Bhakti, Equality, and Power: Temple Potters and Sacred Food (Mahaprasada) in Orissa.

This article examines the complex relationship between Bhakti (devotional worship), power, and social equality in South Asia through the lens of Mahaprasada, the sacred food of the Jagannatha temple in Puri, Orissa. It analyzes nineteenth-century European and Indian texts that paradoxically both condemned the Jagannatha cult and celebrated Mahaprasada as a potential force for dissolving caste hierarchies, juxtaposing these representations with the lived social and economic realities of the low-caste temple potters who produce the vessels for the sacred food. The study reveals that the potters occupied a dynamic position—ritually significant yet socially marginalized—participating in a market of Mahaprasada where ritual and economic values intertwined amid ongoing caste-based inequalities and power struggles. Ultimately, the article argues that Mahaprasada’s role in promoting equality is neither straightforward nor uniform but is shaped by local sectarian heterogeneities, community cosmologies, and political-economic relations, challenging simplified colonial and modernist narratives of Bhakti as inherently egalitarian.