Rath Yatra

About

What to give for Rath Yatra Rath Yatra falls on the second day of the bright fortnight of Ashadha, which puts it in late June or early July. Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra leave the Puri temple for the Gundicha temple and return eight days later, a journey back that Odia families call Bahuda Yatra and Bengali ones call Ulta Rath. You will see the festival written Ratha Jatra in Odia and Rathayatra as one word, and they are the same days. It is kept well beyond Odisha now, and ISKCON has carried it to cities that will never see Puri, so the gift is as likely to be bought in Ahmedabad or London as in Cuttack. What changes hands is almost always something for the shelf at home rather than something for the day itself: a single Jagannath murti, the three figures kept together, or a pocket temple that folds shut. The reason is practical. The festival is one day and the piece stays for years, so the gift worth giving is the one that earns a place in the mandir afterwards. We do not make the chariot The rath itself is the thing asked for most often here and the one thing we do not cast. There is no model chariot, no wooden rath for a Laddu Gopal to sit in, and no silver aswa rath. Those come from makers who specialise in them, and if a chariot is what you came for it is quicker to go straight to one than to work through a grid of figures. What we make is what would sit inside a rath, which for most households is the whole point of owning one. Why there is as much Krishna here as Jagannath Jagannath is a form of Krishna, and that is not a technicality. It is the reason the festival travelled at all, since ISKCON keeps Rath Yatra as a Krishna festival, and a great many households mark the day with the Krishna they already have rather than buying a Puri set. A Krishna piece is a legitimate gift for the occasion and not a substitute for one. Households with young children often keep a Laddu Gopal and pull him in a small chariot on the day, a gentler version of the same rit