Temple Potters of Puri by Mapin Publishing

TEMPLE POTTERS OF PURI

Louise Allison Cort Purna Chandra Mishra

MApin Publishing

First published in India in 2012 by Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd with the kind assistance of the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Simultaneously published in the United States of America in 2012 by Grantha Corporation 77 Daniele Drive, Hidden Meadows, Ocean Township, NJ 07712 E: mapin@mapinpub.com Distributed in North America by Antique Collectors’ Club T: 1 800 252 5231 • F: 413 529 0862 E: info@antiquecc.com www.antiquecollectorsclub.com Distributed in United Kingdom and Europe by Gazelle Book Servies Ltd. T: 44 1524 68765 • F: 44 1524 63232 E: sales@gazellebooks.co.uk www.gazellebookservices.co.uk Distributed in Southeast Asia by Paragon Asia Co. Ltd T: 66 2877 7755 • F: 66 2468 9636 E: info@paragonasia.com Distributed in Rest of the World by Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd 502 Paritosh, Near Darpana Academy, Usmanpura, Ahmedabad 380013 T: 91 79 40 228 228 • F: 91 79 40 228 201 E: mapin@mapinpub.com • www.mapinpub.com Text © Louise Allison Cort Images © Louise Allison Cort DVD footage © Louise Allison Cort Illustrations and maps by Daphne Shuttleworth Design, © Louise Allison Cort All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Potter Maga Bishoi completes the beating of a bai handi. Stacks of pots made by male potter servants.

front Cover

back Cover The Jagannatha Temple, Puri.

ISBN: 978-81-89995-09-6 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-0-944142-75-2 (Grantha) LCCN: 2012944021 Copyeditor Suguna Ramanathan/ Mapin Editorial Design Nidhi Sah/ Mapin Design Studio Printed in China by PWGS

Hail, hail, Brundaban; hail, slayer of Madhu! Let me be upright; let my pots be produced in abundance. Let the preparation of my bountiful pots be flawless. Let them be dispersed gladly throughout the whole world. Let my golden pots not break, nor ignorance overpower me. Let all evils be destroyed. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; The first potterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s prayer, Kurala Purana, chapter 22

To the potters of Puri — LAC & PCM

To my father and to Joy, who believed in this project — LAC To my grandfather, whom I miss very much — PCM

Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Orthography and the Madala Panji

Introduction – INVISIBLE EARTHENWARE

Part I – POTS IN THE JAGANNATHA TEMPLE chapter 1 The Jagannatha Temple: Pilgrims, Sacred Food and Temple Servants chapter 2 The Cycle of Pots in the Temple

33 60

286

Part II – THE POTTERS’ COMMUNITY, WORK AND RITUAL chapter 3 The Village chapter 4 Gifts of a God: Workshop, Kiln, Tools and Materials chapter 5 Work Processes chapter 6 Work Cycles and Life Cycles chapter 7 Kurala Purana: Origins and Status of the Potters as an Occupational Group chapter 8 Kurala Panchami: Makers, Tools and Processes Sanctified

324

Part III – THE POTTERS AS TEMPLE SERVANTS

326

chapter 9

94 96 142 188 224 262

348 378 398

Neli, the Potter’s Wife: The Potter Servants and Their Land chapter 10 Potter Leadership, the Tada Seba and the Monasteries of Puri chapter 11 The Potters as Modern Temple Servants: Duties, Rights and Rewards chapter 12 Incorporating Outsiders, Debating Rights and Duties: Recent History of the Potters’ Community

430

Afterword

434

Appendix I Technology: Terminology and Procedures Appendix II Repertory of the Kumbhara Bishoi Potters Appendix III Documents Glossary Bibliography Index

443 451 461 466 472

ACKNOWLEDGeMENTS

Like all complex projects carried out over extended time and great distances, this one has benefited from the support and cooperation of numerous friends, colleagues, and institutions. A fellowship from the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture and affiliation with the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta (now Kolkata), supported our field research in India between October 1979 and February 1981. Purna Chandra Mishra, who lives in Puri, has maintained contact with the potters, creating invaluable continuity during the long process of preparing the manuscript. The occasional “I” in the text is Louise Cort, who wrote the words, although the narrative and conclusions result from our shared experiences, discussions, and reflections. We met through Frederique Apffel Marglin, now Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology, Smith College. Purna Chandra Mishra assisted Dr. Marglin on research that was published as Wives of the God-King:The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri (1985). It was through Dr. Marglin that I first became aware of the activities of the Orissa Research Project and was inspired to formulate a project to document the potters of Puri. The broad scope of the Orissa Research Project, conducted between 1969 and 1977 by an interdisciplinary team of European and Indian scholars under the auspices of the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, created the niche into which our research fits. Purna Chandra Mishra worked with Orissa Research Project members Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke, George Pfeffer, Jacob Rösel and Heinrich von Stietencron and participated in the transcription and translation of the major primary document, a version of the Madala Panji, the Jagannatha Temple record. The volume summarizing the project findings, The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa (Eschmann et. al. 1978), published shortly before this project began, was of inestimable value in framing the religious, political and social history of the Jagannatha Temple. Jakob Rösel’s Der Palast des Herrn der Welt (1980) provided an overview of the temple’s organization, including its servants. Dr. Marglin’s publication was the first study of a single category of temple servant—the Devadasis or temple dancers. Painters serving the temple, the Chitrakaras, were the focus of Joanna William’s The Two-Headed Deer: Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa (1996) and Helle Bundgaard’s Indian Art Worlds in Contention: Local, Regional and National Discourses on Orissan Patta Paintings (1999). In Puri, we were grateful, above all, for the unflagging collaboration of the families of potters in the three villages of Tikarapada, Kumbharapada and Gopalpur.

To our sadness, many of the grand old women and men who welcomed us so warmly in 1979–81 are not alive to see the publication of our retelling of their community’s story. We hope that they would have approved of our interpretation. Many potters generously shared their time for formal interviews and countless informal chats. Hadibandhu Bishoi and Purnananda Bishoi allowed us to study documents in their possession, while Bansi Bishoi gave us two old pots preserved as building material in the walls of his workshop. We also received invaluable information from Pundit Krushna Chandra Rajaguru (died 1991), hereditary preceptor of the royal family of Puri, and Bhagaban Mishra (died 1987), secretary of the temple cooks’ organization, Suara Nijoga. We were fortunate indeed that the two leading authorities on Indian ceramics, N K Behura of Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar, author of Peasant Potters of Orissa, A Sociological Study (1978), and Baidyanath Saraswati, graciously took interest in our project and contributed their observations.Their joint publication, Pottery Techniques in Peasant India (1966) provided a pan-Indian framework for understanding the potters of Puri. Our research in Puri included production of 16-millimetre colour film documentation of the Tikarapada potters’ community, with a focus on technical processes, which formed the basis for the DVD that is part of this publication. Cynthia Cunningham Cort, who shot the footage, made several long trips by train from Banaras to share expertise and on-location adventures. (We stored our film in the walk-in refrigerator of the Southeast Railway Hotel kitchen.) By fortunate coincidence, between 1979 and 1981, Cynthia and her husband, my brother John E Cort, were serving as monitors for the Banaras campus of the University of Wisconsin Junior Year in India programme. John joined Cynthia on visits to Puri and has generously given both knowledge and moral support; I especially appreciate his careful readings of the manuscript. Joseph Elder, University of Wisconsin, Madison, kindly arranged for processing and storage of the exposed film. We also thank the various people who served as couriers. The original footage is on deposit at the Human Studies Film Archives, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (accession no. 84.8.1). Our research also included formation of two nearly identical collections of the potters’ tools and vessel repertories. We presented one to the museum of the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, whose curator was then A K Das, and the other to the Anthropology Department, National Museum of Natural History,

Smithsonian Institution (accession no. 361229; catalogue nos. 423304–423369— see appendix II). Each collection includes one of Bansi Bishoi’s heirloom pots. In 1984, grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Smithsonian Institution Special Foreign Currency Program funded our research in the Orissa Research Project Archive at the University of Heidelberg. The Special Foreign Currency Program grant also enabled Purna Chandra Mishra to spend a month at the Smithsonian Institution, where we processed the data gathered in Heidelberg and annotated the film footage. In 1992, funded by the Research Opportunities Fund of the Smithsonian Institution, I made a return visit to Puri. We are grateful to the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. for their financial assistance in publishing of this book. Finally, we thank the people who participated in the realization of this book. Daphne Shuttleworth of Daphne Shuttleworth Design translated field sketches into finished drawings and maps, in some cases starting from prototypes prepared by Alan Jay Short. Daniel Bailes of GVI transformed film shots into a visual narrative for the DVD. Bipin Shah, Paulomi Shah and the rest of the team at Mapin put it all together. — Puri and Washington, D.C. Kurala Panchami

