ABSTRACT
A striking late sixteenth-century engraving depicts the so-called Indian ‘juggernaut’. The juggernaut, a form of religious procession in which the bodies of ecstatic Hindu worshippers were supposedly crushed under the wheels of wagons bearing statues of Hindu gods, is most often associated with the city of Puri in the state Odissa. This chapter aims to unpack some of the emotional dynamics of the ‘Indian’ juggernaut viewed through the prism of early modern northern European religious anxieties. It first examines the textual and visual forms through which Europeans created the juggernaut (c. 1300–1600), and then examines the European sources that likely also helped to shape it. European reports of worshippers self-harming in juggernaut-style processions were initially fed through Mediterranean channels. However, the juggernaut seems to have gained particular polemical and visual traction in Northern European printed visual and textual representations.
