The famous Rath Yatra festival, where deities are taken in grand chariots to…

Concept: Rath Yatra (“chariot journey”) is a Hindu festival tradition in which a temple’s presiding deities are taken out of the sanctum and carried through the streets on large, freshly built wooden chariots to visit another shrine associated with them.

Application: The festival described here is the Puri Rath Yatra of Odisha, centred on the Jagannath Temple in Puri.

• Every year, the deities Jagannath, Balabhadra, and Subhadra are seated on three separate chariots built anew for the occasion.

• The chariots are pulled by thousands of devotees from the Jagannath Temple to the Gundicha Temple, a journey of roughly three kilometres.

• The deities remain at the Gundicha Temple for about a week before the return procession, known as the Bahuda Yatra.

Cross-check: The Gundicha Temple detail anchors the festival specifically to Puri, Odisha, rather than to any other state.

• West Bengal’s best-known large-scale religious festival is Durga Puja, not a chariot procession to a temple called Gundicha.

• Gujarat’s Ahmedabad holds its own Jagannath Rath Yatra procession through city streets, but this is a separate, more recent tradition and does not culminate at a Gundicha Temple.

• Uttar Pradesh is known for pilgrimage centres such as Varanasi, Mathura, and Ayodhya, which are not linked to the Gundicha Temple procession.

Result: The state where this Gundicha Temple chariot festival is primarily celebrated is Odisha.