NOTES ON ORTHOGRAPHY AND THE MADALA PANJI

Orthography Recent publications in English on aspects of the cult of Jagannatha have chosen differing solutions to the transcription of Oriya terms, some using Sanskrit spelling, others the Oriya version. Oriya is one of several North Indian languages based on Sanskrit, but its consonants and vowels have shifted in certain ways that are recorded in the Oriya phonetic script. Most noticeably, the Sanskrit “v” changes to “b” (seva, service to a deity, becomes seba in Oriya). We have chosen to render given names in their Oriya form (e.g. Krushna) but to adhere to familiar spellings for well-known names, such as the deity Krishna. For the convenience of non-specialist readers, we have chosen not to use diacritical marks. Place names and terminology are given in accordance with usage at the time of our research rather than those adopted subsequently (Calcutta, not Kolkata; Untouchable, not Dalit). The Madala Panji The main source of historical information on temple organization and the potters’ community was the Jagannatha Temple record known as the Madala Panji. In the manner of all pre-modern Oriya manuscripts, the text of the Madala Panji was inscribed with an iron stylus on specially treated rectangles of palm leaf, then inked. The leaves were strung together by a cord passed through a hole in the centre of each leaf and protected by a pair of wooden covers.1 Several sections of the Madala Panji were recorded simultaneously by different temple officials, called scribes or Karanas; multiple versions were compiled; and decaying old leaves were recopied regularly.2 Debate among historians over the reliability of the Madala Panji centres on the section known as Raja Bhoga Itihasa, which purports to chronicle the temple’s founding and early development.3 Scholars have pointed to discrepancies among versions of the chronicle as reason to discount the reliability of the Madala Panji as a whole.4 The chronicle, however, is only one part of the cumulative document, which began to be compiled around 1600. The major function of the Madala Panji was to provide a record of day-to-day temple activities, including calendrical rituals, appointments of new temple servants, economic transactions and special visitors. Such is the information contained in the version of the Madala Panji acquired by the Orissa Research Project in 1970 from the temple scribe (Deula

Karana) of the Jagannatha Temple and subsequently presented to the Orissa State Museum.5 This information is not subject to doubt as to authenticity, and it is wonderfully rich in detail. The manner in which the Madala Panji contents accrued is summarized in a leaf from the document itself, which records the appointment of a new temple scribe in the 38th regnal year of Birakeshari I (1766/67): Royal decree to the temple superintendent, the manager of the temple estates, all the workers, the chief of the thirty-six servant groups, the cooks and head cooks, and the leaders of the seven lanes [of the city]. Bishnu Patnaik has been given the responsibilities of temple scribe. He will receive a cloth and sandalwood paste from the temple, and he will carry out the duties of temple scribe. According to age-old tradition, the duties consist of recording the decrees of the king and the administration of the temple lands. He records [transfers of] homesteads within the town of Puri; matters regarding the services of the thirty-six groups of servants; food offerings supplied by the king; the stoves in the kitchen; food offerings made on behalf of pilgrims; assigned places for food offerings; [text damaged, but the word may be “appointments”] of abbots; and deeds of sale by servants of Lord Jagannatha. Nothing should occur without his knowledge. The duties of the temple scribe...[text damaged]. He will receive a cloth and remuneration according to custom. Let this be done in the thirtyeighth year of my reign, tenth day of Makara.6

The matters listed here are precisely the sort recorded in the transcription of the temple scribe’s version of the Madala Panji that we consulted in Heidelberg.7 The only problem in using the Madala Panji arises from the fact that many of the leaves are undated, although numerous others are dated clearly to specific regnal years of the Khurda dynasty kings of the 18th through early 20th centuries. In our citations of Madala Panji entries, any dates given are taken from within the leaves, which usually begin or end with the regnal year of a named king, as in the example just quoted. The dates follow the calculation of regnal years by Kedarnath Mahapatra.8 Some leaves give only the regnal year without the king’s name. Internal evidence—a person’s name that also appears in a fully dated leaf, for instance— sometimes suggests which king’s regnal year is appropriate. Dating an undated leaf by its proximity to fully dated leaves is risky, since reading through the leaves in the order they were numbered by the Orissa Research Project clearly shows that the temple scribe did not keep the leaves in chronological order but sorted them according to subject, in order to create useful references for the performance of his duties. For instance, all the surveys of stoves in the kitchen, ranging in date over a century, were found within the same bundle.

The dated leaves are inscribed with the regnal year (anka) of a king, who is usually, but not always, named. This system is described by LSS O’Malley: The Oriyas have an era distinct from the Christian, the Muhammadan and the Hindu methods of reckoning time. It is based on the reigns of the ancient Rajas of Khurda, whose descendants have lost the territory held by their ancestors, but have a spiritual principality, as they are in charge of the temple of Jagannatha. The most striking characteristics of this era are as follows. The figure 1 and all figures ending in 0 and 6, except 10, are omitted. The last anka year of one king and the first anka year of the succeeding king fall in the same year. The year begins on the twelfth tithi [lunar day] of the bright half of the month of Bhadra.9

Since the lunar month Bhadra (or Bhadraba) corresponds to August– September in the Gregorian calendar, each regnal year is expressed as two Western years, for example 1749/50.

1. The history and technique of Oriya palm-leaf manuscripts are presented in J P Das (1985:51–61). 2. The Madala Panji was recorded in four volumes by four different scribes: the Raja Mandala (pertaining to the king’s activities in the temple), recorded by the Sitha Karana and kept in custody of the Raja of Khurda in his Puri palace; the Niti Mandala (pertaining to daily rituals in the temple), recorded by the Behera Karana and kept in custody of the Deula Karana; the Khei Mandala (pertaining to remuneration distributed to the temple servants), recorded by the Dandi Karana and kept in custody of the Tadau Karana; and the Karmangi (pertaining to duties of temple servants), recorded by the Panjia Karana and kept in custody of the Patajoshi Mahapatra (also called Chhatisha Nijoga Naeka) (Senapati and Kuanr 1966:815). 3. ORP Ms 1; ORP Ms 192. 4. The debate over this portion of the Madala Panji is summarized in J P Das (1985:115–6) and Kulke (1987:1–3). 5. Kulke (1987:10–14). The manuscript is listed as Deula Karana in the bibliography in Eschmann et al (1978:491). Oriya transcriptions and English summaries of six bundles of leaves

from the document are available in the Orissa Research Project Archive, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. Unfortunately, only those six bundles, constituting just one quarter of the total of 15,000 leaves, had been transcribed when the manuscript was transferred to the Orissa State Museum. 6. 2 3 27v. This designation follows the numbering system assigned to the six large bundles of leaves transcribed by the Orissa Research Project. Each of the six (designated by the first number) was made up of eight to twelve smaller bundles (designated by the second number), each consisting in turn of about forty individual leaves inscribed on both sides (designated by the third number and r [recto] or v [verso]) (Kulke 1987:16). 7. In Heidelberg, Purna Chandra Mishra reviewed the Oriya transcriptions, and together we prepared new English translations of pertinent material. Those translations are used throughout this text. 8. ORP Ms 102, passim. 9. O’Malley (1984 [1908]:93).

Orissa

Dhenkanal District

Cuttack

• ••

•

Bhubaneshwar

•

Pipli

Puri District

Phulbani District

•

• Ganjam District

Konarak

Puri Khurda Chilka Lake

Bay of Bengal

Nayagarh Koraput District

Ladakh

••

India Rajasthan

•

Joshimatha Badrinath

• Govardhan Uttar Pradesh

Nathdwara

Gujarat

Madhya Pradesh

•

•Dwarka

Orissa

•

Calcutta (Kolkata)

West Bengal

Puri

• Warangal Andhra Pradesh

• Shringeri These maps show only the place names mentioned in the text. Kerala

•

Rameshvaram

Bay of Bengal Bastar District

INTRODUCTION – INVISIBLE EARTHENWARE

As both archaeology and ethnographic studies show, unglazed earthenware clay has always been the preferred medium for ceramic vessels in households and communities of Hindu India. The diverse roles of earthenware pots have been inseparable from the nature of this modest material dug from fields or riverbanks, quickly shaped, and bonfire-hardened into forms that are seemingly fragile yet tough, disposable yet infinitely renewable. In the kitchen, earthenware’s inherent porosity allows cooking pots to sit directly over a fire without shattering from thermal shock and also enables jars to cool drinking water by evaporation. In Hindu religious rituals, earthenware containers for offerings are used just once—exhausting their purity and power in that single use—before being carefully discarded. At village shrines, earthenware votive figures of horses and elephants are dedicated, and then left to crumble. After ritual pollution of a household through birth or death, all earthenware vessels are discarded and replaced with new ones. The natural colours of fired earthenware clay—red or black—convey symbolic meanings relating to sacred or secular usages. Foreign visitors to India, accustomed to associating “ceramics” with shiny white plates and cups, often fail to notice the ubiquitous earthenware, or else they interpret it as “primitive”, as a failure of technological development. But the favouring of earthenware has been a conscious choice for reasons that lie largely outside technology. Clays suitable for high-fired stoneware and porcelain are available in the subcontinent, although they were not mined to make hard, durable, non-porous ceramic vessels until the advent of modern factories. Historically, glazing was confined to earthenware made by Muslim potters within the sphere of Mughal influence in northern India. The best place to see the perfect adaptation of unassuming earthenware used to be the platform of a railroad station, where tea vendors approached the open windows of halting trains carrying battered aluminium teapots and trays of handthrown, handle-less red clay cups. Upon request, they poured streams of hot, milky, ginger-flavoured tea into the clay cups. The porous clay protected the customer’s fingers from the steaming liquid, while each cup was new and untouched, reassuring the strictest Hindu concern for polluting contact with other castes. A well-travelled observer of these cups could see that their contours and textures varied from region to region, even from station to station, ranging from graceful, flower-like forms

left, below Vendor sells tea

to train passengers. centre, Below Clay tea cup

on train window ledge, near Calcutta. right, below Potter moulds a

tea cup from the mound of clay on the revolving wheel (Bolpur, West Bengal).

