Dakshineshwar Kali Temple and Belur Math

To the north of the city of Kolkata is the spiritual escape for the city crowd - the Dakshineshwar Kali Temple and the Belur Math.

The Dakshineshwar Kali Temple was built between 1847 and 1855 by the famous Rani Rashmoni. It is built as a temple complex on the banks of the river Hugli. Other than the central temple to the Goddess Kali, there is the Radha Krishna temple and the twelve Shiva temples as well.

The temple was made famous by its priest Shri Ramakrishna Paramhansa who was considered as an avatar or divine incarnation of Lord Vishnu himself. He is a figure of high cultural, religios and spiritual importance in Bengal.

Ramakrishna's disciple Narndranath Dutta who later took sannyaas and became renowned throughout the world as Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda introduce the Vedanta philosophy and Yoga to the Western world through his tours in America and Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He stirred the Western audience like never before, specially at his first speech in the World's parliament of Religions in Chicago, who at the time was facing a spiritual identity crisis as a result of rapid growth in wealth and materialism as a result of the industrial revolution.

He later came back to Kolkata and built a temple to his Guru, Shri Ramakrishna on the opposite bank of the Dakshineshwar temple on the Hugli river. The temple was made into the Global headquarters of the Ramakrishna Mission, a social and spiritual organization which has its branches all across the globe.

The Belur Math in itself is an architectural masterpiece as it contains Hindu, Christian and Islamic elements in it in order to convey the philosophy of unity of all religions and of a universal faith as preached by Ramakrishna.