Banakalagi Ritual Of Puri Jagannath Temple Deities To Resume Tomorrow

Puri: After a gap of over one month, the Banakalagi Niti of the sibling deities will be conducted at Jagannath Temple in Odisha’s Puri town on Wednesday.

According to the Shree Jagannath Temple Administration (SJTA), the special ritual will be conducted after the end of the second Bhoga Mandap ritual and the temple will remain out of bounds for devotees from 6 pm to 11 pm.

Banakalagi is performed using ‘kasturi’, ‘harital’, ‘karpura’, ‘kesar’, ‘kalasankha’ and ‘dhalasankha’. During the ritual, the darshan of the deities remains suspended for four hours.

Notably, the facial ritual at Srimandir was disrupted and has not been conducted since Niladri Bije (June 1), when the sibling deities returned to the sanctum sanctorum after the annual Rath Yatra, following a dispute between the servitors of Dutta Mohapatra Nijog and Shree Jagannath Temple Administration (SJTA) over the day it should be performed.

The Temple Managing Committee meeting held last week finally decided that the ritual would be conducted twice a month on Wednesdays. “In case, there are other rituals on a particular Wednesday, then the Banakalagi Niti can be conducted on Thursday,” Puri Collector Samarth Verma had informed on July 4.

He, however, clarified that the decision to postpone the ritual will be taken by STJA.