Bonding with the Lord: Jagannath, Popular Culture and Community Formation ed. by Jyotirmaya Tripathy and Uwe Skoda

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bonding with the Lord: Jagannath, Popular Culture and Community Formation ed. by Jyotirmaya Tripathy and Uwe Skoda Tracy Coleman Tripathy, Jyotirmaya, and Uwe Skoda, eds. Bonding with the Lord: Jagannath, Popular Culture and Community Formation. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2020. Building on work undertaken in the Orissa Research Projects—ORP I in the early 1970s, ORP II in the early 2000s—this collection of essays further expands the scope of Jagannath studies. While the publications following ORP I focused on Puri and examined the religio-political history of Jagannath, and works resulting from ORP II shifted the focus to various peripheral traditions in Odisha and their connections with Puri, the present volume explores "what Jagannath means in everyday contexts" (xvi). As the editors state in their theoretically rich introduction, "while not derecognising the historical Jagannath, what is attempted here is a novel look at the deployment of Jagannath in contemporary and popular cultural practices involving the sensorium in the widest sense. The project of culturalising and vernacularising Jagannath … not only materialises Jagannath in people's everyday practices but also democratises Jagannath scholarship, hitherto confined to institutional and textual articulations" (xvii). Far from "desacralising Jagannath and reducing devotees to consumers" (xviii), such an approach recognizes multiple registers and "multiple ways of experiencing sacred and secular Jagannath" and "highlight[s] people's agency" in the production and mediation of Jagannath culture (xix–xx). The volume is divided into three sections: (1) mediating Jagannath, including four chapters examining sight, sound, cinema, and performative spiritual discourse (prabachana) as modes of mediation; (2) practicing Jagannath, where three chapters explore food/prasad culture, household rituals, and devotional music as modes of practice; and (3) re-placing Jagannath, with three chapters focused on temples outside Odisha—in Chennai, New Delhi, and Agartala in Tripura; a final chapter by editor Uwe Skoda reflects on scholarly communities of practice and collaboration between European and Indian scholars in advancing Jagannath studies, and on their work thus far, including manuscripts and archives, publications and conferences, and exhibitions. Together these multidisciplinary studies exploring "bonding with the Lord" make a notable contribution to bhakti studies, asserting the significance of affect in embodied forms [End Page 444] of devotion entailing emotional and physical bonding among devotees and between devotees and Jagannath. In addition to the strong introduction that provides a theoretical framework for the volume overall, the chapters in section one, titled "Mediating Jagannath," identify central themes of omnipresence, accessibility, and intimacy underlying the analyses in every chapter. Just as Jagannath's state cult is associated with watchfulness and protection (9), so his internationally recognized eyes become the site of bonding in darshan and bhakti (6). As his familiar image circulates in the global marketplace far from Puri and Odisha, the "quintessential Jagannath" embodies the "presence of the sacred not only in the secular but also in the ordinary" (21). Divine presence becomes intimately accessible not only visually, but also aurally, in vernacular devotional songs (janana), made more popular, portable, and affordable as music technology advanced in the twentieth century (chapter 2). Similarly in film (chapter 3) and prabachana (chapter 4), vernacular media reach literate and illiterate alike, eventually traversing the Internet as well, enabling Odias in the diaspora to cultivate bhakti for Jagannatha. In all such forms of "material religion," the senses are engaged (78), inviting devotees everywhere, and in their everyday lives, to be "in communion with Jagannath" (82), and to encounter divinity in all that is ordinary (84-85). Illustrating these underlying themes, two chapters are especially compelling. In chapter 5, "Eating with Eyes: The Food Economy of Jagannath Culture," Umasankar Patra examines prasad that is cooked and sold in Odisha's urban temples and spiritual centers beyond Puri. Patra argues convincingly that such commercialization of "deterritorialized" prasad represents a democratization of Jagannath culture "driven by the 'periphery' to subvert the centralization of authority symbolised in the Puri temple" (92-93). In chapter 9, "Delhiwallah Jagannath and the Odia Diaspora," Gautam Choubey provides a social history of Delhi's temples at Hauz Khas and Thyagraj Nagar, examining how Jagannath culture "facilitate[s] secular enterprises such as occupational migration, community formations and even cultural revival in a foreign environment" (180). Evidence...