My association with Jagannath goes back to my student days at the University of Delhi when, upon getting tired of hostel food, I often accompanied my friends to Jagannath temples located at Hauz Khas and Thyagraj Nagar in Delhi. The temple prasad, which comprised dalma, rice, saag and kheer, reinvigorated us. It made me more curious about Odia cuisines, the sociocultural life of Odisha, the Odia diaspora, and above all, Lord Jagannath, who has played an instrumental role in constituting a distinctive Odia identity. In recent times, Jagannath has travelled as a cultural symbol beyond Odisha and several temples have come up in Delhi, Chennai, Agartala, Patna, and other places. With the rise of the Odia diaspora, the Lord has been transformed from a regional god into a pan-Indian religious symbol.
Although there is no dearth of religious and mythological literature on Jagannath, they are mostly in the Odia language. The little critical material produced in English lacks an engagement with Jagannath in popular spaces. Jyotirmaya Tripathy and Uwe Skoda have filled this intellectual lacuna to democratise Jagannath scholarship. Moving away from the text-based research and scholarship, the book answers a significant question—what Jagannath means in everyday contexts, in contemporary and popular practices. They argue that the Lord’s tribal origin, his association with Buddhism and Jainism, his present status as Vishnu’s avatar and “his multiplication through various media and new temples contribute to his democratisation as well as vernacularisation”. Consequently, he has become a polysemic symbol, open to multiple interpretations.
The book employs hitherto untapped materials such as films, music, albums, posters, religious speeches, performances like jatra (folk theatre) and food habits, just to cite a few, to shift our attention away from the textual and scriptural to the popular, from theory to praxis. It highlights the conception, production, circulation and consumption of Jagannath images, videos, cassettes and albums, as god is experienced in different ways. Jagannath’s mediation through these platforms makes him omnipresent and consolidates his power. As an outcome of this democratisation, “the person preparing and selling the sacred food is as important as the person consuming it to experience divinity”.
Lord Jagannath is, as mentioned in the fascinating introduction to the book, primarily a madhurya deity, for “devotees role-play as mother or beloved—enacting mutual care”. Thus, the bonding between the devotee and God ranges from attachment between mother and son, lover and beloved, to “situations of role reversal where the bhakta takes care of the Lord when the latter falls sick”. God is treated as human, and offered bath, fresh clothes, and food. And when he falls sick, he is cured with medicine. As a result, devotion and care become interchangeable.
Apart from humanising the God and examining his presence in everyday life, Tripathy and Skoda have addressed a major question related to Jagannath scholarship, that is, how non-Odias have understood a diasporic Jagannath. They argue that Jagannath’s migration is “linked to the migration of his people. Jagannath travels with Odias when the latter carry his idols, photos, calendars, etc. to their places of residence”. Thus, the current volume broadens Jagannath studies by dividing the book into three sections.
The first section, Mediating Jagannath, has four chapters which emphasise the ways in which Jagannath is mediated in everyday life. The first chapter, entitled In the Eyes of God by Shaswat Panda, examines the iconography of Jagannath in visual cultures. Panda observes what makes the image of Jagannath distinct from most other deities represented in Odia iconography is the pair of round eyes. He examines at length how attributes like kindness and watchfulness are related to Jagannath’s all-pervasive eyes. Animesh Mohapatra in his chapter Worldliness of the Otherworldly: Dissemination of Devotion from Early Modern to Cassette Era traces the journey of janana—a popular form of devotional song—through several forms of circulation, including palm-leaf manuscripts, orality, print, and finally audio cassettes. Mohapatra defines janana as a “specific form of devotional song where a devotee addresses the Lord in an intimate manner and expresses without inhibition a range of emotions such as complaint, demand, love, ecstasy or even anger”. A classic example of a popular Jagannath janana composed by the 18thcentury poet Banamali Das has been cited by Mohapatra: O Jagannath dear!/ I do not seek from you any boon,/ Neither wealth, nor men!/ I beg from you/ Only a handful of dust/ From the Sands of Love.
The essayist concludes that with the arrival of print technology the devotional literature was relegated to the realm of the non-literary, and later it was revived in the cassette era, but never acquired the former glory. In The Prabachans as Performatives, Ranjan Kumar Panda analyses the performative nature of Jagannath prabachana and traces its origins to the emergence of “the Puranas in Odia literature”.
The second section, Practising Jagannath, focusses on the performance of rituals as sites of experiencing Jagannath by both Odias and non-Odias. Umasankar Patra’s Eating with Eyes examines the role of the mahaprasad in democratising the Jagannath culture and forging social bonds. Patra reminds the readers that at Puri “the Brahmin and the untouchable are supposed to eat from each other’s plate and drink from the same container”. His research fills a major intellectual gap as the rich body of scholarship on the Jagannath culture has not dealt with the production and consumption of prasad and its role in generating revenues for the temple. One may think of extending this work further and draw an analogy between the prasad culture of Jagannath and that of ISKCON temples, where both the rich and the poor, devotees and non-devotees, throng to eat prasad.
The third section, Re-placing Jagannath, studies the migration of Jagannath cult outside Odisha. Becoming Jagannath in Dravidanadu by Jyotirmaya Tripathy highlights the tension between the literal meaning of the word Jagannath—nath (lord) of the jagat (universe)—and his identity as an Odia god, a protector of Odia interests. The chapter foregrounds this contestation between the local and the universal, with reference to the Jagannath temple in Chennai. Gautam Choubey in Delhiwallah Jagannath and the Odia Diaspora studies Jagannath temples located at Hauz Khas and Thyagaraj Nagar of Delhi and examines the significance of Jagannath culture to the “sociocultural imagination of Delhi-based Odias”. The last chapter A Scholarly Community around the Lord by Uwe Skoda analyses community formation among scholars working on Jagannath and Odisha.
This anthology is informative, entertaining and instructive for common readers, anthropologists and cultural historians to understand the overwhelming impact of Jagannath cult on Odias and non-Odias in everyday life. Although the book studies the circulation of Jagannath cult in Chennai, Bengal, Tripura and Delhi, there are several other parts of India as well as abroad where the role of temple in the community formation of Odias remains to be investigated. It would be worthwhile to examine what Jagannath means to the Indian diaspora.
(The author teaches English at Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College, Delhi)
