Juggernaut

Juggernaut, or PURI, is the name of a town on the coast of Orissa, at the southern end of the delta of the Mahanadi, celebrated as one of the chief holy places in India. With a resident pop. of 22,000, and some 6000 lodging-houses for pilgrims, it owes its reputation to a temple erected there in honour of Vishnu, and containing an idol of this Hindu god, called Jagannāth or Juggernaut, a corruption of the Sanskrit word Jagannātha—i.e. Lord of the World. It was long a sacred city of the Buddhists, the abode of the Golden Tooth of Buddha. The first historical mention of Jagannāth is in 318 A.D. He represents Vishnu in all his manifestations, and is in a special sense the god of the people. The great festivals sometimes bring 200,000 pilgrims; and the annual offerings may amount to as much as £37,000, besides Jagannāth's revenue of £31,000 from lands and various religious houses. The temple enclosure comprises 120 temples, the chief pagoda being that of Jagannâth, with a tower 192 feet high. There are twenty-four annual festivals in his honour, the chief being the car festival, when Jagannâth (who is armless) is dragged on his car (45 feet high, 35 feet square, with sixteen wheels, each 7 feet in diameter) to his country-house. This is less than a mile distant from the temple, but the heavy sand extends the short journey to several days, until the exhausted devotees resign the task to professional car-pullers, who have also to assist the idol home again. The car festival has been currently believed to be the occasion of numerous cases of self-immolation, the frantic devotees committing suicide by throwing themselves before the wheels of the heavy car. This is, it would appear, a calumny of English writers. See Sir W. W. Hunter's work on Orissa (1872), in which he 'carefully examined the whole evidence on the subject, from 1580, when Abul Fazl wrote, through a long series of travellers, down to the police reports of 1870,' and came to 'the conclusion which H. H. Wilson had arrived at from quite different sources, that self-immolation was entirely opposed to the worship of Jagannâth, and that the rare deaths at the car festival were almost always accidental.'