believe this to be a misprint of Viśva Koṣa. The article on Āryāvarta is located in the second volume of that Encyclopedia, published the same year as Bysack’s piece (“Āryāvartta” 1891). 28 Caṭṭopādhyāy cites Asiatic Researches Vol. 1, 133 and Vol. 5, 132. 29 Caṭṭopādhyāy writes that this site became known as Kālīghāṭ “at least 1000 years ago” (1891, 37). 30 For this piece of information, Caṭṭopādhyāy cites a Kulapañjikā. These are works of family history written by specialists in arranging marriages. Apart from these sources, there is no historical evidence for Adisur’s existence. Kumkum Chatterjee (2005) has written that Kulapañjikās would become the source of great scholarly debate in the early twentieth century among Bengali intelligentsia as to whether or not they constituted valid sources of knowledge, especially on the issue of Adisur’s historicity. 31  In Ghosal’s article, too, Vallal Sen appointed a family to take care of this site of Satī’s toes in the twelfth century. 32  See Bhatia (2017) on the recovery of Vaiṣṇavism via the figure of Caitanya in colonial Bengal and the nationalist uses to which such a recovery was put. 33  Many of the high-​caste Hindus whom Ray lauds are members of the Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family, of which Ray is also a member.

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34  He refers here to previous inhabitants as “rude people.” 35  Ray cites Datta on this point and later repeats it (1902, 15 fn 5, 37 fn 7). 36  He refers to his own reference to Nawab Muhabbat Khan on page 311. 37  The Christian missionary, Alexander Duff, claims that human sacrifice took place at Kālīghāṭ during his own time. That claim is not corroborated (1839, 266–​8). 38  The only works we have on the Kāpālikas have been written by those who oppose them, so such negative portrayals are common (see Lorenzen 1972). 39  This is a rather uncommon arrangement. Even while it is common in Bengal for Kālī temples to include a shrine to Kṛṣṇa (an incarnation of Viṣṇu), it is not common that the proprietors of a Kālī temple would be Vaiṣṇava (see Gupta 2003). 40  See Damen (1983) for a discussion on the use of Caitanya in Keshab Chandra Sen’s Nava Vidhan. See also Bhatia (2017) on the re-​emergence of memories of Caitanya among the Bengali bhadralok more broadly. 41  I am indebted to Hena Basu for her assistance in translating this work. 42  In the middle of his explanation of the city of Calcutta as a holy land of Kālī, for example, Mukhopādhyāy launches into an explanation of the valor and glory of the Hindus who inhabited Bengal (not Calcutta specifically) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially those “powerful zamindars who assumed the title of Raja and stood against the Mughal royal power” (1915, 17). 43  Anthony Firinghi is another famous European Kālī devotee who founded his own Kālī temple in Bowbazar. I do not know of any association he had with Kālīghāṭ in particular. 44  Swati Chattopadhyay uses this phrase to characterize British narratives of the city (2005, 8). 45  This Upendranāth Mukhopādhyāy is not to be confused with the Upendranāth Mukhopādhyāy who writes “Kālīghāṭ Itivṛtta” in 1925. The author of Kalikātā Darśak may be the same man who founded Basumati Press on Beadon Street in northern Calcutta and who edited many works on Hinduism, but I  have not been able to verify this. 46  I  argue that reliable historical evidence for the existence and popularity of Kālīghāṭ temple prior to the seventeenth or eighteenth century either does not exist or has not yet been uncovered. None of our authors provides verifiable evidence of Kālīghāṭ’s existence prior to the fifteenth century. Caṭṭopādhyāy and Ray write that “it is heard” or “it is a matter of history” that Brahmins came to the area in the time of Adisur and Vallal Sen in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Caṭṭopādhyāy cites mention of Kālīghāṭ in a Pīṭhamālā (Sanskrit list of Śaktipīṭhs) and Cūḍāmaṇi Tantra but dates those texts to a vague post-​Vedic period. Dines Chandra Sircar, who wrote the proverbial book on Śāktapīṭhs, does not find Kālīghāṭ in any Pīṭhamālās until the Manasāmaṅgal, which he dates to 1495 (Sircar, 24 fn 1) and notes that it does not gain regular mention in Pīṭhamālās until at least the seventeenth century. Yet Bysack does not mention the Manasāmaṅgal, instead finding the first reference to Kālīghāṭ in a Bengali work in the fifteenth-​century Candīmaṅgal (1891, 310). But as he points out, this reference is not to be found in all manuscripts of that story. When Kālīghāṭ is included, so is the city of Calcutta. That makes it likely that these consist of later interpolations (see Chapter 1, Note 16). Bysack dates the Cūḍāmaṇi Tantra to the late sixteenth century (316) and backs up Caṭṭopādhyāy’s claim that this text includes a

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mention of Kālīghāṭ. Bysack finds no earlier Tantras in which Kālīghāṭ is mentioned. Nor does he find mention of Kālīghāṭ in either the Kālikā Purāṇa or Devī Bhāgavata—​ a finding that surprises him (307). If Kālīghāṭ were mentioned in all manuscripts of the Manasāmaṅgal, I find it difficult to believe that Bysack would have missed it. And if it were not, I would call that reference into question for the same reason Bysack calls the reference in some versions of the Candīmaṅgal into question. The reference to the Cūḍāmaṇi Tantra is outstanding, and yet if Kālīghāṭ were mentioned in that text, I find it difficult to believe that Sircar would have missed it. My aim in this chapter being other than to find Kālīghāṭ’s founding date, I stopped short of digging through multiple manuscripts of each of these texts. I did consult other sources from this time period but found no references to Kālīghāṭ. It is not mentioned in the 1582 Ain-​I-​Akbari, for example, even though that text may contain a reference to Calcutta (the lack of diacritics makes the Persian unclear). Nor is it mentioned in the 1681 diary of William Hedges that records the first governor of the East India Company’s early interactions with Job Charnock in Calcutta. Neither of these omissions serves as proof of Kālīghāṭ’s absence because neither author was primarily interested in the religious lives of Hindus in the area. Thus, even if Kālīghāṭ had been there, these men may not have seen good reason to mention it. What is clear is that Kālīghāṭ was established and well known by the eighteenth century. J. Z. Holwell mentions Kālīghāṭ in 1766 as follows: “Kalleka, Kalkee or Kalle Poojah, (for they are synonymous) falls on the last day of the moon in September. This goddess is worshipped all the night of that day universally, but in a more particular manner at Kallee Ghat, about three miles south of Calcutta; an ancient Pagoda dedicated to her there, stands close to a small brook, which is by the Brahmins deemed to be the original course of the Ganges” (1779, 130–​1). What Holwell means by “ancient” we cannot know. By 1810, when Maria Graham publishes her journal, the new Kālīghāṭ temple had been constructed and she writes that the prior temple had been standing for “long”: “This is the season of festivals; I hear the tomtoms, drums, pipes, and trumpets in every corner of the town, and I see processions in honour of Kali going to a place two miles off, called Kali Ghaut, where there has long been a celebrated temple to this goddess, which is now pulled down, and another more magnificent is to be erected in its place” (134). These authors had no personal or political stake in dating the temple and appear to simply be recording their observations about a site that was important to Hindus in the area. Their works corroborate Kālīghāṭ’s inclusion in two mid-​eighteenth-​century Bengali texts, the Gaṅgābhaktitaraṅgiṇī (126–​7) and Annadāmaṅgal (41). There, Kālīghāṭ is not only mentioned but described more fully, including references to Kālīghāṭ’s accompanying shrine to Nakuleśvar. The uncertainty of the fifteenth-​and sixteenth-​century sources and the very clear popularity of Kālīghāṭ in eighteenth-​century sources leads me to conclude that Kālīghāṭ was established in either the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. 47  I met with P. T. Nair on many occasions in October 2011 and April and May 2012. He conveyed to me in those meetings that Bengali histories of the city are predominantly “cooked up” because they are written by individuals interested in making the city older than it actually is. He believes Bysack’s to be the most authoritative narrative, but warns that it should also be measured against concrete facts. I am indebted to him for the resources he pointed me to regarding the city’s history. Nair

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(1993) is an especially fruitful resource. I am also thankful to historian Abhik Ray for introducing me to Nair. Chapter 2

1  Parts of this chapter were presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2015. The paper was entitled “Managing God’s Money: Brahmins, Civil Society, and the ‘Public’ in Twentieth-​Century Bengal” and was included in a panel entitled: “In God We Trust: Rituals of Money and the Changing Political Economies of India Across Centuries.” I  am indebted to my co-​panelists Prasannan Parthasarathi, Namita Dharia, Tulasi Srinivas, and our respondent Ameya S. Balsekar for their insights. 2  “Shebait” is a transliteration of “sevāyet.” 3  Presler demonstrates that state control of temples was predicated on the notion that temples were inherently public (1987, 36–​56). 4  The centrality of Indian lawyers to India’s colonial middle classes and their pivotal role in the nationalist movement have been the focus of a great deal of scholarship. See Mukherjee (2010, 105–​49) on what she calls “Vakil Raj.” 5  This observation has also been made of judges in the United States, particularly those sitting on the Supreme Court. For the many issues that influence U.S. judges’ interpretations of law, see Segal and Spaeth (2002) as well as Epstein and Knight (1997). I am indebted to Kathleen Tipler for these references. 6  In the personal plea he attached to a publication of this lawsuit, Haldar writes that a “band of self sacrificing lawyears [sic]” provided “ungrudging services” in this suit (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941). 7 Ritu Birla’s article (2015) on the latter issue points to similar claims made recently by India’s courts regarding private companies. By arguing that those companies have responsibilities to the public, they legitimate their supervision of those companies. 8 See Scott (2015) for an analysis of how the subjugation of religious ideas and forms to court adjudication changed their meaning in the Maharaj Libel Case of 1862. 9  Hindu temples, including Kālīghāṭ, are overflowing with material offerings that overwhelm the senses. Flueckiger’s description of the “aesthetics of excess” of the Gangamma festival may also be applied to the aesthetics of temple worship. Both are “relatively unrestrained, characterized by excess, over-​abundance, multiplicity, and intensity” (2013, 29). On darśan, see Eck (1998). 10  The Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family continues to assert its connection to the temple by attempting to attach a plaque to an exterior wall of Kālīghāṭ indicating their former ownership of its land and their construction of the temple in 1809 (“Sabarna Family Link to Kalighat Temple,” Hindustan Times, February 18, 2012). West Bengal’s Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, has funded the erection of a gate depicting India’s 51 Śaktipīṭhs on Kalighat Road (“KMC Plans Grand Gate to Kalighat,” The Times of India, September 9, 2010). India’s vice president and West Bengal’s governor offered prayers at Kālīghāṭ after the 2004 tsunami (“Peace Prayer,” The Telegraph, January 4, 2005). Nepal’s kings and now presidents visit Kālīghāṭ when they are in Kolkata (“Nepal President in Kolkata, Visits Alma Mater,” The Times of India, January 29,

