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Dakshineswar Kali Temple

The Dakshineswar Kali temple is a temple of the goddess Kali on the east bank of the Hooghly north of Calcutta, built by Rani Rashmoni and consecrated in 1855, where the mystic Ramakrishna served as priest and lived for some thirty years.

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Rani Rashmoni

Rashmoni was the widow of a wealthy Calcutta landowner, Rajchandra Das, and managed his estates after his death. She was known for her charities and for defending fishermen and tenants against the East India Company. According to the temple's tradition, she was preparing a pilgrimage to Varanasi when the goddess appeared to her in a dream and told her to build a temple on the bank of the Ganges instead. She bought land at Dakshineswar in 1847.

The temple

The main temple is in the navaratna style of Bengal, with nine spires arranged in two tiers over a square body, raised on a high platform. The goddess is installed as Bhavatarini, "she who carries her devotees across the ocean of existence", standing on the prone body of Shiva. Facing the river is a row of twelve temples of Shiva, and the complex also has a temple of Radha and Krishna and a bathing ghat.

The consecration was delayed because Rashmoni belonged to the Kaivarta caste, which orthodox Brahmins considered low, and priests were unwilling to serve a temple founded by her. Ramkumar Chattopadhyay, a Brahmin scholar, ruled that the difficulty could be met by making the temple over to a Brahmin, and he agreed to serve as priest. The temple was consecrated on 31 May 1855.

Ramakrishna

Ramkumar's younger brother Gadadhar, later known as Ramakrishna, joined him at the temple and became its priest after Ramkumar's death in 1856. He was consumed by longing for a vision of the goddess, and his intense devotion, which those around him at first took for madness, was followed by years of practice under teachers of tantra, Vaishnava devotion and Advaita Vedanta, and by experiments with Islamic and Christian devotion. He came to teach that all religions were paths to the same God.

Ramakrishna lived at Dakshineswar for about thirty years, in a room in the temple garden that is preserved. His wife, Sarada Devi, lived for some years in the nahabat, a small music tower. Disciples came to him from Calcutta, among them, from 1881, a young student named Narendranath Datta, later Swami Vivekananda. Ramakrishna's conversations were recorded by Mahendranath Gupta and published as the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

The temple today

The temple remains one of the most visited in Bengal, especially at the Kali Puja. Across the river stands Belur Math, the headquarters of the order founded by Ramakrishna's disciples. The temple area was renovated in the 2010s with a new approach from the Dakshineswar station.

Further reading

  • Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine. University of California Press, 1986
  • McDermott, Rachel Fell. Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal. Columbia University Press, 2011
  • Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996

See also

  • Kali — The dark, fierce goddess of time; destroyer of ego and evil.
  • Calcutta — Calcutta, renamed Kolkata in 2001, is the city on the Hooghly in Bengal that grew from the East India Company's trading settlement of the 1690s into the capital of British India until 1911 and the centre of the Bengal Renaissance.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.