Dakshineshwar Kali Temple is a Hindu sanctuary situated on the eastern banks of the Hooghly River in a humble community in the north of Kolkata named Dakshineshwar. The magnificence and appeal of Dakshineswar Kali Temple is known to be to such an extent that an outing to Kolkata is regularly supposed to be deficient without a visit to this sanctuary.

History and Legend :

While the spiritual history of this temple has the mystic sage and reformer Ramakrishna Paramahansa and his wife Sarada Devi associated with it, the socio-political history associated with the temple is quite interesting too.

Established by Rani Rashmoni of Bengal in 1855, the Dakshineswar Kali Temple was opened to guests only two years before the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, likewise famously known as India’s first conflict of Independence. Indeed, even the engineering of the sanctuary has a chronicled contact as it is worked in the customary ‘nava-ratna’ or nine towers style that comes from Bengal School of Architecture.

The sublime sanctuary of Dakshineshwar was worked by Rani Rashmoni, a humanitarian and a faithful devotee of Goddess Kali. Rumors have spread far and wide suggesting that Rani Rashmoni needed to go on a journey to Varanasi to offer prayers to the mother Goddess. The prior night she was booked to leave for Varanasi, she imagined about the Goddess requesting that she develop a sanctuary close to Ganges and set a sculpture as opposed to going right to Varanasi.

Rani quickly began making game plans to assemble a sanctuary. Subsequent to looking into a few plots of land to build the sanctuary, she focused down on the 20-section of land by the eastern banks of Ganges, some portion of which had a Muslim cemetery that additionally took after a turtle bump, which was viewed as total able for loving Shakti as per Tantra customs. Another part of the land belonged to a European named John Hasty and this part of the land was popularly known as Saheban Bagicha. With construction of a Hindu temple on a site, parts of which belonged to different faiths, it signifies the unity of all faiths.