Tradition · Tripuri royal-tribal festival · India
Kharchi Puja
A week in July at Old Agartala in which the fourteen deities of the Tripuri — the chaturdasha devata, kept as fourteen heads without bodies — are carried from their temple to the Saidra river, bathed, and worshipped. The priest is a Chantai of the indigenous line, not a Brahmin, but the temple was built by a Manikya king in 1770, so the rite is at once tribal and royal: a dynasty of Sanskritised kings maintaining the worship of the deities of the people they ruled.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 23.800, 91.320
Worth knowing
The fourteen are heads only, and the reason given is practical — the full images were too heavy to carry to the river, so the bodies were dispensed with and the heads kept.
Connections (1)
- Patronage networkUjjayanta Palace, Agartala
Kharchi shows what the Manikya kings did with the religion of the people they ruled. The fourteen deities of the Tripuri are worshipped by a Chantai priest of the indigenous line, not a Brahmin — but their temple at Old Agartala was built by a Manikya raja in 1770, and the dynasty that commissioned it also commissioned the Rājmālā, a Sanskritised chronicle tracing itself to the Mahābhārata. The palace at Agartala is the later, more European face of the same arrangement.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kharchi puja”. Tripura government records; Rajmala, the Tripuri royal chronicle.
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