Regeneration Through Illness: Ratha Yātrā in Purī

Abstract

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin’s "Regeneration Through Illness" examines the ritual and symbolic significance of Lord Jagannātha’s annual illness (anasāra) and the Ratha-yātrā festival in Purī as a cultural performance of death and rebirth. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork and previous studies of temple rituals in Orissa, she explores how Jagannātha’s withdrawal from public view due to “illness” is not perceived as divine absence but as a gestational pause, a necessary interlude of renewal that culminates in the Lord’s triumphant reappearance during Ratha-yātrā. Apffel-Marglin argues that this cycle mirrors both agrarian regeneration and socio-political restoration, situating Jagannātha not as a distant deity but as an embodied presence whose vulnerability enables healing and communal rebirth. She unpacks how ritual specialists, particularly the Daitā priests (linked to tribal ancestry), play a key role in ministering to the ailing Lord—underscoring indigenous and non-Brahminical agency in this restorative drama. The essay thus reinterprets illness, not as a flaw or breach of divinity, but as a fertile suspension of normativity, allowing divine, natural, and social forces to be realigned through embodied ritual performance.