By Charudutta Panigrahi
There are poets who are born, poets who are made, and then there is the rare being who is handed a crown and quietly sets it down to pick up a stylus instead. Upendra Bhanja (c. 1670–1740) belongs to that almost mythic third category. Born into the ruling Bhanja house of Ghumsar — a princely state in the hills of southern Odisha, near the town that today bears the dynasty’s name, Bhanjanagar — he was a prince by blood and an emperor by acclamation. But the empire he chose to rule was not made of land, revenue, or armies. It was made of language. Posterity remembered the choice by giving him a title no battlefield could confer: Kabi Samrata, the Emperor of Poets.
The Bhanjas of Ghumsar were not strangers to the muse. Upendra’s grandfather, King Dhananjaya Bhanja, was himself a poet of distinction who composed a Raghunatha Bilasa[1] and the romance Ratna Manjari[2], leaving the boy a literary inheritance as real as any treasury. Yet where Dhananjaya wore both crowns — ruler and writer — Upendra made a decision that defines him. Born into a royal family, he never reached for the throne. He gave his entire life to poetry rather than to governing a kingdom.
Read that again, because it is the hinge on which his greatness turns. In an age when kingship was the highest ambition a man could hold, when wars were waged for a few miles of forest, a prince looked at the apparatus of power and found it smaller than a perfectly turned verse. This is not eccentricity. It is a radical reordering of values — a man declaring that the imagination outranks the sceptre. He even signed his early work not as a king but as Birabara, “the brave one”, the courage in question being aesthetic rather than military. The maverick was visible from the first line he ever wrote.
What separates a fine poet from a phenomenon is not feeling alone — feeling is the common inheritance of all poets. What separates Upendra Bhanja is the sheer, audacious engineering of his art. He belonged to the Riti Yuga, the ornate age of Odia literature, but he did not merely participate in it; he became its summit, so completely that the period is sometimes simply called the Bhanja Juga, the Age of Bhanja.
Consider his masterpiece, the Baidehisha Bilasa, his retelling of the Ramayana. The entire epic is composed under a self-imposed law of staggering difficulty: every single line begins with the syllable “ba.” The work is divided into fifty-two cantos, and even the verse-counts of those cantos are chosen so they carry the “ba” sound — bais (twenty-two), batisi (thirty-two), and so on. An entire sacred epic, hundreds upon hundreds of lines, marching to a single phonetic drumbeat without once stumbling into nonsense or losing its emotional fire.
And this was not a one-time stunt. He did it again, and again, as if the impossible were merely a daily exercise. Subhadra Parinaya takes “sa” for its governing initial. Kala Koutuka takes “ka.” Damayanti Bilasa runs on “da,” Padmabati Parinaya on “pa,” Satisha Bilasa on “sa.” He treated the most punishing constraints in world literature the way a master musician treats a difficult raga — not as a cage but as the very source of beauty. This is lateral thinking in its purest poetic form: the discovery that limitation, deliberately embraced, can generate freedom and surprise rather than smother them. The French Oulipo movement of the twentieth century — Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and others — built an entire celebrated avant-garde around exactly this principle of “constrained writing.” Upendra Bhanja had been doing it, at epic scale and with devotional grandeur, three hundred years earlier, in a hill kingdom of eastern India.
If the syllabic constraints reveal his discipline, his Chitra Kavya[3] reveals his outright wizardry. Upendra Bhanja composed an entire treatise on it, the Chitra Kavya Bandhodaya, and laced examples through his other works. In this form — bandha, meaning “binding” or “design” — the poet arranges the letters of his verse so that, written out, they form a recognizable picture: a tree, a mace, a chariot, a serpent, a sheaf of arrows, a wheel. The astonishing part is the double burden the poet accepts. The letters must form the shape, and the same letters, read in their proper sequence, must form a poem that carries genuine meaning. Word and image are forced to be true to each other at once.
