The Spiritual Disruption of Urban Space
By Sara Black Brown, originally published in Religions 2024, 15(12), 1456.
At the initial moment when the Manhattan Rath Yatra turns onto Fifth Avenue at 45th Street, there is a great crush of people between the massive cart ropes that pull the deities’ chariots and a great push-and-pull between those who are dancing along with the kirtan and those who simply walk the parade route but end up packed into the space in front of the cart. A tight line of NYPD motorcycles contains the crowd on the Northbound side of the street, even as a stream of yellow taxis continues to honk its way down the other side, and pedestrians on either sidewalk stop to point, gawk at the parade, and pull out their cameras to capture the spectacle. The whole scene gives a strong impression of a river of color and sounds rushing through the canyon-like spaces between skyscrapers—what one devotee referred to as the “grandeur of Fifth Avenue”.
There is a moment when the press is such that I, wielding cameras in both of my hands, find myself wedged between enthusiastic dancers and police motorcycles in a chaotic moment that brings to mind a conversation with a friend at the Alachua Hare Krishna community who told me that when he attended the main Rath Yatra in Puri, he was so overwhelmed in the face of the massive, energetic crowd that he thought, momentarily, that he was going to die. I think of the experiences that led the British to coin the term “juggernaut”. It was, for my friend, a moment of clarity, a moment of awe in the face of the vast sublime that included a sudden awareness of his own fragility—and it seems that that moment of being temporarily overwhelmed by awe and an awareness of mortality is part of the Rath Yatra experience. It adds a poignant quality to the notion of taking darshan.
Like the altar of the temple, the Rath Yatra chariots are an explosion of colorful decoration. Each is a wooden cart painted brightly in red and yellow with animal designs—elephants between the spokes of the wheels, swans along the bed of the cart. Each is topped with an arch-shaped canopy made of red, blue, and yellow fabric. The many, many yards of garland stitched together by devotees over the last week are draped liberally around the carts. Each is effusively decorated with greenery, ribbons, tulle, fabric lanterns, and an abundance of star-shaped balloons. The passengers themselves— the sculptures of Jagganath, Subhadra, and Balaram—each sit in splendor at the front of their own chariot. Each member of the divine trio is accompanied by two or three devotees who fan them with peacock feather fans and otherwise attend to their comfort.
Taking the Rath Yatra through a public space may be considered a particularly significant religious act because, as the procession passes through a prominent and heavily populated location, those actions of temple worship that are believed to have a direct and immediate impact on the state of the soul are offered to the general public. The Rath Yatra may be seen as a traveling darshan, for example, taking a temple deity into the street and passing through the center of the city. Among devotees of Krishna, great significance is attached to an encounter with Jagganath on the street. According to Kurma,
It’s explained in the scriptures that if anyone sees the deity Lord Jagganath riding on the cart—let’s just say some street bum happens to be walking in the street and he happens to see Lord Jagganath on the cart—it has tremendous spiritual importance for him. It has a very purifying effect. Spiritual progress means that your negative karma is dissipated. In order to progress in spiritual life one has to eradicate good and bad karma, so most of these festivals have that effect on anyone who participates knowingly and unknowingly. And if someone participates unknowingly just by seeing the cart or by seeing the enthusiasm… their spiritual life has begun.
The Festival of Rath Yatra specifically introduces, along with darshan and kirtan, an element of lila. The entwined spiritual and artistic traditions of India include the practice of lila, or “divine play”, a kind of sacred theater that re-enacts the pastimes and biographies of gods and goddesses as a divinely ordained means of comprehending them. Suzanne Schwartz writes that “the world as we know it, according to Hindu philosophy, is a dream, a play, an artful construction devised by the divine realm. It is both comedy and tragedy, often simultaneously, and it is ultimately unreal”.
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