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2011). In 2002, King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah caused a stir with animal rights groups when he offered an animal sacrifice at Kālīghāṭ (“Nepal King Leaves Bloody Trail Behind,” Indian Express, June 28, 2002). 11 Local and national media outlets abound with reports of celebrities visiting Kālīghāṭ when they are in Kolkata. Those include Sachin Tendulkar, Gautam Gambhir, Sushmita Sen, Vidya Balan, Ekta Kapoor, and Rani Mukherjee. 12  As discussed in the previous chapter, details regarding the early history of Kālīghāṭ are scant and highly debated. However, the details of its management system are mainly agreed upon both in historical texts and as discussed among sevāyets today. I outline that system of management here in its pre-​1961 form. 13  This system is common throughout Bengal. See Togawa (2006, 75–​89) and Chaudhuri (1981, 31–​52). 14 In the early nineteenth century, the sevāyets hired members of the family of Śrīpada Bhaṭṭācārya from Somra, a village in the Hooghly District, to serve as purohits. They are employees of the temple and are paid a fixed sum each month. Complicating the system further, there are also pāṇḍās present at the temple who guide pilgrims through the temple and through individual rituals. All three of these—​sevāyets, purohits, and pāṇḍās—​are often referred to by devotees as “priests,” even though they each play a very different role in the temple process. In my description of the division of Kālīghāṭ’s wealth and management, I refer only to the sevāyets. See Sanjukta Gupta (2003) for a further discussion of this arrangement, as well as the ritual repercussions of the sevāyet family’s Vaiṣṇava orientation. 15  The aim of Ward’s work was to expose idolatry and priestcraft (Scott 2016, 36). 16 “Reconsider Order, Plead Kalighat’s Pandas,” Times of India, November 27, 2011. 17  Rammohan Roy translated Vedic texts into both English and Bengali (Halbfass 1988, 203). 18  Joanne Waghorne notes that temple Brahmins in Madras were criticized for the same reasons: “Cast into the role of enemy of progress, the temple priests were often pictured with bellies swollen from the profits of their traffic in superstition” (2004, 43). 19  Sarkar also notes on page  62 that this was a major theme in Kaliprasanna Singha’s Hutom Penchar Naksha, the first satirical novel in Bengali, published in 1862. 20  The suit was published as The Kalighat Temple Case (1904). 21  “The Tantric Age We Live In,” The Indian Witness, December 24, 1903. This article was reproduced in its entirety in The Kalighat Temple Case (1904). 22 Caṭṭopādhyāy had reported in 1891 that Kalighat’s sevāyets were engaged in increasing conflict with one another. He laments that while Kālīghāṭ’s prosperity had increased a great deal (unnati lābh kariyāche) over the previous century, the sevāyets’ unity had decreased (ektār hrās haiyāche) (1891, 96). In the early twentieth century, the sevāyets created a Sevayet Committee in order to hear and settle disputes among them (Banerjee v. Kalimata 1949, 6). 23  “Article 23—​No Title,” The Times of India, August 29, 1891. 24  This is also known as the Dakor Temple Case. 25  For laws pertaining to Muslim institutions, see Qureshi (1990) and Kozlowski (1985).

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26  Bhattacarya notes that this idea runs counter to Śāstric injunctions, which state that gods cannot hold property and that temple property belongs instead to the votary who first established it (1893, 601). Davis notes the same in his discussion of debates between medieval and modern interpreters of the Śāstras (2010, 200–​6). 27  See also Birla (2009) on the colonial state’s regulation of the market and of economic actors through the language of “public.” 28  For negotiations surrounding activities appropriate to the colonial city’s open spaces, see also Chatterjee (2011, 75–​93) and Chattopadhyay (2005, 225–​73). 29  These regulations allowed for the creation of state boards in Tamil Nadu, as previously discussed. In Bengal, where there was greater resistance to state intervention in religious institutions, those bodies were not created and by and large were not involved in temples’ affairs (Presler 1987, 7). Jagganāth Temple in Puri was a major exception. See Mubayi (2005), Eschmann et al. (1978), and Dube (2001). 30  This Act (also known as “Act XX” or the “Pagoda Act”) divested state bodies of the authority to directly intervene in temple management so that the Board of Revenue that once appointed Collectors at Madras Presidency temples was now no longer able to do that. Instead, local committees were appointed to oversee temple affairs (Iyer 1905, 340–​9). Sarkar notes that in the wake of the Elokeshi scandal in the 1870s referred to above, the non-​interference policy was questioned by many Indians who felt that there should be more rather than less government guardianship of religious institutions whose indigenous authorities had proven themselves unfit (2001, 78). 31 He writes that Kālīghāṭ Dwipika was composed in 1891 by a sevāyet, Kālīprossanna Bidya-​Bisarad, who had also edited Hitabadi. I  did not encounter this text in my fieldwork and have not found record of it anywhere outside of this judgment. 32 One defendant claims the toes are located under the Nakuleśvar Bhairav temple and another that they might be located at another temple named Kālīghāṭ located near Katwa. 33 One of those resting houses, or dharamśālās, now houses Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying and Destitute (also known as Nirmal Hṛday). Sir Hariram Goenka and the Calcutta Corporation together constructed that building in 1929. It was provided for Mother Teresa’s use in 1952. On the initial dedication by Goenka and then-​mayor, B. K. Basu, see “Kalighat Dharamsala” (1929, 80). 34  For example, the British Indian Association had given the sevāyets notice in 1924 to stop their ill treatment of the public. Public volunteer organizations engaged in activities at the temple during ceremonial occasions, and the sevāyets had appealed to the press to help them combat an anti-​sacrifice campaign (Kalimata v.  Banerjee 1941,  45–​6). 35 The Bengali text reads:  “Āmi bahukālābadhi sannyāsīder tattbābadhāne thākiyā nānā prakāre kaṣṭa pāiyāchi, ekhan tumi āmār sebā pujār bhāra gṛhor haste arpaṇ kara, tadbārā jagate āmār sebā pujār pracār hauk.” The 1941 judgment reveals that H.  N. Haldar had approached Upendranāth Mukhopādhyāy before bringing his suit to court, in the hopes that the sevāyets would amend their ways. Mukhopādhyāy is reported to have refused to heed H. N. Haldar’s request himself

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or to widely publicize that request to the rest of the sevāyets (Kalimata v. Banerjee 1941,  24–​5). 36  Those cases are cited as: Surendra Krishna Roy v. Sri Sri Bhubaneswari (AIR 1933 Cal 295, 1932); Mundanchari Koman v. Achuthan Nair (61 IA 405 ILR 58 Mad 91, 1934); Babu Bhagwan Din v. Gir Har Saroop (67 I.A. 1, 1940); Sethuramaswamiar v. Meruswamiar (ILR 41 Mad 296, 1917). 37  The Sanskrit text, as quoted by Caṭṭopādhyāy (1891, 27), reads: “bhūmounipatitā jetucchāyāṅgāvayavāḥ; jagmuḥ pāṣāṇatvāṁ sarvve lokānāṁ hitahehave; devibhāgavata 11 adhyāya.” 38  I cannot locate confirmation of who exactly that judge was. The report of this transaction is included in the 1956 court order but does not use the judge’s name. 39  For Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar’s involvement with that college, see Hatcher (1996, 44–​116). 40  The ECCS would be comprised of Office Bearers (chairman, vice-​chairman, secretary, and others to be determined by the sevāyets) plus 15 other sevāyets (two to be elected from each of the five branches of the Haldar family, and five to be elected by the Council from any branch). 41 Presler notes similar sentiments in the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department in Tamil Nadu (1987, 45). 42  See Derrett (1999) for an analysis of this report. 43 On these two points pertaining to Sri Dwarkadhishji and Sri Trikamrayji temples, see Desai v. Deputy Charity Commissioner (1987). 44  The Brahmin Tilkayat of Nathdwara claim that temples of the Pushtimarg sect are havelis (private, often palatial, homes) rather than temples, indicating their private nature. They furthermore claim that the Nathdwara temple is denominational and therefore not public (see Govindlalji v. State 1962). For contemporary debates regarding the state of Pushtimarg temples, see Bachrach (2017). 45  Derrett argues that the government of India had every intention of maintaining control of temples’ financial aspects through Sections 25 and 26 of the Constitution, going so far as to call these sections “cunningly drafted” (1999, 491). 46  Pertaining to the famous Sri Sabhanayagar Temple in Cidambaram whose Podhu Dikshitars have claimed in court case after court case that Sabhanayagar is private, see Subramanian v. State of Tamil Nadu (2014). See also Younger for a brief discussion of the legal status of the temple in the twentieth century (1995, 147–​8). 47 See lawsuits pertaining to Sri Dwarkadhishji, Sri Trikamrayji, Nathdwara, and Sabhayanagar, in Chapter 2, Notes 43, 44, and 46. 48  Fuller (2003) notes that Minakshi’s priests’ adoption of the Āgamic training the government has been pushing on them for years, coupled with a state government that is favorable toward temples and their Brahmins, has improved their situation from the 1990s onward. 49  As Gilmartin (2015, 379) argues, under colonial (and here, post-​colonial) law, the sovereignty of a deity becomes a social rather than a cosmological fact. Chapter 3

1 Various parts of this chapter were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego, California, in 2014; the Annual

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Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2014; and the Religion in South Asia Conference at Missouri State University in 2015. I  am grateful for the insights of my co-​panelists Jennifer Ortegren, Daniel Chiefer, Nicole Wilson, and our respondent Joanne Waghorne on the first panel, “Where Class Meets Religion: Reshaping Middle-​Class and Hindu Worlds in Contemporary India.” I am also grateful for the insights of my co-​panelists Jeremy Saul, Jane Lynch, Victoria Gross, and respondent Tulasi Srinivas on the second, “Tracking Patronage in South Asian Public Life.” Finally, I  am grateful for the invitation of Stephen Berkwitz to present my work at Missouri State University in 2015. He, along with Jack Llewellyn, C. S. Adcock, and Hamsa Stainton at that conference, provided particularly fruitful comments. 2  See pages 21–​25 of the Introduction for a discussion of the range of India’s new middle classes. 3  Calcutta’s name was officially changed to Kolkata in 2001. As this chapter deals with Kolkata in the twenty-​first century, I  switch to the new spelling throughout. I  employ the previous spelling only when referencing nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century Calcutta and when referring to official organizations that continue to carry that name, including the Calcutta High Court. 4  “From Pilgrimage to Heritage,” The Statesman, September 9, 2004. 5  “By Boat, a Pilgrim’s Triangle,” The Telegraph, March 13, 2003. 6  Pathak and Ghosh parted ways in the early 2000s, so that The Boston Project is no longer involved in the IFSD’s efforts. 7 On purity and auspiciousness in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions, see Carman and Apffel-​Marglin (1985). 8  The courts dismissed both complaints. 9  Discipline is the word employed by the Court in 2006. It was repeated to me many times throughout my fieldwork as something that middle-​class citizens feel Kālīghāṭ lacks among its Brahmins, beggars, and some devotees. 10  See, for example, the work of Bonani Kakkar and Subhas Datta: “PUBLIC: People United for Better Living in Calcutta,” http://​www.calcuttapublic.org (accessed October 14, 2015); Tithiya Sharma, “Subhas Dutta: One Man Army in Kolkata,” The Better India, June 28, 2011. 11  See also Chattopadhyay (2005) on different spatial practices among Bengalis and Europeans in colonial Calcutta. 12 As Upadhya (2008) points out, this group hardly represents the Indian middle class as a whole. Yet they are integral to our understanding of the implications of globalization in India. Fuller and Harriss (2005) also examine this subset of the middle class. 13  The efforts of NGOs in this arena are especially stark. In Mumbai, the Citizens Forum for Protection of Public Space work to improve the environment of the city and address corruption (Fernandes 2006, 137). In Kolkata, People United for Better Life in Calcutta (PUBLIC; calcuttapublic.org) works to “improve the environment of Calcutta and promote sustainable urban living” by preventing pollution and conserving heritage buildings. Resident Welfare Associations in Delhi promote security and the maintenance of parks and gardens (Srivastava 2014, 425). In Chennai, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage seeks to conserve the city’s