This is concrete poetry, pattern poetry, visual literature — the very thing that Western modernists would later treat as a daring twentieth-century experiment — accomplished in Odia centuries before, and not as decoration but as a recognised branch of high art. To do it once is clever. To codify it into a system and deploy serpents, chariots and wheels of living verse is the work of a mind operating on a plane the rest of us can only squint at.
His verbal play did not stop at shape. He was a master of shlesha, the art of double meaning, building lines and even whole passages capable of yielding more than one interpretation depending on how the syllables are parsed — a single string of sound concealing two stories. He commanded all nine rasas of classical aesthetic theory, weaving the erotic, the heroic, the compassionate and the serene through narratives like Lavanyabati and Koti Brahmanda Sundari, romances of princes and princesses whose love is rendered with a sensuous, jewelled intensity. And as if poetry were not enough, he is credited with compiling the Gita Abhidhana, regarded as the first dictionary in the Odia language — the poet doubling as the first systematic guardian of his tongue’s vocabulary. Tradition celebrates him for feats so extreme they sound like legend: epics shaped as palindromes, retellings managed under near-unthinkable phonetic restrictions. Whatever one accepts of the more dramatic claims, the documented body of work alone places him among the most technically dazzling poets in any language on earth.
The kind of mind that can run an epic on a single syllable, that can make letters stand up as chariots and still sing, that can fold two meanings into one breath of sound — that is a contribution to the universal record of human creativity. He sits naturally beside the most inventive formal artists the world has produced. For roughly two centuries his style was the gold standard against which elite Odia poetry measured itself, and his songs travelled into the very grammar of Odissi music. A labourer on a village road and a dancer in a royal courtyard could both carry his lines — a reach across class and circumstance that is the surest sign of a true national treasure.
He is revered, finally, not only for what he made but for what he refused. He refused the easier glory of the throne. He refused the lazy path of plain narration when the labyrinthine one was available. He insisted that the Odia language could do anything Sanskrit could, and then proved it. That insistence is an act of cultural self-respect that belongs to the whole country’s story of finding its voice.
Folio depicting scene from Lavanyavati by Upendra Bhanja by an unknown artist from the early 19th century in, now in Chazen Museum of Art, Madison. From Public Domain
A word, then, on the soil that produced this phenomenon. Ghumsar, the seat of the Bhanja kings, lay in the wooded uplands near present-day Bhanjanagar in Ganjam district. It is a place worth knowing for more than one reason — for it was also the site of one of the earliest and most stubborn armed resistances to British colonialism.
The story of “the first war of independence” is told in textbooks as beginning in 1857. Yet the hills of Ghumsar were already aflame against the East India Company a full century earlier. When the British asserted control over the region from the 1760s, they demanded heavy tribute from the Bhanja rulers, and the rulers — backed by the formidable Kondh tribal Paiks who regarded the Bhanja Rajas as their protectors — refused to be tamed. The resulting struggle was not a single revolt but a chain of uprisings sustained, by documented accounts, from the mid-eighteenth century into the 1860s. The most decisive flare-up, the “Goomsur Campaign” of 1835–36, saw the Madras Native Infantry deployed against the Kondhs and their chiefs before the state was finally annexed. Resistance did not die even then: leaders such as Dora Bissoi and, after him, Chakra Bissoi kept the cause of the Bhanja line alive against the colonial administration for decades more
To call it, without qualification, the first mutiny in all of India would overstate a contested record; rebellions flared in Bengal, Bihar, Banaras and the tribal Jungle Mahals across the same long century. But to say that Ghumsar was among the very earliest theatres of organised, sustained armed defiance of the Company is simple, documented fact. The land that gave India its Emperor of Poets also gave it some of its earliest rebels. There is a fitting symmetry in that: the same soil bred both the courage to resist an empire and the genius to build one out of nothing but words.
[1] Odiya retelling of Ramayana written in the seventeenth century
[2] One of the first Odiya romances
[3] Picture poetry
Charudutta Panigrahi writes on culture, history, and the quiet connections that books forget to mention.
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