pulled from the silky golden clay of the Ganges Delta to thick red cones made in the Rajasthan desert. The train’s departing lurch was the signal to passengers to drop their emptied cups on to the tracks, where the wheels quickly ground the clay to powder. Meanwhile, not far from the station, a potter crouched before his whirling wheel, swiftly shaping more cups from a miniature mountain of clay. Ethnographic studies of earthenware pottery in India are plentiful. Building on a foundation of articles documenting pottery in a particular village or local area, several volumes have examined production on a regional (Behura 1978) or national (Behura and Saraswati 1966, Saraswati 1978, Shah 1985a, Huyler 1996, Perryman 2000) scale. Expanding beyond considerations of village-based potters, some studies have focused on urban potter communities (Krishnan 1989, Kramer 1997) or on ritual uses of earthenware (Shah 1985b). This study is the first to describe in detail a community of potters working for a major religious institution, and to explore how the role of temple servant affects the potters’ understanding of their work and of themselves. As a pilgrimage centre of national importance, supported by the patronage of successive regional dynasties and by fervent popular belief, the Jagannatha Temple requires earthenware in great quantities for the creation and distribution of the sacred food that is an integral feature of daily ritual and pilgrimage. Three hundred potters participate as temple servants in maintaining the temple’s ritual cycle by performing their divinely assigned task—to produce a repertory of unglazed earthenware pots with distinctive faceted walls, fired to a ruddy red. Each manifestation of this infinitely multiplied pot form is used just once—to prepare the cooked meal of the temple deities, to offer the food, and to distribute it to temple servants and pilgrims—before being disposed of in a prescribed manner. The potters’ rewards extend beyond land, shelter, and a share of the sacred food to a rich mythology embodied in their annual festival and a profound conviction of the sacred necessity of their daily work.

This study demonstrates that the concepts elaborated at the ritual heart of the cult of Jagannatha suffuse even the mundane activities at the periphery, invisible though those activities may be to most ritual specialists and devotees. Reflecting devotional attention to the centre, scholars have focused on texts and doctrines, on architecture, on the temple’s historical role as regional centre, or on those temple servants who occupy ritually and politically conspicuous roles. Nonetheless, the grand cycle of temple activities would be profoundly transformed should the “invisible” pots and their makers be removed from it. Perhaps that transformation is already underway. Just as glasses and porcelain cups have replaced the clay cups on tea vendors’ trays, so the pressure of modern

City of Puri

State Highway 8 Bhubaneshwar

scale in kilometers 0

Indradyuma Tank

Nuasahi

Atharanala Bridge

Tikarapada

Badasahi Alamachandi Temple

•

Kusasahi

Jail

•

Hospital

Bada Oriya Monastery

•

Parbatipur

Jagannatha Ballabha Radhaballabhi Monastery Monastery Temple Office Municipal Market

•

Uttara Parshwa Monastery

•

Gundicha Temple

•Bus Stand

Pandita Monastery

• Train Station

•Palace

•Emara

•

Monastery Raghabadasa Monastery

Monastery

a nd Da oad a R d B a an d Gr

m Ku

a bh

Beleshwara Temple

•

Lion Gate

• Panjabi Monastery

•Lokanatha

•

• •

The Jagannatha Temple

• Shriramadasa

•

Narendra Tank

Markandeya Tank

Dhipasahi

Kumbharasahi

Hulahulia River

Gopalpur

Jenapur

•

Siddha Monastery

Cha

Mochisahi

kr a

t ir t

Dakshina Kali Temple

•

Mahiprakasha Monastery

• Shankarananda Monastery

Shwetaganga Tank Chikiti Monastery

•

Balisahi

Swargadwara

Swargadwara Road

Temple

Bay of Bengal

•

secular economic life threatens the community of potter servants, who struggle to balance their religious dedication and their daily finances. This study, conducted between 1979 and 1981, observes the potters’ technical prowess, sustained by devotion, and also examines the tensions within their relationships with more powerful temple servants and authorities—notably the cooks who are the potters’ counterparts and main customers within the temple walls. We conclude that the role of the potter as temple servant is at once glorious, as demonstrated by texts and personal interpretations of the potters’ divinely-appointed service, and pathetic, as shown in the brutality of caste-based hierarchy and cash-based exchange penetrating the modern temple’s daily operations. The temple town

The Jagannatha Temple, Puri.

The role of the temple potter, despite the greater complexity of context, is ultimately not so dissimilar from that of village potter. Located on the periphery of the temple town of Puri, where their smoky and potentially dangerous occupation causes the least inconvenience, the potters’ communities are easily overlooked unless one is searching for them. Before describing the origins of this project and the structure of the narrative, we will begin by casting a sweeping glance across Puri. Puri faces the Bay of Bengal, so the sun rises from the sea. Long before daybreak, fishermen of the Nolia community have paddled far out in boats intricately pieced from driftwood. As the sky brightens, triangular patchwork sails pull the boats back to shore. Along the water’s edge stroll shawl-wrapped Bengali visitors whose families have vacationed for generations at venerable seaside hotels. The fishermen, wearing conical hats plaited from palm leaves, push their boats beyond the surf and haul in their nets. Their wives quickly count the catch and load their baskets to take to market. Bengali matrons bargain for fish to be prepared by their hotel kitchens for lunch, while wheeling gulls and wild red dogs watch for remnants. Slanting inland above the low roofs of the town, the sun’s raking light picks out the whitewashed stone tower and the three lower, pyramidal roofs of the Jagannatha Temple. From the temple tower’s peak, red and yellow cloth flags point inland with the breeze. Before dawn, while the walled courtyards still lay in deep shadow, several temple servants made their way by lamplight to the main door of the sanctum. They broke the clay seal applied to the door’s lock as the last duty of the preceding night, and entered to awaken the three gods who preside over this city and all its movements—Jagannatha, “Lord of the World”, his sister Subhadra and his elder brother Balabhadra. Standing side by side on the Jewel Altar beneath the stone tower, the three deities gaze down on their servants with unblinking eyes—Balabhadra’s and Subhadra’s

The Jagannatha triad. Painting, pigment on prepared cloth, 91.2 x 158.2 cm. Puri, circa 1955. Girard Foundation Collection, Museum of International Folk Art (DCA), Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo by Blair Clark. The blue panel below depicts priests conducting the worship to offer cooked food in three clusters of clay pots arranged before the three deities—Jagannatha (right), Subhadra (centre) and Balabhadra (left). The food thus consecrated will become mahaprasada, “great grace”.

almond-shaped, but Jagannatha’s perfectly round.The image of Jagannatha is over two metres tall, the other two nearly the same size. The three images are made not from the customary metal or stone, but from roughly-shaped logs of neem wood painted in the prescribed colours (Jagannatha is black, Balabhadra is white, and Subhadra is golden-yellow). Short arms, without hands, reach forward from either side of the oversized heads of Jagannatha and Balabhadra, while Subhadra is an armless column. Usually, the strange forms are concealed and adorned by rich ensembles of garments, jewels and floral garlands, governed by seasonal and ritual requirements. Later in the morning, worshippers and pilgrims from all parts of India will press into the sanctum to gaze devoutly upon these unique images, performing darshan, the central act of witnessing the deity. Although temple priests and scholars debate the many layers of meaning embodied in the Jagannatha triad, most worshippers know the dark-faced god as a compassionate lord who watches over them and rewards their devotion. As a father feeds his children with the leftovers on his plate, so Jagannatha succours his devotees with his nourishing and powerful consecrated food, known as “great grace” or mahaprasada. Twists of smoke begin to drift from the vents beneath the flat roof of the massive kitchen in the south-east corner of the temple’s outer compound. Temple priests have relit the sacred flame to kindle fires in hundreds of stoves, and cooks are preparing the deities’ first main meal of the day.

Worshippers on the beach at dawn, Rasa Purnima festival.

