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.