Jyotirmaya Tripathy - Bonding with the Lord: Jagannath, Popular Culture and Community Formation

BONDING WITH THE LORD

BONDING WITH THE LORD

Jagannath, Popular Culture and
Community Formation

Edited by

Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Uwe Skoda

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For Hermann Kulke

CONTENTS

I congratulate Jyotirmaya Tripathy and Uwe Skoda on their fascinating anthology Bonding with the Lord: Jagannath, Popular Culture and Community Formation and for inviting me to contribute a foreword to it. This takes me back to my own sustained engagement with Odisha and Jagannath studies that defined me as a scholar. As a member of the two Orissa Research Projects (ORPs) of the German Research Council from 1970 to 1975 and from 1999 to 2005, it is alluring for me to reconsider their history in view of the present volume. It makes me see the present anthology as a logical expansion of some of the issues that my colleagues and I delved deep into.

One observation is particularly noteworthy. Looking back to the preliminaries of the second ORP, the subject of a few chapters in this anthology reminds me strongly of the conference with a very similar title Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion and the State in Orissa, which had been organised jointly together with Prof. Burkhard Schnepel in June 1997 at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg. The German Research Council financed the conference. The subsequently published conference volume with the same title was presented to the Chief Minister of Odisha, Naveen Patnaik in 2001. In fact, the inducement to organise this conference was the expected presence of several Odia and Indian scholars of Odisha studies at that time at Heidelberg such as Gaya Charan Tripathi, Gaganendra Nath Dash, Prasanna Kumar Nayak, Ishita Banerjee, Saurabh Dube and Subrata Mitra. What would have been more obvious than to invite together with them also the former German members of the first ORP to a conference for a kind of stocktaking about ongoing new research on Odisha about twenty years after the end of the first ORP. No exact plans about future cooperation existed yet at that time, although Burkhard Schnepel and I had toyed already with the idea of trying to apply for a second ORP. But the successful course of the conference and the consent and approval by the participants led to the clear decision to apply for a new project as the second ORP.

But it took more than a year to define in detail the new research agenda of a second ORP in view of the results of the first project and the individual and general accomplishments of Odisha studies during the last twenty years. As well documented by its major publication, The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, published in 1978, the first ORP had focussed primarily on Puri and its Jagannath cult. The result of the intensive debates about follow-up studies was to apply in 1998 for a successor project with the title Various Identities: Socio-Cultural Profiles of Orissa in Historical and Regional Perspectives. Its major idea was to extend the studies beyond Puri and its Jagannath cult into its hinterland and its various identities. The outcomes of the studies of the second project were anthologies like Periphery and Centre edited by Prof. Georg Pfeffer and Centers Out There? Facets of Subregional Identities of Orissa, which I edited with Georg Berkemer.

It is interesting and fascinating to read the Introduction of this anthology 20 years after the end of a great project on Odisha studies. But again, as in the case of the beginning of ORP II, the present volume rightly intends not only a visiting and revisiting of Jagannath; it reveals a clear progression and further advance of Odisha and Jagannath studies. Already the sub-title of the book Jagannath, Popular Culture and Community Formation and of its introduction reveal three such significant advances. They focus on community formation and not state formation (the subject of both ORPs in different ways), on popular culture rather than Brahmanical or tribal culture, and finally, not only in but also beyond Odisha.

To quote from the Introduction: Jagannath is metonymic of Odishas life-world, but what matters in this context to my knowledge is the fact that so far only very little genuine scholarly work has been devoted to these essential but neglected issues. Without going into details, but looking at the contributions to this anthology, I have the strong impression that it fulfils the necessary requirements to be a noteworthy intervention in the way Jagannath is understood and will inspire new projects on, in and beyond Odisha.

Hermann Kulke

Professor Emeritus, University of Kiel, Germany

When a non-resident Odia academic and a European scholar of Odisha meet and choose to work together on topics of mutual interest, Jagannath, the Lord of the Universe, is always an inescapable presence. With a dose of self-reflexivity we may say that Jagannath as a scholarly pursuit is perhaps the most authentic (or should we say the easiest) way of being an Odia and the most legitimate way of being a scholar of Odisha. Or so we thought, and embarked on this journey after working together for close to ten years.

Given that giant leaps have already been taken in terms of Jagannaths institutional history by scholars associated with ORPs as well as other independent researchers, the volume presents perhaps mere baby steps. However, they traverse a new ground by exploring Jagannath in popular culture and tracing His relevance in community formation. The nature of our enquiry demanded an involvement of scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds who approach the research questions from within a framework that is multidisciplinary.