Scholarly Reconstructions

Long, long before Balabhadra became known as Jagannath's older brother, scholars believe he might once have been worshipped in a completely different way — as a fierce, one-legged Shiva god, carved standing on top of a simple wooden pillar.

Anncharlott Eschmann's classic essay in The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa (1978) identifies Balabhadra with Ekapada Bhairava, the single-legged Shaiva pillar-deity worshipped among tribal communities of ancient Odisha, discussed further in this collection's philosophy cluster. Thirteenth-century sculptural panels at Konark retain this earlier iconography clearly, demonstrating that the current Balabhadra form absorbed, but crucially did not entirely erase, this older Shaiva substrate.

A number of scholars believe that Jagannath's very earliest form might not have been a wooden log at all, but rather an image of the fierce lion-god Narasimha, bursting dramatically out from within a wooden pillar.

The Stambha-Narasimha thesis, advanced by Eschmann, proposes that Jagannath's origin lies in the Vaishnava absorption of earlier tribal wooden-pillar deities, mediated specifically through the widely known mythology of Narasimha emerging from a pillar to slay Hiranyakashipu. This thesis offers a compelling explanation for two otherwise puzzling features of the current iconography: the deity's distinctively stumpy, limbless form, and his unusual wooden material, both discussed at length in this collection's origin cluster.

Archaeologists made an astonishing discovery: stone statues of Jagannath and his siblings dating back roughly eleven hundred years — and remarkably, they weren't found anywhere near Puri at all, but far away in what is today Chhattisgarh.

Ninth-century stone Jagannath-Balabhadra-Subhadra triads have been discovered in Dakshina Kosala, corresponding to the upper Mahanadi valley of modern Chhattisgarh, predating the current wooden Puri iconography by several centuries. This significant archaeological finding lends substantial material weight to the western-Odishan or Chhattisgarhi origin theory discussed in this collection's origin cluster, moving the theory beyond legend into documented material evidence.

According to the temple's own ancient diary, a king named Yayati Keshari built the very first stone temple dedicated to this divine trio well over a thousand years ago — long before the current temple at Puri was ever constructed.

Yayati Keshari of the Somavamsi dynasty, reigning approximately from 885 to 925 CE, according to the Madala Panji discussed in this collection's sthala cluster, constructed the original stone temple for the Jagannath triad within Dakshina Kosala. The current temple's location at Puri and its distinctive wooden form thus represent a later relocation and significant iconographic shift away from this earlier stone-temple tradition.

The powerful Ganga king Anantavarman built the massive temple that still stands in Puri today, roughly nine hundred years ago — and he did it not only out of devotion, but also as a clever way to help unite his large and diverse empire under one shared symbol.

Anantavarman Chodaganga, reigning from 1078 to 1150, as historian Hermann Kulke details extensively, deliberately promoted Jagannath as a unifying imperial deity, transforming what had previously been a comparatively local pilgrimage shrine into a full-fledged state temple explicitly competing in scale and ambition with the Chola dynasty's celebrated Brihadeeswarar Temple. Construction of the temple spanned from roughly 1140 to 1198 CE, continuing well beyond Anantavarman's own reign.

Scholars carefully studying Odisha's history figured out that there were three main paths by which local tribal gods gradually became absorbed into mainstream Hindu worship — one path through Shiva, one through the Goddess, and one through Vishnu.

Eschmann's influential typology of Hinduization identifies three distinct pathways operating across Odisha: a Shaiva pathway, through which tribal deities were absorbed as forms of Bhairava or Rudra, exemplified by Balabhadra; a Shakta pathway, through which tribal goddesses were absorbed as forms of Devi, exemplified by Subhadra and Vimala; and a Vaishnava pathway, through which tribal deities were absorbed as forms of Vishnu, Narasimha, or Krishna, exemplified directly by Jagannath himself. Puri stands out as uniquely retaining all three of these pathways simultaneously within a single sanctum, rather than following just one.

One of the most important things scholars have discovered is that there was never actually a hard, sudden break between the old tribal ways of worship and the newer mainstream Hindu ways in Odisha — instead, it's all really one long, continuous, unbroken story.

Eschmann's central thesis holds that Odisha's tribal-Hindu religious life forms what she terms an 'uninterrupted continuum,' rather than representing any clean break between a supposedly primitive tribal past and a subsequently civilized Hindu present. Jagannath stands as the material embodiment of precisely this continuum — his priesthood seamlessly includes former tribal lineages, the Daitapatis, working alongside Vedic Brahmins, without either group's role being treated as a historical relic superseded by the other.

In every single ceremony held at the temple, tribal priests and Brahmin priests work side by side as genuine partners, neither one replacing the other — and remarkably, this kind of arrangement doesn't really happen anywhere else quite like it does here.

The Daitapati-Brahmin dual priesthood constitutes Puri's clearest institutional signature and its most concrete living evidence for the Eschmann-Kulke-Tripathi thesis. Daitapatis, descended from Vishvavasu as discussed in this collection's origin cluster, retain an exclusive monopoly over physical contact with the deities during Anasara, Snana Yatra, and Nabakalebara, while Brahmin sevayats perform the accompanying Sanskrit ritual liturgy. Neither priesthood can function independently of the other, representing a codified tribal-Vedic institutional synthesis with genuinely few, if any, parallels elsewhere in India.

