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Chapter 7: Jagannath — Lord of the Universe

There is a moment during the Nabakalebara ceremony — which occurs at irregular intervals of twelve to nineteen years, whenever an extra month (Adhika Masa) falls in the month of Ashadha — when the old wooden bodies of Jagannath, Balabhadra, and Subhadra are carried out of the inner sanctum at midnight, wrapped in silk, and taken to the Koili Baikuntha, a burial ground within the temple compound. The new bodies, carved in secrecy from sacred neem logs discovered through an elaborate search party of priests and servitors, have already been consecrated. What happens inside the darkened sanctum during the transfer — the precise moment when the Brahma, the life-substance, is moved from the old body to the new — is performed by a single hereditary servitor, the Daitapati, blindfolded, his hands wrapped in cloth. He cannot see what he touches. No one else is present. When the 2015 Nabakalebara took place, an estimated one million pilgrims converged on Puri for the public phase of the ceremony, but the actual transfer remained what it has always been: invisible, untouchable, unknowable. The divine, in the Jagannath tradition, is something you cannot look directly at, even as it stares back at you with enormous painted eyes from the most visible chariot on the planet.

This is the central paradox of Jagannath, and it ramifies into every dimension of the tradition. The deity is simultaneously the most public god in Hinduism — paraded through the streets, fed before a hundred thousand witnesses, his chariot so famous that it gave English the word “juggernaut” — and one of the most secretive. The inner sanctum rituals are closed. The Brahma transfer is hidden even from the man who performs it. The wooden body is deliberately unfinished, as if the sculptor walked away mid-carve. The theological statement embedded in that incompleteness is radical: the divine is not a representation to be perfected but a presence to be encountered, always partially, always through a veil.

The Deity Who Defies Categories

Jagannath is an anomaly in the Hindu pantheon, and no amount of scholarly rationalization has managed to make him fit neatly into any single theological lineage. He has no clear Vedic origin. He is not mentioned in the early Puranas in any form recognizable as the deity worshipped at Puri. He is carved from wood — neem, specifically — rather than stone, a material choice that distinguishes him from virtually every other major temple deity in India. His form is abstract: round eyes, a wide, almost startled face, stumps instead of hands, no feet. There is no anatomical completeness. The body terminates in a flat wooden base. This is not the result of artistic incompetence or erosion. The form is deliberately, theologically incomplete. The Daru Brahma — the concept of Brahman (the ultimate reality) manifested in wood (daru) — holds that the infinite cannot be given a finished form. Every attempt at completion would be a limitation. The unfinished body is the most honest representation possible of something that, by definition, exceeds representation.

The three deities on the ratnavedi (the jeweled platform in the inner sanctum) are siblings: Jagannath, the eldest brother; Balabhadra, his elder brother in most Hindu traditions but positioned to his right on the platform; and Subhadra, their sister, standing between them. This sibling triad is itself unusual. Most Hindu temple complexes center on a deity and consort — Shiva and Parvati, Vishnu and Lakshmi. The Puri arrangement foregrounds a familial bond rather than a conjugal one. Lakshmi has a separate, smaller temple outside the main complex, and the mythology includes a famous episode where she is angry at Jagannath for neglecting her during the Rath Yatra. The theological architecture of the relationship is domestic, almost conversational — a family with its tensions and reconciliations, not a cosmic couple in eternal embrace.

The Daru Brahma tradition means the deities must be periodically replaced. Wood decays. Unlike stone, which endures for millennia, neem is impermanent by nature. This impermanence is not a defect to be engineered around but a feature of the theology. The Nabakalebara — literally, “new body” — treats the old wooden forms as bodies that have aged, died, and must be given funerary rites. The old Jagannath is buried. A new Jagannath is born. The deity undergoes what humans undergo: death and renewal. The neem logs for the new bodies must be located through a search process guided by specific signs — the tree must have four main branches, must be near a cremation ground, must have an anthill at its base, must be near a pond with a snake, must be flanked by specific other trees. When the right log is found, it is cut with golden axes, transported on a special cart, and carved by the Maharana (carpenter) caste servitors inside the temple. The entire process can take months. The 2015 Nabakalebara — the most recent as of this writing — was the subject of intense media coverage, not because its rituals had changed, but because the nation was finally paying attention to what Puri had been doing, in essentially the same way, for the better part of a millennium.

