How Jagannath festival became Juggernaut massacre
Did you know that the English word “Juggernaut” is derived from Jagannath, and is pronounced the same way? But the difference lies in that the word has been disastrously misinterpreted to mean very negative things, just the opposite of the original word which is divinity Itself!
Dictionary.com gives the meanings for juggernaut:
- Something, such as a belief or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed.
- An overwhelming, advancing force that crushes or seems to crush everything in its path.
- Juggernaut Used as a title for the Hindu deity Krishna.
- a massive inexorable force that seems to crush everything in its way [syn: steamroller]
- a crude idol of Krishna [syn: Juggernaut]
As an explanation behind the etymology of the word, it also gives the following: Senses 1 and 2, from the fact that worshipers have thrown themselves under the wheels of a huge car or wagon on which the idol of Krishna was drawn in an annual procession at Puri in east-central India.
Webster.com says:
- chiefly British : a large heavy truck
- a massive inexorable force, campaign, movement, or object that crushes whatever is in its path [an advertising juggernaut] [a political juggernaut]
The British never even bothered to witness the Jagannath Puri annual festival of Chariots because of the crowds of Indians that it attracted, but they assumed the right to write everything about it - they saw dead bodies and bones on the roads after the carts had passed through and assumed that these belonged to men who just threw themselves at the huge chariot-wheels as sacrifice to the Gods.
It is very disturbing that such things could be written and were believed and that Hindu God’s names should become negative words in English vocabulary due to stark ignorance. The reality itself was very different and Mike Dash, the author of “Thug : The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult“, reveals the truth in his wonderful book. Snippets:
…at the famous temple complex at Juggernaut, on the Bay of Bengal, where every March tens of thousands of chanting pilgrims lined the roads to watch the procession of four gigantic wooden carts, each bearing a ‘monstrous idol’ in the form of an ancient statue of a major Hindu god. The carts were drageed along by the brute muscle power of the faithful. Each one was 43 feet high, garishly painted, and mounted on 16 enormous wooden wheels, and it was widely rumoured - and generally believed - that pilgrims sacrificed themselvesto their gods each year by hurling themselves to destruction beneath the carriages
As a footnote, he adds the truth:
In truth deaths of this sort were rather rare, and were generally accidents caused by the sheer press of people along the route; according to the British army officer Thomas Bacon, who wrote about Juggernaut in the early 1830s, there had been no genuine suicides there since 1821. It was true he added that the road leading to the temples was indeed lined with thousands of bleached human bones; but these, he was told, had been deposided not by suicides crushed beneath the wheels of the carts but by hundreds of terminally ill pilgrims who died in their desperate attempts to reach the temples.
So, in fact, there were not any human sacrifices offered to the Gods at Puri. One could not stop people that committed suicides this way, but interpreting them as sacrifices is just ignorance and foolishness. If one were to commit suicide in a temple because that is a very sacred place indeed, that is only a suicide and not a human sacrifice. I mean, get a perspective!
On a related note, read why the British viewed Hinduism as barbaric.
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