Bengali devotion to Kali has a distinctive emotional register that sets it apart from Shakta worship elsewhere in India, one closer to intimate family argument than formal supplication. Ramprasad Sen, an eighteenth-century poet whose songs remain widely sung today, addresses Kali not with uniform reverence but as a mother who neglects her child, scolding her, bargaining with her and refusing to be placated, a devotional posture that treats the goddess's terrifying imagery, a naked black figure garlanded with skulls, standing astride her own husband, as fully compatible with intimate, even exasperated, love. Kalighat, as one of Bengal's most prominent Kali sites, sits at the center of that devotional tradition.
Kalighat is also one of the few major urban Hindu temples in India where animal sacrifice, specifically goat sacrifice, continues to be performed openly, defended by its practitioners as the offering the goddess herself is understood to receive rather than as a practice requiring justification to outsiders. The temple has left its mark on visual art as well: Kalighat gave its name to a distinctive school of bold, cheaply produced watercolor paintings sold to nineteenth-century pilgrims as devotional souvenirs, work that later influenced modern Indian art and is now collected in major museums, a rare case of a pilgrimage economy's incidental output outliving the immediate devotional context that produced it.