Bahula Temple (Shrinkala Shakti Peetha)

Bahula Temple, in Ketugram in the Katwa subdivision of Purba Bardhaman district, marks the spot traditionally held to be where the left arm of Sati fell after her body was cut apart following Daksha’s yajna — one of the 51 Shakti Peethas of Bengal. The Goddess is worshipped here as Bahula, with her consort Bhairava known as Bhiruk (Bhirukeshwar); notably, the settlement itself was known as Bahula before later coming to be called Ketugram, suggesting the shrine’s identity shaped the village’s own name over time.

The temple’s stone image of Bahula, together with images of Kartikeya and Ganesha placed alongside her, is attributed by local tradition to a ruler remembered as Raja Chandraketu — identified in one follow-up source, citing the historian Binoy Ghosh, as “son of king Bhopal” — though no date or independent corroboration for this figure or the installation could be found in the sources checked. Ketugram also carries a literary association beyond the Shakti Peetha tradition: local legend connects the medieval Bengali poet Chandidas to the village, recounting a period of exile after he married a widow from a lower caste, before he was said to have returned and served as priest of a Bahula-linked temple in the area — a detail that, if accurate, would tie this shrine into Bengal’s wider devotional-poetry tradition, though it rests on local legend rather than independently dated literary history. Some accounts describe the temple as originally standing on the bank of the Ajay river, though the river has since shifted and the shrine now stands at some distance from its current course — a detail consistent with the slow migration of Bengal’s delta rivers over the centuries. Worship continues at the site today as part of the living Shakti Peetha pilgrimage tradition of West Bengal, though little in the way of dated inscriptional or architectural history has survived or been documented for the structure itself.