Emerging from lodging houses crowded into the grid of lanes between the shore and the temple, clusters of men and women wearing the plain white garments of pilgrimage, led by the pilgrims’ priests or Pandas who have served generations of their families, converge on the shore at the place called Swargadwara, “Gate of Heaven”. In languages of all corners of India, Pandas instruct pilgrims in the first duty of their pilgrimage, a purificatory bath in the sea. Hesitantly, the pilgrims— many seeing the ocean for the first time—crouch in the cold surf. Then, dripping and shivering, they follow the priest’s directions for a brief ritual to feed their ancestors with “rice balls” shaped from damp sand. Thus prepared, they walk up the sloping lane toward the temple, passing shops selling sweets and souvenirs and beggars crouching on the curb. They enter the main gate, facing east and guarded by a pair of painted stone lions, to behold the deities. The morning express train from Calcutta whistles importantly as it crosses the bridge over the river that forms the landward boundary of the sacred town. As the train pulls into Puri Station, red-jacketed porters jog barefoot alongside, negotiating with passengers leaning out the windows. Pilgrims’ priests in white shawls and dhotis query travellers about native places and names of ancestors, seeking pilgrims they can claim as hereditary clients. Rickshaw drivers bargain for fares. Wealthy Bengalis exit the first-class cabins to supervise the removal of piles of luggage, while peasants clutching small bundles jump down from the second-class cars.

The train’s whistle reverberates through the village of Tikarapada, located on the river bank, not far from the bridge. The village’s several dozen households of potters have been awake and busy since before sunrise. Men move damp pots, prepared the previous day, from their workshops into patches of sunlight in adjacent yards and lanes. Women bend from the waist to sweep household verandas with palm-leaf brooms, skirting rows of small pots they made by lamplight the previous evening. Groups of chattering children straggle through the lanes toward the school. When someone switches on a radio in a workshop, Jagannatha’s devotional songs, meltingly sweet, fill the fresh morning air. A potter helps two farmers load fired pots into large hemispherical baskets, which the farmers carry on their heads through the lanes to the square at the village entrance, where their wooden-wheeled cart stands ready. Towards noon, the cart piled high with round-bottomed red pots, pulled by two short-legged white bullocks, will creak slowly past the Lions Gate of the Jagannatha Temple and turn the corner to the South Gate, where the farmers will deliver the pots to the temple cooks’ storehouse. By late morning, temple priests have conducted the ritual presentation to the deities of their first cooked meal, served on metal trays, and have completed the offering of hundreds of clay pots of additional cooked food destined for distribution to temple servants and devotees. In the temple market—the Ananda Bazaar, “Market of Bliss”—pilgrims and Puri householders negotiate with vendors for assorted sizes of pots full of rice, sweet and savoury curries, chutneys, flavoured yogurt and steamed and fried cakes, all part of the bounteous meal of Lord Jagannatha. Some pilgrims can afford only a token portion—a clay pot of rice split in half, a small clay cup of curry, or a clay dish of cakes, which they eat in the tree-shaded corners of the market. Wealthy pilgrims, or those who have come in large groups from distant towns and villages, order variety and quantity, including huge pots holding rice to feed forty or fifty people. As the farmers’ bullock cart heads homeward past the Lions Gate, temple bearers balancing baskets of leaf-covered pots on their turbaned heads hurry out through the jostling crowd to deliver sacred food to devotees waiting at hotels, pilgrim rest houses, and private homes. A sacred meal and a cup of tea One noon in January 1972, my friends Biswarup and Nivedita Bose and I were among those hundreds, perhaps thousands, who received a portion of Jagannatha’s mahaprasada. Signalling this event, the waiter in our hotel dining room seated us at a separate table (away from the guests eating the hotel lunch of fish curry) and wiped it carefully. Nivedita lifted the pots from the basket to the table, then spooned their contents on to fresh banana leaves that served as plates instead of the hotel

crockery.The rice was fragrant, and the thick vegetable curries, one seasoned mildly with mustard seed and the other with grated coconut, were surprisingly subtle in flavour. Biswarup explained that the Jagannatha Temple cuisine, unlike restaurant fare, made no use of chilli, garlic, onions, or exotic vegetables such as tomatoes and potatoes that had entered India in recent centuries; the dishes prepared for Lord Jagannatha preserved the aromatic seasonings used in the kitchens of the former royal courts of Orissa. Steamed cakes made from fermented rice and pulse flours combined the tangy sweetness of jaggery with a nip of camphor, cardamom and black pepperâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;flavours that reflected Orissaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s historical ties with South India. As artists who had lived their whole lives in the cultural centre and university town of Shantiniketan in West Bengal, Biswarup and Nivedita included potterymaking among their prolific skills. While savouring the rich tastes of the food, we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fail to notice the attractive pottery containers. Ruddily red, in assorted sizes but of a uniform hemispherical shape with a thick rim, these pots bore several rows of faceting around their bellies that made them appear metallic, as though beaten from copper, and each pot also had a circular facet in the centre of its round base. Late that afternoon we stopped for tea at a large shop situated across the main square from the Lions Gate of the Jagannatha Temple. As waning light threw the walls of the surrounding buildings into shadow, electric bulbs twinkled and the square bustled with activity, reverberating with sounds of rickshaw bells, crow caws and human voices. Beneath eye-catching signboards, open-fronted shops offered colourful hand-woven saris and towers of glittering brass and aluminium pots. Temporary stalls and tables displayed carved stone and wooden images of the Jagannatha triad, necklaces of holy beads, votive paintings and tiny cloth packets of sun-dried sacred rice and sweets, along with secular souvenirs and practical necessities. Worshippers moved ceaselessly in and out through the Lions Gate. Amidst the swirling crowd, individuals hurrying by paused to face towards the temple and bring their hands together in prayer. While watching the activity, we sipped tea from hemispherical clay cups. The unglazed earthenware cups, girded with a single narrow row of facets, seemed kindred to the pots that had served our lunch. Their appearance was quite different from the conical, wheel-thrown clay teacups I had encountered elsewhere in Bengal and Orissa. Round bases and subtle undulations in the walls indicated that they were formed by hand. When the shopkeeper came to collect our empty cups I held on to mine, but his face registered disapproval. Firmly claiming the used cup, he tossed it into a rubbish basket. Then he took a new cup from a stack in a glass-fronted cabinet and placed it in my hand. Nivedita explained quietly that, according to Hindu custom, clay cups once drunk from must be discarded, since use makes them ritually as well as physically impure.

Guna by his kiln (Kumbharapada, 1972).

Meanwhile, Biswarup asked where these cups had been made. The shopkeeper explained that he got them from the part of Puri known as Kumbharapada,“Potters’Quarter”, which lay just beyond the bus stand on the main road, and which also supplied pots to the temple kitchen. Early next morning, we set out by rickshaw to visit Kumbharapada. As soon as we turned a corner into the long straight lane of the potters’ quarter, pots in all stages of production appeared everywhere. We stopped by a short flight of steps leading through an ornate iron gateway into a yard containing an open-sided workshop. A white-haired man and a younger one came toward us. We introduced ourselves and began chatting. My notes show that we covered many topics relating to the faceted “jewel pots”, as Akrura Bishoi and his son Guna proudly called them.The image that stands out in my memory is handsome Guna posed before us, his bare feet spread and his head thrown back, his oiled hair black and wavy, his eyes bright and his lips red with betel juice. “We are the potter servants of Lord Jagannatha,” he proclaimed. “Only when cooked in our jewel pots does ordinary rice become mahaprasada. Prasada cooked in any other pots is not Lord Jagannatha’s.” Meeting the potters For years, Guna’s proud declaration rang in my thoughts. As I learned more about the Jagannatha Temple, I realized my extraordinary fortune in coming into contact with the temple renowned throughout India for its sanctified food—mahaprasada, distinguished by its “greatness” from the ordinary offerings or prasada of other temples—and for its vast kitchen complex with a staff of hundreds that produced the daily divine banquet.The integral role of those faceted red earthenware pots—a role that was exhausted by a single use—continued to intrigue me. During 1976– 79, while researching ceramics in Japan, I paid particular attention to earthenware vessels used for festivals and rituals in Shinto shrines and certain Buddhist temples and learned that the same concept of single sacred use applied there as well.1

left Brundaban on the first day of Kurala Panchami, 1979. right Hadibandhu.

Documentary and archaeological evidence shows that earthenware production once flourished in Japan, for domestic as well as sacred use, but by the 1970s little remained. Under economic pressure, Kyoto shrines connected to the imperial court had relaxed religious prohibitions against reuse and converted to washable porcelain vessels. In the village that had once supplied earthenware to those elite shrines, the honoured work was just a memory, and the last two women who made such vessels died during my stay in Kyoto. Even at Ise Grand Shrine, the pre-eminent pilgrimage destination in Japan, production of clay offering vessels survived only through the dedication of a few elderly farmers who gathered on Saturdays at the shrineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s earthenware workshop. With deepened appreciation, I remembered Guna and his father describing the three hundred potters who served Lord Jagannatha in Puri. Finally, I returned to Puri for a deeper look at the potters, their work and their place within the great institution of the Jagannatha Temple. During my first meeting with Purna Chandra Mishra, I told him of the potterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s declaration that had drawn me back. He admitted that he had paid little attention to potters until then, focusing like all devotees on the merits of the sacred food that the pots contained. A native of Puri and a Brahmin whose faith and culture tied him closely to the temple, he was also a historian whose career involved him in research on various aspects of temple history and organisation. He understood my eagerness to tease out the meanings of the pots and the potters in relationship to the larger patterns of temple activities. The following morning we made our initial field trip to Kumbharapadaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;where our first stop was the workshop of Guna Bishoi.