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heritage by cleaning up its temples, churches, and historic homes that have fallen into disrepair and that have been encroached upon by poor people seeking habitation (Hancock 2008, 20). 14  Ray and Katzenstein (2005) have examined the ways in which state–​NGO relations in India oscillated throughout the last half of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of Independence, state bodies and NGOs worked closely together to alleviate poverty. In the 1970s and ’80s, NGOs were the means by which activists could work toward the goal of poverty alleviation apart from the state and what was dubbed its inefficient and ineffective bureaucracy. Since the 1990s, the relationship between NGOs and the state has once again become very close. 15  Bhuwania attributes the formation of the PIL to the Supreme Court’s very unpopular support of Indira Gandhi’s institution of an emergency government. He argues that in 1977, that Court was on a mission to improve its public image (2014, 320–​1). 16 Through its adjudication of PILs, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to “life and personal liberty” to mean the right to live in a healthy, pollution-​free environment. 17  Kaviraj does not provide a specific date for the park’s construction, nor have I been able to find one. 18 More recently, the middle classes have protested moves by municipal authorities to erect a club, toilets, and a stage in the park, further reducing its green space and perhaps encouraging further encroachment (see “Deshapriya Park Shrinks, Yet Again,” TNN, June 14, 2011). 19  Bandyopadhyay’s article provides a good overview of these movements. In the 1950s, “hawkers’ corners” were created in public spaces to allow hawkers to sell their wares in specified areas, including the “Kalighat Refugee Hawkers’ Corner” in the Kālīghāṭ neighborhood. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, however, with the influx of more people into the city, the number of hawkers increased dramatically. “Operation Hawker” was launched by the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Corporation and Public Works Department in 1975 to crack down on the trade. This effort was soon thwarted after retailers also opposed the movement, citing a loss of income to their shops. After Operation Hawker, the hawkers organized into unions and, citing their economically disadvantaged positions, garnered some modicum of support from citizens. 20 The CPI(M) also engaged in the destruction of squatter settlements throughout Calcutta during its reign, including in Patuli and the Rail Colony near Rabindra Sarobar Lake (Chatterjee 2004, 60; Roy 2003, 210). 21  See “A Walk from Kolkata—​to London?” Business Standard, April 26, 2012, and “London-​Style AC Double-​Decker Buses for Kolkata Tourism,” Indo-​Asian News Service, October 17, 2011. 22  “Come, Invest in Bengal, Mamata Banerjee Urges Tatas, BMW,” The Times of India, September 8, 2016. 23  In his ethnography of young volunteer charity workers in Calcutta, Hutnyk provides a good overview of foreign views of the city in the twentieth century. 24  The building in which it is housed was originally a resting house for pilgrims at Kālīghāṭ donated by Hariram Goenka to the city of Calcutta in 1924 (“Kalighat Dharamsala” 1929, 80). In time, the municipal authorities received reports that this

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public space was being “misused,” so in 1952, they handed over the same building to Mother Teresa to run her hospice (Chawla 1992, 160). 25 This was noted earlier in the twentieth century as well (see Mukharji 1934, 240). 26  A similar sentiment is noted in Chattopadhyay (2005, 260). 27 “Profile:  NRI Entrepreneur Mridul Pathak, Philanthro-​ Preneur,” India Empire, January, 2012. 28  International Foundation for Sustainable Development, “Kalighat Redevelopment Project,” http://​ifsdindia.com/​enterprise.html (accessed August 15, 2013). 29 “Biography,” www.parthaghosh.com (accessed April 16, 2009). 30 The Boston Pledge, “Current Focus,” www.thebostonpledge.org/​initiatives. html (accessed April 16, 2009). 31 The Boston Pledge, “About the Boston Pledge,” www.thebostonpledge.org/​ about.html (accessed April 16, 2009). 32  See “Bengal Turns to NRIs for Funds,” Indo-​Asian News Service, October 20, 2002, and “W Bengal to Seek NRI Funds through Ads in US Newspapers,” Rediff. com, October 16, 2002. 33  “Boston Bengalis Hunt for Business Ideas,” Rediff.com, February 2, 2006. 34  The Boston Pledge, “About the Boston Pledge,” www.thebostonpledge.org/​ about.html (accessed April 16, 2009). 35 “WBTDC Signs MoU with Boston Pledge in Kolkata to Position Kalighat Temple as Heritage Spot,” Express Travel World, February 15, 2002. 36 “From Pilgrimage to Heritage,” The Statesman, September 9, 2004; and “Kalighat Future: Beauty & Piety,” The Telegraph, June 28, 2004. 37  “Temple Uplift on Track,” The Telegraph, May 11, 2005; and “Facelift with Guest House,” The Telegraph, August 1, 2006. 38  “Kalighat Future: Beauty & Piety,” The Telegraph, June 28, 2004. 39 Quoted in “Judge Wish on Offerings—​ Kalighat Temple,” The Telegraph, September 9, 2006. 40  “Court Scan on Temple,” The Telegraph, April 12, 2008. 41  “Kalighat Temple Project Bogged Down, State Fears Fund Slash,” The Times of India, December 26, 2008. 42  I am grateful to research assistant Hena Basu for suggesting I attend these hearings and for attending with me on one occasion. 43  “Plan for Kalighat Temple,” The Telegraph, November 11, 2011. 44  He is also quoted as making this statement in the article cited in Chapter 3, Note 42. 45 The trustees of that temple also printed a pamphlet of their renovation plans:  Dakshineswar Kali Temple:  The Centre of International Interest & National Importance (n.d.). 46  This is a paraphrased summation of a self-​created document entitled “The Steps Taken for Dakshineswar Kali Temple” given to me by Banerjee on November 30, 2011. 47  See “Crusade Against Animal Sacrifice at Kalighat,” The Telegraph, October 24, 2000; “Court Ruling on Animal Sacrifice Bolsters Activists,” Indo-​Asian News Service, September 21, 2006; and “Don’t Be Cruel,” The Telegraph, October 11, 2006.

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48  Samanta suspects the same of her informants (1994, 783). 49  “Holy Chaos,” The Telegraph, May 9, 2013. 50  Uddalak Mukherjee, “Where Many Worlds Meet—​Filth, Sex and Devotion Vie with One Another in Kalighat in Spite of the Court’s Attempt to Clean It All Up,” The Telegraph, June 11, 2013. 51  International Journal of Hindu Studies 5, no. 3 (2001). Scholars continue this conversation in a forthcoming follow-​up issue of this journal (vol. 23, no. 1 [2019]). 52  See, for example, Gupta on Ramakrishna and Vivekananda (2006, 108 and 106, respectively). 53  In this piece, Davis discusses the VHP’s project of “liberating” Hindu temples from Muslim incursions beginning in 1984. 54  See, for example, “HC Orders on Kalighat being Flouted: NGO,” The Times of India, July 11, 2013. In 2017, efforts to cleanse and renovate the temple area were renewed, this time with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at the helm. Whether those efforts will be successful remains to be seen. See “Kalighat Temple Area to be Beautified, Says Mamata,” Indo-​Asian News Service, July 4, 2017, and “Kālīghāṭ Mandir Niye Mukhyamantrīr Udyog [Chief Minister’s Efforts at Kālīghāṭ Temple],” Khabar 365 Din, July 5, 2017. 55  Uddalak Mukherjee, “Where Many Worlds Meet—​Filth, Sex and Devotion Vie with One Another in Kalighat in Spite of the Court’s Attempt to Clean It All Up,” The Telegraph, June 11, 2013; and “Kalighat Temple Road a Squatter’s Paradise,” The Times of India, December 11, 2013. Chapter 4

1  Parts of this chapter were presented at The Gender and Justice Speakers Series hosted by the Women’s and Gender Studies Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma in 2017. I am grateful both for Lupe Davidson’s invitation to present my work and for her scholarly insights. 2  Given the sensitive nature of ongoing lawsuits at the temple and the tenuous nature of the livelihoods of many of my interlocutors, I  have changed or omitted their names throughout this chapter, except in cases where those interlocutors have disclosed their opinions in public settings. 3  I employ Chatterjee’s definition of “civil society” here. For debates on the various uses of the term, see Bhargava and Reifeld (2005) and Kaviraj and Khilnani (2001). 4  Menon writes that her view diverges from Chatterjee’s on this point. Whereas he argues that the poor can appeal to the state through the moral claim that the state owes them welfare, she argues that this is not so in post-​1990s India. Chatterjee, however, does admit that government policy no longer seeks to help the poor endure within the space of the city (2004, 144). For another example of the way the poor are framed as obstacles to development, see Ghertner (2015). There, he argues that while the construction of slums and malls are both illegal in parts of Delhi, the government selectively allows the latter because they contribute to the creation of a “world class” city. 5  See also Kaviraj on democracy giving the lower classes confidence to claim public spaces (1997, 108).

