Through the week, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have flocked to Puri, a temple town in Odisha. There, three colossal chariots containing the gods Jagannath, Balabhadra, and Subhadra were pulled along a 3-kilometre stretch, to the adulation of devotees.
Jagannath is one of India’s most famous gods. His name inspired the English word “juggernaut”, and travellers’ accounts from as early as the 17th century reveal that pilgrims journeyed hundreds of miles to worship him. Yet Jagannath’s origins lie not solely in devotion: he was one of many “state gods” established during a centuries-long geopolitical struggle across India’s east coast. His history encompasses inter-regional flows of ideas, complex local politics, and revolutionary medieval super-states.
The history of Jagannath has many strands, but here we will explore its political dimensions—which begin in an unexpected place: Tamil Nadu in the 11th century.
State gods in the Chola Empire
From 985 CE onwards, the Chola emperor Rajaraja I embarked on an astonishing programme of expansion, culminating in 1010 with the inauguration of a titanic shrine called the Rajarajeshvaram, “The Home of Rajaraja’s Lord”. (Today it is known as the Brihadeeswara temple at Thanjavur).
The Cholas often patronised local deities to win loyalties, but at the peak of their expansion, they were most interested in new forms of Shiva, who would act as the focus of their empire. Their temples served as massive ritual engines to redistribute war loot. The Rajarajeshvaram had a massive treasury and thousands of animals, most seized through war and then invested in the hinterland to stimulate agriculture. Rajaraja’s successor, Rajendra I (r. 1012–1044) built another temple, “The Home of the Chola Who Conquered the Ganga”, and consecrated it with waters brought from the Ganga river. According to Chola inscriptions, this was the culmination of a ravaging expedition that extended from present-day northern Andhra Pradesh all the way to Bengal.
To the Cholas’ contemporaries, it may have seemed that their military successes stemmed from their massive Shiva temples, in turn endowed with war loot. And so, the 11th century saw a spurt of massive temples being initiated, such as the incomplete Bhojeshwar temple in Bhojpur (Madhya Pradesh). One of the most spectacular such temples—and the most relevant to the story of Jagannath—is the Lingaraj temple at Bhubaneswar.
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The rise of Jagannath
The Lingaraj temple was commissioned by the Somavamsis, a clan from Central India that had conquered the coastal kingdom of Tosali. (We spoke about Tosali and its remarkable dynasty of queens defeated by the Somavamsis in an earlier Thinking Medieval column.) As distinguished historian Hermann Kulke points out in his book chapter, “Imperial Temple Architecture and the Ideology of Kingship in Odisha”, the Somavamsis almost certainly built the Lingaraj to rival the great temples of the Cholas further south along the coast. More importantly, just as Chola temples acted as integrative centres for their state, the Lingaraj was intended to integrate the Somavamsi’s forest kingdom with the newly conquered coastal plain. Unfortunately, the Somavamsis were unable to capitalise on the great temple. Indeed, by the late 11th century, imperial temples across India were floundering: they had few devotees outside the court and were too expensive to maintain without conquest.
This paved the way for an aggressive new power: the Gangas of Kalinga, a kingdom on the border of present-day Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. By 1135, as Prof Kulke writes in The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition in Odisha, the Ganga king Anantavarman (r. 1078–1147) had unified the small kingdoms of the Odia coast and sought to consolidate his rule. To do so, he needed a god to patronise, to turn into the emblem of Ganga power and piety. A new god wouldn’t suffice; he needed an independent, popular deity. At Puri, he found just such a deity: a “Wooden God”, identified with Purushottama, a form of Vishnu. The god’s shrine had long been in disrepair. Anantavarman ordered it massively expanded, aiming to transform it into a new imperial centre. And so, in the 1140s, the lofty spires of the Jagannath temple at Puri first began to rise.
Over the next century, as the temple grew, the geopolitics of the east coast worsened. From the 1150s onward, the Cholas—once dominant up to coastal Andhra Pradesh—withdrew into the Kaveri valley. The political vacuum was filled by a dynasty from the interior of Telangana, the Kakatiyas. In their capital, Warangal, the Kakatiyas built a great imperial temple to Svayambhu Shiva, the Self-Manifest. Seeking to integrate the proud post-Chola aristocrats of the Andhra coast, they claimed merely to be “worshippers of the divine feet of the illustrious lord Svayambhudeva”. This made Kakatiya rule more acceptable to blue-blooded nobles. Loyalty to the Kakatiya king, a man of peasant stock, was presented as devotion to Shiva. This was a significant political innovation.
Quickly learning from Kakatiya success, by 1230, the Ganga kings of Odisha claimed to be “the son and the deputy of Purushottama (Jagannath).” Over 1230–31, the temple of Jagannath was further expanded, and land was donated to Brahmins. By 1237, the Chodagangas no longer called themselves kings at all: only the “rāhuta” (Raut, “king’s son”) of the god. This was an elegant smoke and mirrors: by the 1230s, the Gangas were the dominant kings of the east coast, successfully expanding into Bengal and warring with armies of the Delhi Sultanate. By claiming the title of Jagannath’s rāhuta, they made their rule more acceptable to country strongmen, who were in turn considered the king’s rāhuta. If the king himself was a rāhuta of Jagannath, being the Ganga king’s rāhuta was simply devotion to Jagannath.
Also read: Why are South Indian temples larger than ones in North? Answer isn’t ‘Islamic invasions’
Jagannath and Odia kingship
The Kakatiya’s god, Shiva the Self-Manifest, did not survive the conquests of the Delhi Sultanate. But Jagannath, protected by the powerful Ganga state, did. By the 1400s, the Gangas were overthrown by one of their ministers, who established a new dynasty, the Gajapatis. The Gajapatis had no right to claim descent from Jagannath. Instead, they adopted a new title: the Elected of Jagannath, Foremost Servitor of Jagannath. As usurpers, they relied on the god for legitimacy, requesting Jagannath’s assistance in defeating rebels. In return, they made further gifts to the god, further growing his regional prominence.
As Jagannath’s wealth and religious following grew, he also became a target for looting armies. In the 1500s, his shrine was targeted by the Afghan mercenary Kalapahad, under the employ of the Sultan of Bengal. Soon after, both Bengal and Odisha became provinces of the Mughal Empire of the Gangetic Plains. As Prof Kulke points out, the popularity and antiquity of Jagannath drew ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims, which Mughal governors encouraged by recognising local rajas as “kings of Puri”. In 1633, the English traveller William Bruton noted that Mughal officials attended the Jagannath Rath Yatra alongside the raja. Dibyasingha IV, today the titular king of Puri, is descended from the same clan.
The history of Jagannath in the early modern period is complex. The temple often served as a chess piece between its Brahmin community, the local rajas, and various Muslim officials. But it always continued to expand and grow. According to the 1971 census, one in seven people in Puri was employed by the temple, and it continues to have its own dedicated sub-castes of service personnel, such as potters. From a local deity to the emblem of an expanding empire, to a symbol of Odisha itself, Jagannath is one of India’s most remarkable gods. No other deity encapsulates a region’s history quite as he does: not Venkateshwara at Tirupati, not Nataraja at Chidambaram. For all of Jagannath’s mythology, his past is deeply political; based on statements from some politicians, it seems that the god will continue to have a political future as well.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Prashant)