Overview

• The Puri festival that inspires the term ‘juggernaut’ runs June 27 to July 5 and has drawn renewed media attention to its linguistic roots.
• The Oxford English Dictionary traces ‘juggernaut’ back to a 1638 citation and records its evolution from a literal chariot to a metaphor for overpowering force.
• Researcher Anil Dhir notes that Rev. Claudius Buchanan popularised the word in the early 1800s with a violent framing tied to reports of devotees crushed under the wheels.
• Over the centuries, English has adopted words such as shampoo from Hindi, cummerbund from Persian-Hindustani, Jodhpurs from Rajasthan and mulligatawny from Tamil cuisine.
• Contemporary coverage contrasts colonial-era misconceptions of these terms with their modern celebratory uses in commerce, literature and popular culture.