Jagannath

The temple of Puri was begun by the Eastern Ganga king Anantavarman Chodaganga, whose inscriptions of around 1134 to 1135 mention it, and completed by Anangabhima Deva. The temple's own chronicle, the Madala Panji, records its kings, its rituals and its troubles, among them invasions in which the images were hidden or damaged.

The god himself is older than the building and harder to place. The Skanda Purana tells of King Indradyumna, who sent his priest to find a blue god worshipped secretly by a Sabara forest chief. In 1978 Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke and G. C. Tripathi argued that Jagannath began as a tribal god of wooden posts, and that the Daitapati servitors, who count themselves the Sabara chief's descendants, remember that past; later scholars have asked how far that thesis reflects colonial history writing.

He has been read as Krishna, as Vishnu, as Narasimha and, by Shaiva and Shakta worshippers, in their own ways; Mahaprasad is first offered to the goddess Vimala inside the temple.

The rituals of the chariot festival are old and exact. Jagannath rides Nandighosha, of sixteen wheels; Balabhadra rides Taladhwaja, of fourteen, with the palm on its flag; Subhadra rides Darpadalana, of twelve. The king sweeps the chariots in the Chhera Pahanra. On the way back the gods are dressed in gold, the Suna Besha, a custom said to go back to Kapilendra Deva in 1460.

The Nabakalebara, the renewal of the bodies, falls in a year with two months of Ashadha, eight to nineteen years apart; recent ones were in 1969, 1977, 1996 and 2015. The chariot festival grew famous far beyond India, and gave English the word juggernaut.