About this stamp
New Bodies for the Gods
India Post issued this ₹5 stamp on 17 July 2015 for Nabakalebara 2015 at the Jagannath Temple, Puri. Nabakalebara, “new body”, is the ancient ritual in which the wooden images of Jagannath, Balabhadra, Subhadra and Sudarshan are replaced by new ones. It is held in a year with two months of Ashadha in the Hindu calendar, which comes every twelve to nineteen years; the one before 2015 was in 1996. The brochure compares it to the soul taking a new body, as a person puts on new clothes and gives up the old.
The Daru Brahma
The images are carved from neem trees, the Daru Brahma, that must meet strict signs. The priests of the temple worship the goddess Mangala at Kakatpur, who is said to reveal the trees to them in dreams. The logs are drawn to Puri on carts pulled by devotees and carved in secret within the temple. At midnight on Adhika Ashadha Krishna Chaturdashi the Brahma, the sacred essence, is moved from the old images to the new, and the old ones are buried at Koili Baikuntha inside the temple. The procedure is written on palm-leaf manuscripts that only the three head priests may read.
The stamp was designed by Alka Sharma; Security Printing Press, Hyderabad printed 0.6 million.
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