Kapila and his daughter Pageli

Maga

Hata, his wife Haramuni and their daughter Mina

Bansi

Lakshmidhara

Sarathi, his wife Nishamani and their son Duryodhana

Trilochana

Brudabanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stepmother Malati and her great-grandson Muna

Trinathaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife Harsamani and son Suratha

Prafulla and his son Niranjan

Lakshmidhara’s mother Taramani

Bansi’s wife Bisika

Sabitri, on the family land during the black gram harvest

Purna’s preliminary research had revealed that Kumbharapada was only the most prominent of three related villages of potters serving the temple. By chance, his wife Sureshwari, who taught Sanskrit at Puri Women’s College, and her students had recently “adopted” another of the potters’ villages, Tikarapada, for a community service project.They funded a school taught by a village woman, arranged for repairs to public property, and promoted savings accounts.That successful association had made it easy for Purna to visit Tikarapada and meet the headman, Hadibandhu Bishoi. We decided to focus upon Tikarapada in our research. Kumbharapada, situated near Puri’s crowded centre, included a large proportion of other Hindu caste groups, as well as one of the two mosques in Puri, and it was affected by the roughness of urban life around the bus stand. Gopalpur lay far outside the city, at the end of a dirt track that would be impassable during the rainy season, and the farmer population outnumbered the handful of potter households. Tikarapada, located just a few kilometres beyond the far end of the Bada Danda or Grand Road, locus of the renowned annual Cart Festival of the Jagannatha Temple, was a selfcontained and quiet community dominated by potters. Our research quickly fell into a pattern. Most mornings we met at my lodging and rode our bicycles to Tikarapada. Leaving the cycles in an empty plot belonging to Hadibandhu, we made our rounds of the village—literally, since one roughly circular lane linked all the houses and the workshops of the thirty-five potter families who lived there. Apart from our daily impromptu encounters in the village, we also arranged formal interviews in my lodging, where we could talk in privacy. From time to time, we visited Kumbharapada and Gopalpur as well. Our mornings in Tikarapada usually began and ended in conversation with Hadibandhu and his neighbour, Brundaban Bishoi, a senior member of another influential lineage.The two men differed profoundly in temperament. Brundaban was stern and puritanical (disapproving of tea, cigarettes and cinema), and he sponsored traditional evening gatherings for reading religious texts aloud. Hadibandhu was loquacious, inquisitive, given to intellectual speculation, and known for his evening walks to a tea stall near the railroad crossing to smoke a little marijuana. Hadibandhu expressed his devotion to Lord Jagannatha in the flamboyant altars he constructed for the potters’ annual ritual, Kurala Panchami, and he maintained a hall of sacred texts within his household compound. Almost any topic we raised was bound to elicit contrary opinions from the two men, but they shared a deep interest in helping us explore the nature of their community’s work as temple servants. The other members of potter households quickly became familiar as well. The older men, all accomplished potters, included grizzled Artta; youthful Bansi with a wild tangle of grey hair; Kapila, who managed one of the largest workshops; Maga with his shrill parrot-like laugh; and Hata, whose pensive comments often evoked

the good old days. Lakshmidhara, Sarathi, Prafulla and Trinatha were just assuming new roles as married householders and beginning to take on greater responsibility for community-wide activities.Younger still, the irrepressible Trilochana delighted in offering us green coconuts plucked from the trees of their owner—a temple cook—even as the cook was talking with us. According to custom, we addressed the married women as “wife of ” their husband or “mother of ” their children rather than by their proper names. The young wives passed us with sari ends drawn modestly over their faces, but the older women chatted freely with Purna and took me into their kitchens to feed me while bombarding me with friendly questions. We met especially often with bright and earnest Sabitri, who had returned to her father Brundaban’s house after an unhappy marriage in Kumbharapada and who ran the nursery school sponsored by Sureshwari’s students. We were gratified that the potters seemed to enjoy our visits. As a foreigner, I offered novelty and diversion, but Purna Chandra Mishra meant much more. This university-educated Brahmin was happy to have tea in potter households, even though convention should have required him, as a member of the highest caste, to refuse to dine with Shudras, the lowest. He became a source of counsel on all sorts of matters ranging from health, finances and astrology to strategies for dealing with the temple cooks, who were forever plotting to reduce payments to the potters. Despite the convention of equality among temple servants of all caste groups—the equality symbolized by the distribution of Jagannatha’s sacred food to all servants and all pilgrims—the potters did not escape the stigma of their status either in the temple or in the outside world, where they were often victims of their poverty and lack of education. The potters’ compensation for their patient answers to our questions was their rewarding association with Purna Chandra Mishra. In order to understand the relationship of the potter servants of the Jagannatha Temple to the work and social role of ordinary village-based potters, we made several trips to other parts of Orissa, and I visited village and urban potters’ communities elsewhere in India, including Ladakh, Gujarat, and Kerala.These investigations confirmed my initial impression that the circumstances of the Puri potters were truly exceptional. The book’s structure This report of our findings has three sections.The first section presents the organisation of the Jagannatha Temple in relationship to the complex system of temple servants and the extensive use of pots within the temple, particularly in the kitchen. It introduces the potters as temple servants, as seen from the temple’s perspective. The second section shifts to the potters’ perspective in their village-based world, with its technical, social, ritual and mythic dimensions. In their village,

especially in their workshops, the potters loom large as skilled professionals who draw strength and inspiration from their belief that the god Vishnu created their ancestor and equipped him with sacred tools in order to supply a basic requirement of human life. The technical and mythical aspects of tools, work processes and work cycles are examined in detail, culminating in a description of the annual potters’ festival, Kurala Panchami, which celebrates the potters’ divine origins and patronage. The third and final section links these two realms of temple and village, while narrating the history of the potters as temple servants. Legends and traditions ascribe a distinguished status to the Puri potters, as servants of Lord Jagannatha, yet their stature seems pitifully diminished in the light of the struggles that have taken place over the past two centuries—particularly since Independence in 1947—to define the temple organisation in legal terms of rights and obligations. On a daily basis, the potters experience the bewildering contradiction between the sacred and secular definitions of themselves as temple servants. The story we tell relates the reality we discovered during field work conducted between 1979 and 1981, long enough in the past for us to decide against a narration in the “anthropological present”. In the intervening years, the pace of transformation has continued to accelerate in the operations of the temple as in the larger social, economic and political structures of India. Pressures on the potters’ community from within the temple as well as from society as a whole have intensified. We describe an environment in which the potters’ proud legacy as temple servants and their economic and social struggles were in precarious balance. Since then, the balance seems to have shifted still further away from the potters’ favour as temple servants, although their prospects as individuals may have improved in some cases. The occupation of potter has become less reliable as the basis of the community. We feel fortunate to have spent time in the Puri potters’ community when a glorious concept of its divinely-sanctioned operation, as narrated to us by Hadibandhu, Brundaban and the other elders, was compellingly visible in daily procedures and annual rituals. Our goal is to record the potters’ own collective vision of their role as servants of the Jagannatha Temple. We might be criticised for failing to maintain critical distance, or for appearing to speak of the “good old days”, just as the potters used to tell us of better bygone times. To the contrary, even as the potters narrated to us their own idealised version of their “history” as temple servants, we witnessed their current struggles within those sanctified bonds. For convenience, in this text we have separated different strands of narration, although for the potters—and for us, the witnesses—all unfolded simultaneously. They strove to understand the relationships, and we were sympathetic as they sought guidance from their idealised self-definition as temple-servants to deal with the actuality of their lives. 1 My research on ritual earthenware in Japan is described in Cort (2008).

PART I â&#x20AC;&#x201C; POTS IN THE JAGANNATHA TEMPLE

chapter 1

THE JAGANNATHA TEMPLE: PILGRIMS, SACRED FOOD AND TEMPLE SERVANTS

The potters who serve the Jagannatha Temple are but a single element of the great network of belief, ritual, duty and reward that energizes the living institution. The creation and distribution of sacred food (mahaprasada) is a powerful central process that draws pilgrims from throughout India. Prepared by various categories of temple servants working in the temple kitchen, using raw materials gathered from dedicated temple lands, the mahaprasada is sanctified in the daily offerings to the temple deities, then distributed to temple servants and devotees. This chapter will present the chief elements of that process, so as to provide the context for the potters’ role in the temple. Pilgrimage

Pilgrims leave the Jagannatha Temple with clay pots and palm-leaf packets of mahaprasada.

