This book is about what temples do for Hindus in the modern era, particularly those who belong to India’s diverse and evolving middle classes. While many excoriate these sites as emblematic of all that is backward about Hinduism and India, many others work to modernize them so that they might become emblems of a proud heritage and of the nation’s future. I take Kālīghāṭ Temple, a powerful pilgrimage site dedicated to the dark goddess Kālī, in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) as a case study in the phenomenon by which middle-class Hindus work to modernize temples. At the height of the colonial era in the 1890s, they wrote books and articles attaching this temple to both rationalist and spiritual forms of Hinduism. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, they filed and adjudicated lawsuits to secularize and democratize its management structure. Today, in the wake of India’s economic liberalization, they work to gentrify Kālīghāṭ’s physical spaces. The conceptual, institutional, and physical forms of this religious site are thus facets through which middle-class Hindus produce and publicize their modernity, as well as their cities’ and their nation’s. The use of Kālīghāṭ as a means to modernization is by no means uncontested. The temple plays a very different role in the lives and livelihoods of individuals from across the class spectrum. The future of this and other temples across India thus relies on complex negotiations between actors of multiple class backgrounds who read their various needs onto these sites.
