To define the plague that devastates the world in her novel The Last Man, Mary Shelley (also the author of Frankenstein) writes: Like Juggernaut, it proceeds crushing the being of all who stand in the high road of life.

The term Juggernaut is also used by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to describe the violent personality of the twisted antagonist. However, readers are likely more familiar with it, at least comic book fans, because it is the name of a colossal and invincible Marvel supervillain, the stepbrother of Professor Xavier, in the X-Men series created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

In reality, we could find countless references across a multitude of fields, since, although it is not included in the dictionary, the word has been incorporated into literary vocabulary as a metaphor for a destructive and unstoppable force. The immediate reason for this meaning is found in the 19th century when we imported it as an Anglicism that, strictly speaking, is not one because the English language also borrowed it from a much farther place: from the Jewel of the Crown of its empire, India. It is the adaptation of the Sanskrit name Jagannath, one of the names of Krishna, meaning lord of the universe.

Statue of Krishna, in classical style, from the Sri Mariamman temple (Singapore).
Statue of Krishna, in classical style, from the Sri Mariamman temple (Singapore). Credit: AngMoKio / Wikimedia Commons

In Krishnaism, Krishna is the principal form of divinity, from which all other gods emanate. In Hinduism, he is considered a hero of the Yadu dynasty, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, and becomes the protector of the world against chaos. Although the word Krishna translates as “the black one”, he is iconographically represented with blue skin, especially when he appears as Jagannath. In such a case, his main center of worship is the Indian city of Puri, located in the northeast of the country, where there is a huge mandir (temple) dedicated to him, his sister Subhadra, and his brother Baladeva.

The Jagannath Temple, which began construction in the 12th century by Anantavarman Chodaganga, the first king of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, on top of another preexisting one from two hundred years earlier, contains the statues of the three siblings, made of wooden blocks painted black, white, and yellow, respectively. The style of these figures is not realistic at all, making them appear, at least in appearance, closer to the imagery of American totems. All this broke with the artistic conventions prevailing at the time, so several legends arose to explain it.

The most common is the one that attributes responsibility to Indradyumna, a monarch of the Tamil branch of the Pandya dynasty. This dynasty ruled, alongside the Chola and Chera, the southern third of the Indian subcontinent and the northern half of Sri Lanka, which were the territories spanned by Tamilakam or Tamil country, between the 7th century BC and the 17th century AD. The figure of Indradyumna is semi-legendary, as he is placed chronologically millions of years ago, in the fourth manvantara (the era of Manu, the Hindu progenitor of humanity), which is why he is surrounded by a handful of fantastic legends.

Aerial view of the Jagannath Temple in Puri.
Aerial view of the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Credit: Government of Odisha / Wikimedia Commons

One legend says that Indradyumna found a giant log on the beach and, since Krishna had prophesied such a discovery, he hired a Brahmin to carve the manifestation of the deity as Jagannath and his siblings into it. The priest agreed on the condition that no one disturbed him, but the delay in finishing the work made the king impatient, and one day he entered the workshop. The sculptor, who turned out to be Vishvakarma himself, the architect of the gods, disappeared and left the work unfinished. Another version says that Vishvakarma did not continue the work out of disappointment with his inability to give them the finish he desired.

The fact is that the statues were left without limbs and were limited to the faces, which did not prevent the monarch from considering them legitimate representations of Jagannath and his siblings. He ordered them to be placed in the temple following the advice sung to him with his vina (zither) by Narada Muni. This was a divine wandering monk considered a manasa putra (mind-born son) of Brahma, the creator god of the world. Thus, Narada Muni would be the first created being and would not only become a rishi (sage) but also a gandharva (a kind of earthly archangel).

There is a tradition that says Krishna’s sixteen thousand one hundred and eight wives asked his adoptive mother, Yashoda, to narrate the erotic lilas (pastimes, amusements) of her stepson with the gopīs (adolescent cowherd girls) when he was young; according to another version, it was the gopīs themselves who told the queens. In any case, Yashoda began her story, confident that Subhadra was guarding the door, but Subhadra entered a trance upon hearing those adventures and did not realize her brothers were arriving. Upon hearing the narration, they experienced a physical change, losing their arms and legs, their hair standing on end, and their eyes growing larger.

The three siblings: Balarama, Subhadra, and Jagannath.
The three siblings: Balarama, Subhadra, and Jagannath. Credit: no bias — קיין אומוויסנדיקע פּרעפֿערענצן — keyn umvisndike preferentsn / Wikimedia Commons

In other words, the statues of the Puri temple acquired the appearance they currently have (inside which, by the way, it is said that the bones of Krishna rest; something that contradicts the Hindu myth written in the Bhagavata Purana, one of the most important religious texts on the life of Krishna, which states that he did not die but ascended to heaven physically). As can be seen, the Jagannath Temple is a fundamental place for Krishna worship, and this is heightened by the celebration of a fascinating annual rite during the Dwitiya (second day) of Shukla Paksha (waxing moon) of Ashadha Maas (the third month of the lunar calendar).

