Rath Yatra in Jagannath Puri

Rath Yatra

The month of June is a month of laborious affairs in India – one of the most laborious being the Rath Yatra in Puri. To call it anything short of humungous would be unfair – it is literally the melting pot of the faithful, each of whom stake claim to some part of the massive forty five feet high chariots which they can attempt to pull, albeit for a few seconds. The chariots belong to the deities of the famous Jagannath Temple in Puri – Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra. But more on that later.
The Puri festival has indeed gone global, if one were to go by the numbers of overseas travellers who hit the shores of Puri last month. It is generally argued that the ISKCON’s international outreach has given this festival to a western audience but one suspects there is much more than just that. In any case, the present writer himself has been witness to the Rath Yatra being celebrated in a city as distant from South Asian Hindu faith as Prague in the Czech Republic.
On a tranquil summer day not so long ago, a lazy siesta on one of Old Town Square’s many benches was disrupted by the clanging manjiras of the many Krishna bhakts who accompanied their own chariot (about 20 feet high itself!) down to the banks of the Vltava – not that they could customarily set it afloat but the numbers watching or chanting for the same was indeed a surprise. They didn’t get what they wanted but the point was made – the Rath was no more about Jagannath’s trip to his aunt’s home – it was now a signifier of popular Hindu faith and festivity in a manner much different from the Kumbh or Pushkar.

Sudashan Pahandi in Rath Yatra

So what is Puri about, in the month of Ashad in the Hindu lunar calendar when the moon is at its golden best? It’s an old story which has slowly made its way into the pages of Grandma’s Tales for every school goer in East and South East India – the mighty Jagannath travels to meet his aunt and his queen on this day, thus allowing one and all to view him in all his glory. Jagannath, the limbless god of story books, comes into his own through Vaishnav traditions which borrow somewhat imaginatively from the Skanda Purana and the Rg Veda. The most well-known of the lot is the tale of how Vishwakarma pretended to be a carpenter who arrived at the court of Indradyumna (an otherwise disputed figure himself among Indologists and historians) to carve out idols from a holy log of wood, on the condition that no one else would view his work till it was finished. As is stuff of myth and legend, the condition was broken and the transgression punished – the grand architect vanished without a trace leaving the wooden statues of the siblings limbless, when Indradyumna (or Gundicha, his queen, depending upon one’s source) opened the door to his workshop out of curiosity once the sounds of work had died down.

There are other versions of these tales, depending on whether one factors in the rise of Buddhism in the early centuries of the first millennium A.D – with the spread of Buddhist faith, Puri found newer articulations backed by some more imaginative thinking.

Emerging Devotees flock to pull the Holy Chariots

The most cogent understanding is, in fact, that the Jagannath myth predates these interventions – that is, the Vedic and the Buddhist and even the Jain. Like all dominant religious thought and rituals which need to co-opt and imbibe forms of smaller and less powerful faith systems in order to gain acceptance within larger fora, Vedic writing and cultural production is a resonant story with Jagannath being one instance in a long and fraught history of such ‘assimilation’ – in this case, Jagannath was claimed as an avatar of Vishnu. Combining elements of tree worship along with the cult of the ‘daitas’ as all-purpose servitors, the Vedic intervention brought with it a more ritualised and Sanskritised form of worship. Neem, the tree which Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra are made of, is also a prime constituent of local non-Brahminical and tribal forms of worship – and while the temple does not have an inherent caste hierarchy (which may well be a remnant of Jagannath’s pre-Vedic past), it still is witness to a strict division of labour between ‘daitas’ and the ‘purohits’ who are strict Mahaprastha Brahmins.  
These nine days that the deities leave their abode are considered extremely auspicious. While on a regular day, non-Hindus aren’t allowed entry into the temple, this is one day that everyone seems to be able to partake in the virtues of the holy trio. The Garud-Dhwaja is the official chariot of Jagannath which is followed by the Tala-Dhwaja with Balabhadra and the Padma-Dhwaja with Subhadra. The flags atop the chariots give them their names – each with more than a dozen wheels and a small pantheon of nine blessing deities. These massive chariots are such an exhilarating sight that children save up money over the year or rely on generous grandparents to buy them miniature models of the same – which are then pulled along narrow by-lanes as part of friendly races or just another imaginative game. Craftsmen making these miniature models are their busiest before June – working day and night across Odisha and West Bengal to make sure the models reach the intended markets.

So, the Rath Yatra is not just about Jagannath – it is about a festival that holds different meanings for each of those who partake in it and remains a contested site. For the Vaishnav fold – it is about preservation just as for the Kondhs and other non-Brahminical and tribal communities, it is about memory and the power of myth. For each child, it is an indulgence that he/she will soon grow out of and for all of us who wish to travel to Puri to see what else the Rath Yatra is about – it is an open canvas.

