Overview

Kalighat is said to be the oldest and most potent Hindu pilgrimage site in the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). It is home to the dark goddess Kali in her ferocious form and attracts thousands of worshipers a day, many sacrificing goats at her feet. In The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City, Deonnie Moodie examines the ways middle-class authors, judges, and activists have worked to modernize Kalighat over the past long century. Rather than being rejected or becoming obsolete with the arrival of British colonialism and its accompanying iconoclastic Protestant ideals, the temple became a medium through which middle-class Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as the modernity of their city and nation. That trend continued and even strengthened in the wake of India's economic liberalization in the 1990s. Kalighat is a superb example of the ways Hindus work to modernize India while also Indianizing modernity through Hinduism's material forms. Moodie explores both middle-class efforts to modernize Kalighat and the lower class's resistance to those efforts. Conflict between class groups throws into high relief the various roles the temple plays in peoples' lives, and explains why the modernizers have struggled to bring their plans to fruition. The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City is the first scholarly work to juxtapose and analyze processes of historiographical, institutional, and physical modernization of a Hindu temple.

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Deonnie Moodie tells a fascinating story about the changing and contested meanings of the famous K=al=igh=at temple in Kolkata (Calcutta) from the colonial past to the present day. Her book is elegantly and evocatively written, but it is also a solid work of interdisciplinary scholarship based on extensive, first-hand research. Moodie excellently combines the study of Hinduism and religion with anthropology, history, and legal studies, and her theoretical and comparative analysis of religion and modernization is closely tied to detailed empirical evidence. --Chris Fuller, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science Grounded in history and rich ethnographic detail, Deonnie Moodie's study of the K=al=igh=at temple adds an important new perspective to the much-studied Kolkata middle class, linking the historical with contemporary middle-class efforts to modernize the temple. By focusing on the close interanimation of the sacred and the public, Moodie's study makes a critical contribution to understanding the sort of processes that are shaping a contested modernity in modern India. --Sanjay Joshi, Professor of History, Northern Arizona University Here in Kolkata, Moodie sets her discussion of the growing power of middle class religiosity amid the deeply material - sacrifice, blood, and tears - of the K=al=igh=at temple. Throughout the extensive discussion, voices of the past mix with voices of the present and we hear not just the middle class intone their desires for meditative quiet and cleanliness but also the beggars and the priests, reminding us that the power of the temple may well rest as much in chaos as in order, as much in blood as in pamphlets, as much in the intensity of experience as in inner peace-a major contribution to the discussion of alternate modernities, the developing religious sensibilities of the Indian middleclass, and the increasingly visible presence of religion in urban landscapes. --Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Professor of Religion, Syracuse University

Here in Kolkata, Moodie sets her discussion of the growing power of middle class religiosity amid the deeply material - sacrifice, blood, and tears - of the Kalighat temple. Throughout the extensive discussion, voices of the past mix with voices of the present and we hear not just the middle class intone their desires for meditative quiet and cleanliness but also the beggars and the priests, reminding us that the power of the temple may well rest as much in chaos as in order, as much in blood as in pamphlets, as much in the intensity of experience as in inner peace - a major contribution to the discussion of alternate modernities, the developing religious sensibilities of the Indian middleclass, and the increasingly visible presence of religion in urban landscapes. * Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Professor of Religion, Syracuse University * Grounded in history and rich ethnographic detail, Deonnie Moodie's study of the Kalighat temple adds an important new perspective to the much-studied Kolkata middle class, linking the historical with contemporary middle-class efforts to modernize the temple. By focusing on the close interanimation of the sacred and the public, Moodie's study makes a critical contribution to understanding the sort of processes that are shaping a contested modernity in modern India. * Sanjay Joshi, Professor of History, Northern Arizona University * Deonnie Moodie tells a fascinating story about the changing and contested meanings of the famous Kalighat temple in Kolkata (Calcutta) from the colonial past to the present day. Her book is elegantly and evocatively written, but it is also a solid work of interdisciplinary scholarship based on extensive, first-hand research. Moodie excellently combines the study of Hinduism and religion with anthropology, history, and legal studies, and her theoretical and comparative analysis of religion and modernization is closely tied to detailed empirical evidence. * Chris Fuller, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science *

"""By combining historical and ethnographic sources in interdisciplinary unison, Moodie illustrates how religious life at Kalighat is not diminishing but is attuning to the modern metropolis... Moodie's unique methodology and scope is truly commendable. As a result, her book contains considerable insights about Hindu temples in contemporary India, which will provide essential reading for those studying them."" -- Matthew Martin, Pembroke College, University of Oxford, Journal of the Oxford Graduate Theological Society (JOGTS) ""Deonnie Moodie tells a fascinating story about the changing and contested meanings of the famous K=al=igh=at temple in Kolkata (Calcutta) from the colonial past to the present day. Her book is elegantly and evocatively written, but it is also a solid work of interdisciplinary scholarship based on extensive, first-hand research. Moodie excellently combines the study of Hinduism and religion with anthropology, history, and legal studies, and her theoretical and comparative analysis of religion and modernization is closely tied to detailed empirical evidence."" --Chris Fuller, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science ""Grounded in history and rich ethnographic detail, Deonnie Moodie's study of the K=al=igh=at temple adds an important new perspective to the much-studied Kolkata middle class, linking the historical with contemporary middle-class efforts to modernize the temple. By focusing on the close interanimation of the sacred and the public, Moodie's study makes a critical contribution to understanding the sort of processes that are shaping a contested modernity in modern India."" --Sanjay Joshi, Professor of History, Northern Arizona University ""Here in Kolkata, Moodie sets her discussion of the growing power of middle class religiosity amid the deeply material - sacrifice, blood, and tears - of the K=al=igh=at temple. Throughout the extensive discussion, voices of the past mix with voices of the present and we hear not just the middle class intone their desires for meditative quiet and cleanliness but also the beggars and the priests, reminding us that the power of the temple may well rest as much in chaos as in order, as much in blood as in pamphlets, as much in the intensity of experience as in inner peace-a major contribution to the discussion of alternate modernities, the developing religious sensibilities of the Indian middleclass, and the increasingly visible presence of religion in urban landscapes."" --Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Professor of Religion, Syracuse University"

Author Information

Deonnie Moodie is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions at University of Oklahoma. Her research has been funded by her home institution as well as by Fulbright and Harvard University, where she earned her PhD. Moodie is especially interested in religion in urban India and the ways people of various class backgrounds negotiate urban spaces as sites of devotion, memory, monumentality, labor, and leisure.

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