ARTS & EVENTS

Festival of the Chariots

Parade of splendor celebrates Hindu deities in Santa Monica

By Bridgette M. Redman

Three 50-foot chariots will once again parade down the streets of Santa Monica on Aug. 7, leading thousands of people to the return of the annual Festival of the Chariots, also known as RathaYatra. This Hindu parade and festival celebrates the Hindu god Vishnu’s triumphant return to his home town of Mathura nearly 5,000 years ago. The parade and festival are a long-standing tradition in Santa Monica, one broken only by the pandemic for the past two years. Sponsored by the ISKCON Los Angeles New Dvaraka Temple, the parade begins at 10 a.m. at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium (Main Street and Pico Boulevard). “We rumble down Main Street with all three chariots, the canopies flying up about 40 feet,” said Svavasa Dasa, president of the temple and organizer of the festival. Eventually they take a righthand turn and head to the ocean where they parade along the mile-long boardwalk from Santa Monica to the Venice Beach pavilion where the festival takes place from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The festival features live music, dance, chanting, children’s activities, a gift shop, tents with displays and information about the temple and a free vegetarian feast. “We cook for 10,000 people,” Dasa said. “We cook it all ourselves—we cook for a few days. What is cool about the food is that the people who cook it are all priests and priestesses in our society. They cook all this food and then we pray over it and we offer it as a blessing to the people who come down. It’s a pretty big event.” The crowd, Dasa said, numbers in the tens of thousands, often brought to the festival by following the magnificence of the parade. The Santa Monica festival began in 1977. Dasa came to LA in 1986 and has been leading the festivals ever since. He described it as a wonderful time to meet people who may not have known much about them or understood their traditions and why they do them. “A lot of people are very happy to hear that we are a spiritual movement,” Dasa said. “We believe in God. We introduce The annual Festival of the Chariots, also known as Ratha-Yatra, returns to Santa Monica on Aug. 7 after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic.

people to our culture. We have a main stage and on that main stage we have cultural Indian dances and then in our booths, we have people that give the philosophy of what we do and who we are.” Dasa described the festival as a family event where children are welcome. It also introduces people to the Center, ISKCON Los Angeles. The temple is next to Govidna’s Gifts and Govinda’s Restaurant, both well-known in the Southern California yoga and health food communities. At the temple, ancient Indian mantras are chanted by devotees and accompanied by exotic instruments and incense. “We have a museum that gives you a perspective of who we are and what we are,” Dasa said. “That museum is internationally known. We have a vegetarian restaurant called Govinda’s that is very popular and well known for its vegetarian, vegan kind of food. The festival brings a lot of people to our area to take a look at those things.” While the parade begins at 10 a.m., devotees will start their day at 4:30 a.m. At 7:15 a.m. there is a deity greeting and Lord Jagannath appears in the temple at 7:45 a.m. (Lord Jagannath is the avatar of Vishnu and it is from him that the English word juggernaut is from). At 8 a.m., the deities leave for the parade while the devotees have breakfast in the temple. This year they are excited to be returning after two pandemic years. Dasa pointed out that when you’ve been doing a festival for 46 years, people get used to it and look forward to it. “It’s going to be a breakout year,” Dasa said. “We’ve been shacked up for two-and-a-half years. When we go down to the Venice Beach area to do our street chanting, a lot of people ask when we are coming back. It creates a lot of excitement.” The Festival of Chariots is being celebrated in 100 major cities around the world. It commemorates a time when Lord Krishna appeared in Mathura and then became a king in Dvaraka, a city in India. He made a journey back to his hometown and the parade depicts Lord Krishna traveling with his brother (Balabhadra) and his sister (Subhadra). Each chariot is decorated with flowers and balloons. Dasa pointed out that the word “Krishna” refers to the supreme Lord and means “the All-Attractive One.” That is also the word for “God” in the Vedic culture and the reason why they commit to making the procession so pleasing and beautiful. Once the parade and festival are over, the chariots, which are made of aluminum, get folded up and placed in a storage locker. They’ve been engineered, Dasa said, so that they can fit in a 53-foot-long trailer. There they will wait until next year’s celebration, resting after the 2022 celebration that welcomes people back to the parade of gods.

Festival of the Chariots

Aug. 7 at 10 a.m. Starting location: 1855 Main Street, Santa Monica iskconla.com/rathayatra