Juggernaut

My first experience of this word was as a child, growing up in the UK. The term “juggernaut” is used in British English predominantly as the name for a large, articulated lorry with many wheels. The name, like so many others, was borrowed from another language.

An Indian word originally, juggernaut comes from the Sanskrit name for the god Vishnu, Jagganath. The British had trouble pronouncing the word and it became corrupted to Juggernaut. Jagganath means “lord of the universe” and is one of the many titles of Krishna (for he is also Vishnu, in one of his many incarnations). The dictionary definition of juggernaut is also “a literal or metaphorical force which is unstoppable and crushes everything in its path”. Note that in this form, the word is presented in lower case as it is no longer a proper noun. In a less familiar form, it can also mean “A belief or organisation, that requires blind and destructive devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed”.

The temple of Jagganath of Puri is located in Orissa, on the eastern coast of India. Every year, there is a procession in which effigies are made of the three gods of the temple (Jagganath, his brother Balabhadra and his sister Subhadra) and pulled through the streets of the city by devotees of the temple on huge rathas, or carts. This is where the British association with large lorries becomes obvious. The carts are constructed by traditional methods from scratch every year and dismantled at the end of the festival. A pot said to contain the ashes of Krishna is placed into the effigy of Jagganath every twelfth year. The carts are some fourteen metres high, weigh many tons and have between twelve and sixteen wheels. The two-mile procession from the temple to the beach is called Rathotsavam.

The procession is described (somewhat inaccurately) by Jules Verne in his classic book Around the World in Eighty Days:

A group of old fakirs were capering and making a wild ado round the statue; these were striped with ochre, and covered with cuts whence their blood issued drop by drop…stupid fanatics, who, in the great Indian ceremonies, still throw themselves under the wheels of Juggernaut.

This is possibly the passage that gave rise to the apocryphal stories about devotees throwing themselves under the wheels of the ratha in self-sacrifice to Krishna. The reality is that being so heavy and unwieldy, the carts would often run out of control, crushing hapless bystanders.