Tarapith Temple

Tarapith is one of Bengal's principal Shakti Peethas and among the most important living centres of Tantric Shakta practice in India, its present temple structure largely an 18th- and 19th-century rebuilding over a much older sacred site. The presiding image depicts Tara, one of the ten Mahavidya goddesses, in the unusual iconographic act of suckling Shiva, a form found almost nowhere else in mainstream Hindu temple art. The adjoining cremation ground, where Tantric sadhana has historically been practised, is integral to the site's ritual identity and gives it a starkly different character from Bengal's more genteel Vaishnava shrines. Closely associated with the 19th-century ascetic Bamakhepa, Tarapith continues to draw both devout pilgrims and researchers of Tantric tradition.