Puri: Gajapati Maharaja of Puri Divyasingha Deb Thursday performed the ‘Chhera Pahanra’ ritual, ceremonially sweeping the floors of the chariots of Lord Jagannath, Lord Balabhadra and Devi Subhadra.
Devotees will begin pulling the chariots shortly.
Clad in spotless white attire and carried in a silver-plated palanquin, the titular king of Puri arrived at the chariots, where he ascended each one and swept its floor with a golden-handled broom as priests chanted Sanskrit shlokas and sprinkled flowers and fragrant water.
The Gajapati Maharaja is regarded as the first servitor of Lord Jagannath and performs the ‘Chhera Pahanra’ as part of the traditional ‘Rajaniti’ (royal ritual).
The temple town has been blanketed by a multi-layered security cover with the deployment of around 13,000 personnel from the state police, central forces, Indian Navy and Coast Guard, while special focus is on crowd control, traffic management and emergency response, the officials said.
The administration has made elaborate security arrangements to prevent any untoward incident and taken steps to tackle waterlogging along the route that the chariots will take.
Puri received a staggering 143.8 mm of rain on the eve of the iconic chariot festival, and the weather department issued a warning for downpour and thunderstorms for Thursday.
Special arrangements have been made to drain out rainwater from the Grand Road and facilitate a smooth procession, as devotees will pull the chariots of Lord Jagannath, Lord Balabhadra and Devi Subhadra along the thoroughfare from the 12th-century shrine to the Shree Gundicha temple, around 2.6 km away.