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6  Mannathukkaren argues that political society in fact often works in opposition to the goal of democratization (2010). 7 Minakshi’s priests, for example, have accused government officials charged with managing temple affairs of both interfering with rituals and engaging in corruption by taking bribes (Fuller 2003, 142–​4). 8  He reported his full name, but I  have omitted the first name to protect his identity. “Singh” is most commonly the surname of male Sikhs but is also a Hindu kṣatriya caste name. 9 For example, see “Kālīghāṭ Keleñkāri [Scandal at Kālīghāṭ],” Anandabazar Patrika, January 19, 1993; “Devotion Versus Corruption,” The Statesman, June 25, 1994; “Pandas Held for Harassing Devotees at Kalighat,” Asian Age, June 3, 1996; and “Panda-​Monium at Kalighat Temple,” The Telegraph, March 9, 2010. 10 Similar incidents have been reported by other devotees (see “Kalighat Present: Force & Fleece,” The Telegraph, June 28, 2004). 11 “Kālīghāṭ: Chabisaha Parichaypatra Pāṇḍader [Kālīghāṭ: Photo Identity Cards for the Pāṇḍas],” Anandabazar Patrika, December 20, 1993. See Chapter 2 for a description of the KTC and how it came into being. 12  “Court Bans Pandas from Kalighat Temple,” The Telegraph, November 26, 2011. 13  “Pandas Take to the Street—​Temple Ouster Feared,” The Telegraph, September 11, 2006. 14  “Pandas Cry Foul Over Lost ‘Right’,” The Telegraph, September 17, 2006. 15 “Reconsider Order, Plead Kalighat’s Pandas,” Times of India, November 27, 2011. 16  “Kalighat Temple Project Bogged Down, State Fears Fund Slash,” The Times of India, December 26, 2008. 17  See “HC Upkeep Order for Kalighat Temple,” The Telegraph, May 8, 2013, and “Kalighat Temple Road a Squatters’ Paradise,” The Times of India, December 11, 2013. 18 In 2017, Mamata Banerjee pledged to beautify Kālīghāṭ but specified she would do so without removing beggars and hawkers: “Ucched Chārāi Kālīghāṭ Mandir Catvare Soundarjāyan [Kālīghāṭ Temple Area to be Beautified Without Evictions],” Ei Samay, July 5, 2017. 19  Estimates of daily temple earnings reported in the newspaper range anywhere from 10,000 to 500,000 rupees ($200–​$10,000). See “Reconsider Order, Plead Kalighat’s Pandas,” Times of India, November 27, 2011, and “HC Orders Curbs to Clean Up Kalighat,” The Telegraph, April 21, 2012. 20  Quoted in “Cloud on Kalighat Temple Revamp,” The Telegraph, September 12, 2006. This was also noted in “Kalighat Restoration: Bengal Govt Is Willing, but Not the ‘Pandas’,” Indian Express, September 13, 2006. 21  The court ruled then that Kālī would own the building as part of her debottar property. 22 The 650  million (65 crore) number was reported in 2004:  “Kalighat Future: Beauty & Piety,” The Telegraph, June 28, 2004. 23  Noting a similar technique employed by the state in some cases, Ananya Roy argues that “the seeming absence of effective government is itself a state strategy” (2011, 262). 24  Suchitra Samanta describes this practice at Kālīghāṭ as well (1994, 779–​803).

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25  “Calcutta HC Bans Entry of Persons Inside Temple Premise,” Deccan Herald, April 20, 2012. 26  “Panda-​Monium at Kalighat Temple,” Times of India, April 22, 2012. 27  “Apex Court Permits Access to Kalighat Temple’s Sanctum Sanctorum,” Indo-​ Asian News Service, May 21, 2012. 28  “[picture on page 6]” Bartamān, May 4, 2012. Translation by Hena Basu. Conclusion

1 Parts of this chapter were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015. The paper was entitled “Kolkata: City of Temples” and was included in a panel entitled “Sacred Sites in Urban India: Changing Temples, Changing Hinduisms.” I am indebted to my co-​panelists Joyce Flueckiger, Jennifer Ortegren, and Emilia Bachrach, and our respondent Leela Prasad for their insights. 2  McCoy Owens makes this argument regarding recent changes to Swayambhu, a Buddhist pilgrimage site in Nepal. 3  Flueckiger makes this argument poignantly in her work on Hindu shrines in Hyderabad (2015). 4  Hancock (1999, 181) provides a good description of this, drawing heavily on Eck (1998). 5  See also Waghorne (2004, 143), Srinivas (2009), and Davis (1991, 42–​82). 6 Hancock also points out that renovation projects have pedagogical aims (2008, 99–​100). Waghorne likens renovated temples to museums in that they are both sites employed to educate the public in middle-​class mores (2004, 146). 7  See, for example: “Even God Is Feeling the Pinch of Cash Recall,” Hindustan Times, November 27, 2016. Kālīghāṭ is the subject of that article, but Dakṣiṇeśvar is the temple pictured. For a time, Google Maps, too, featured a picture of Dakṣiṇeśvar’s exterior in its entry on Kālīghāṭ:  Google Maps, “Kalighat Kali Temple, Kolkata” (accessed December 13, 2016). 8  See “Kali Temple Rewind to Glory,” The Telegraph, October 26, 2002, and Dakshineswar Kali Temple: The Centre of International Interest & National Importance (n.d.). 9  “Govt to Ease Pilgrims’ Progress at Dakshineswar Temple,” TNN, December 19, 2013. 10  “By Boat, a Pilgrim’s Triangle,” The Telegraph, March 13, 2003. 11 “Tourism Circuit to Come Up Around Tarapith,” The Indian Express, July 7, 2015. 12  “Lake Kalibari:  A Divine Dream Comes True,” http://​www.lakekalibari.org/​ (accessed October 14, 2015). 13  “Phurphurā Śariph, Tārāpīṭh Natun Unnayan Parṣad Gaḍche Rājya [State to Create New Development Board for Furfura Sharif and Tarapith],” Ei Samay, March 19, 2015. 14 “Jayalalithaa Announces Funds for Renovation of Churches, Mosques in Tamil Nadu,” Indian Express, September 18, 2016.

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INDEX

Adi Ganga River, 76, 100, 113, 114, 150, 167 Adisur, 54, 55, 57, 176n30, 177n46 animal sacrifice, 1, 38, 133, 135, 159, 165, 181n34; arena for, 149, 151–​53; Bāgdi caste performs, 151; blood from, 28, 102, 122, 152; critiques or dislike of, 18, 26, 42, 128, 175n10; daily rate of, 151; discontinued, 9, 128; goddess demands, 15, 153–​54; hidden or minimized, 59, 121, 128, 149, 152, 162, 163; in historical narratives, 61–​ 62; legislation or legal cases about, 121, 135, 140, 151–​54; meat from, 9, 15, 152; by Nepal’s king, 179–​80n10; performers of, 128, 140, 151; Vedic vs. Tantric, 9, 28 anti-​Brahminism, 28, 30, 32, 164 Appadurai, Arjun, 70, 73, 97–​98, 172n13, 173n27 Archaeological Survey of India, 144, 166 architecture, 50; of Dakṣiṇeśvar, 167; Bengali-​style, 33; British-​style, 33, 46, 50, 169–​70; communicative, 164; of Kālīghāṭ, 3, 16, 18, 75–​76, 86, 115, 123, 164; of Lake Kālībāṛi, 168; laws protecting, 166; Muslim, 17 Āryans, 52, 59, 176n21 Asha, 17–​19, 25–​26,  145–​46

Bahula,  50–​51 Banerjee, Ashok, 122–​23, 148 Banerjee, Mamata, 7, 111, 146, 167, 179n10, 186n54, 187n18 Bangalore, 2, 20 beggars, 19, 129, 139; banned from Dakṣiṇeśvar, 128; banned from Kālīghāṭ, 17, 18, 100, 101, 103, 121, 122, 126, 138, 150–​51; bans ignored by, 6, 36, 134–​38, 140, 145–​46, 159; discipline or control of, 100, 183n9; improvise, 145–​46; in Kālīghāṭ neighborhood, 6, 64, 112; middle-​class or modernist view of, 103, 108, 140; pāṇḍās and, 141; politicians and, 146, 187n18; in public spaces, 136–​37; statistics about, 112, 140, 145 Belur Maṭh, 128, 156, 167 Bengal: castes and classes in, 23, 30; colonial-​era, 23, 32, 41, 44–​46, 55, 62, 82, 176n32; early history of, 53–​55, 57–​58, 62–​63; economics or politics in, 111, 119, 146; geology of, 49–​50; Kālī or Kālīghāṭ in, 3, 5, 20, 27–​30, 32, 52, 128, 164, 177n39; Mughal-​era, 44, 177n42; Śaktism in, 30; Tantra vs. bhakti in, 28–​30, 54; temple legislation or lawsuits in, 71, 82, 95, 126, 174n37, 181n29; temple modernization

205

Bengal: castes and classes in (cont.) in, 27, 70; temples in, 32, 34, 57, 78, 82, 95, 132, 174n36 Bengali Renaissance, 23, 118–​20 bhadralok, 29, 31, 34, 173n26, 177n40; Tithi Bhattacarya on, 43; critiques of, 64, 174n1; defined, 23; Kālīghāṭ and, 37–​39, 41–​43, 63–​64, 131, 135; modern emphasis on, 110, 120, 131; public spaces and, 104; Sanskrit College and, 90 Bhagavad Gītā, 14 bhakti, 28–​30, 54, 128 Bharat Sevāśram Saṅgha, 68, 91, ​93 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 24–​25, 132 Bhatia, Varuni, 29, 176n32, 177n40 Bhaṭṭācārya purohit family, 172n10, 180n14 bhāv, 127, 129, 165 (see also Kālīghāṭ:  aesthetics of; Kālīghāṭ: experience of visiting) Bose, Shib Chunder, 63–​64, 77 Bose, Surabhi, 100–​1, 103, 108, 122, 124–​27, 144, 148, 162. See also lawsuits: Bose v. Union of India Boston Project, The (TBP), 100, 118–​20,  183n6 bourgeoisification, 2, 20, 162, 163 Brahmins, 8, 12, 42, 54–​55, 60, 89, 182n44; authority of, 19, 71, 78, 82, 87, 97; Bengali, 59; bhadralok, 23; Bhaṭṭācārya purohit family of, 172n10, 180n14; class positions of, 72; criticism of, 67, 69, 71, 77–​79, 82, 121, 180n18, 183n9; daśanāmis, 56; education or training of, 90, 172n13, 182n48; history of, 54–​57, 177n46; in Jagannāth temple, 174n36; land grants to, 54, 84; lawsuits involving, 78–​80, 89–​91, 94, 97, 100, 108; legislation affecting, 79, 82, 96; middle class and, 74, 101, 120, 134; in Mīnākṣi temple, 172n13, 182n48; organizations for, 142–​43; as priests, 14, 54, 74, 81; replaced as temple managers, 69, 73, 96; rituals of, 60, 70, 74, 172n10; Śākta, 42, 61; sāthī, 141–​43; Tamil, 32, 172n13, 180n18, 182n48; as temple

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managers or proprietors, 33, 35, 54–​55, 67, 71, 80–​81, 87; temple, 4, 26, 67, 73, 77–​79, 82, 101, 134, 151, 174n36, 180n18; as trustees, 80; types or hierarchy of, 14, 77, 141, 172n10; wealth of, 18, 19, 26, 35, 69–​70, 76–​79, 82, 83, 172n13. See also pāṇḍās; priests; pūjāris; purohits; sevāyets Brahmo Sabha/​Samaj, 22, 41–​42, 131, 166 British: in Calcutta, 1, 17, 31, 33–​34, 37–​38, 44–​47, 64, 65, 170, 174–​ 75n5 (see also Kolkata/​Calcutta: as British city); colonial administration or officials, 42, 43, 120; Hindu temples and, 32–​33, 63, 69–​71, 79, 82, 98, 174n35, 174n36; historical narratives by, 20, 33, 37–​38, 44–​47, 49, 64, 77; in historical narratives by Bengalis, 51, 54, 55, 57–​58, 63, 113; impact on modern Indian law, 69, 165; Indian middle class and, 23–​24; Kālīghāṭ and, 45, 47, 54, 65; modernity of, 21; view of public spaces of, 104 British Empire, 31, 46, 175n5 British Indian Association, 89, 181n34 Brosius, Christiane, 19, 106, 171n4 Buddhists, 54, 57, 183n7, 188n2 Bysack, Gaur Das: background or family of, 42–​43, 56, 175n12; cited by others, 63, 85, 176n20; as historian, 38; “Kalighat and Calcutta” by, 39; on Kālīghāṭ pilgrims, 37, 41, 56–​57; on Kālīghāṭ’s early history, 52, 56, 60; on Kālī in Calcutta’s history, 37, 41, 49, 52, 58; on mūrti’s discovery, 56, 60; reformist Hindu values of, 41, 62, 66; on sacrifice, 61, 162; sources used by, 177–​78n46 Caitanya, 29, 54, 56, 61–​62, 176n32, 177n40 Cakravartī, Bhavānīdās, 61–​62, 75, 93 Calcutta Corporation. See Kolkata Municipal Corporation/​Calcutta Corporation

