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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Gazing at a dying god
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Gazing at a dying god

In the run-up to Rath Yatra, a magical night spent inside the jagannath temple

The Jagannath temple complex. Photo: India PicturePremium
The Jagannath temple complex. Photo: India Picture

For an Odia like me, despite being born and raised in faraway Mumbai, visiting Jagannath temple in Puri is to visit a beloved relative. I may skilfully slip past other relatives when on a whirlwind business trip like this one, but I cannot avoid this very delightful god-friend of mine, especially when he is dying.

Jagannath means “lord of the world" and is the form of Hindu gods Krishna/Vishnu worshipped in Odisha. Locally Jagannath is called Kaliya, for its black colour, with great affection, although modern colour prejudice makes many insist that Krishna is actually blue. He is God, of course, spelt with a capital G, but more than that he is your friend, as the dominant mood in the temple is of sakha-bhaav, devotion through the emotion of friendship.

The unique feature of the temple is that Krishna is worshipped not with a spouse, but with his siblings, his elder brother Balabhadra and his younger sister Subhadra. The images are malformed, with no hands or feet, and disproportionately large heads. They are not made of metal or stone, but of wood and cloth and resin, and therefore must be replaced from time to time, leading to rituals in which the enshrined deities fall sick, die and are reborn.

The drive was wonderful. No traffic, mercifully, and a fantastic road, with the state gearing up for Nabakalebara, or the ceremony of the deity’s rebirth, which takes place every 10-19 years. It is a ritual that takes place when the extra month (adhik maas) meant to align the Hindu lunar calendar to the solar cycle appears in the summer so that there are two months of Ashadha (June-July), not just the one. Every year, in the month of Ashadha, when the summer is at its height, the deity and his siblings step out to bathe in public, unable to bear the heat inside the temple. This happens on Snana Purnima. When you bathe with 108 pots of water under the blazing sun, you fall ill. And so every year, for the fortnight that follows, Krishna and his siblings take ill and are kept in a recovery chamber called anasar ghar. When they recover, appetite returns and they wish to eat the food cooked by their aunt Gundicha, whose house is a little away from his temple. So Krishna steps on his grand chariot and makes his way there. This is the start of the famous nine-day Jagannath Rath Yatra (this year it begins on 18 July), whose gigantic chariots inspired the British to coin the word “juggernaut". I was going to Puri just a week after the bathing ritual. Only this time the sickness was prolonged—45 days—during which the old image would “die", and a new image would be “born".

I reached the hotel in time to eat the famous temple food or mahaprasad, known locally as abhada. The Puri temple is famous for its kitchen, where large pots of food are placed on top of each other and cooked with wood fire and steam. It is possibly the largest pressure cooker in the world. Food is the tangible manifestation of love, and this temple food is made available to all via the market of bliss (Ananda Bazaar) located adjacent to the temple. I ate khichdi and two types of dal and a vegetable dish. It was served on a banana leaf, and, out of respect for the deity, we sat on the floor, ending the meal with Odisha’s famous sweet dishes (known to outsiders as Bengali sweets!) such as caramelized cheesecake (chhena-poda pitha) and baked rasgulla, with nolen-gud kheer (date-palm jaggery porridge).

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Published: 04 Jul 2015, 12:29 AM IST
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