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The whitewashed stone tower of the Jagannatha Temple rises majestically over the green and red landscape of coastal Orissa.1 To the traveller or pilgrim approaching Jagannatha Puri, “the city of Jagannatha”, by land, the tower first beckons from a great distance across flat fields punctuated by clusters of coconut palms. Once, like the tower of the “ black pagoda” at Konarak to the north, it also guided seafarers following the coast. In the eight centuries since the Jagannatha Temple was erected at the command of the founder of the Imperial Ganga dynasty, Chodaganga (r 1078–1147 or 1150),2 allegedly to replace a still older temple in this ancient holy place, this tower has been the focus of widening rings of spiritual, political and geographical identity.3 The original shrine of the patron deity of the dynasty incorporated the local aboriginal cult of the wooden god, but the temple gradually became associated with overarching Hindu cults, and Jagannatha was identified with the ninth incarnation or avatar of Vishnu. Supported by a growing body of legends and sacred texts, the temple drew worshippers as pilgrims from ever greater distances toward the sacred centre—the Jewel Altar beneath the tower, bearing the images of Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra. Ordinarily, these three main images remain deep within the temple.4 Once a year, however, on the second day of the bright fortnight in the lunar month of Ashadha (June–July), they are brought out through the Lions Gate and placed on three towering, newly constructed and adorned wooden carts.Throngs of worshippers pull the carts along the length of the broad central road of the city to the Gundicha Temple, said to

During Ratha Yatra, pilgrims visit the three deities on their carts in the square in front of the Jagannatha Temple.

be Jagannathaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birthplace, where the deities rest for seven days before returning the same way. Exaggerated tales by British missionaries of pilgrims throwing themselves beneath the wheels of the cart created the English term â&#x20AC;&#x153;juggernautâ&#x20AC;?, an inexorable force that crushes whatever lies in its path. To worshippers of Jagannatha, however, the Ratha Yatra or Cart Festival, when the deities move through the city among their ecstatic devotees, is the highpoint of the annual cycle of temple rituals.5 Huge crowds assemble in Puri annually for Ratha Yatra, and cyclically for the ritual renewal of the images (Nabakalebara) at intervals specified by astronomical calculations (most recently in 1996), but numerous pilgrims approach the city at all times of the year as they have for centuries.Their goal is liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Within the network of sacred sites (tirtha) that stretches across the Indian subcontinent, Puri occupies multiple positions of meaningfulness.6 Pilgrimage is tirtha yatra, journey to a tirtha, or simply yatra. As one of the four most important and holy tirthas marking the four cardinal directions, Puri is also known as a dhama, together with Badrinath in the north, Rameshvaram in the south and Dwarka in the west. It is also one of the four cardinal centres of ascetic orders, or pithas, reputedly established by the sage Shankara in the ninth century, along with Joshimatha in the north, Shringeri in the south and Dwarka in the west.7 Puri is believed to be a powerful sacred field, or kshetra. As shankha kshetra, the sacred field of Puri takes the shape of a conch shell (shankha), one of the four emblems of Vishnu, with the broad end of the shell lying at the Lokanatha Temple in the west and the tip resting in the east, at the Beleshwara Temple. Swargadwara to the south and Indradyumna Tank to the north-east mark the other boundaries, with almost half of the sacred shell lying beneath the Bay of Bengal.8 In the centre

or navel of the conch rises the low artificial hill called Nilachala, Blue Mountain, where the Jagannatha Temple stands. At one time all but the wealthiest pilgrims made the journey to Puri on foot, however great the distance. A British visitor in 1868 met a party of Punjabis who had journeyed two thousand miles and had been travelling for four or five months.9 Soon after taking control of Orissa in 1803, the British constructed a paved highway following sections of the ancient pilgrim road leading south from Bengal. A British administrator described the “Jagannath Road” in the 1870s as a work of almost Roman solidity, being raised fifteen or twenty feet above the level of the country across which it runs, visible from afar like a great dyke with its solid masonry bridges, long rows of shady trees and lines of telegraph posts and wires. The surface is metalled with laterite, or iron-sandstone, a dark red stone found all over Orissa which makes admirable roads, bridges and other buildings. Along this noble road passes all the year round, but chiefly at the seasons of the great festivals—the Dol Jatra or Spring festival in January, and the Rath Jatra or Car festival in June—an endless string of pilgrims from all parts of India; the poor limping wearily on foot, the rich in bullock carts or palkis, to the great temple at Puri.10

Railroads followed. Starting in 1918, the Puri Express reduced travel time from Calcutta to twelve hours.11 Nowadays, whole villages of pilgrims from Rajasthan travelling by chartered bus make the round-trip journey in just a month.12 The usual activities of the pilgrim after reaching Puri have not changed greatly since the British administrator Andrew Stirling described them in 1846: After the preliminary ceremonies are gone through and the fees paid, the pilgrim goes and looks at the image; he next bathes in the sea, and then returning to the temple, purchases some rice which has been recently offered to Juggernauth, and with it performs the obsequies of his deceased ancestors. During his stay he attends the daily solemnities, and makes offerings through the Brahmins of rice and other articles to Juggernauth. For payment the officiating priests supply him with food ready dressed, which is particularly nutritious, as having been first presented to Juggernauth.... The penitent also feasts the Brahmins, and eats with all descriptions of pilgrims, of whatever caste.13

What the pilgrim does in Puri depends partly on his or her social status and level of education and wealth. The more knowledgeable the pilgrims in textual traditions, the more thoroughgoing their activities will be within the sacred field of Puri.14 Some pilgrims go around the shankha kshetra in a clockwise direction, starting and ending at the Lokonatha Temple and passing along the ocean shore, in the belief

that this circumambulation stores up merit. Some make the rounds of the five sacred bathing places (also called tirtha) in Puri.Two are on the shore—Swargadwara, “Gate of Heaven”, and Chakratirtha, where the divine log of wood from which the first image of Jagannatha was carved washed ashore. The other three tirthas are artificial ponds—Shwetaganga Tank, Markandeya Tank and Indradyumna Tank.15 Some people come here towards the end of their lives, in the full conviction that the person who dies in Puri is released immediately from the cycle of rebirth.16 Sacred Food: mahaprasada

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For the average peasant pilgrim who spends only a few days in Puri, even the longsought goal of darshan of the images on the Jewel Altar may be brief. The most memorable religious moments may be, instead, the holy bath in the surf and the meals of sacred cooked food.17 Indeed, while in other respects Puri shares the characteristics of all great tirthas, its unique feature is the nature of the food that is cooked in the temple kitchen, offered to Jagannatha as “pleasure” (bhoga), symbolically consumed by him, and then distributed to the pilgrims as the deity’s leftovers or “grace” (prasada). Prasada is common to all temples dedicated to Vishnu, though it may be as simple as a few uncut fruits. Jagannatha’s customary bhoga, however, is a complete cooked meal on a grand scale—grand in the variety of dishes offered, using only strictly prescribed seasonal and costly ingredients, and grand in the quantities cooked and distributed.18 Three such meals are presented daily. Sheer quantity and quality alone, however, are not the chief source of the food’s fascination. Partaking of Jagannatha’s leftovers is not a secular feast (although the flavour of the food is renowned) but a religious act. The consecrated food offering of the Jagannatha Temple, known by the distinguishing name of mahaprasada, “great grace”, is said to be the holiest of all prasadas in India, worth the hardships of traversing the subcontinent. (Although ordinary devotees associate mahaprasada with Jagannatha, temple ritual specialists know that the cooked food offered to Jagannatha, and therefore prasada, becomes mahaprasada only when it is then offered to the goddess Bimala, thought to be the original presiding deity of the place where the Jagannatha Temple stands and worshipped at a shrine in the south-west quadrant of the inner compound.)19 The power of mahaprasada purifies the partaker, confers blessings, cures disease, and absolves the dying person of all misdeeds.20 Thus, pilgrims returning home take small cloth packets of dried sacred rice to distribute to relatives and neighbours and to keep on hand against the moment when, sprinkled into a glass of plain water, the rice will transform the water into mahaprasada to moisten the lips of the dying. Sherds from the clay pots in which the food is cooked have the same capacity and are also carried home by pilgrims.

One sign of the greatness of mahaprasada is its power to transcend all usual caste barriers to commensality.21 Attitudes toward food consumption among Hindus dictate that a member of a higher caste may not receive cooked food from a person of lower status. Indeed, the orthodox Brahmin eats behind closed doors, so as to avoid the very glance of a lower-caste person, which might corrupt the purity of the cooked meal, especially the cooked rice. The process of eating contaminates food, and sharing of leftovers is restricted to intimate family members. The legends related to pilgrimage in Puri, however, reiterate in many forms the core idea that, where mahaprasada is involved, Brahmin and Untouchable may eat cooked rice from the same plate. Writing in the 19th century, William Wilson Hunter described the role of mahaprasada in drawing pilgrims from all castes and from throughout India: Sureshwari Mishra serves mahaprasada to Purna Chandra Mishra, their son Bapi and her sister Kuni, in their courtyard of their home, Puri.

