| This dissertation is an analysis of discursive productions of Kalighat, a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Kali in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India. It is the most famous temple in what was once the capital of the British Empire in India and what is now India's third largest city. Kalighat has a reputation for being ancient, powerful, corrupt, and dirty. This dissertation aims to discover how and why these are the adjectives most often used to describe this temple. While there are many stories that can be told about a place, and many words that can be used to characterize it, these four dominate the public discourse on Kalighat. I demonstrate in these pages that these ideas about Kalighat are not discoveries made about the site, but are instead creations of it that have been produced at certain times, according to certain discursive practices, toward certain ends.;Employing Michel Foucault's concept of the "discursive object," I analyze the ways in which verbal and written statements pertaining to the temple - ostensibly about a physical object with a material reality - in fact produce various discursive objects. When people think, talk, and write about Kalighat, they produce various "Kalighats." I focus particularly on statements made by middle-class Bengali Hindus in books, newspaper articles, lawsuits, campaigns, and in personal conversation with me. From the colonial period to the present, in the vernacular Bengali language and in English, ideas about what this temple is have been produced in tandem with ideas about the nature of the city and its colonial legacy, what constitutes good Hinduism, the role of law in religious institutions, and middle-class notions of what a Hindu temple in a modern city ought to look and feel like. These ideas build upon one another, so that Kalighat emerges, through two centuries of discourse, as a powerful symbol of Hindu heritage and dominance in this former colonial capital city and as a site that middle-class citizens, as well as government bodies, desire to influence and control. While this work is a case study on Kalighat, it contributes to our understanding of what religious sites are and how they are produced through discursive practices. |
