Tradition · maritime commemoration festival · India
Bāli Jātrā
Also known as Bāli Jātrā, Cuttack
On Kārtika Purnima every year, Odias float small paper and banana-bark boats with lamps in them on tanks and rivers, saying boita bandāna — worship of the boat — and at Cuttack the observance becomes the largest fair in the state, held on the Mahanadi sands at Gadagadia Ghata. The name means voyage to Bali. It commemorates the sādhabas, the merchant mariners who sailed from Kalinga's ports to Java, Bali, Sumatra, Lanka and the Malay coast on the north-east monsoon.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 20.475, 85.877
Worth knowing
It is a trade route remembered as a ritual: the sailing season is gone, the ports have silted, and what survives is a whole population setting toy boats on the water on one night each year and a fair on the riverbed.
Connections (4)
- Shrine within cityCuttack
The festival's largest form is Cuttack's. Boita bandāna — worship of the boat — is kept across Odisha on Kārtika Purnima, when lamps in small paper and bark boats are floated on any available water, but at Cuttack it becomes Bāli Jātrā, a fair of over a million people on the Mahanadi sands at Gadagadia Ghata. The city sits at the head of the delta through which Kalinga's merchant mariners, the sādhabas, reached the sea, which is why the commemoration concentrated here rather than at the silted ports themselves.
- Maritime routeBali
The voyage the festival is named for, and the one destination whose name the Odia observance kept. Kalinga's sādhabas sailed on the north-east monsoon to Java, Bali, Sumatra and the Malay coast, and Bāli Jātrā means voyage to Bali. What makes the tie visible is what went with the cargo: Bali is the one place in Indonesia where a Hindu society survived the region's conversion to Islam intact, with Sanskrit liturgy, Balinese Brahmin priests, temple festivals and the Rāmāyaṇa still in daily performance.
- Trade routeBorobudur, Java
What the merchant traffic carried besides cargo. Borobudur was raised in central Java around 800 as the largest Buddhist monument on earth, its galleries carrying the Gandavyūha and the Lalitavistara in relief — Indian texts, in an Indian iconographic programme, built by a Javanese dynasty that had never been ruled from India. The Odia festival commemorates the shipping that made such transmission routine, and the monuments at the far end are the evidence that philosophies moved along with the timber and the cloth.
- AnalogueSonepur Mela
Kārtika Purnimā is the subcontinent's day for water and boats and buying. In Odisha it is Bāli Jātrā, when paper boats are floated for the merchant mariners who sailed to Bali and a fair covers the Mahanadi sands. In Bihar it is Sonepur, where cattle are sold at the Gandak's mouth. The same full moon ends the sailing and the growing season at once, which is why the fairs and the launchings are on it.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bali Jatra” and “Boita Bandana”. Odisha state cultural department records; Hermann Kulke and B. P. Sahu on Kalinga's maritime history.
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