"An example will serve to illustrate the spiteful spirit of the Christian missionaries at that time. They spread a canard in India and abroad that many Hindus voluntarily rushed under the wheels of the great chariot during the annual rathayãtrã at Puri, and got themselves crushed to death in order to attain salvation. The great chariot, according to them, was always accompanied by droves of dancing girls who sang lascivious songs and made obscene gestures towards crowds on both sides of the broad street. The “great” William Wilberforce, who ruled the circle of Christian crusaders in Britain and who adamantly advocated the Christianization of India by an unstinted use of state power, demanded immediately that the temple of Jagannath be demolished to stop this “devil-dance” for good. The British Commissioner of Puri at that time saved the situation by writing a long letter to a liberal British M.P. in which he stated that he along with many other British civilians in the district had been a regular witness of the rathayãtrã for twenty years but had never witnessed a single victim under the wheels nor found anything immodest in the songs and symbolic gestures of the dancing girls. The English word “Juggernaut”, which according to the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary means “any relentless destroying force”, is a living witness to the inventive imagination of the early Christian missionaries."

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Original Language: English