INDIA: A History - by John Keay

Cover Page

John Keay’s ‘India: A History’ is an engrossing read for any lay-reader of history – it uses a wide range of sources and crafts the stories into rather lucid prose. While the book lacks sufficient primary material from the archives scattered across the country, the author seems at ease with collating and substantiating ideas using an assortment of secondary publications. One is even heartened to see the amount of space given to what is termed, for lack of a better word, “ancient” history – something that is not as popular as the period spanning the last 300-600 years, in academic circles of historical study. The book retains its ease with language through the five hundred-odd pages, thus providing its readers with an accessible narration of different historical incidents spanning more than a couple of thousand years.

In addition, it is commendable in terms of its use of pictures and diagrams which manage to simplify chronologies that would be otherwise rather addling – take the case of what Keay calls ‘Other Indias’ or the history of the mainstream nationalist movement, where a diagrammatic representation helps one understand the broad sense of time within which things took shape in just a few moments. The book combines evidence and narrative in a manner reminiscent of the likes of Percival Spear. The book follows his other overviews such as his book on the East India Company – a work which similarly brought together an excellent knowledge of secondary studies and some interesting primary work in order to show the mechanisms of control that evolved with British imperialism.

However, the classicism in the book’s narrative gives way to several gaps – one may even call them silences. Take for instance the notion of an overbearing sub-continental sense of nationality that comes into being with the chapter on Vedic Myths – although the influence of Romila Thapar’s writing ensures that the ‘Aryan’ is represented by Keay with all its flaws as a ‘misnomer’ (ref. Aryanisation) – the understanding of Aryan migration and the hybridity of cultural exchange gets subdued and ‘India’ comes into the fore as a presupposed geographical and political territory. While ‘dasa’ culture finds scant mention, the silence on these early roots of ‘gotra’ and caste bear heavily on the narrative. What is impressive, nonetheless, is that sources are treated as such and not as factual representations while a healthy amount of scepticism lines the use of dated sources.

The author tends to take the scepticism too far as well – describing a ‘nagging problem of Indian history’ to be “light on dates” and “rip-roaring hero narratives” as he departs from the works he owes much to – those of Kosambi and Thapar. While his momentary disregard for “contexts – geographical, social, environmental and economic” seems a bit fruitless, it is further exposed as such when he alternatively sets out to lend “historicity to the hero” but only manages to provide obvious conclusions from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata using basic tenets of source-criticism. He never manages to return to “dates”, settling regretfully for “an entire river basin and a timespan of centuries”.

John Keay

Beyond the ossified understanding of the term ‘India’, he even manages to replicate the biases of his sources on several counts dealing with the period following Ghaznavid influx. Here, he collapses the distinction he held for the Aryan intervention, between “invasion” and “migration” and settles comfortably for “invasion” – a bias long established in colonial historiography. The ‘Muslim’ period is as much a misnomer as is the “Aryan” and this contradiction is evident even beyond William Dalrymple glowing reviews of the book’s impartiality on its back cover. Keay goes on to comfortably summarise and tie up his knowledge of secondary sources in order to gradually start providing accounts of wars and violence in as authentic a manner as he possibly could – while strangely (or not?) the same tone is missing while discussing the Gupta rule and the Aryan intervention itself. The tone of authenticity is substantially suspect because of a lack of references – a cursory look at the list provided at the end of the book will be enough to give one an idea of the problems with Keay’s assumptions and conclusions.

What he seems to miss is an ability to acknowledge that certain things are not so easily explained given that they occurred several years ago and the sources we see today are merely ‘traces of the past’ and not a direct and authentic ‘window’ into the past. Things change subsequently when he deals with the British conquest of southern Asia, which he comfortably again compartmentalises into ‘India’. Taking from the works of C.A. Bayly, Bernard Cohn, Thomas Metcalf and others, he provides a succinct account of events but gives in to the constraints set up by his own ambition for the book – crucial critical perspectives on the political work of Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah go missing while the substantial political interventions of Ambedkar and Periyar are practically absent. Events like the Naval Mutiny and the role of Subhash Bose’s Indian National Army are glossed over. While one can understand this book to be priviledging a longer duration of time that spans the flawed periodisation of “ancient” and “medieval” as against the “modern” which gets a lot of attention by historians, one also must acknowledge the book’s limitations in perspective. The level of criticality to be expected from an author as experienced as John Keay is found wanting.

Having said that, the book makes some things very noticeable in the way that it is divided – the most important being the role of commodities. Salt, rice, metal and other such forms of commodities which allow for different narrations of history through their own trade circuits and registers of labour and cultural value find important mention in Keay’s work. It is now for newer historians to take up the task and add more knowledge to what is already known about the lives of artefacts, commodities and other substances.