A wave of vi­brant colours, rhyth­mic drum­ming, and joy­ous chant­i­ng swept through the streets of Port-of-Spain last Fri­day as the In­ter­na­tion­al So­ci­ety for Kr­ish­na Con­scious­ness, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Sri Sri Rad­ha Gopinatha Mandir, pre­sent­ed the an­nu­al Ratha Ya­tra—al­so known as the Fes­ti­val of Char­i­ots.

The cel­e­bra­tion be­gan at Memo­r­i­al Park, where an elab­o­rate­ly dec­o­rat­ed char­i­ot stood draped in bright fab­rics and adorned with flow­ers and in­tri­cate de­signs.

The pro­ces­sion wound its way along Fred­er­ick Street, even­tu­al­ly ar­riv­ing at the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade, draw­ing cu­ri­ous on­look­ers and de­vot­ed par­tic­i­pants

The fes­ti­val’s ori­gins trace back to the an­cient Ja­gan­nath Tem­ple in Puri, in the east­ern In­di­an state of Odisha. The name it­self—Ratha Ya­tra—means “jour­ney of the char­i­ots,” and it com­mem­o­rates the an­nu­al pro­ces­sion in which the deities Lord Ja­gan­nath, his broth­er Lord Bal­ab­hadra, and his sis­ter God­dess Sub­hadra are car­ried through the streets.

“Ja­gan­nath” trans­lates to “Lord of the Uni­verse.” Con­sid­ered a form of Lord Vish­nu, he oc­cu­pies a cen­tral place in the hearts of devo­tees. Leg­end tells of Sub­hadra, who once ex­pressed a de­sire to see the city out­side the tem­ple’s walls. That wish gave rise to the tra­di­tion of parad­ing the di­vine trio through the streets, al­low­ing all, re­gard­less of caste or creed, to glimpse the deities and re­ceive their bless­ings.

In Port-of-Spain, the spir­it of that an­cient fes­ti­val came alive as devo­tees, dressed in vi­brant tra­di­tion­al at­tire, took hold of the two long ropes at­tached to the char­i­ot and be­gan to pull. Each step was ac­com­pa­nied by the pul­sat­ing beat of drums, the clang of hand cym­bals, and the melod­ic strains of kir­tans—de­vo­tion­al songs prais­ing Lord Kr­ish­na, who is wor­shipped as the eighth in­car­na­tion of Lord Vish­nu.