Origins and the Tribal Connection

The question of where Jagannath comes from has generated more scholarly argument per square foot of evidence than almost any other problem in Indian religious history. The dominant narrative in popular culture — and one that carries significant political weight — is that Jagannath was originally a tribal deity, worshipped by the Sabara people of the forest, who was “adopted” or “appropriated” by the Brahmanical establishment and installed in a grand temple. The story goes something like this: Biswabasu, a Sabara chieftain, worshipped a deity called Nilamadhava in a secret forest shrine. Indradyumna, a Brahmin king, sent his priest Vidyapati to find this deity. Vidyapati married Biswabasu’s daughter, Lalita, to gain access to the shrine. When the deity disappeared — having been reclaimed by the divine — Indradyumna built a great temple, and the deity reappeared in the form of a sacred log floating on the sea, which was carved into the wooden figures we see today.

This narrative appears in the Indradyumna legend section of the Skanda Purana and in the Deula Tola (a medieval Odia text on temple architecture), but the versions are not consistent with each other and are clearly layered over centuries. The story has been read in multiple ways. The tribal-origin school sees it as evidence that the Jagannath cult began as a Sabara form of worship, possibly connected to a sacred wooden post or tree deity, which was then Brahmanized. The Brahmanical school sees the legend as a charter myth for the temple’s founding, with the tribal element serving as a narrative of inclusion — the Sabara are not displaced but incorporated as the Daitapati servitors who still perform the most intimate rituals. The Buddhist-origin school, represented by scholars like Jaganath Panda and N.K. Sahu, points to evidence that the Jagannath image may have been a relic container for a tooth of the Buddha, and that the Puri temple site was originally a Buddhist stupa.

Hermann Kulke, the German historian who directed the Heidelberg Orissa Research Project through the 1970s and 1980s, produced some of the most careful scholarship on this question. Kulke’s approach was to track the political function of the Jagannath cult rather than chase a single origin. His argument, broadly, was that Jagannath served as a “royal deity” through which successive ruling dynasties — the Somavamshis, the Eastern Gangas, the Gajapatis — legitimized their power. The cult’s genius was its absorptive capacity: it could incorporate tribal elements, Buddhist elements, Shaiva elements, and Vaishnava elements without breaking. Each incorporation expanded the cult’s constituency. By the time Anantavarman Chodaganga built the present temple in the twelfth century, Jagannath had become a theological big tent — a deity who could mean different things to different communities while remaining singularly powerful as a symbol of the Odia polity.

The colonial-era scholarship added another layer. British administrators and missionaries, encountering the Rath Yatra in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced lurid accounts of devotees throwing themselves under the chariot wheels — accounts that were wildly exaggerated and served the ideological purpose of demonstrating Hindu “fanaticism” that needed civilizing. The word “juggernaut” entered English loaded with these distortions. Simultaneously, colonial ethnographers classified Jagannath worship as originally “tribal” or “aboriginal,” fitting it into the racial-evolutionary frameworks they applied to all Indian religion. The idea that Jagannath was a “primitive” deity subsequently elevated by Brahmanical Hinduism suited the colonial narrative that Hinduism was a layered accretion of increasingly sophisticated invasions — Aryan over Dravidian over Aboriginal. This framework has been largely dismantled by postcolonial scholarship, but the tribal-origin narrative persists in popular accounts, partly because it serves a different political purpose today: it allows tribal communities to claim a foundational role in Odisha’s most important religious tradition, a claim that has implications for identity politics and resource allocation.

What is most honest to say is that Jagannath’s origins are genuinely syncretic, and that the tradition’s power lies precisely in its refusal to be reducible to a single source. Buddhist relics, tribal tree worship, Vaishnava theology, Shaiva tantra, Jain asceticism — traces of all of these are present in the temple’s rituals, iconography, and mythology. The tradition did not evolve by replacing one layer with another but by accumulating layers, each new one leaving the previous ones partially intact. The result is a living palimpsest, a tradition that contains its own history rather than erasing it.

The Temple as Political Machine

When Anantavarman Chodaganga, the founder of the Eastern Ganga dynasty in Odisha, built the Jagannath Temple at Puri around 1135 CE, he was not simply constructing a place of worship. He was building a political machine. The temple was the mechanism through which the Ganga dynasty — originally from the south, ruling in Kalinga by conquest — converted military power into spiritual legitimacy. The Ganga kings did not merely patronize Jagannath. They became his servants. The title “Gajapati” — lord of elephants, the supreme ruler — was explicitly subordinated to a higher title: Jagannath Dasa, servant of Jagannath. The king was the deity’s feudal subordinate. His authority to rule derived not from bloodline alone but from divine mandate, and that mandate was physically manifest in the temple.

