Bhubaneswar, April 20: Appeasing the ubiquitous pandas at Puri’s Jagannath temple is considered as good as appeasing Lord Jagannath Himself. Defying this unwritten rule might not be easy even for the President of the country.
Three sets of servitors at the 12th century shrine have claimed to be the traditional priests of President Pranab Mukherjee’s family, putting the Shree Jagannath Temple administration in a fix over assigning a panda to perform puja for him during his visit to Puri on April 25.
“They are claiming to have attended to his forefathers from his ancestral village, Miriti, in Bengal’s Birbhum district. We will wait for specific instructions from the President’s secretariat in this regard. But, in case we don’t get any such communiqué, we will allow all the three sets of servitors to accompany him,” said temple chief administrator Arvind Padhee.
“There is one Madhusudan Pujapanda and brothers on the one hand, and the Gochhikars on the other. The other servitor has shown me some photographs to substantiate his claims,” he said.
The Gochhikars claimed that they had conducted a puja for the President’s mother, Rajlakshmi, and that she had offered a pot of attica (cooked rice) before the Lord.
“We have records which will prove that we attended to his mother and 21 others during her visit to the temple on March 17, 1965. She had decided to make an offering of Rs 11 to the Lord, but discovered that she was short of Rs 5. She requested my father, Ramkrushna Gochhikar, to collect the remaining amount when he visited her village,” said Damodar Gochhikar, the youngest son of the family.
Another servitor Ramkrushna Das Mohapatra, who had performed a puja for Pranab Mukherjee before he was elected as the First Citizen of the country last year, has also come forward with photographic evidence. Das Mohapatra said he had met the President in Delhi on April 17 to discuss the issue. “Our relation dates back to 1978. He visited the temple in 1980, 1987 and again in 1992, when he was the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. I have been serving him all along,” he said.
A temple official said the servitors maintained a register called warija to record the names of devotees pouring in from across the states, especially from Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Maharashtra.
According to practice, the servitors used to send their agents to various parts of the country to get them to Puri, at times personally accompanying them. Then they recorded the names of the devotees and their date of visit when they come to the temple.
“Through the registers, they find out about their forefathers or others, who came visiting from their village or district. Accordingly, the servitor in charge of a particular village or district serves the subsequent generations. In return, the devotees pay them according to their capacity,” said Gochhikar.
The temple chief administrator said he had heard out all parties concerned in the three-cornered contest and appealed to them to facilitate smooth conduct of the nitis.