The temple's own book of records — the Madala Panji, a huge palm-leaf chronicle written by generations of temple scribes — is being carefully digitized right now. In October 2025 the Odisha government announced a project called Gyana Yagnya Mandap, a digital library at the site of the old Raghunandan Library in Puri, dedicated to preserving the Madala Panji and other rare temple manuscripts. Meanwhile, a statewide manuscript survey called the Gyan Bharatam Mission has already registered more than fifty-three thousand palm-leaf manuscripts in Odisha alone.

In October 2025 the Odisha government announced the Gyana Yagnya Mandap, a new digital library at the site of the old Raghunandan Library in Puri, specifically to preserve and digitize the Madala Panji and other palm-leaf ritual manuals of the Jagannath temple. Alongside this, the statewide Gyan Bharatam Mission manuscript survey, launched 16 March 2026, has been registering privately-held palm-leaf manuscripts through the "Bharatam" app, with more than 53,950 manuscripts recorded so far and Puri among the priority districts. A dedicated Palm-Leaf Manuscript Museum is also planned. The primary corpus of the tradition, in other words, is not a closed archive — it is being catalogued and expanded in real time.

For years people thought of Sarala Das's Odia Mahabharata as "the" book. But scholars have now counted about two hundred and eighty different palm-leaf copies of it just in the Odisha State Museum — and no two are exactly alike. Every copyist across five centuries added, changed, or shaped the text a little differently. So Sarala Das's masterpiece is not one book. It is a whole living forest of related books.

A 2020 digital-humanities paper in the International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications argues that roughly 280 palm-leaf manuscript copies of Sarala Das's Odia Mahabharata survive in the Odisha State Museum alone, and that "no two copies are exactly the same." The author proposes a POS-tagging and corpus-linguistics approach to studying textual variation rather than pursuing a single "authentic" text, reframing Sarala Das not as a fixed founding book of Odia literature but as a live manuscript tradition of hundreds of divergent copies — a fundamental shift in how the text should be read and cited.

Not everyone in Odisha worshipped Jagannath as their family deity. The great historian Hermann Kulke has pointed out that Odisha's roughly twenty-four smaller feudal kingdoms — the "little kings" — each had their own tribal goddess called a thakurani, served by tribal priests, as their family deity. The little kings still honored Jagannath as the god of the whole state, but each of them kept a separate, deeply local goddess for their own family and village. Two whole religious worlds ran side by side.

In a Sahapedia interview, the Indologist Hermann Kulke draws a careful structural distinction between state-level Jagannath worship and the local tribal-goddess (thakurani) cults of Odisha's roughly twenty-four ex-feudatory "little kingdoms." Each little kingdom carried its own tribal goddess as kuladevata, served by tribal priests, while the same king simultaneously honored Jagannath as the state deity. This is a clean, scholar-stated separation between "state religion" and "local/tribal religion" that most popular retellings blur — and it complicates the flat opposition of "tribal versus Sanskritic" Jagannath by showing that both existed, side by side, within the same rulers' religious lives.

The Odisha State Museum holds somewhere between thirty-seven thousand and fifty thousand palm-leaf manuscripts, on twenty-seven different subjects — Vedas, tantras, astronomy, law, Ayurveda, mathematics, sculpture, music, and more — in five different languages. Some are shaped like fish, some like fans, some like parrots, and some like swords. Some are even written on ivory or bamboo instead of palm leaves. Among them is a rare ivory manuscript of the Abhinava Gita Govinda, finished on 6 April 1494, dedicated to King Purushottama himself.

The Odisha State Museum holds an estimated 37,000 to 50,000-plus palm-leaf manuscripts across twenty-seven subject categories including Veda, Tantra, Jyotisha, Dharmasastra, Ayurveda, Ganita, Silpasastra, and Samgita, in Odia, Sanskrit, Bengali, Telugu, and Persian — a far larger and more diverse textual universe than the Panchasakha-focused corpus most popular accounts describe. The collection includes manuscripts shaped like fish, fans, parrots, and swords, and materials beyond palm leaf, including ivory, bamboo, and bhurja bark. A specific highlight is the illustrated ivory manuscript of the Abhinava Gita Govinda, dated by inscription to 6 April 1494 and dedicated to Gajapati king Purushottama, directly linking the museum's archive to the Gita Govinda textual tradition already central to the Puri temple's daily ritual.

During Rath Yatra, the Gajapati king himself steps out of the palace to sweep the platform of Jagannath's chariot with a golden broom. Scholars Julia Hegewald and Subrata Mitra have argued that this famous ceremony — the Chhera Pahara — is not just symbolic humility; it is a carefully structured moment in which the very highest human authority publicly acknowledges the tribal Daitapati servitors as sharing the deity's own ancestry. In that single act, the whole social hierarchy is briefly turned upside down.

The scholars Julia Hegewald and Subrata Mitra argue in "Jagannatha Compared" (Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics) that the Chhera Pahara — the Gajapati king's ritual sweeping of the chariot platform during Rath Yatra — functions structurally as a moment of highest-to-lowest social integration, tied to the tribal ancestry of the Daitapati servitors who share the deity's ritual body. Under this reading, the ceremony is not merely a display of royal humility but a coded acknowledgment of the tribal-priest lineage's foundational role in the deity's own identity — a scholarly reframing worth reading alongside the tribal-origins critique in the origin chapter.