But the true source of Jagannathâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s undying hold upon the Hindu race consists in the fact that he is the god of the people. As long as his tower rises upon the Puri sands, so long will there be in India a perpetual and visible protest of the equality of man before God. His apostles penetrate to every Hamlet of Hindustan preaching the sacrament of the Holy Food. The poor outcast learns that there is a city on the far eastern shore in which high and low eat together.

In his own village, if he accidentally touches the clothes of a man of good caste, he has committed a crime, and his outraged superior has to wash away the pollution before he can partake of food or approach his god. In some parts of the country, the lowest castes are not permitted to build within the towns, and their miserable hovels cluster amid heaps of broken potsherds and dunghills on the outskirts. Throughout the southern part of the continent it used to be a law, that no man of these degraded castes might enter the village before nine in the morning or after four in the evening, lest the slanting rays of the sun should cast his shadow across the path of a Brahmin. But in the presence of the Lord of the World priest and peasant are equal. The rice that has once been placed before the god can never cease to be pure, or lose its reflected sanctity. In the courts of Jagannath, and outside the Lion Gate, 100,000 pilgrims every year are joined in the sacrament of eating the holy food. The lowest may demand it from, or give it to, the highest. Its sanctity overleaps all barriers, not only of caste, but of race and hostile faiths; and I have seen a Puri priest put to the test of receiving the food from a Christian’s hand.22

Hunter related a story told to him by an Oriya servant: There came a proud man from Northern India, who swore that he would look upon the Lord of the World, but that he would eat no leavings of mortal or immortal being. But as he crossed the bridge outside the sacred city, his arms and legs fell off, and there he lay on the roadside for two months, till a dog came out of the town eating a fragment of the holy food, and dropped some as he passed. The proud man crawled forward on his stomach, and grubbing with his mouth in the mire, ate the leavings, all slavered from the jaws of the unclean animal. Thereupon the mercy of the good lord Jagannath visited him; new limbs were given to him, and he entered the holy city as a humble disciple.23

Clearly, this equalizing power is of special significance to those of lowly station. In the 19th century, as the pilgrimage roads grew smoother, pilgrim guides from Puri, fanning out across India to recruit new devotees, placed emphasis on the nature of Jagannatha as Jagabandhu, “friend of the universe”, and Dinabandhu, “friend of the lowly and the poor”, 24 and on his mahaprasada as the token of that nature. During a terrible famine in Orissa in 1866, crowds of peasants converged on Puri in the certainty that Jagannatha would feed them.25 In all probability, the powerful meanings of mahaprasada accrued gradually to the customary provisions made by kings to the temple of their tutelary deity. The chronicles contained in the temple record known as the Madala Panji, however, present a story of purposeful actions on the part of devout Ganga dynasty rulers.

At first, according to the chronicles, only cold food was offered.26 Anangabhima III (r 1211–45), who dedicated his kingdom to Jagannatha in 1230, initiated the offering of cooked food, centred around rice, the staple food of eastern India. Anangabhima “set aside ten thousand bharanas of paddy to be given as bhoga to the Lord and distributed among the poor”, and he offered eighty-four “big kuduas of cooked food” to the deity on the Jewel Altar.27 Rather than using a term indicating a bell-metal pot (customary in temple kitchens) or atika, a domestic cooking pot made of clay, the text specifies kudua, designating the distinctive faceted, red clay pot used to cook rice in the Jagannatha Temple kitchen. In some sources, the advent of cooked food offerings is placed much earlier, through association with the legendary founding of the original temple of Jagannatha by King Indradyumna and the elevation of the tribal deity to a manifestation of Vishnu, under royal patronage. A tribal version of the legend recorded by Verrier Elwin relates how a Brahmin named Vidyapati, sent by Indradyumna in search of Vishnu, found in the land of the tribal Saoras a fowler named Vishwabasu, who secretly worshipped a blue stone image and fed it daily with fruit and flowers. Vishwabasu revealed the image to Vidyapati, but the deity did not come to take the offerings; instead, a voice spoke to the fowler: O faithful servant, I am wearied of thy jungle flowers and fruits, and crave for cooked rice and sweetmeats. No longer shalt thou see me in the form of thy blue god. Hereafter I shall be known as Jagannath, the Lord of the World.28

Madala Panji accounts, stressing the virtuous actions of successive kings in improving facilities for offering the food and increasing its diversity, suggest that, by the 15th century, the quantities were exceptionally grand. The founding king of the Suryavamshi dynasty, Kapilendra or Kapileshwar (r 1435–67), found it necessary to grant additional land to the potters who supplied cooking pots to the temple kitchen in order to increase their numbers. In 1470, his successor, Purushottama (r 1467–97), built a hall for offerings, called the Bhoga Mandapa, at the front of the main complex of temple buildings.29 The Bhoga Mandapa represented a new and expanded role for mahaprasada. Established royal offerings of cooked food, supplied from lands dedicated to the temple (amruta manohi) and presented on the Jewel Altar, were known as “fixed offerings” or kotha bhoga.30 In contrast, the Bhoga Mandapa was the setting for offering excess food prepared in the temple kitchen for distribution to pilgrims (bhoga mandapa bhoga) or on behalf of monasteries (upadhi). The quantity of that excess food increased over time in response to the growth in the numbers of pilgrims. A need to manage growing crowds is suggested by Kapilendra’s order of 1446 to construct a wall (bahara bedha, “outer wall”) around the entire temple complex, followed in 1472 by Purushottama’s decision to erect

The red-roofed Lions Gate, in the outer temple wall, is the main entrance to the Jagannatha Temple complex. The offering hall, or Bhoga Mandapa, is located just inside the inner wall; behind it are the towers of the dance hall, the assembly hall, and the sanctuary containing the Jewel Altar.

an inner wall (kurma bedha) enclosing the main temple buildings, including the new Bhoga Mandapa.31 Madala Panji records credit various Khurda dynasty kings with elaborating the menu further and improving facilities, contributing to a still wider distribution of sacred food.The dynasty’s founder, Ramachandra I (r 1568–1600), decreed an increase in the variety of dishes.32 Mukunda I (r 1657–88) introduced lavish innovations in the category of sweets.33 A grandmother of Birakeshari I (r 1739–93) donated funds to erect a “golden hall” to be used for drying the remnants of mahaprasada rice.34 The regular offering of cooked rice and accompanying dishes to Lord Jagannatha on the Jewel Altar became associated with the well-being of the kingdom itself. During the reign of Purushottama (1600–21), when Mughal vassals threatened the temple, the main images were secreted on an island in Chilka Lake for several years and then taken to a remote village; only cold food was offered to them when they were thus in exile.35 In effect, the deities were reduced once again to the condition of eating wearisome “jungle fruits and flowers”. The temple was desolate: “The cooking of Puri mahaprasada was stopped forever”, as were all the major temple rituals, and Puri “took the form of a cremation ground”36 instead of the auspicious conch shell. The deities were removed again for safekeeping during

30 29

27 1

Inner wall

22 24

Outer wall

Plan of the Jagannatha Temple.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Jewel Altar Inner Sanctum Audience Hall Jaya Bijaya Gate Dance Hall Offering Hall (Bhoga Mandapa) Passage from Kitchen to Inner Sanctum Shrine of Indrani Lakshmiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kitchen Temple of Bimala Shrine of Bata Ganesha Shrine of Bata Mangala Shrine of Bala Mukunda Kitchen Passage from Kitchen to Inner Sanctum

16 Shrine of Ishaneshvara 17 Bathing Dias 18 Ananda Bazaar 19 Lions Gate 20 Well 21 Drainage from Kitchen 22 Kitchen 23 Path 24 Handi Joganiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office 25 Well 26 South Gate 27 West Gate 28 Burial Ground 29 Well used for Bathing Festival 30 North Gate

This map shows only the structures mentioned in the text. It is based on Starza 1993, fig. 3, which identifies all structures.

carpenters and blacksmiths.55 Some potters cultivate their own small plots of land or work as day labourers. The relationship of the potter servants to Jagannatha is representative of a servant-patron relationship of the kind that was once prevalent between potters and wealthy zamindars, princely rulers and religious institutions.56 Typically, the potter in such a relationship received a plot of arable land on which to live and work in return for supplying pots; he was known as a sebaka or servant. In Orissa, with the abolition of princely states and landlord systems and the reduction of temple landholdings, most of these relationships vanished after 1947. In all of India, only a few other groups of potters working as temple servants approach the scale of the Puri potters’ activities. A smaller community of potters in the village of Kapileshwar, outside Bhubaneshwar, supplies pots to the Lingaraja Temple as well as to some Vaishnava temples in the city. Some major pilgrimage temples dedicated to forms of Vishnu elsewhere in India, such as Govardhan in Uttar Pradesh or Nathdwara in Rajasthan, attach similar importance to elaborate cooked food offerings and thus support communities of potters to supply the required pots.57 Pots For The Jagannatha Temple

top Stacks of pots made by

male potter servants. below Maga completes the beating of a bai handi.

