There was a Kali shrine on this creek long before there was a Calcutta, and one durable reading of the city's name traces it to Kalikshetra or Kalikata, the ground of Kali. The present temple building dates from 1809, funded by the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family.
It is one of the fifty-one Shakti Peethas. The tradition holds that the toes of Sati's right foot fell here. The image is unusual and unmistakable: a black stone face with three enormous gold eyes and a protruding gold tongue, quite unlike the Kali of the Puja pandals.
The Adi Ganga beside it was the main channel of the Hooghly until the eighteenth century. It is now a narrow, poor thing, and its condition is a standing civic argument.
This is a working shrine, dense and fast-moving. Touts at the approach will offer priority access; the ordinary queue works.
What the guidebook leaves out
The Kalighat pat painters worked in the lanes around this temple through the nineteenth century, inventing a fast, flat, satirical style that later fed straight into modern Indian art. Jamini Roy built a career on it.
