Ratha Yatra

Ratha Yatra, the "chariot festival", is the great festival of Puri in Odisha, in which the deity Jagannath (a form of Krishna/Vishnu), with his brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra, is brought out of the famous temple and drawn through the streets on three colossal wooden chariots to a garden temple some distance away, staying for a week before the return journey. It falls on the second day of the bright fortnight of Ashadha (June-July). Uniquely, it is the one occasion on which these deities, whose temple bars non-Hindus, are brought out into public view, so that all may see them; enormous crowds haul the chariots by hand with great ropes.

The festival is the source of the English word "juggernaut", from early European travellers' reports (some exaggerated) of the immense cars and the crush of pilgrims. Theologically it expresses the accessibility of the divine, the Lord leaving the seclusion of the sanctuary to come among the ordinary people, and the pulling of the chariot is itself held to be a meritorious act. New chariots are built each year to a fixed design and dismantled after; the images themselves are wooden and, in a rare rite, periodically replaced. Ratha Yatras modelled on Puri's are now held in many cities worldwide, spread especially by the Hare Krishna movement.

Roughly once every eight to nineteen years, determined by a specific and irregular rule of the lunisolar calendar involving an extra month falling in the lunar month of Ashadha, the wooden images of Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra are entirely replaced in a ceremony called Nabakalebara, new body, in which specific trees meeting exacting traditional criteria are located, felled and carved into new images before the old ones are ceremonially retired.

The most closely guarded part of the ceremony is the transfer of the brahma padartha, a sacred substance believed to constitute the living essence of the deities, from the interior of the old wooden images into the newly carved ones, a rite performed at night by specially designated priests, blindfolded and with their hands wrapped in cloth so that they cannot see or directly touch what is transferred, and the details of what is actually moved have never been disclosed outside this closed priestly process, making Nabakalebara one of the clearest instances in Hindu temple practice of a central ritual whose specific content is deliberately kept unknown even to most of the tradition's own devotees, let alone to outside observers.

Pulling the ropes of the chariots is traditionally open to anyone present regardless of caste or religion, a rare instance of a core ritual act at a major Hindu festival carrying no restriction on who may perform it, consistent with the theological point that the festival exists precisely to bring Jagannath out to people who could not otherwise approach him inside the temple, including those historically barred from entering it.