juggernaut (n.)
A juggernaut is a force that flattens whatever is in front of it. The word is an English rendering of Jagannath, a deity of eastern India whose name means lord of the universe.1
One part of the image is plain enough. At the Rath Yatra in Puri, enormous chariots carrying the deities are pulled through the streets by hundreds of people, and something that heavy is genuinely hard to stop or steer once it is moving.1
The rest was supplied. Claudius Buchanan, an Anglican chaplain who had seen the festival, published Christian Researches in Asia in 1811; it became one of the most widely read English accounts of India of its day. He wrote the procession up as a scene of heathen horror, in support of the case for Christian missions, and that is the book the English word came through.2
English kept the crushing and left the rest behind.12
The company became a juggernaut.