Nila Madhava and the unfinished images of Puri

The temple's chronicle tells the same episode with the queen as the one who breaks the promise: after two weeks of silence from behind the doors she grows anxious for the old carpenter and opens them, and the deities are found without hands. The chronicle also records the documented renewals — the 1575 reinstallation after the 1568 Afghan invasion, counted as the first Nabakalebara, when Bisara Mohanty saved the sacred substance of the damaged image inside a drum.

Anncharlott Eschmann, with Kulke and Tripathi (1978), proposed that Jagannath was in origin a tribal god who became brahminic in the course of Hinduisation: the wooden-post worship of the Sabaras and Khonds, the older Narasimha associations and the periodic renewal of the body at Nabakalebara are read as tribal survivals, and the Sabara chief of the legend as a memory of that past. More recent work examines the tribal-origins framing itself as a product of colonial historiography. Devalok records the thesis and its critique side by side; the Buddhist-origin theories are regarded as insufficiently supported.

Pilgrims tell that the substance moved from the old image to the new at every Nabakalebara is the unburnt heart of Krishna, cast into the sea after his death and found by Indradyumna, and that the priests who transfer it at midnight are blindfolded with their hands wrapped in cloth. The temple has never said what the Brahma Padartha is.