This arrangement — where the temple legitimizes the state, and the state sustains the temple — proved extraordinarily durable. Every subsequent power that controlled Odisha had to negotiate its relationship with the Jagannath temple. The Gajapati dynasty, which succeeded the Gangas and ruled from the fifteenth century, deepened the identification of kingship with divine service. Kapilendra Deva, the greatest Gajapati ruler, controlled territory from the Ganges to the Kaveri, but his most important title remained Jagannath Dasa. His military campaigns were framed as extensions of Jagannath’s sovereignty.

When the Afghan sultanates of Bengal and the Mughals conquered parts of Odisha in the sixteenth century, they faced a strategic choice. Destroying the temple — the standard procedure for establishing Islamic authority in northern India — would mean permanently alienating the population. Accommodating the temple would mean accepting a rival source of authority. The pragmatic solution, adopted by most Muslim rulers, was accommodation. The temple was not destroyed. Its revenues were sometimes redirected, its privileges sometimes curtailed, but the institution survived. Kala Pahar’s alleged attack in the sixteenth century — a figure of uncertain historicity — is the exception that local tradition remembers precisely because destruction was the exception, not the rule. The Mughal governor Murshid Quli Khan actually formalized the temple’s land grants and tax exemptions, recognizing that Puri’s stability depended on the temple’s stability.

The Marathas, who controlled Odisha through the eighteenth century, took a different approach: they tried to claim the temple for themselves. Maratha administrators positioned themselves as protectors of Jagannath, using the association to legitimize their rule over a population that saw them as extractive outsiders. The British, arriving in 1803, initially continued this pattern — the East India Company actually administered the temple directly for several decades, collecting the pilgrim tax (which was enormously lucrative) and managing the annual festival. British administrators wrote reports on temple finances, supervised the Rath Yatra, and took a cut of the revenue. It was only after sustained missionary criticism — that a Christian government was profiting from “heathen” worship — that the Company withdrew from direct management in the 1840s, handing control to a body of trustees. The irony was thick: the same colonial power that would use “juggernaut” as a metaphor for blind destructive force was, for forty years, the deity’s landlord.

The fundamental pattern survived into the postcolonial era. After Indian independence, control of the temple shifted to the state government through the Shri Jagannath Temple Act of 1955. The Gajapati of Puri retained a ceremonial role — most visibly, performing the Chhera Pahanra, the ritual sweeping of the chariot road during the Rath Yatra — but administrative power moved to a government-appointed managing committee. This arrangement has been the source of continuous tension. Servitor families argue that government bureaucrats lack the ritual knowledge and spiritual commitment to manage a living temple. The state government argues that the temple’s vast assets — land, jewelry, cash offerings — require professional administration and cannot be left to hereditary custodians whose interests may not align with broader public accountability. The Supreme Court of India has intervened multiple times, most recently to adjudicate disputes over the temple’s treasure inventory and the rights of servitors versus the managing committee.

The deeper point is structural: the Jagannath Temple has never been merely a religious institution. It has always been a node where political legitimacy, economic power, social hierarchy, and spiritual authority converge. Understanding the temple as only a place of worship is like understanding a stock exchange as only a place where paper changes hands. The building is the least interesting part of what happens there.

The Temple Economy

The Jagannath Temple is one of the largest employers in Puri, and possibly the most complex non-industrial organization in Odisha. The sevayat system — the hereditary servitor network — encompasses 36 categories of service (niyoga), performed by approximately 6,000 servitors from different castes. There are cooks, flower-stringers, lamp-lighters, musicians, sweepers, water-carriers, fan-wavers, wood-suppliers, cloth-washers, gate-keepers, and dozens of others. Each family’s identity is defined by its specific service. A Suara family cooks. A Puspalaka family makes garlands. A Khuntia family opens the temple doors. These are not jobs in the modern sense — they are caste identities, inherited, non-transferable, and tied to specific micro-tasks within a daily ritual cycle that begins before dawn and ends well past midnight.

