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Institutional Development of the Sect       The second epoch, the one of its actual institutional growth, begins with the "death" of Mahima Svami in the year 1876, when he spent a few days meditating in the state of Samadhi, until a voice from the space declared that this was the final samadhi.       There after his body was buried in Joranda. May be the founder's death caused unrest; the Mahima Dharmins themselves narrate that Queen Victoria had heard of the appearing of Mahima Svami and wanted to arrest him. However, her emissary came too late, i.e. only after the final samadhi. N.K. Sahu speaks, though again without evidence, of an intervention by Commissioner Ravenshaw.14 In the very same year, a sort of council appears to have taken place in Joranda in which a foundation stone of Gaddi Mandira was laid which was built in the following years.       Bhima Bhoi is said to have taken part in this council, but he did not participate in the construction of the shrine in Joranda. On the contrary, he built with his group of Kaupinadharis his own Asrama in Khaliapali in the next year 1877 with the consent of the Raja of Sonepur Niladhara Singh. Besides Joranda, this is today the most important centre of the sect.       Where as Joranda became the centre of a strictly organised monastic order which accepted no women, but admitted them only as laymen of the sect, a rather tantric trend developed in Khaliapali. Bhima Bhoi lived there with four "female companions", two spiritual and two worldly (of whom one hailed from the Brahmin caste) and with four scribes whom, it is claimed, he used to dictate his works simultaneously.       It was from the group of Bhima Bhoi and Khaliapali that the raid on the Jagannatha temple took place in 1881, about which it has been repeatedly asserted hat Bhima Bhoi himself had led it. This was, however, not the case as follows from the court records in unequivocal terms. On the contrary, the group of twelve men and three women "barbarous people" was under the direction of a certain Dasram who declared that the voice of Alekha Svami had ordered him to burn the statues of Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra. The intruders came only up to the Bhoga Mandapa of the Jagannath temple in Puri and from there they were driven back by pandas and pilgrims in the course of which their leader lost his life. Not worthy is the fact that the group carried a pot with boiled rice and tried to eat it with in the temple. They also apparently wanted to carry through the right- all castes were initially entitled to it- to enter the temple and eat there together.       The judgement passed by the Deputy Magistrate against the survivors of the group was in line with the ruling orthodoxy which prevented the low castes from entering the temple. They were sentenced to two months "rigorous imprisonment" for "rioting" and for "committing trespass into a place of worship", in which the reason reads, "low caste people and barbarous people, who have no distinction of caste such as the defendants are not allowed to enter the temple of Jagannath"15 . Whereas none of the pandas was called to account four members of another group of Mahima Dharmins from Sambalpur were sentenced to seven day's "rigorous imprisonment", since they admitted like wise having the intention to burn Jagannatha. 14 Ibid 15 Jagannatha Temple Correspondence, no. 224,p. 1314

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