Calcutta High Court, 95, 183n3; ASI and, 144, 166; Chief Justice of, 121, 124, 150 (see also Patel, J. N.; Sinha, Bhuvaneswar Prasad); Development Committee mandated by, 126–​27; Goenka and Bose’s PILs before, 100, 101, 121, 144, 148, 149; interview with Banerjee and Sen about case before, 122–​24, 148; Kālīghāṭ declared public by, 27, 87–​88; rulings on animal sacrifice, 128, 151; rulings on cleaning Kālīghāṭ, 100–​1, 121, 126; rulings on inner sanctum, 142, 143, 150, 153; rulings on pālā sales, 87, 122; rulings on pāṇḍās or hawkers, 126, 142, 144, 146; rulings on temple management or finances, 68–​69, 126; order of 2013, 126–​ 27, 134; Prahlad’s suit before, 14, 17, 18; Temple Committee mandated by, 68–​69, 73, 90–​91, 93. For specific cases, see under lawsuits Calcutta. See Kolkata/​Calcutta Candīmaṅgal, 55, 56, 177–​78n46 caste: class and, 23, 164, 169; identity and, 26; lower, 32, 64, 77, 102, 103, 141, 164, 169, 173n26; modernity and, 21, 173n26; political parties and, 24, 169; temples and, 32, 86, 96, 102, 164; upper, 22, 23, 55, 71, 77, 101, 176n33 Caṭṭopādhyāy, Sūrjyakumār: background or family of, 42–​43; cited by others, 63, 68, 89; on donations to Kālīghāṭ, 75–​76; historian, 38; on history of goddess worship, 59; on Kālīghāṭ’s early history, 53–​54, 58, 60–​61, 176n29, 177n46; on Kālīghāṭ’s pilgrims, 37, 41, 62; Kālīkṣetra Dīpikā by, 39, 51, 63, 68, 85, 89; on Kālī or Kālīkṣetra, 37, 41, 49, 51–​54, 57, 59–​63; on mūrti’s discovery, 53; reformist Hindu values of, 41, 62, 66; on sacrifice, 61–​62; on sevāyets, 180n22; sources used by, 51, 59, 176n28, 176n30, 177n46, 182n37; on Vaiṣṇavism,  61–​62

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 82, 104, 137, 172n17, 175n13 Charnock, Job, 33, 44–​47, 57, 65, 178n46 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra, 31, 42, 68, 175n11 Chatterjee, Gyanendra Mohon, 68, 71, 84–​90,  162 Chatterjee, Kumkum, 175n17, 176n30 Chatterjee, Partha, 23, 104–​5, 107, 137–​38, 158, 186n3, 186n4 Chattopadhyay, Swati, 49, 177n44, 181n28, 183n11, 185n26 Chennai/​Madras, 2, 19–​20, 32, 96, 106, 157, 164, 169, 183–​84n13 Christians, 1, 21, 63, 69, 75, 77, 133, 177n37 cities, 35–​36, 105–​8, 110, 138, 169–​70,  186n4 Civil Procedure Code, 83–​84, 89–​90 civil society, 107, 137–​39, 158–​59, 186n3 civilization: British or Western, 21, 38, 47; Hindu, 52; Indian, 21, 63, 176n21 class: caste and, 22–​23, 101; competition based on, 20; defined, 22; Kālī worship transcends, 27, 32, 164; religion and, 131, 139, 163, 166; scholarship on, 22, 137, 173n20; of sevāyets, 71–​73, 147; views of Kālīghāṭ and, 4, 18–​19, 36, 64–​65, 131. See also lower classes; middle classes cleanliness: drawbacks of, 129–​30, 163, 165–​66; of Jain temples, 172n15; “Kālī doesn’t care” about, 16, 154; of Kālīghāṭ, 14, 15, 16, 18, 27, 33, 35, 99–​102, 108, 118, 120–​28, 135, 147, 150–​51, 154, 158–​59, 165; lawsuits or court orders mention, 100–​1, 108, 114, 121–​22, 126–​27, 135, 150; middle classes and, 106, 109, 117, 127; as modernist idiom or value, 3, 24, 27, 99, 104, 136, 161; of public spaces, 82, 104, 117; purity and, 102; Shree Charitable Trust website emphasizing, 124–​25; of temples, 19, 33, 104, 127, 129–​30, 136, 172n15. See also dirtiness

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Communist Party of India (Marxist), 33, 110–​11, 119, 142, 184n20 Constitution of India, 96, 100, 108, 125, 139, 182n45, 184n16 corruption: of Brahmins or sevāyets, 35, 67, 78, 79, 97, 101, 120–​22, 147, 151; defined, 151; of earlier religion, 37, 38, 73; of government officials, 183n13, 187n7 Cotton, H. E. A., 44, 46, 50 Dakṣa, 50, 171n5 Dakṣiṇeśvar, 42, 50, 51, 100, 156, 176n25; Ashok Banerjee on improvements to, 123–​24; beggars banned from, 128; Kālīghāṭ compared to, 13, 14, 117, 123–​24, 128–​30, 140, 157, 165; Kālīghāṭ confused with, 164, 188n7; state projects at, 167 darśan: court rulings impacting, 88, 140, 153; at Kālīghāṭ, 11, 18, 74, 113, 123, 153, 155–​56; at other temples, 128–​29 daśanāmīs, 56, 60 Datta, Prānkṛṣṇa: background or family of, 42–​43, 175n12; cited by others, 177n35; geology in work of, 49–​50, 57; as historian, 38; on history of goddess worship, 59–​60; “Kalikātār Itivṛtta” by, 39; on Kālīghāṭ’s early history, 57, 60, 177n46; on Kālī or Kālīkṣetra, 37, 41, 52; on mūrti’s discovery, 57; on pilgrimage to Kālīghāṭ, 37, 41; reformist Hindu values of, 41, 62, 66; on sacrifice, 62; sources used by, 50, 176n23 debbotar, 80, 84–​85, 87 democracy, 24, 143, 164, 186n5, 187n6; disorder in, 137; as ideal or idiom, 3, 73, 95, 137; in temple management, 2, 70, 73, 95, 142, 164, 172n16 dirtiness, 99, 136; age or power and, 103, 130, 165; concept of, 102–​4, 130; Douglas on, 130; of Kālīghāṭ, 26, 101–​3, 112, 122, 130, 134, 157–​58; of Kolkata, 112–​13, 120 discipline, 19, 100, 103, 123, 125, 183n9 District Courts, 34, 67–​68, 88–​90 Durgā, 175n11

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Durgā Pūjā, 62, 128 Dutt, Govind Chunder, 63–​64 Dutt, Michael Madhusudhan, 42 Dutt, Romesh Chunder, 31, 175n17 East India Company, 3, 33, 44, 47, 65, 69, 82, 175n5, 175n15, 178n46 Elokeshi scandal, 78, 181n30 encroachments, 19, 107, 110, 167, 184n13, 184n18 endowments: for deities, 80, 84, 87; for deities vs. public, 94–​95; of Kālīghāṭ, 85–​87, 91; by kings or zamindars, 70; laws about religious, 34, 70, 80, 82; state bodies regulating, 19, 70, 95, 182n41; temples as, 19, 71, 80 entrepreneurialism, cultural, 23, 162 entrepreneurs, 100, 101, 105, 113, 119 Executive Committee of the Council of Shebaits (ECCS), 90, 91–​92, 182n40 Fernandes, Leela, 24, 105, 173n25 Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter, 179n9, 188n3 foreigners: Kālīghāṭ as seen by, 58, 100, 112, 147, 164; in Kolkata, 8, 46, 100, 111–​12, 118, 120, 147, 184n23. See also British Fuller, C.J., 25, 70, 97, 172n13, 173n19, 182n48, 187n7 Gaṅgābhaktitaraṅgiṇī, 45, 55, 60, 178n46 Ganges River, 11, 14, 47, 50, 54, 178n46 gentrification, 2, 19–​21, 107, 111, 131 Ghosal, Pudma Nav, 51, 176n31 Ghosh, Moloy, 142–​43 Ghosh, Partha, 100–​1, 103, 118–​20, 127, 131, 133, 162, 183n6; Bengali Renaissance and, 120. See also Boston Project Goenka, Hariram, 181n33, 184n24 Goenka, Prahlad Roy, 13–​14, 27, 33, 99–​101, 122, 124, 126–​27, 154, 162; case filed in 2005 by, 13–​14, 17, 18, 100, 120–​22, 142, 149 (see also lawsuits: Goenka v. Union of India); case filed in 2011 by, 13, 14, 122,

126, 148–​49 (see also lawsuits: Bose v. Union of India); modernist views of, 25, 26, 99, 101, 103; as public’s representative, 26, 162; spiritual practices of, 132 Government Pleaders, 108, 122 Govindapur, 44–​45, 52–​53,  56–​58 Gupta, Sanjukta, 28, 177n39, 180n14 Habermas, Jürgen, 26, 27, 173n23 Haldar, Harendra Nath (~H.N. Haldar), 67–​68, 71–​72, 78, 83–​84, 88, 94, 102, 179n6, 181n35 Hāldārs, 11, 72, 174n38, 182n40; on KTC, 90; litigation by, 78, 102; name of, 54; as Vaiṣṇavas, 28, 61, 62 Hancock, Mary, 19–​20, 106, 133, 169, 184n13, 188n6 Hatcher, Brian, 22, 41, 77, 173n19, 182n39 hawkers, 6, 7, 12, 27, 126, 143–​44, 159, 187n18; bans or limits on, 17, 19, 101, 103, 114, 126, 146, 150, 167; bans resisted by, 122, 126, 134, 137, 138, 144; beggars become, 146; corners for, 143, 184n19; criticism of, 140; in Kolkata, 110–​11, 137, 144, 184n19; noise of, 100, 103; operations targeting, 110, 144, 146, 184n19; organizations for, 135, 138, 143–​44, 184n19; at other temples, 19; statistics about, 110, 140 heritage sites: Hindu nationalists’ view of, 132–​33; IFSD and, 100, 117–​18, 127; Kālīghāṭ as, 18, 20, 57, 99–​100, 117–​ 20, 127, 133, 144, 166, 169; middle class and, 20, 94, 106, 127, 132, 169; monuments as, 3, 17, 99, 103, 106; NGOs focusing on, 107, 183–​84n13; TBP and, 119; temples as, 19, 132–​33, 161, 183–​84n13 Hinduism, 66, 159, 169; bourgeoisified, 162; histories of, 53, 59–​62; Kālīghāṭ as emblematic of, 34, 37, 49, 59, 162; middle-​class forms of, 1–​2, 35–​36, 130–​32, 166; modern, 34–​36, 161–​62, 174n3; monolithic forms of, 22, 37; as monotheistic

