Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/126

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now seen Christian worship in Madras; and before long an opportunity occurred of seeing idolatry in one of its most common forms–that known to us as.

Juggernaut is a name familiar to the Christian world. The huge car in which this “Lord of the world” (as his name is by interpretation) is drawn, the multitudes who flock to his temple at Cuttack, and the horrors there enacted, have been made familiar to us by Buchanan and others. It is not so widely known that though this is the most famous, it is not the only scene of the ceremony of car-drawing. On the contrary, almost every temple has its festival day, on which the idol-god is treated to a triumphal ride by its votaries.

A car-drawing was to take place at Mailapur, a suburb of the city. With a friend, I started for the scene of the celebration. Our road lay through the crowded streets. Passing the bazaar with its busy buyers and sellers, the nabob's palace and the mosque, we drove through a vast grave-yard—a city of the dead,