The Bengali Shakta Trail: Kalighat, Tarapith and the Goddess of the East

Drive 250 km north from Kolkata and you reach a small village called Tarapith on the bank of the Dwaraka river. Behind the temple is a cremation ground where, for over a century, sadhakas have lived openly — eating ash, sleeping among burning pyres, conducting tantric rituals that the rest of India practises in secret or not at all. Tarapith is one of the three peethas that anchor what locals call the Bengali Shakta Trail — a circuit through Devi shrines where the goddess is worshipped not as a benign mother but as a fierce, weapon-bearing destroyer. The other two are Kalighat in Kolkata and Jwala Devi far to the north in Himachal.

Kalighat: the temple that gave a city its name

Sati's right toe fell here. The neighbourhood — Kali-kshetra in Bengali — got anglicised by the British as Calcutta, and the city took its name from the temple. The current sanctum was rebuilt in 1809 by the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family; the Kali idol is unique in being entirely free-form, three large eyes, a long protruding gold tongue, four arms holding a sword and a severed demon's head. Tuesdays and Saturdays — Kali's days — bring queues of two to four hours. Right next door, Mother Teresa's Nirmal Hriday hospice operates inside what was once the Kali pilgrim hostel; she chose the location precisely because it was where Calcutta's dying poor came to die. Pilgrims today often visit both in one morning — the goddess's temple and the woman who tended her devotees.

Tarapith and the saint who never left the cremation ground

The 19th-century saint Bamakhepa (1837-1911) lived his entire adult life on the Tarapith cremation ground. He ate the discarded food of pilgrims, slept in cremation ash, and is said to have personally seen and conversed with Tara Ma — the goddess depicted in the temple as a fierce form of Kali, three feet of black stone trampling Shiva. His samadhi shrine is 200 metres from the main temple, and pilgrims circumambulate both. The Mahasmasan (cremation ground) directly behind the temple remains an open tantric site — sadhus welcome respectful visitors but photography is forbidden. The temple itself accepts bhog that includes fish, an unusual addition for a Devi shrine and a clear marker of the Bengali Shakta heritage. Daily blood offerings (goat, by tradition) continue at the morning bali; the practice draws criticism but the temple trust holds it as an unbroken 800-year-old observance.

Jwala Devi: the temple with no idol

Six hundred kilometres north-west, set in the Kangra valley below the Dhauladhar peaks, is Jwala Devi — where Sati's tongue fell. The sanctum has no idol. It has only nine perpetually burning natural-gas flames emerging from a fissure in the rock, each named for a different aspect of the goddess (Mahakali, Annapurna, Chandi, Hinglaj, Vindhyavasini, Mahalakshmi, Saraswati, Ambika and Anjana Devi). The most famous historical episode: Mughal emperor Akbar in the 16th century tried to extinguish the flames by diverting a stream over the source. The water vanished but the flames continued. He returned, offered a golden parasol — and legend says the parasol transmuted to a base metal as he approached, signifying the goddess had refused his offering. The Akbari Kund and what locals say is the failed parasol are still on display in the courtyard.

Kamakhya: the supreme tantric peetha of the East

If the Bengali Shakta Trail has a centre of gravity, it is Kamakhya in Guwahati, where Sati's yoni fell — the most powerful peetha in the entire tantric tradition. The Ambubachi Mela in mid-June, when the temple closes for three days to mark the goddess's annual menstruation and reopens in full ritual, draws sadhakas from across India. Most Bengali Shakta operators bundle Kamakhya with the Kolkata-Tarapith leg as a single 7-day eastern yatra — the spiritual heart of the Ashtadasha circuit's eastern arc.

The two stops that are no longer reachable

Two of the peethas in Adi Shankara's eighteen-stop list are physically inaccessible to Indian pilgrims today. Shankari Devi on Swami Rock at Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, was destroyed by Portuguese cannon in 1622 — Constantino de Sá de Noronha had the entire Koneswaram complex pushed off the 130-m cliff into the Bay of Bengal. The original Shivalinga was recovered by Tamil Hindus in the 1950s and is now reinstalled in the rebuilt Koneswaram temple; the Devi shrine itself is a modern small reconstruction on the cliff edge. Visitable, but only by Sri Lanka tourist visa. Sharda Peeth in the Neelum Valley of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is the eighteenth and final peetha — and it has been unreachable to Indians since the 1947 partition. The temple is in better physical condition than Shankari Devi (Pakistan reopened it in 2022) but no Kartarpur-style corridor exists. Most pilgrims complete the yatra symbolically at Sringeri Sharadamba in Karnataka, the matha Shankara himself founded as Sharda Peeth's southern counterpart.