Missing key to temple’s vault ignites furor
PURI, India — A group of men in loincloths assembled outside a 12th-century temple on a hot April day in Puri, India, preparing to venture deep inside to a pitchblack vault where piles of gold and silver jewelry were stored under lock and key.
To enter Jagannath Temple, dedicated to an important Hindu deity, the group of 16 archaeologists, Hindu priests and government officials had to pass through metal detectors. Their skimpy loincloths were required as a security measure along with oxygen masks in case the vault, unopened for more than three decades, lacked breathable air.
Their instructions were simple: Check the structural integrity of the vault and ignore the millions of dollars’ worth of antiquities stashed inside.
Anyone who spends much time in India’s Hindu temples is accustomed to being just steps from extreme wealth. Locked away in hundreds of the country’s largest temples is a staggering amount of gold, weighing as much as 8.8 million pounds, the World Gold Council has estimated. Under current market rates, that stockpile would be worth roughly $160 billion.
But despite their abundance of ancient riches, India’s temples are often poorly managed. With security measures lacking, they can be a tantalizing target for thieves.
The April expedition did not take long. An hour after entering the temple, the men emerged, telling a crowd of waiting pilgrims that they had not needed to enter the locked vault, known as the Ratna Bhandar, because they had been able to peer inside through the bars of a gate.
But two months later, another explanation was leaked to local news outlets: The men had not been able to go in because the keys to the vault were missing.
The response was swift. A top temple administrator was fired. Officials with the state government of Odisha, which includes Puri, called for an investigation. Soon after, they discovered that 8 pounds of gold donated by visitors was also missing from the temple’s administrative offices.
Around Odisha, suspicion quickly mounted that some of the antique jewelry in the vault had been pilfered by what a local journalist, Sandeep Sahu, called “a criminal nexus of temple officials and servitors” who had access to the keys.
But the hive-shaped Jagannath Temple in Puri, which forms part of the pilgrimage known as Char Dham — a four-part circuit traveled by Hindus to attain salvation — is far from an easy target.
A tight-lipped committee controls who can enter, where donations of money or jewelry are stored and how that information is disseminated to the public. The strict entry rules are designed to safeguard both the temple’s status as a sacred space and the treasures it contains.
In 1984, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, was famously denied entry because her husband was a follower of Zoroastrianism, an ancient monotheistic religion. Even today, priests guard the entrance, turning away non-Hindus and some non-Indians from sects such as Hare Krishna, which is popular in the West.
Reports of internal strife have also tarnished the temple’s reputation over past decades. Managers of the temple said in the 1978 report that “misappropriation, theft, lawlessness, harassment of pilgrims and exploitation had become the order of the day.”
That same year, to encourage transparency, an inventory was made of the vault. Temple officials reported finding a hoard of nearly 500 pounds of antique silver and gold ornamental jewelry designed to adorn statues of gods.
The vault last was opened in 1985, according to R.N. Mishra, a former temple administrator, who said he and a group of officials had retrieved some gold for maintenance work and promptly returned the key to the district treasury.