Source: TW
Early East India Company officials were relatively cautious about interfering in Indian religion. It was Baptist (e.g. William Carey, et al.) and Anglican (e.g. Claudius Buchanan, et al.) missionaries who circulated stories of thousands of people being crushed annually under the chariot of Jagannāth The Christian missionaries sought to frame the Ratha Yātrā as a scene of carnage and an “altar of Moloch” in order to prompt a British ban on the procession and justify increased funding for missionary activity. This was later popularized in works like Robert Southey’s early 19th century poem the Curse of Kehama: The ponderous Car rolls on, and crushes all. Through blood and bones it ploughs its dreadful path. It was actually British civil servant and statistician William Wilson Hunter who wrote a two-volume work on Odisha’s history, culture, and demographics and laid to rest the “calumnies in which some English writers have indulged with regard to Jagannath.” It was Hunter who established that deaths were rare and when they did occur they were almost exclusively due to crowd surges, heatstroke, or accidental falls in the massive crush of people and not intentional acts of sacrifice.