The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), Odisha has launched a project “listing and Documenting the Monuments of the Jagannath Sadak in Odisha”. The project is being undertaken to highlight the sad plight of this once-great and now-forgotten road on which the pilgrims travelled to visit the gods at Puri. This is being done to coincide with the upcoming Nabakalebar festival at Puri.
A four-member delegation comprising of INTACH State convenor AB Tripathy, Ananta Mahapatra, Sanjeev Hota and Anil Dhir toured the entire stretch of the Old Jagannath Sadak from Jaleswar till Bhadrak recently.
The Jagannath Sadak was the old pilgrim road from Kolkata to Puri. It took form sometime in late 1700s and was the lifeline for all pilgrims who came to Puri. It was, from 1825, known as the Orissa Trunk Road, but for the devotees who descended on this path and made the slow way to Puri, it has always been known as the Jagannath Sadak.
The road wound its way touching Midnapore, Baleswar, Nilgiri, Bhadrak, Jajpur, Dharamshala, Chhatia, Cuttack, Bhubaneswar and Pipili. The travellers covered the distances by bullock carts, hackneys, palanquins, horses and elephants, but most of them trudged on foot. There were many amenities for the travellers.
There were Choultries, Dharamshalas, wells, tanks, culverts, bridges, temples, rest sheds, Ghats, etc. Many remnants of these are still visible on the isolated stretches of the road. Toll tax from the pilgrims was collected from the time of the Mughals, a tradition which continued under the Maratha regime too.
With the advent of the railways in 1892, the Jagannath Sadak fell into disuse, and over the next few years was lost forever. The railways shortened the travel time from three weeks to eighteen hours. As it was a coastal road, many stretches of the road just vanished with time. It was encroached upon by villages, and some lengths now form the NH-5 and the railway.
AB Tripathy has lamented that many vestiges of the road are vanishing rapidly. There is wanton destruction of heritage monuments, structures, wells, ponds, etc., of the road. He said the relevance of the road in the formation of Odisha and the spread of the Jagannath Culture has been overlooked in history. This was the road which was taken by the marauding Mughals, Afghans, Marathas and later on the British to conquer Odisha. This was the road on which Chaitanya, Guru Nanak and Kabir travelled when they visited Puri.
The listing project will help create awareness of the history of the Jagannath Sadak and help conserve and preserve whatever is left of this great road, he added.