Baripada: As devotees rested their soles elsewhere in the state a day after pulling the chariots of the Trinity, thousands of others gathered here to witness the siblings’ sojourn beginning Sunday.
As tradition goes, the chariots — Taladhwaja and Darpadalana — of Lord Jagannath’s two siblings, Balabhadra and Subhadra are pulled on the first day. The chariot of the Lord, Nandighosh, would roll Monday.
Though celebration of Rath Yatra begins here along with Puri, the chariots of the deities are pulled from the following day starting with those of Balabhadra and Subhadra.
However, the deities were taken to their respective chariots as per rituals Saturday. Baripada hosts the second most popular Rath Yatra after Puri and so is known as ‘Dwitiya Srikshetra’. The uniqueness about Rath Yatra here is first, the car-pulling lasts for three days unlike Puri. The second is that the chariot of Devi Subhadra is pulled only by women.
The tradition of the Devi Subhadra’s chariot being pulled by women started in 1975. At that time the district administration made it a rule on the occasion of International Women’s Day that henceforth the Darpadalan chariot would be pulled only by women devotees.
So it was that among the thousands of devotes who have descended on this town, there was a large number of women.
There are two Jagannath temples in the town. While the bigger one organises the car festival with three chariots, the other temple is referred to as Banthia Jagannath (dwarf god) where the deities are smaller and only one car is used in the festival to take the trinity to Gundicha temple.
The culturally sensitive city not only attracts crowd from the neighbouring districts, but also from other areas of bordering Jharkhand and West Bengal.
The size of the crowd and of the chariots in Baripada are also next only to Puri. To ensure smooth conduct of three-day Rath Yatra, the district administration has made elaborate arrangements.
PNN
