Oh! Juggernaut

 “Juggernaut” is the Anglicized name for the Hindu god Jagannath, the “Lord of the Universe.” Jagannath, a form of the god Vishnu, presides over a massive temple in Puri, India alongside his brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra. The most famous ritual at the Puri temple is the Rath Yatra. During the Rath Yatra the wooden forms of the gods are ceremonially placed on large towering carts, or chariots, and pulled through the streets of Puri by devotees. “Juggernaut” entered the English language in the early nineteenth century as colonial Britons in India encountered Jagannath and his chariot and tried to make sense of what they were seeing.

Rev. Claudius Buchanan was the first British official to popularize “the Juggernaut” in both Britain and the United States in the early 1800s. Buchanan was an Anglican chaplain stationed in India and a staunch supporter of Christian missions to India. As might be expected from a missionary during the period, Buchanan’s took a negative view of Juggernaut. In his letters sent back home from India, Buchanan presented Juggernaut as a dangerous, violent, and bloody religious cult. These letters were reprinted throughout Christian missionary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, in 1811, Buchanan published Christian Researches in Asia, his broad examination of the religious state of India and its need, as he saw it, for Christian missions. In Christian Researches Buchanan described devotees throwing themselves under the wheels of Juggernaut’s chariots. He used a biblical reference to the Old Testament’s description of the heathen god Moloch (to whom people sacrificed their children) to explain Juggernaut to his Christian audience.

“The idol called Juggernaut has been considered as the Moloch of the present age; and he is justly so named, for the sacrifices offered up to him by self-devotement are not less criminal, perhaps not less numerous, than those recorded of the Moloch of Cannan.”

Buchanan’s description of Juggernaut became quite popular. Christian Researches in Asia was reprinted in numerous editions in America and Britain. The descriptions of Juggernaut were also excerpted in nearly every missionary magazine in the country. So, when the first American missionaries were sent to India from New England in 1812, it is no surprise that they sent back their own descriptions of Juggernaut to be published in America missionary magazines that continued to represent the god as violent and idolatrous. This image of Juggernaut was so well-known in Protestant missionary circles that one missionary magazine from 1813 even used Juggernaut as a metaphor for the vice of alcohol. Like Juggernaut, the article argued, alcohol has “shrines on the banks of almost every brook” and “four thousand self-devoted human victims, immolated every year upon its altars.” Thus, “juggernaut” started to become a term for any violent or dangerous force.

Over the next decades, as Americans learned more about India and Hindu religions, the meaning of “Juggernaut” began to split between its general use as a powerful dangerous force and its more specific reference to the Hindu god at Puri