religion (or not), 38, 41, 59, 130; temples or temple worship in, 1, 38,  162–​63 Hindu reformers: on Āryans or Vedas, 34, 176n21; in Calcutta, 31–​32, 120; goddesses and, 28, 42, 175n9; history writers as, 27, 34, 41, 59, 62, 66; judges as, 71; on Kālīghāṭ, 25, 27, 28, 30, 34, 41–​43, 66, 135; middle-​ class values of, 25, 173n19; opposition to, 97, 140; priests criticized by, 67, 69, 77–​78; state intervention in temples supported by, 95; temples or temple worship criticized by, 1, 22, 34, 41–​43,  120 Hindu revivalists, 31–​32, 34, 43, 62, 77, 96, 131–​32, 135 history, 31, 33–​34, 38–​39, 46–​47, 49; alternative narratives of, 63–​65; lawsuits’ use of, 85–​86 Holwell, J. Z., 45, 178n46 Hooghly River, 44, 78, 100, 113, 117, 128, 167; called Bhāgīrathī, 56, 57 image worship, 1, 22, 63, 94, 180n15 Indian National Congress Party, 24,  95–​96 International Foundation for Sustainable Development (IFSD), 14–​16; building or renovation projects of, 101, 120–​22, 166; as “catalyst organization,” 15, 26; KTC and, 149; plans for Kālīghāṭ, 22, 115–​17, 119–​22, 126–​27, 149, 166; TBP or Ghosh and, 100, 118, 120, 183n6; Tourism Boards or Ministry and, 120, 122, 149; website of, 117. See also Pathak, Mridul Jaidev, 7–​9, 11–​12, 18, 25 Jains, 172n15, 183n7 Jangal Giri, 56, 60 Joshi, Sanjay, 23, 43, 173n17 judges, 14, 35, 69–​73, 79–​80, 98, 99, 108, 121, 126, 162, 179n4; KTC members selected by, 91–​92; as modernizers, 67, 71–​72, 127; in U.S., 179n5 juristic personhood, 80, 84, 94

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Kālī: in Bengal, 27–​30, 32, 164, 177n39; bhūt (ghostly attendants) of, 9; British or foreigners and, 47, 63, 112–​13, 175n15, 177n43; care of, 18–​19, 68, 81, 87, 90, 154; devotees of, 3, 11, 30, 37, 63, 76, 140, 151–​58, 177n43; food offerings to, 9, 15, 61, 75, 126; history of, 27–​30, 59–​62, 165; at Kālīghāṭ vs. other temples, 5, 26, 165; Kolkata/​Calcutta and, 30–​32, 37, 41, 50–​54, 56, 58; lawsuits filed on behalf of, 67–​69, 71, 78, 83–​84, 88, 90, 93–​94, 153; mūrtis of, 2–​3, 6, 11–​12, 28, 31, 37–​38, 50, 52–​53, 55–​57, 60, 86, 157; poetry to, 29, 165, 173n19; power of, 127, 128, 130–​31, 164, 165; property owned by, 80, 84, 89, 95, 98, 187n21; in Purāṇas, 28, 53, 56; reform of, 28–​29, 36, 128, 162, 165; sacrifices to, 1, 9, 15, 28, 61, 64, 102, 133, 151–​52, 175n10; Tantric view of, 28–​30; temples of, 4, 13, 14, 27, 167, 177n39; Vaiṣṇava transformation of, 28–​29, 61, 128; as Vedic goddess (or not), 54–​55, 59, 65–​66; worship of, 11, 12, 15, 22, 26–​29, 57, 59, 75, 108, 125, 139, 141, 159, 163 Kālīghāṭ: administration or management of, 2, 11, 13, 67–​73, 88–​90, 92, 94, 97, 135, 139, 147, 162, 174n37 (see also Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee); aesthetics of, 30, 35, 103, 114, 122, 126, 127, 129, 179n9; Bengal or Bengalis and, 3, 30–​31, 52; in British histories or diaries, 44–​49, 63, 178n46; as charitable institution, 15, 86, 92; colonial-​era histories of, 2, 34, 37–​ 65, 162 (see also British: historical narratives by; Bysack, Gaur Das; Caṭṭopādhyāy, Sūrjyakumār; Datta, Prānkṛṣṇa; and Ray, Atul Kṛṣṇa); communities or stakeholders of, 4, 26, 101, 139, 140, 154; compared to other monuments, 118, 120; compared to other temples, 2, 26, 31, 38, 70, 129,

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164, 165 (see also Dakṣiṇeśvar: Kālīghāṭ compared to); construction of, 3, 33, 86; contemporary histories of, 65–​66; criticisms of, 1–​2, 37, 63, 158, 173n28 (see also under cleanliness; dirtiness); crowds at, 7, 26–​27, 99, 156–​57, 159; digital or futuristic plans for, 117; dispersed governance of, 151; as emblem, 20, 31, 34, 35, 37, 43, 59, 62, 66, 99, 119, 120, 133, 154, 166; as emblem of backwardness, 1, 113; as emblem of modernity, 99, 101, 104, 136, 159, 162; experience of visiting, 101, 103, 121, 123, 129–​31, 154, 156, 159, 163–​64, 179n9; façade or exterior of, 5, 99, 100, 103, 113, 136 (see also under architecture); founding or early history of, 12–​13, 33, 37, 41, 45, 47, 53–​58, 177–​78n46, 180n12; garbha gṛha or inner sanctum of, 11–​12, 15, 31, 78, 121, 125, 126, 142, 150, 153, 155; Hindu identity and, 31, 34, 49, 133; importance or popularity of, 2–​3, 5, 11, 13, 18, 64, 75, 86, 120, 129, 165, 177n46, 179n10, 180n11; Indian nation and, 3, 162; Kālī’s vs. middle classes’ kṣetra, 133; Kamala and Moodie’s visit to, 4–​13; Kṛṣṇa shrine at, 12, 177n39; lawsuits involving, 83 (see also lawsuits); nāṭmandir of, 18, 145, 150, 151, 155; neighborhood of, 1, 5, 7–​8, 15–​17, 40, 42, 112, 133; newspaper coverage of, 27, 76, 78, 79, 100, 112, 129, 134, 135, 141, 153, 173n28, 180n11, 187n19; offering boxes in, 121, 126–​27; plan of current temple, 10; as private temple, 2, 61, 68, 84, 142; as public space, 35, 99, 127, 139; as public temple, 2, 27, 34, 67–​69, 71, 77, 83–​89, 93, 94, 138, 142, 162; Raja Mansingh as founder of, 12, 55; red light district near, 7, 17, 112, 143; reputation of, 18, 112, 121, 134, 165; safety in, 99, 108, 112–​13, 121–​23, 125, 126, 150; security cameras in, 121, 122, 124, 126, 148, 150, 153, 163; shops near, 56 (see also hawkers);

Srimitra’s and Subhra’s visits to, 155–​58; as tourist attraction, 14, 15, 17, 26, 35, 99–​100, 113, 117, 120–​22, 127, 149, 166–​67; wealth of, 67, 75–​76, 87, 91, 148, 180n22, 187n19; worship at, 4, 11–​12, 15, 26, 87, 140, 151, 153, 163, 172n10 (see also animal sacrifice) Kālīghāṭ Development Committee,  126–​27 Kālīghāṭ Kālīmandir Brahman Sahakarmī Saṅgaṭhan,  142–​43 Kalighat Refugee Hawkers’ Corner, 143, 184n19 Kālīghāṭ Temple Committee (KTC), 13–​15, 142, 144; building or renovation projects and, 122, 147–​50; court orders resisted or ignored by, 122, 133; current composition of, 69, 97, 147–​48; District Court cases involving, 67–​68, 88, 90; financial records of, 148; High Court cases involving, 68–​69, 88–​91, 148–​50; public representatives on, 68–​69, 73, 88, 92​, 97, 121, 124, 148; Supreme Court cases involving, 69, 92, 120, 153 Kalikātā (village), 44–​45, 52, 56, 58, 63, 65 Kālīkṣetra, 39, 50–​51, 53–​55, 64, 68, 85, 89, 112 Kamala, 4–​9, 11–​13, 18, 26, 31, 128, 158, 163 Kāpālikas, 54, 61, 62, 177n38 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 38, 104, 109, 186n5 kings: in historical narratives, 54, 57, 59; of Nepal, 179–​80n10; replaced by Mughals or British, 32; replaced by state, 97; temples built or endowed by, 3, 4, 29, 32, 70, 74, 164, 171n6 Kolkata/​Calcutta: Ballygunge neighborhood in, 13, 129, 165; as British city, 31, 33, 37, 46–​47, 49, 58, 64, 65; as capital, 1, 31, 46, 175n5; college or university personnel in, 90, 91, 92, 93, 154; colonial-​era, 1, 17, 23, 27, 31, 44–​47; colonial-​era histories of, 2, 31, 33–​34, 37–​65, 178n47 (see also

British: historical narratives by; Bysack, Gaur Das; Caṭṭopādhyāy, Sūrjyakumār; Datta, Prānkṛṣṇa; and Ray, Atul Kṛṣṇa); as commercial center, 169; contemporary histories of or novels about, 65–​66, 111–​12; demographics, 23; early history of, 17, 20, 33, 44–​47, 50–​53, 55–​58; as Hindu city, 31, 34, 37–​38, 49–​53, 55–​58, 118, 133, 163, 167, 169–​70; Hindu reforms and revivals in, 31–​32; immigrants to, 109, 113; name of, xv, 50–​51, 58, 65, 112, 171n2, 183n3; parks or public spaces in, 99, 103, 109–​11, 131, 137, 167, 184n17, 184n18; reputation of, 100, 101, 109, 111–​12, 118, 120, 159; sacred soil of, 50–​52; Tollygunge Phari neighborhood in, 4. For courts in, Calcutta High Court; District Courts Kolkata Municipal Corporation/​Calcutta Corporation, 42, 46, 86, 120, 181n33; Kālīghāṭ PIL or renovations and, 126–​27, 144, 149; KTC and, 68, 91–​92 Kṛṣṇa, 12, 29, 129, 177n39; Krishna Leela theme park, 20 kṣetra, 51–​52, 133. See also Kālīkṣetra Lakṣmī: Kālī as, 28 Lapierre, Dominique, 111–​12 lawsuits: Banerjee v. Kalimata (1949), 89, 180n22; Banerjee v. Mukherjee (1956), 68, 90–​91; on behalf of deity vs. public, 99 (see also Kālī: lawsuits filed on behalf of); Bose v. Union of India (2013), 100, 108, 122, 126, 144, 148–​49; colonial-​era laws and, 67–​71, 79–​88; Deoki Nandan v. Murlidhar (1957), 94; Desai v. Deputy Charity Commissioner (1987), 182n43; Emperor v. Banerji (1903), 78, 102; Goenka v. Union of India (2006), 100, 121, 142; historical discourses and, 85–​86, 89, 94; Kalimata v. Banerjee (1941), 68, 84–​88, 102, 179n6, 181n34, 182n35; Kalimata v. Mukherjee (1961), 69, 92, 93; Maharaj libel case, 78, 179n8;

