Place · Eastern Ganga Vaishnava temple · India

Jagannātha Temple, Puri

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

19.805, 85.818

Connections (10)

• PatronageNarasiṃhadeva I

  The Eastern Gangas built the Jagannātha temple at Purī under Anantavarman Chodaganga and Konārk under Narasimhadeva I, a century and a half apart. Konārk was the attempt to go beyond Purī in scale; the sailors who used both as landmarks called one the White Pagoda and the other the Black.

• Ganga dynasty templesKonark Sun Temple

  Konārk and the Jagannātha temple at Purī are the two masterworks of Eastern Ganga building, thirty-five kilometres apart on the same coast. European charts called Purī the White Pagoda and Konārk the Black, and used the pair to fix position on a shore with no other landmarks. Konārk's collapse left Purī the only working Ganga temple of the pair, and Purī's kitchen and ratha yātra grew into the institution the ruined one never became.

• Mythic displacement toAlarnath, Puri

  For the fortnight of Anavasara, when the Jagannātha images are withdrawn from view after the bathing festival, Purī's pilgrims go to Alarnāth at Brahmagiri instead, on the understanding that the god is there. One temple's closed season is another temple's crowd. Chaitanya is said to have stayed at Alarnāth during one such fortnight and left the impression of his body in the stone, which is shown there.

• Craft tradition ofAnanta Vasudeva, Bhubaneswar

  Ananta Vāsudeva at Bhubaneswar cooks its mahāprasād as Purī does, in earthen pots stacked over one fire, and the two are the only Odishan temples that do. A Vaishnava kitchen in a Śaiva city keeps the practice of the coastal Jagannātha temple sixty kilometres away. Both kitchens cook in unglazed earthen pots stacked seven deep over a single wood fire, with the topmost cooking first, which no other Indian temple kitchen does.

• Craft tradition ofPaṭṭachitra, Raghurajpur

  Raghurajpur is a service village of the Jagannatha temple, and its painters hold a liturgical office: during the anasara fortnight after the bathing festival, when the wooden images are withdrawn from view, painted pattachitra stand in their place on the throne and receive worship. The craft is therefore not decoration of a cult but a part of it, and the right to paint the substitutes is inherited along with the obligation to do so.

• Succession in timeUdayagiri (Odisha)

  The Odishan monasteries were still functioning when the Eastern Gangas began the Jagannatha temple at Puri a hundred kilometres away in the twelfth century, and the absorption is visible on the ground: Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra as a triad of wooden images, the exclusion of image-making from stone, and the Buddhist reading of the triad as the three jewels have all been argued for centuries. What is certain is that one tradition's patronage moved to the other inside a few generations.

• Shrine within cityPurī / Jagannātha Purī

  Every year in the month of Āṣāḍha (June-July), Jagannātha, Balabhadra and Subhadrā are carried out of the 12th-century temple on three immense wooden chariots down the Grand Road to the Guṇḍichā temple two kilometres away. The deities stay there nine days before returning on the Bahuḍā Yātrā. The chariots — Nandighoṣa (Jagannātha, 45 feet tall), Tāladhvaja and Darpadalana — are rebuilt new each year from the same reserve of neem logs. European travellers who watched the procession in the 16th-19th centuries took Jagannātha's Sanskrit name back into their own tongue: it reached English as 'juggernaut', the word for any vast, unstoppable force.

• Site withinVimalā, Purī

  The Vimalā Śakti Pīṭha stands inside the Jagannātha temple compound at Purī, in a shrine on the southwest corner of the inner courtyard. Her ritual precedence is absolute within the complex: no food offered to Jagannātha becomes mahāprasād until it has first been offered to Vimalā — a Śākta node embedded in a Vaiṣṇava temple, and the clearest surviving example of the Devī-primary liturgy that shaped eastern India before the medieval Vaiṣṇava syntheses.

• Site adjacencyRaghurajpur

  Raghurajpur's chitrakar families supply the pattachitra paintings and painted deity portraits used in and around the Jagannath temple at Puri — notably the anasara patti images that replace the main icons for a fortnight each year during the Snana Yatra retreat. The village is twelve kilometres from Puri on the Bhargavi river, and almost every household works to Jagannath-temple ritual demand. Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, the Padma Vibhushan architect of modern Odissi dance, was born here, and the gotipua boy-dancer troupes from which Odissi partly emerged still train in the village.

• Modelled afterJagannath Temple, Ranchi

  The Jagannath temple at Ranchi, built in 1691 by the Nagvanshi prince Thakur Ani Nath Shahdeo on Jagannathpur hill, was consciously modelled on the Puri Jagannath — the three deities (Jagannath, Balabhadra, Subhadra) are installed on a Puri-pattern ratnavedi, the annual Rath Yatra uses Puri-form wooden chariots, and the daily puja follows the Puri Chhatisa Nijog rituals as closely as a Chotanagpur household could afford. The Nagvanshi royal house could not easily make the Puri pilgrimage from the plateau, so Shahdeo built the Puri at home.

On these journeys

• Eastern Ganga & Kalinga

Sources

History of India — Wikipedia

• Wikipedia — History of India
• Wikipedia