Jagannath Temple, Puriਜਗਨਨਾਥ ਮੰਦਰ, ਪੁਰੀ

The Jagannath Temple at Puri, Odisha, is the eastern seat of the Char Dham and one of Hinduism's most visited pilgrimage sites. Its 65-metre Kalinga tower was built in the 12th century by the Eastern Ganga king Anantavarman Chodaganga. Its gods, Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra, are carved from neem wood and renewed every 12 or 19 years in the Nabakalebara ritual.

Why are the deities made of wood?

In almost every other major Hindu temple the gods stand in stone or metal. At Puri they are carved from margosa, neem wood, and tradition calls Jagannath Daru Brahma, the god made of wood. Every 12 or 19 years, when a lunar year carries two months of Ashadha, the temple performs Nabakalebara, the renewal of the body: new images are carved from sacred neem trees and the old ones are buried in the temple garden at Koili Vaikuntha, while a small sacred substance, the Brahma Padartha, is transferred from the old idols to the new in a secret night ritual. The last Nabakalebara, in 2015, drew more than three million devotees to Puri. Legend explains the unfinished look of the idols. When King Indradyumna, the traditional founder, found a radiant log floating in the sea, the god Vishwakarma arrived disguised as a carpenter and began carving, on condition that no one disturb him. After two weeks the anxious queen had the door opened, and the carpenter vanished, leaving the deities without arms or fully formed hands. A divine voice is said to have told the king to install them anyway: the lord without hands, the saying goes, still holds the world. The worship itself is older than the present temple. Many historians trace it to the Bhil and Sabar tribal communities of the region, whose priests, the Daitapatis, still claim descent from those tribes and still perform some of the temple's most intimate rituals.

Who built the present temple?

The present stone temple was begun by Anantavarman Chodaganga, the first ruler of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, who reigned around 1078 to 1150 CE. A Shaivite who turned Vaishnavite after conquering the Utkala region in 1112, he raised the great tower over an older shrine site that the Puranas already called Purushottama Kshetra. His successor Anangabhima Deva III formally dedicated his whole kingdom to Jagannath and issued inscriptions describing himself not as a sovereign but as the Rauta, the servant, of the deity. Under the Gajapati kings of the 15th and 16th centuries the temple became a state-supported religious centre. It also became a target. In 1568 the Afghan general Kalapahar invaded Puri, looted the treasury and burned the wooden images; tradition says the Brahma Padartha was rescued and hidden in a drum, and in 1575 Ramachandra Deva of Khurda reinstalled new images, the first ritual Nabakalebara. The temple chronicle, the Madala Panji, records 18 invasions and plunderings, and servitors repeatedly carried the deities to hiding places around Chilika and Khurda. After the British conquest of Odisha in 1803, the East India Company ran the temple under its own board and kept the old pilgrim tax until missionary-led pressure in Britain had it abolished in 1840. Independent India reorganised administration under the Shri Jagannath Temple Act of 1955, and the temple is now managed by a committee headed by the Gajapati Maharaja of Puri. Hindus who complete the Char Dham begin the journey here, in the east, before turning to Badrinath, Dwarkadhish and Ramanathaswamy, a clockwise circuit pilgrims are expected to make once in their lives.

What happens at Ratha Yatra?

Every year in Ashadha, the monsoon month that falls in June or July, the three deities leave their sanctum through the eastern Singhadwara and travel about three kilometres down the Bada Danda, the Grand Road, to the Gundicha Temple, traditionally their birthplace. There they stay nine days before returning on the Bahuda Yatra. The vehicles are enormous wooden chariots, rebuilt from scratch every year: Jagannath's ratha stands about 14 metres high, takes nearly two months to construct, and is pulled by devotees with thick ropes. The most famous rite is the Chhera Pahara, when the Gajapati king, the most exalted person in the old Kalinga order, dresses as a sweeper and cleans the road before the chariots with a gold-handled broom, sprinkling sandalwood water. Under the lordship of Jagannath, the ritual says, there is no difference between a king and the humblest devotee. The Ratha Yatra gave English the word juggernaut, from the massive chariots that roll through Puri. It is among the oldest Hindu festivals known to the Western world: a Franciscan friar, Odoric of Pordenone, described the chariot procession in an account written in 1321. Before the yatra comes the Snana Yatra, the ceremonial bathing of the deities, after which tradition says they fall ill and retire for fifteen days, the Anavasara, tended by the Daitapati servitors while devotees worship at the nearby Alarnath temple instead. On the return, the Niladri Bije, Jagannath must offer rasgulla to his consort Lakshmi, who was left behind, before she lets the deities back inside.

The temple kitchen that feeds thousands

The Rosaghara, the temple kitchen, is counted among the largest temple kitchens in the world. Fifty-six varieties of vegetarian food are cooked without onion or garlic in earthen pots stacked over wood fires, under the supervision, tradition says, of the goddess Lakshmi herself. The cooked food becomes Mahaprasad only after it is offered to the goddess Vimala, whose shrine inside the complex is counted among the most important Shakti Pithas. Six food offerings are made through the day, from the morning Gopala Vallabha Bhoga to the night's Bada Singhara Bhoga, and the prasad is shared with devotees who gather at the Anand Bazaar inside the temple, one of the great communal meals of Hinduism.

Guru Nanak's aarti of the sky

Puri's pull reached beyond Vaishnavism. Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, visited the temple in 1506 or 1508 during his eastern udasi, and there, tradition holds, he recited the aarti "Gagan mein thaal", an aarti sung without platters or lamps, with the sky itself as the salver. The temple drew many of the great acharyas: Adi Shankaracharya established his Govardhan Math here, one of the four seats of his tradition; Ramanuja founded the Emar Matha in the south-eastern corner; Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the founder of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, lived in Puri for twenty-four years and taught the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra; and Vallabhacharya is remembered for a seven-day recitation of the Bhagavata here. The memory of the Guru's visit is part of why Puri appears in Sikh tradition alongside the great Hindu tirthas. Guru Nanak Dev Ji, like Chaitanya, found in Jagannath a god who draws every tradition toward him.

Architecture: the tallest tower of Odisha

The temple is the finest surviving work of Kalinga architecture, the regional stone style of Odisha. The sanctum rises as a curvilinear Rekha Deula, a tower on a raised platform that climbs 65 metres, making it the tallest temple in Odisha. It is crowned by the Nila Chakra, an eight-spoked wheel of ashtadhatu, an eight-metal alloy, about 3.5 metres tall. Every day a servitor climbs the tower to change the Patita Pavana flag, a rite so central that the flag is treated as equal to the deities themselves. The complex spreads over about ten acres inside the Meghanada Pacheri, a fortified wall 6.1 metres high, and holds some thirty smaller shrines. Four gates face the cardinal directions, the eastern Singhadwara with its crouching lions being the main entrance, reached by twenty-two steps, the Baisi Pahacha. On its right a painting of Patita Pavana, saviour of the fallen, once received the prayers of those who could not enter. Before the gate stands the sixteen-sided Aruna Stambha, a monolithic pillar topped by Aruna, the sun god's charioteer, brought here from the Konark Sun Temple by a Maratha guru. Inside, the deities stand on the Ratnavedi, the throne of pearls, flanked by shrines to Ganesha, Shiva, Surya, Saraswati, Narasimha, Rama and Hanuman. A 75-metre Shree Mandir Parikrama heritage corridor now rings the Meghanada Pacheri; its foundation was laid in November 2021 and it was inaugurated on 17 January 2024, giving pilgrims an open pathway around the temple.