JuggernautHow the word originated

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

Tiring of postcards, I browse through my guidebook, then read a few pages of The History of India, full of interesting information if a little dry and unabsorbing. I glean a few titbits from it about places I have been, places I am going, the place where I am now. The origin of the word juggernaut, for instance: from the god Jagannath, Lord of the World. His main temple is in Puri, founded by the Ganga king Chodaganga and originally dedicated to Puroshottama, one of the thousand names of Vishnu, later changed to Jagannath. It is the Jagannath Temple that is the main draw for the pilgrims who came to town. According to the Puranas, sacred texts of the Hindu religion, Krishna had been wandering in a nearby forest when he was mistaken for a deer and killed by a hunter. The body was cremated, the ashes put in a box, which a local king instructed should been made into an image of the god. The artisan Vishakarman agreed to undertake the task, provided he was left undisturbed while he worked; but the king, impatient, troubled him after a mere fifteen days, and the carving was left incomplete. The image in the temple at Puri, representing the deity - not the original carving, although there were those who claim it is - is a crudely carved block of wood, and during the two week festival of Rath Yatra in midsummer, this image of Lord Jagannath is removed from its shrine and loaded onto a vast chariot, which is then hauled along the city's main drag, two miles to Jagannath's Garden House on the edge of town. The chariot is so massive it takes several hundreds of devotees to pull it along - although there are, of course, always many thousands willing to lend a hand. The journey takes several days. It had once been held auspicious to die by hurling oneself beneath the mighty wheels, and deaths during the festival, although no longer commonplace, still occur, the chariot of Lord Jagannath, once in motion, proving an unstoppable force capable of crushing anything that lay in its path: whence the word juggernaut.