Spatial Embodiment Research Articles

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 the city its name: Kali, the black divinity of death and destruction. Many examples of this imagery can be found in literature, where the Goddess and her myth are used as a metaphor to describe Calcutta. The deathly and violent connotations of Kali 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 to investigate certain aspects of Calcutta's negative imagery with visual methods: the abstraction of the metaphorical link between goddess and city was transposed by photographs and video to their concrete, contemporary urban space. Images produced on the icons of Kali around Calcutta, on the temples dedicated to the Goddess and on the rituals made in her honour will show the spatial embodiment of the Kali/Calcutta link and its deep relation with colonial history. The adoption of visual methods enhanced the peculiarity of the Kalighat neighbourhood, the place where Mother Teresa's Hospital of the Dying Ones stands back to back with Goddess's Kali most ancient temple and icon. Kalighat is not only the historical site where the symbolic link between city and goddess was developed, but also the place where the dark narrative is kept alive.