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lawsuits: Banerjee v. Kalimata (1949) (cont.) pālā-​related, 78–​79,  87; Sabarna Roychowdhury Paribar v. . . . (2003),  66–​67; Subramanian v. State of Tamil Nadu (2014), 182n46; Tambekar v. Govindram (1887), 79. See also public interest litigation liberalization (economic), 24, 101, 105–​7,  130 lower classes, 4, 25, 64, 101, 109, 134, 138, 164, 172n16, 186n5 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 16–​17, 118 Manasāmaṅgal, 55, 177–​78n46 Manusaṃhitā, 53, 59 McDermott, Rachel, 29, 165, 175n10 Menon, Nivedita, 158, 186n4 middle classes: animal sacrifice and, 128; Brahmins and, 32, 33, 35, 67, 72–​74, 94, 120, 172n13; colonial-​era, 1, 21–​24, 31, 41–​43, 161, 171n3, 179n4; courts or judges and, 71, 72, 94, 108–​9, 127, 179n4; defined, 22; egalitarianism and, 23, 73, 172n16; gentrification by, 20, 131; historical discourses by, 20, 34; history of, 22–​25, 105, 161; international travel by, 106, 110; Kālī or goddesses and, 165–​67; Kālīghāṭ administration and, 26, 33, 67, 72–​73; Kālīghāṭ criticized by, 2, 42, 112, 157, 183n9; Kālīghāṭ in narratives by, 43–​44, 62, 65, 161; Kālīghāṭ modernization by, 25, 31, 42, 132, 135–​36, 169; modernity and or modernist views of, 22–​23, 26–​27, 30, 72; new, 24–​25, 101, 105–​6, 109, 127, 130; old, 24, 25, 99, 105, 130; PIL by, 67, 108, 138; political influence of, 111; public or urban spaces and, 103–​6, 109–​11, 117, 127, 129, 131, 167, 184n18; representative of public (or not), 4, 26, 73, 92–​93, 133, 159; resistance to projects of, 33, 101, 134, 135–​38; scholarship on, 105, 107, 130–​31, 173n24, 173n25; Tantra and, 30, 128, 131; temples and, 20–​21, 32–​34, 41–​44,

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103–​4, 127–​28, 131–​32, 137, 161–​62, 167, 172n16, 188n6; temples managed or controlled by, 4, 21, 25, 27, 33–​35, 133–​34, 163; values of, 20, 22–​25, 35, 43, 99, 101, 103, 127–​28, 139, 173n19, 188n6 missionaries, 1, 75, 77, 111, 177n37 Mitra, Anjan, 138–​40, 149, 168 Mitra, Manimanjari, 109 Mitra, Rajendralal, 31, 175n17 Mitter, Sir Rupendra Coomar, 88–​89 modernist values or idioms, 3, 25–​26, 99, 161, 173n26; in Hindu reform movements, 43, 69; historical narratives and, 37, 52, 85; middle classes’, 30, 67; temples and, 92, 104, 136, 165–​66, 168; public spaces and, 82, 103 modernity: Indian, 2, 20, 21, 25, 159, 161, 163; Kālīghāṭ and, 2, 25–​27, 37, 82, 159; middle-​class, 23, 26–​27, 161, 171n3; religion and, 21, 82; scholars on, 172–​73n17, 173n26; temples and, 20, 22, 36; tradition and, 37–​38, 159; values of, 21 modernization: in Bengal, 27–​28, 31–​33, 41–​42; consequences of, 36, 163–​66, 169; in India, 1, 33, 44; institutional or of management, 67, 69–​70, 72; of Kālīghāṭ: of, 2–​4, 19, 22, 25, 30, 42, 49, 66, 70, 98, 101, 127, 131, 133, 135–​36, 139–​40, 147, 164, 168; middle class role in, 1–​4, 42, 44, 133, 135–​36, 139, 147, 168; opposition to, 4, 25, 33, 35–​36, 135–​36, 139–​42, 159; ritual or worship and, 140; silence about vs. resistance to, 154–​55, 158; by writing vs. building, 32, 33, 66. See also temples: modernization of monuments, 17, 35, 99, 109, 169, 170; Acts governing, 166; international experience of, 101, 106, 120; Kālīghāṭ as, 33, 99, 120, 127, 133, 165; temples as, 161, 166 Mookerjee, Ramaprosad, 68, 89–​92, 162 Mughals, 29, 32, 44, 47, 173n22, 174n33, 175n15, 177n42 Mukherjee, Gopal, 14–​15, 18, 25, 26, 140,  146–​50

Mukherjee, Manik Lal, 68, 90, 92 Mukhopādhyāy, Harisādhan, 62–​63,  177n42 Mukhopādhyāy, Upendranāth (Kālīghāṭ Itivṛtta author), 85, 87, 102, 155, 177n45, 181n35 Mukhopādhyāy, Upendranāth (Kalikātā Darśak author), 64, 175n6, 177n45 mūrtis, 6, 55, 94–​95, 144; age of, 130; criticism of, 75; of Daśamahāvidyā, 57; discovery of Kālī’s, 37, 50, 52–​53, 55–​57, 60; history of worship of,  59–​60; of Kālī or at Kālīghāṭ, 2–​3, 52–​53, 55–​57 (see also under Kālī); legal status of, 80; svayaṃbhū, 31, 38; temples as homes to, 57, 74, 98 Muslims, 132, 169, 180n25; in colonial era or colonial-​era discourses, 22–​23, 44, 54, 64, 173n22; in contemporary era, 154, 168; Hindutva and, 133, 186n53; as pāṇḍās, 141 Nanda, Meera, 168–​69 nationalism, 3, 31, 133, 161 nationalists, 3, 39, 82, 137, 176n32, 179n4; criticism of priests or religion by, 77–​78, 95; goddess in discourse of, 42; Hindu, 24, 132–​33, 168–​69; Kālīghāṭ in discourse of, 44, 133; temples and, 132, 161, 168, 186n53 Nava Vidhan, 41, 42, 177n40 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1, 36, 132, 137, 154, 171n1 New Delhi, 19, 44, 129, 139, 168, 183n13, 186n4 Nirmal Hriday, 8, 112, 145, 181n33, 184–​85n24 Nivedita, Sister, 63, 175n10 non-​governmental organizations (NGOs), 110, 125, 135, 138, 147, 158, 183n13, 184n14; middle classes’ forming of, 2, 24, 35, 99, 107–​8, 138; PILs filed by, 108; as tool or technology, 101, 107, 137 non-​resident Indians (NRIs), 100, 113, 119 North American Bengali Conference, 113,  118–​19

order, 3, 82, 100, 103, 114, 122, 123, 129, 153 Orientalists, 1, 41, 52, 174n3, 176n21 Ortegren, Jennifer, 25, 105 pālās, 11, 91, 147, 150; disputes over,  78–​79; history of, 75; income from, 14, 75–​76; sale of, 14, 87, 88, 122, 148 pāṇḍās: castes of, 141, 187n8; criticism of, 7, 140–​43, 145; defined, 6, 141, 180n14; extortion or harassment by, 7, 76, 100, 88, 121, 122, 130, 142–​43; income of, 18, 141, 159; lawsuits involving, 78, 88, 102, 141–​42; modernist aspirations of, 25; modernization opposed by, 135, 136; noise or shouting of, 156; at other temples (or not), 124, 128, 129; protests by, 158; removal of or desire to remove, 18, 88, 101, 103, 124, 126, 129, 138, 143, 146; sevāyets et al. vs., 14, 78, 102, 180n14; state authority and, 146; statistics about, 140, 141; unions of, 36, 141–​43 Patel, J. N., 121, 123 Pathak, Mridul, 33, 101, 122, 127, 133, 154, 162, 183n6; background of, 16, 101, 113; Bengali Renaissance and, 120, 131; funds obtained by, 15, 16, 27, 100, 120; IFSD founded by, 15, 99; interview with, 15–​18, 117–​18; on Kālīghāṭ’s cleanliness, 15, 100; on “Macaulay syndrome,” 16–​17, 118; modernist views of, 25, 26, 103; plans for Kālīghāṭ, 16–​17, 100, 113–​18, 149, 166. See also International Foundation for Sustainable Development pilgrims: animal sacrifice by, 62; British and, 65, 174n36; Buddhist, 188n2; circuits or routes of, 36, 167; convenience or comfort of, 14, 84, 87, 88, 91, 98; to Dakṣiṇeśvar, 167; extortion of, 74, 84, 87–​88, 143; government support for, 167–​68; guides for, 6, 88, 142, 180n14; in histories of Calcutta, 41, 55–​57, 62; to Kālīghāṭ, 5, 14, 41, 62,

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| 213

pilgrims: animal sacrifice by, (cont.) 65, 84, 86–​88, 91, 98, 112, 113, 120, 130, 142–​43, 146; Muslim, 168; reformers criticize, 41; rest houses for, 8, 14, 86, 184n24; to Tirupati, 129; as tourists, 14, 167; sevāyets and, 84 Pīṭhamālā, 50–​51, 53, 177n46 pīṭhasthāns, 56, 84–​86, 89, 94 political society, 36, 136–​38, 158, 187n6 pollution, 47, 102, 107, 108, 110, 183n13, 184n16 Portuguese, 44, 47 Presler, Franklin, 33, 70, 79, 179n3, 181n29, 182n41 priests: category defined, 180n14; criticism of, 77–​79, 180n18; hereditary, 41, 67; in historical narratives, 53, 54, 55; modernist view or modernization of, 43, 172n13; rituals performed by, 74, 88, 172n10; social class of, 72; Tamil, 97, 172n13, 182n48, 187n7; temple offerings given to, 70, 74–​76, 79, 124, 126, 141 (see also pālās); types of, 141, 180n14; wages of, 91, 172n13; wealth of, 18, 67, 79, 94. See also Brahmins; pāṇḍās; pūjāris; purohits; sevāyets public (legal designation), 20, 27, 34, 67, 68, 71–​73, 74, 81–​82 public interest litigation (PIL), 111, 148–​50, 184n15; court officials’ investigations due to, 122–​23, 146; criticized, 108; defined, 107–​8; by Goenka, 13, 120–​24, 126, 142, 147–​48; middle classes and, 67, 99, 108–​ 9, 138; results of, 135, 144, 152; by Sāvarna Rāy Choudhurī family, 65; as tool or technology, 101, 107, 137. For specific cases, see lawsuits public spaces: beggars or hawkers in, 18, 103, 109–​10, 112, 137–​38, 184n19; clean, 82, 99, 104, 117; contested, 134, 136, 181n28; Kālīghāṭ as, 35, 99, 127, 139; middle classes and, 20, 101, 103–​4, 109, 114, 117, 129, 131, 167; modernist notion of, 82, 99, 104, 129; multicultural, 133; NGOs and, 107, 110, 183n13;

