ABSTRACT
A s a seaside town with a long, wide, and sandy beach where waves break in from the Bay of Bengal, Puri attracts numer ous tourists throughout the year, primarily from Calcutta. The center of life in Puri, however, is not its lovely beach, cer tainly the best on the eastern Indian seaboard; life here is focused on the temple of Jagannātha (or Jagannāth)—the lord of the universe-located in a plaza in the central part of the town. The temple is set inside a high-walled enclosure, which only Hindus may enter. The temple tower dominates the landscape for miles around, and the first sight of it is always exciting to the Hindu pilgrims who come to worship at this shrine. In the days of the sailing ships, this tower provided a landmark to the sailors who in the seventeenth century and later used to refer to this as the "White Pagoda," as opposed to the "Black Pagoda" of the thirteenth-century Sun Temple of Konārak farther east along the coast. Before a road was built along the shore, Konārak was only a night's bullock-cart journey from Puri.