The economic logic of this system is feudal, not capitalist. Servitors are compensated not with salaries but with shares of the temple’s offerings — rice, lentils, cloth, cash donations — distributed through an extraordinarily intricate allocation system. The shares are hereditary and divisible. Over centuries, as families have split and multiplied, the shares have been subdivided to the point where some servitors hold fractions of a fraction of the original allocation. This has created chronic poverty among many servitor families, whose hereditary claim to a temple function yields almost nothing in material terms. Simultaneously, it has created resistance to reform: even a tiny share is a claim of identity and status, and no one surrenders it voluntarily.

The temple kitchen — the Roshaghara — is the most visible manifestation of this economy. It is, by credible estimates, one of the largest kitchens in the world. Every day, 56 dishes (the Chhappan Bhog) are prepared and offered to the deity. The cooking is done exclusively in earthen pots stacked in pyramidal arrangements over wood fires, using no metal vessels, no modern fuel, and no mechanized equipment. The pots are stacked seven high, and the food cooks from the top down — a feat of thermal engineering that has puzzled food scientists. On festival days, the kitchen produces enough food to feed up to 100,000 people. The total daily output on ordinary days is sufficient for roughly 25,000 meals.

This food, once offered to the deity, becomes Mahaprasad — literally, “the great grace.” And here the theological meets the social in a way that has no parallel in orthodox Hinduism. Mahaprasad annihilates caste. When food has been offered to Jagannath, it is sanctified beyond human hierarchy. A Brahmin and a Dalit eating Mahaprasad together are not breaking a social norm — they are fulfilling a theological one. The food is Jagannath’s leftover, and before Jagannath’s leftover, all human distinctions are irrelevant. In practice, this principle has been imperfectly realized — the serving order within the temple follows caste hierarchy, and the social dynamics of the Ananda Bazaar (the market outside the temple’s Lion Gate where Mahaprasad is sold on sal leaves) are not free of caste consciousness. But the principle itself is revolutionary for a tradition embedded in one of India’s most caste-stratified societies. The Mahaprasad tradition did not abolish caste in Odisha. But it created a daily, institutional, theologically grounded practice of inter-caste commensality that has no equivalent elsewhere — a crack in the wall that, over centuries, has let certain kinds of light through.

The Rath Yatra — The World’s Largest Chariot Festival

Every year, on the second day of the bright fortnight of the month of Ashadha (June-July), three enormous wooden chariots are pulled through the Grand Road (Bada Danda) of Puri, carrying the three deities from the main temple to the Gundicha Temple, roughly three kilometers away. The chariots are newly built every year. Jagannath’s chariot, the Nandighosa, stands approximately 45 feet tall and requires 884 pieces of wood. It has 16 wheels, each seven feet in diameter, and is draped in red and yellow cloth. Balabhadra’s chariot, the Taladhwaja, is slightly smaller, with 14 wheels and blue and red cloth. Subhadra’s chariot, the Darpadalana, has 12 wheels and is dressed in red and black. The chariots are built by hereditary carpenter families beginning on Akshaya Tritiya (April-May), using specific types of wood — phassi, dhausa, and simili — sourced from designated forests under government permit.

The pulling of the chariots is the festival’s defining act. Thick ropes, some fifty meters long, are attached to each chariot, and devotees — by the hundreds of thousands, sometimes over a million on the main day — pull the deities through the streets. The movement is jerky, labored, often halting for hours. The chariots do not glide. They lurch, stop, are coaxed and heaved forward foot by foot. There is no motorized assistance. The journey that should take an hour by distance often takes the entire day. The English word “juggernaut” — meaning an unstoppable force — is etymologically derived from Jagannath but semantically inverted. The actual chariot is entirely stoppable. It moves only because thousands of hands pull it. The divine, in this tradition, does not descend under its own power. It moves through the street only because the people carry it. The theology is participatory in the most literal sense.

The most politically significant ritual of the Rath Yatra is the Chhera Pahanra — the sweeping ceremony. Before the chariots move, the Gajapati of Puri — historically the king, now a ceremonial title held by the Bhoi dynasty — climbs onto each chariot and sweeps the platform around the deity with a gold-handled broom. The king, the supreme temporal authority, performs the work of the lowest servant. This is not metaphorical humility. It is a public enactment of the principle that before Jagannath, there is no rank. The king sweeps. The untouchable pulls. The chariot moves. The visual grammar is democratic in a way that the social structure of the surrounding society conspicuously is not. The Rath Yatra does not describe the world as it is. It performs the world as the tradition says it should be.