dvd

The male potter servants, numbering around three hundred, make wide-mouthed pots in ten different sizes, ranging in height from twelve to forty-one centimetres.58 They throw the preliminary form on a fast-turning wheel for the sake of the symmetry of rim and shoulder, then use a pair of tools—a wooden paddle and a fired-clay anvil—to close the bottom of the pot, and to enlarge and give final shape to the body. This process (which will be described in detail in chapter 5) is identical to the procedure followed by virtually all potters throughout India, but one crucial difference sets this process and its products apart.Whereas pots made elsewhere are paddled out to a perfectly smooth spherical or ovoid shape, the pots made for the Jagannatha Temple seemingly retain the marks of their beating. Actually the marks are added to the smooth, beaten form during a second phase of the beating process, using a special paddle. Several tiers of facets cover the sides, while a circular mark appears in the centre of the pot’s round base. Women of the potters’ community make a dozen varieties of small containers and lamps. They shape them by hand alone, as they are not permitted to use the potter’s wheel, but they finish the larger sizes with paddle and anvil to create a faceted appearance. Insofar as we could determine, the faceting is unique to pots destined for use in the Jagannatha Temple.59 No faceted pots have been excavated as yet from early historical sites in Orissa. Major temples such as Lingaraja in Bhubaneshwar, which might yield useful material on the subject, are protected from archaeological inquiry because they are in active worship. The potters of Kapileshwar serving the

top Bansi’s wife Bisika adjusts the shape of a hand-formed oli. below Pots made by women potters, with and without facets.

Lingaraja Temple make smooth, ovoid pots quite distinct in appearance from the rounded, faceted pots destined for the Jagannatha Temple. Material evidence on Puri pots is lacking for the very reason that the Jagannatha Temple supports a group of three hundred male potters and their families: according to rules of ritual purity, clay vessels can be used in the temple only once. By the end of each day, used pots must leave the temple, either as containers for cooked food or as part of the rubbish removed in the thorough daily cleansing of the kitchen. Potters do not save pots unless they are cracked, smoke-darkened, or otherwise unacceptable to the temple. The oldest pots we ever identified were damaged ones that had been incorporated instead of bricks into the structure of a workshop wall built some fifty years earlier by the grandfather of the current owner.60 They differed only in minor detail from present-day pots. This was entirely proper, for the essence of the Puri potters’ service (as detailed in the Madala Panji description quoted earlier) is to produce an endless stream of identical pots, each approximating the same ideal form. Innovation in such a context is an undesirable departure. The faceting on the walls of the pots and the round mark on their bases (topi) distinguish these vessels as destined for use in the Jagannatha Temple for the production of mahaprasada. The physical features have multiple meanings. At the simplest level, they serve as proof that their contents are genuine, not the food of another temple kitchen passed off by unscrupulous priests as mahaprasada. Furthermore, Puri potters understand the facets to represent lotus petals totalling (figuratively, not literally) the auspicious number of 108. Hadibandhu told us that the facets on the pot replaced the lotusflower diagram customarily drawn with rice-flour solution on the purified ground where a plate of cooked food was to be offered to an honoured guest. He proudly explained that the potters’ ability to make pots with ready-made lotus diagrams contributed greatly to the efficiency of the daily food-offering rituals in the temple. KC Rajaguru, a learned Brahmin knowledgeable in esoteric temple rituals, interpreted the tiers of beaten facets and the circular mark in the centre as counterparts of the lotus-like sacred diagram or Shri yantra associated with the Goddess. The Shri yantra makes the pots into vessels of female power essential to cooking using the baishnabagni mantras. The fire that is ritually renewed in the temple kitchen each morning, then used to light the hundreds of stoves, is called baishnabagni, “Vishnu’s fire”. The priest strikes the flame during the enactment of a fire sacrifice or homa, remaining mindful that the goddess Lakshmi, bathed and purified after her menses, is waiting in the fire pit to meet Vishnu.61 The sexual union of the two deities sparks the flame.62

Base of a temple pot, bearing facets and topi.

Visually, the faceting on the walls of the pots destined for the Jagannatha Temple resembles beaten marks on the walls of raised metal cooking vessels. In the hierarchy of materials from which vessels can be made, clay ranks below gold, silver and other metals.63 Most temple kitchens use cooking pots made of brass or bell-metal alloy. In the Jagannatha Temple kitchen, however, where thousands of pots are required daily, metal vessels would be impossibly costly to purchase and maintain and would not be appropriate as containers in which to carry away the mahaprasada. Although the clay pots made for the Jagannatha Temple lie at the opposite end of the scale from gold pots, they are frequently dignified by the epithet “golden”. The Oriya potters’ sacred text, the Kurala Purana, records a prayer to Vishnu recited by the first potter, Rudrapala: “Let my golden pots not break.” Rudrapala’s descendant, Sunaikara (“Gold-worker”), turns a clay pot into a “golden ewer” by the strength of his devotion. The Puri potters, by producing the huge quantities of faceted pots required daily by temple ritual and procedure, provide vessels that are “as good as gold”. A second prominent characteristic of the pots destined for the Jagannatha Temple is their red colour. Red is associated with auspiciousness and with the energy of benevolent goddesses. The cooking pots commonly used in Oriya kitchens, known as atika, are intentionally blackened by firing in a smoky atmosphere. They are also used for rituals following a death or to propitiate a malevolent goddess, but they are not permitted within the walls of the Jagannatha Temple.64 While the demand for mahaprasada draws pots into the temple kitchen, at a more fundamental level the steady flow of pots into, through and out of the temple is propelled by concepts of ritual purity and pollution that govern cooked food. Of all materials that may be used as food containers, porous clay is the most vulnerable to the polluting effect (metaphorically as well as literally) of contact with body effluvia such as saliva. Metal pots may be renewed by scouring with sand or rinsing with acidic fruit juice, but clay pots cannot be reclaimed. In most households, a cooking pot is used until it breaks, or until an event such as birth or death in the extended family requires that the household’s clay pots be replaced. Such a pot may last as long as one or two years. By contrast, the life span of a pot selected for ritual use is short and clearly defined. At the beginning of the ritual, the pot is pure by virtue of its newness, having passed through the purifying fire. At the conclusion of the ritual the pot has fulfilled its role and is discarded in a body of water or at a special place meant for the disposal of rubbish.65

Since faceted clay pots are the chosen vessels of the Jagannatha Temple kitchen, the rhythm governing their use is regulated by the rule that they can be used only once. Far from diminishing their value, however, this brief but special role charges them with meaning not accorded to ordinary black cooking pots. So also their makers, the potters of the Puri community, are dignified by their work in producing these pots. Their role as temple servants is to produce an endless stream of perfectly replicated, pure and new versions of the archetypal pot. As Maga assured us:

The Shri yantra.

I do not mind the time and effort that it takes to make the same shape of pot over and over again. I feel sad only when something happens to my pot— when it breaks in the kiln or on the way to the temple and so loses the chance to serve Lord Jagannatha.

Temple Cooks Of all the categories of temple servants, the most significant for this study, aside from the potters themselves, are the temple cooks. They hold key positions among the many categories of servants associated with the temple kitchen, the vast and bustling site of the preparation of all food offerings and chief destination of earthenware pots within the temple. In the next chapter, where we examine how pots are used within the temple, we will look more closely at the various roles of temple servants working within the kitchen. Here we will introduce the cooks as temple servants, then describe the kitchen complex that is the arena for their work. In 1979, there were 475 households of temple cooks (Suaras) and their leaders, head cooks or Mahasuaras. According to the Madala Panji, sixty-four cooks were among the original temple servants enrolled by Ananghabhima III.66 Early in the temple’s history, the cooks of the day received a grant of three bati or sixty acres of residential land in Mochisahi, the quarter east of the temple, where the cooks’ population is still concentrated.67 (Unlike the potters who need work space, they did not require land for anything other than their homes, since they worked in the temple kitchen.) The original Suaras are said to have been of non-Brahmin (perhaps even tribal) status, but they were elevated to the Brahmin caste (the requisite for a Hindu cook) for the sake of expanding the activities of the kitchen. According to a story told to us by KC Rajaguru, a certain king dreamed that Jagannatha wished to eat rice pudding (khiri) and fried cakes (kakara). The king decided to express his devotion by creating a great “ocean” of rice pudding on the floor surrounding the altar, enclosed by a wall of cakes. Since the kitchen did not have enough cooks to prepare such quantities, the king’s ritual advisor, the Rajaguru, received the king’s

CRAFTS

Temple Potters of Puri Louise Allison Cort and Purna Chandra Mishra

498 pages, 268 colour photographs 30 b&w drawings 3 map with DVD 8.5 x 11” ( 216 x 280 mm), hc ISBN: 978-81-89995-09-6 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-0-944142-75-2 (Grantha) ₹3500 | $65 | £42 2013 • World rights