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parks, 109–​11; poor people in, 138, 186n4, 186n5; sacred space and, 20, 129, 139; secular, 20, 99; temples, 20, 103, 104, 129 public sphere, 21, 23, 135, 173n23 public temple(s), 19, 20, 27, 81; colonial laws on, 81; concept of, 69, 73–​74; drawbacks of, 138–​39; excess income of, 95; in independent India, 94–​96; open to all castes, 96; Supreme Court cases on, 94–​95, 142. See also Kālīghāṭ: as public temple pūjā, 7, 12, 15, 76, 142; history of, 59, 62; lawsuits mentioning, 84–​85, 88, 91; shops selling materials for, 124–​26; Vedic vs. Tantric, 9; virtual (e-​pūjā), 113, 117, 163 pūjāris, 14–​15, 150 Purāṇas, 28, 38, 41, 51, 53, 59; Bhāgavata, 56; Devibhāgavata, 89, 178n46, 182n37; Kālikā, 56, 178n46 Puri. See temples: Jagannāth purity, 3, 20, 28, 102–​3, 183n7; caste and, 139, 175n10. See also cleanliness purohits, 86, 140–​42, 153, 154, 180n14 Rādhā, 12, 129 Ramakrishna, 42, 124, 128, 131, 165, 167, 176n25 Ramakrishna Mission, 128 rationality, 3, 21, 34, 38, 43, 72–​73, 161 Ray, Atul Kṛṣṇa (~A.K. Ray): background or family of, 42–​43, 176n33; cited by others, 63; on Calcutta or Kālīkṣetra, 37, 41, 50–​52, 54, 56, 60; on geology, 49–​50, 63; as historian, 38; on Kālīghāṭ’s early history, 54–​58, 61; on Kālīghāṭ’s pilgrims, 37, 41, 55; reformist Hindu values of, 41, 62, 66; on sacrifice, 61; Short History of Calcutta by, 39, 42; sources used by, 50, 63, 176n23, 177n35 Rāy, Durgācaraṇ,  76–​77 renovations, 36, 167, 172n6, 172n15, 188n6; of Dakṣiṇeśvar, 123–​24, 140, 167, 185n45; difficulties of,

138–​40, 144, 147, 149; funds for, 15, 19, 122, 132, 149–​50, 168–​70; of Kālīghāṭ, 99, 113–​14, 120, 122, 128, 132–​33, 136, 138–​40, 144, 147–​50, 167, 168, 186n54; new building vs., 20; NGOs’ role in, 107; of Somnātha, 132; in Tamil Nadu, 19, 106, 168–​69; transform for elite, 136 Roy, Rammohan, 1, 22, 41, 77, 118, 180n17 sacrifices: Dakṣa’s, 171n5; human, 47, 49, 61, 64, 177n37; Tantric, 9, 28, 30, 102, 133; Vedic or homa, 9, 28, 60, 131, 153; vegetarian, 9, 62. See also animal sacrifices Śaivas, 29, 42, 173n30 Śāktas, 26, 29–​30, 42, 57, 60–​63 Śaktipīṭhs, 4–​5, 50, 63, 181n32; court cases referencing, 86, 89; gateway depicting, 147, 179n10; Kālīghāṭ among, 4, 12–​13, 64, 89, 177n46; Kālīghāṭ as most powerful of, 3, 26, 31, 165; story of, 171n5; Tārāpīṭh among, 167. See also pīṭhasthāns saṃnyāsīs, 51, 54, 60, 62 Śaṅkarācārya, 56, 59, 60 Śāstras, 78, 80, 94, 103, 181n26 Sāthī Brahmin Saṅgathan,  142–​43 Satī, 5, 12, 50, 51, 53, 86, 171n5, 176n31 Sāvarṇa Rāy Coudhurī family, 179n10; Haldar family and, 174n38; Kālīghāṭ temple constructed by, 33, 45, 56, 172n7, 179n10; PIL filed by descendants of, 65; as zamindars, 42, 44, 57, 172n7; Ray as member of, 42–​43,  176n33 Scott, J. Barton, 71–​72, 77–​78, 179n8, 180n15 secularism, 136, 139–​40, 161. See also public spaces: secular Sen, Keshab Chandra, 41–​42, 77, 177n40 Sen, Vallal, 54–​56, 176n31, 177n46 sevāyets: authority of, 71, 81, 94, 97, 147, 157; beggars and, 145; court orders ignored or resisted by, 36, 97, 135–​36, 139, 147–​50, 153, 159; criticism

of, 14, 77–​78, 101, 121, 124, 140, 143, 145, 147, 150–​51, 181n34; defined, 11; on ECCS, 90, 92, 182n40; education of, 25; in historical narratives, 61, 180n22; Kālīghāṭ’s first, 75; on KTC or as temple managers, 67–​69, 90–​91, 97, 120, 135, 139, 147–​48, 151, 180n12; lawsuits or disputes involving, 34, 67–​69, 71, 78–​79, 81, 84–​85, 87–​94, 102–​3, 120, 122, 174n38, 180n22, 181n35; middle class replaces, 73; numbers of, 140; pāṇḍās et al. vs., 11, 14, 139, 141–​43, 172n10, 180n14; social class of, 71–​72, 147; as trustees, 71, 80; wealth or income of, 67–​68, 75–​76, 84, 87, 90, 91, 92, 127, 140 (see also pālās) sex workers, 1, 7, 64, 78, 102, 112 Shree Charitable Trust, 100, 108,  124–​25 Sinha, Bhuvaneswar Prasad, 69, 92, 162 Śiva, 59, 60; Kālī and, 6, 11, 51; liṅgās, 12; as Nakuleśvara, 50, 178n46, 181n32; Satī and, 50, 171n5 Sontheimer, Günther-​Dietz, 51–​52, 79, 94 sovereignty: of courts or state, 79, 98, 137; of deities, 70, 74, 79, 81, 97, 98, 133, 154, 161, 165, 182n49; of public, 98, 133, 137 Supreme Court of India: darśan ruling by, 153; Kālīghāṭ declared public by, 27, 142; PILs and, 107–​8, 184n15, 184n16; Temple Committee mandated by, 69, 93–​95, 97, 120, 147 Sutāṇuṭi, 44, 45, 47, 52, 58 Swāminārāyaṇ, 20, 129 Tagore, Debendranath, 41 Tagore, Rabindranath, 1, 16, 42, 118–​20,  131 Tamil Nadu, 35, 70, 97, 168, 172n13, 182n41; goddesses in, 32, 157, 164; legislation or lawsuits involving temples in, 95–​96, 181n29, 182n46

Index 

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Tantra (sect), 14, 28–​30, 174n34; denigrated or minimized, 38, 41, 42; in historical narratives, 53–​55, 57, 175n8; Kālī or goddesses in, 28, 128, 131, 133; ritual in, 29–​30, 41 (see also sacrifices: Tantric); sects of, 28, 29, 54, 61, 62; temples influenced by, 102, 131 Tantras (texts), 38, 41, 53, 56, 57, 59–​60, 173n30, 177–​78n46 Tantrikas, 28, 60–​61, 112, 157 Tārāpīṭh, 14, 167–​68 temple administration, 32–​35, 69–​71; colonial-​era laws or lawsuits on, 67–​70, 79–​84, 181n30; in independent India, 94–​95, 97; state or court interventions in, 82–​83, 94–​95, 97, 139, 181n29 temples: aesthetics of, 179n9; age and power of, 130; Akṣardhām, 19–​20, 129–​30, 139, 164, 168, 172n16; Ayodhya, 132; Baidyanāth, 32; in Bengal, 14, 27, 57, 70–​71, 95, 132; Bhuvaneśvarī, 155–​56; Birla (in Kolkata), 129–​30, 165; British officials and, 32, 70, 174n35 174n36, 175n15; Cidambaram’s Naṭarāj or Sabhanayagar, 172n14, 182n46; colonial-​era laws or lawsuits, 67–​70, 79–​83, 181n30 (see also lawsuits); communities of, 26; for deities vs. public, 73; Dwarkadhishji, 182n43; as emblems, 120, 136, 158 (see also Kālīghāṭ: as emblem); as endowments or trusts, 19, 71, 80–​82; finances of, 69–​70, 72–​74, 127; government role in, 19; identity and, 20, 36, 167, 169; impurity vs. dirt at, 102–​3; ISKCON, 20; Jagannāth, 32, 156, 174n36, 181n29; Kolavizhi, 19; in Kolkata, 5, 14, 31, 55, 57, 167–​68; Lake Kālībāṛi, 168; Māruṇḍeśvara, 19; middle classes and, 3–​4, 20–​21, 32, 35, 127–​29; Mīnākṣi, 169, 172n13,

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182n48, 187n7; modernization of, 1–​4, 19–​22, 25, 27–​28, 31–​32, 44, 67, 69–​70, 72, 86, 162; modern or modernist, 20, 32, 129, 161–​63, 168; as monuments, 161, 166; Nathdwara, 182n44; new questions about, 163; patrons or donors of, 3, 33, 80–​81, 85; pre-​modern or traditional view of, 3, 32, 74–​75, 80–​81; private, 19, 81, 84, 87, 89–​90, 94, 96, 139, 142, 172n14, 182n44, 182n46; publics of, 26–​27; Puṣṭimarg havelis, 172n14, 182n44; reformists’ views of, 22, 27, 34, 41–​42, 96, 161; secondary shrines in, 12, 32; Somnātha, 132; state control of, 19, 35, 73, 96–​97, 158, 179n3, 182n45; Tarakeswar, 78; Tārāpīṭh, 167; Tirupati, 129, 169; Trikamarayji, 182n43; wealth of, 35, 70, 74–​76, 98. See also Dakṣiṇeśvar; Kālīghāṭ; public temples Teresa, Mother, 8, 17, 111–​12, 145, 181n33, 185n24. See also Nirmal Hriday Tiwari, Krishna, 143 tourism: circuits or tours for, 100, 111, 167–​68; “Incredible India” campaign, 120; NGOs or individuals promoting, 14, 15, 17, 35, 111, 117, 166; pilgrimage and, 167; state boards promoting, 35, 99, 106, 100, 120–​22, 127, 149, 166–​68; temples or religious sites and, 19, 99, 168–​69. See also Kālīghāṭ: as tourist attraction Trinamool Congress Party, 33, 111 Union Tourism Ministry, 100, 120, 122, 149, 167 Vaiṣṇavas, 42, 54, 174n34, 176n32; Kālī or Kālīghāṭ and, 28–​29, 61–​62, 128, 177n39, 180n14 vana,  51–​52 Vedas, 28, 34, 37–​38, 41, 43, 53; Hindu reformers and, 62, 66, 176n21,

180n17; Kālī worship and, 59–​60, 65, 66; revival of rituals of, 131, 173n30. See also sacrifices: Vedic Victoria Memorial, 17, 103, 118, 170 Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), 132, 186n53 Viṣṇu, 15, 28, 42, 59–​61, 171n5, 177n39 Vivekananda, Swami, 1, 22, 42, 166, 186n52; Belur Maṭh founded by, 128; inserted into Kālīghāṭ narrative, 131, 175n10; Kālī worship or poetry by, 22, 173n19; Pathak or Ghosh on, 118, 120, 131

Waghorne, Joanne, 19–​20, 32, 103, 131, 164, 172n16, 175n7, 180n18, 188n6 West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation (WBTDC), 100, 120–​21, 127, 138, 149 Wilson, C. R., 47, 49, 63, 176n20 yoga, 14, 61, 132, 167 zamindars, 42, 44, 54, 57, 59, 177n42; temples endowed or built by, 29, 70, 74–​75, 81, 164, 172n7

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