Puri: Tomorrow will be the traditional procession in honour of Lord Jagannath, Balabhadra, and Subhadra, and it will see millions of devotees attend the world-famous Jagannath Rath Yatra in Puri, Odisha.
The nine-day annual festival will be held from June 27, during which the trio will be taken out of the Jagannath Temple on a huge rath to a nearby Gundicha Temple about three kilometres away. Dressed in elaborate robes and pieces of jewellery, the idols will cover the distance along the streets of Puri on the specially designed and hand-crafted wooden chariots, accompanied by the chant of “Jai Jagannath” and the blowing of a conch shell. After a week of staying at Gundicha, the idols will return to their parent temple during the Bahuda Yatra on July 5.
The construction of all three giant chariots has been extremely skilled, and the wood has just been harvested, so they are all unique and individual, just like the deities they will be carrying: Nandighosha for Lord Jagannath (45 feet, 18 wheels) Taladhwaja for Balabhadra (44 feet, 16 wheels) and Darpadalana for Subhadra (43 feet, 14 wheels). Constructed according to Vedic scriptures, elaborately designed raths (or chariots)—drawn by thousands of devotees on foot over a 3-kilometre stretch of Puri’s Bada Danda, or Grand Road—are among the most significant cultural artefacts in Odisha.
For lakhs of devotees expected to visit Puri from all over India and overseas to witness the procession, the Hindu festival and pilgrimage is a spiritual affair as well as an occasion for the entire spectrum of indifferent communities in India to stand together and head nowhere except to the world-famous Rath Yatra at Puri. It also represents one of the great promises of Hinduism — that salvation will be available to attendant Hindus.
Above, More than a lakh of devotees have reached Puri for the Jagannath Rath Yatra, and the Odisha government has done its best to make the festival seamless: by providing layered security with AI-enabled CCTV cameras and increasing the number of special trains from Puri to Bhubaneswar.