We refer to the festival in honor of Jagannath, the Ratha Yatra, an expression that alludes to a public festival based on a procession of chariots but, in this specific case, refers to the one that has taken place in Puri since at least the 13th century, according to the Franciscan missionary Odoric of Pordenone, who visited India in the Middle Ages and documented it in his work Relatio or Chronica XXIV Generalium Ordinis Minorum. Each of the three gods, Jagannath, Subhadra, and Baladeva, has their own chariot, which is enormous and constructed ex professo for each edition with wood from some native trees—called dhausa and phassi—which is brought on rafts along the Mahanadi River from the Dasapalla region.

The carpenters designated ad hoc build and decorate them meticulously with carved reliefs, following a prescribed religious scheme. The chariot of Jagannath is called Nandighosa, is fourteen meters high, has sixteen wheels (two meters in diameter each), and is covered by a red and yellow fabric canopy (the total fabric used is twelve hundred square meters, sewn by fourteen tailors). Balarama’s chariot is slightly smaller, has fourteen wheels, and its colors are red and blue. Subhadra’s chariot, the same size as the previous one but with twelve wheels, is covered in red and black tones. Each chariot is adorned with wooden figures of gods and pulled by four horses guided by a sarathi (charioteer); at least in theory, since the horses are also artificial.

One of the Ratha Yatra chariots of Puri.
One of the Ratha Yatra chariots of Puri. Credit: Debavasya / Wikimedia Commons

In practice, it is the Vaishnavas (pilgrims) who take turns—there are plenty, as thousands gather—to pull the chariots amidst dancing and singing, transporting them over the three kilometers of the grand avenue Bada Danda that connects the Jagannath Temple with another dedicated to Gundicha, the wife of King Indradyumna, which is why the event is also known as Gundicha Jatra. From there, nine days of festivities await before making the return journey. The purpose of the procession is to present Vamana (a dwarf form of Jagannath), a way to free oneself from the cycles of reincarnation, as it signifies traversing through life.

It can be done in two ways: making a circuit around the temple or taking a journey from it. But just contemplating the chariots is enough to purify oneself because they emanate holiness. If one can touch them, all the better, and this is where the concept of juggernaut comes into play, as the first Europeans who saw the Ratha Yatra reported that some devotees threw themselves under the chariots as a form of self-immolation and were crushed to death. This is mentioned in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a 14th-century book based on the testimony of the aforementioned Odoric of Pordenone. Not everyone agrees with that view; some believe that they were actually just accidents due to overcrowding.

In any case, the British accepted the interpretation of sacrifice as valid, referencing the reprimand that the sage Chaitanya, founder of Bengali Krishnaism, gave in the 16th century to his disciple Sanatana Goswami when the latter expressed his intention to throw himself under the wheels of the chariot: Your decision to commit suicide is the result of ignorance. One cannot obtain the love of God simply through suicide. You have already dedicated your life and body to my service, so your body does not belong to you, nor do you have any right to kill yourself.

An American bandwagon.
An American bandwagon. Credit: Freekee / Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Therefore, the word juggernaut, which, as we mentioned earlier, is the name of Krishna, resulting from combining jagat (“world”) and nātha (“lord”) in Jagannath, traveled from Asia to Europe. The first to bring it over was Reverend Claudius Buchanan, an evangelical chaplain of colonial Calcutta who, in his writings, focused all his attention on this controversial custom, despising it as bloody, violent, superstitious, and backward, as he thought of almost all of Hinduism. And juggernaut was incorporated into the language to refer to a dangerous and uncontrollable force, sometimes pejoratively associated with the so-called bandwagon effect, to explain ritual suicides.

The bandwagon effect is the name given to the psychological phenomenon of adopting behavior by imitating what others do, hence the tendency to throw oneself under the wheels. Interestingly, this expression also has to do with carriages, as it comes from the horse-drawn wagons that carried music bands in parades or circus processions; during the 1848 U.S. presidential campaign, a clown invited General Zachary Taylor, the Whig party candidate (who would eventually win and become the 12th president), to ride on his vehicle, setting such a precedent that wagons became part of the campaigns (and with them the disparaging expression “jump on the bandwagon”).

Decades later, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some Hindu communities settled in England and the U.S. that offered a broader and more accurate view of what the Ratha Yatra festival was, but by then the word juggernaut had already become so entrenched that it was impossible to reverse its meaning.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on September 6, 2024: Juggernaut, el origen de la palabra que define una fuerza destructora, incontrolada e imparable

SOURCES

Jose Carlos Gomes da Silva, The cult of Jagannātha. Myths and rituals

Avinash Patra, Origin & Antiquity of the Cult of Lord Jagannath

O. M. Starza, The Jagannatha Temple at Puri. Its Architecture, art and cult

Michael J. Altman, The origins of the juggernaut

Wikipedia, Juggernaut

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