The deities remain at the Gundicha Temple for nine days — the period is called Gundicha Yatra — before the return journey, the Bahuda Yatra. On the way back, the chariots stop at the Mausi Maa temple (the aunt’s temple), where Jagannath is offered a special cake called poda pitha, a burnt cake that is a humble, almost comically everyday food item. The deity who is “Lord of the Universe” stops at his aunt’s house and eats a burnt cake. This is Jagannath worship in its essence: cosmic theology embedded in domestic familiarity. The lord of the universe has an aunt who overcooks his cake. The profundity is in the intimacy.

It would be naive to claim that the Jagannath tradition abolished or even fundamentally weakened caste in Odisha. It did not. The temple itself is organized along caste lines. The sevayat system is hereditary and caste-specific. Non-Hindus are barred from entering the temple — a restriction that has been challenged in court multiple times and remains in force, controversially, as of this writing. Indira Gandhi, born a Nehru and married to Feroze Gandhi (a Parsi), was reportedly denied entry in the 1970s, though accounts vary. The restriction applies to converts, foreigners, and anyone whose Hindu identity is deemed ambiguous by the temple authorities. The Jagannath tradition, for all its theological radicalism, operates within, and sometimes reinforces, the very hierarchies it doctrinally transcends.

And yet. The theological radicalism is real, and its effects, over the long run, have been material. The incomplete form of Jagannath — no hands, no feet, no recognizable anatomy — is a standing rebuke to the idea that divinity can be captured in any human category, including caste. If the god himself is beyond form, then the forms humans impose on each other are exposed as constructions, not cosmic law. This is not an argument the tradition makes in so many words. It is an argument the tradition makes in wood.

The Mahaprasad tradition created a daily institutional practice of commensality that, whatever its limitations in execution, established the principle that shared sacred food overrides caste distinction. In a society where eating together was the most tightly policed boundary of caste, this was not a minor concession. It was a structural exception, built into the center of the most important religious institution in the state, repeated daily for centuries.

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the Bengali saint who arrived in Puri around 1510 and spent the last eighteen years of his life there, transformed the emotional register of Jagannath worship. Chaitanya did not build institutions. He sang. He danced. He wept in ecstasy before the deity. He collapsed at the Lion Gate. His devotion — bhakti — was radically egalitarian in its affect. The intensity of his love for Jagannath made social distinctions irrelevant, not through doctrinal argument but through emotional overflow. You cannot maintain caste hierarchy in the middle of ecstatic communal singing. The body does not cooperate. Chaitanya’s movement connected Puri to the broader Vaishnava bhakti tradition spreading across eastern India, and his followers — the Gaudiya Vaishnavas — became a permanent presence in Puri, maintaining monasteries (mathas) that continue to operate today. The ISKCON (Hare Krishna) movement is a twentieth-century descendant of this lineage, and its global spread has made Jagannath one of the most internationally recognized Hindu deities.

The inclusion of tribal elements in the Jagannath tradition — the Daitapati servitors who claim Sabara descent, the periodic rituals that involve tribal communities, the origin narrative that positions the tribal as the first devotee — functions as what we might call structural acknowledgment. It is not full inclusion. The Daitapati families occupy a specific, bounded role within the temple hierarchy. But the fact that the most intimate ritual of the tradition — the Nabakalebara transfer — is performed by servitors who trace their lineage to the tribal community that worshipped the deity before the Brahmins arrived is a remarkable institutional memory. It says, in effect: we built the temple, but they found the god. That distinction is preserved in the ritual architecture, not erased by it.

The Living Tradition

To write about the Jagannath tradition in the past tense would be a fundamental error. The temple’s daily ritual cycle — beginning with the Mangala Alati (early morning worship) at 5 AM and ending with the Bada Singhara Dhupa (night meal) and Pahuda (bedtime ritual) around midnight — continues exactly as it has for centuries. The deities are woken, bathed, dressed, fed, entertained, and put to sleep every day. The 36 categories of sevayats perform their hereditary functions. The kitchen fires burn. The Mahaprasad is prepared and distributed. The Ananda Bazaar opens. The cycle repeats. There is no “off” day. The temple closes only for a few hours during the Anasar period of the Rath Yatra, when the deities are considered “ill” after their ritual bath and are kept in seclusion while being repainted.

