The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City
Kalighat and Kolkata
Deonnie Moodie
Reviews and Awards
"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 Kālīghāt 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 Kālīghāt 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 Kālīghāt 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