Bhakti, Equality, and Power: Temple Potters and Sacred Food (Mahaprasada) in Orissa

Abstract This article analyses the relationship between Bhakti, power, and equality in South Asia, by studying the meanings of Mahaprasada, or the sacred food of the Jagannatha temple in Orissa, as represented in nineteenth-century European and Indian texts. The article further juxtaposes these textual meanings with the social practices of the low-caste potters of the temple who make the vessels where the sacred food is prepared. Despite missionary condemnations of the idolatry of the Jagannatha cult and administrative attacks on the cult’s rituals and practices, Mahaprasada was paradoxically celebrated by these same texts as embodying the potential of destroying caste hierarchies. The article critically examines such colonial framings of Mahaprasada, by bringing them into conversation with the community cosmologies, economic practices, and political strategies of the temple potters. The article argues that the potters’ entanglements with the temple revealed complex contingencies in the ways in which Mahaprasada determined relations of caste and market. As a low-caste, yet ritually significant, group instrumental in the making of Mahaprasada, the temple potters participated in a market of the sacred food, where ritual and economic values merged, and were shaped by other power relations of the temple. In matters of caste, the potters both upheld and challenged caste distinctions by both their ritual roles and heterogeneous sectarian inheritances. Put together, I examine how paradoxical subtleties of colonial constructions of Bhakti were defied by the economically complex and religiously multiple worlds of marginal communities.