The tradition is living, which means it is also contested. The non-Hindu entry ban generates recurring controversy. Advocates argue it preserves the sanctity of a tradition that has its own internal logic and should not be subjected to liberal universalist norms. Critics argue it contradicts the very theology of the tradition — a deity whose form insists on the transcendence of categories cannot, in good conscience, be sequestered behind a categorical restriction. The managing committee’s relationship with the servitor community is perpetually fraught. Government-appointed bureaucrats and hereditary ritual specialists operate with fundamentally different logics of authority, and the friction between them surfaces in court cases, public protests, and media battles with depressing regularity. The commercialization of the Rath Yatra — corporate sponsorship, television rights, VIP viewing galleries — sits uneasily alongside a festival whose theological core is radical egalitarianism. The chariot is pulled by all. But some watch from better seats than others.

These tensions are not signs of decline. They are signs of life. A dead tradition has no disputes. The Jagannath tradition generates conflict because it still matters — politically, economically, spiritually, culturally. Jagannath is not a heritage artifact to be preserved under glass. He is an active participant in Odia public life. “Jai Jagannath” is as much a greeting as a prayer, used in text messages, phone conversations, and political speeches. When Odisha’s cricket team wins, the chant erupts. When a politician begins a rally in western Odisha — hundreds of kilometers from Puri, in regions with their own distinct deity traditions — they often begin with “Jai Jagannath” because the phrase has transcended its temple-specific meaning and become a marker of Odia identity itself.

The Jagannath tradition permeates Odia culture at every level. Pattachitra painting — the intricate scroll art form of Odisha — overwhelmingly depicts Jagannath iconography. Odissi dance originated in the temple as the Mahari tradition, with devadasis performing before the deity. The Odia literary canon is saturated with Jagannath references. The Gita Govinda of Jayadeva, a twelfth-century Sanskrit poem that became the foundational text for both Odissi dance and Jagannath temple ritual, is recited daily in the temple as part of the evening worship. The Odia calendar revolves around the Jagannath festival cycle — the Rath Yatra, the Snana Yatra, the Chandan Yatra, the Nabakalebara — such that the year’s emotional architecture is shaped by the deity’s ritual life. Even Odia food culture is inflected by the Mahaprasad tradition: the emphasis on vegetarian temple food, the centrality of rice and dal, the particular spicing that characterizes Puri cuisine, all trace their genealogy to the temple kitchen.

The political salience is equally persistent. The Gajapati title, though now ceremonial, carries weight. During elections, politicians seek the Gajapati’s blessing — or at least his photograph. The temple managing committee is a patronage prize that state governments guard jealously. Control of the temple remains, as it was under the Gangas and Gajapatis, an index of control over the symbolic infrastructure of the state. When Odisha’s government changes, one of the first things to change — subtly, through appointments and committee reshuffles — is the relationship between the state and the temple.

There is a concept in software architecture called a “God object” — a single component that holds too many responsibilities, knows too much, and is entangled with too many other components. It is considered an anti-pattern: the sign of a system that was not designed but accumulated. The Jagannath tradition is, in a sense, the God object of Odia civilization. It is theology, economics, politics, caste system, food culture, art tradition, festival calendar, identity marker, and tourist economy — all in one unfinished wooden figure. It is over-coupled, over-loaded, and by any principle of clean design, it should have been refactored centuries ago. The fact that it has not been — the fact that it works, messily, contradictorily, but works — tells you something about how civilizations actually function, as opposed to how they are theorized. They do not follow clean design principles. They accumulate. They absorb contradictions instead of resolving them. They run on code that no one fully understands, maintained by hereditary programmers who know their specific module but not the whole system, and the system continues to compile and execute daily, because enough people keep pulling the ropes.

The unfinished wooden body of Jagannath is the most honest piece of religious architecture in India. It makes no claim to completeness. It does not pretend to capture the divine in a finished form. It presents itself as a work in progress — always being renewed, always being replaced, always pointing beyond itself. In a country where temples are encrusted with intricate carvings that attempt to represent every aspect of existence, Jagannath sits in the inner sanctum with no hands and no feet, enormous eyes staring out, and says: the divine is not something you finish. It is something you carry, together, through the streets, one heave at a time, and if the chariot stops, it is because you stopped pulling. The god does not move himself. You move him. And in moving him, you discover that the distinction between the one who carries and the one who is carried was never as clear as you thought.

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.