Kalighat, the Home of Goddess Kali: the Place Where Calcutta is Imagined Twice: A Visual Investigation into the Dark Metropolis

The identity of Calcutta has often been associated with the goddess who gave thecity its name: Kali, the black divinity of death and destruction. Many examplesof this imagery can be found in literature, where the Goddess and her myth areused as a metaphor to describe Calcutta. The deathly and violent connotations ofKali are extended to the city, which is depicted as a ‘metropolitan nightmare’,a place identified with overpopulation, poverty, political riots and sickness.Goddess Kali -the city's symbolic ideal-type - was used as an entry point toinvestigate certain aspects of Calcutta's negative imagery with visual methods:the abstraction of the metaphorical link between goddess and city was transposedby photographs and video to their concrete, contemporary urban space. Imagesproduced on the icons of Kali around Calcutta, on the temples dedicated to theGoddess and on the rituals made in her honour will show the spatial embodimentof the Kali/Calcutta link and its deep relation with colonial history. Theadoption of visual methods enhanced the peculiarity of the Kalighatneighbourhood, the place where Mother Teresa's Hospital of the Dying Ones standsback to back with Goddess's Kali most ancient temple and icon. Kalighat is notonly the historical site where the symbolic link between city and goddess wasdeveloped, but also the place where the dark narrative is kept alive.