Thread: Hinduphobic origins of the word ‘juggernaut’ “Juggernaut” is the Anglicized name for the Hindu god Jagannath, the “Lord of the Universe.” “Juggernaut” entered English in the early 19th c. to mean “a powerful, dominant, unstoppable force”, as colonial Brits encountered the massive chariot of Jagannatha being pulled through the streets devotees during the Rath Yatra. Rev. Claudius Buchanan was the first to popularize “the Juggernaut” in both Britain and the United States in the early 1800s. Buchanan was an Anglican chaplain stationed in India, and a staunch supporter of Christian missions to India. In his letters sent back home from India, Buchanan described ‘“Juggernaut” as a dangerous, violent, and bloody religious cult. These letters were reprinted in Christian missionary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1811, Buchanan published Christian Researches in Asia, his broad examination of the religious state of India and its need for Christian missions. He described devotees throwing themselves under the wheels of Juggernaut’s chariots. He used a biblical reference to the Old Testament’s description of the heathen god Moloch (to whom people sacrificed their children) to explain Juggernaut to his Christian audience:“The idol called Juggernaut has been considered as the Moloch of the present age; and he is justly so named, for the sacrifices offered up to him by self-devotement are not less criminal, perhaps not less numerous, than those recorded of the Moloch of Cannan.” “Ruminating long on the.. empire of Moloch in the heathen world, I cherished my thoughts on the design of some ‘Christian institution’, which, being fostered by Britain, my Christian country, might gradually undermine this baleful idolatry, and put out the memory of it forever.” In the book he also claimed that Juggernaut “is said to smile when the libation of blood is made.” For Buchanan, Juggernaut represented everything that was wrong with “heathenism” in India that Christianity could solve: a symbol of violence, bloodshed, death, and “idolatry.” Buchanan’s description of Juggernaut became quite popular. Christian Researches in Asia was reprinted in numerous editions in America and Britain. The descriptions of Juggernaut were excerpted in nearly every missionary magazine in the country. When American missionaries were first sent to India in 1812, they sent back their own descriptions of Juggernaut to be published in American missionary magazines that continued to represent the god as violent and idolatrous. This idea/image of Juggernaut was so well-known in Protestant missionary circles that one missionary magazine from 1813 even used Juggernaut as a metaphor for the vice of alcohol. Like Juggernaut, the article argued, alcohol has “shrines on the banks of almost every brook” and “four thousand self-devoted human victims, immolated every year upon its altars.” Thus, “juggernaut” started to become a term for any violent or dangerous force.