Charudutta Panigrahi introduces us to to the eighteenth century literary giant, Upendra Bhanja, who gave up his crown for the love of words. Click here to read.
Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan highlights the contemporariness of Sangam Literature with discussion about a narrative based on trust and power politics. Click hereto read.
Title: Icons of Odisha – Lives that Shaped a State
Author: Bhaskar Parichha
Publisher: BK Publications Private Limited
Odisha had been in the past been under the hammer for its grinding poverty and wide spread starvation deaths, despite its rich mineral resources. Beneath the markers of its civilisation – its magnificent temples, hoary history of maritime trade and its resuscitation as a distinct linguistic state in 1936, lurks the story of individuals whose ideas, actions and creative energies have shaped the heartbeats of the land. Bhaskar Parichha, a writer and critic of repute, without being hagiographic has tried to capture the life, ideas and contributions of 30 such individuals from the 19th Century to the present day, with the fond hope that they brush the imagination of the world.
Odisha has a very proud literary pedigree. Starting with Sarala Das in the 15th Century, who is called Adi Kabi (first poet), and Upendra Bhanja in the 18th century, who is called Kabi Samrat (emperor of poets) the father of modern Odia literature has to be Fakir Mohan Senapati.
Senapati was, as Parichha writes “to Odia literature what Prem Chand was to Hindi and Tagore to Bengali – the conscience keeper of his people.” He was a literary polymath, who explored almost every genre — poetry, translation, satire and fiction. He is best remembered as pioneer of modern Odia fiction. With his eye for realism and flair for humour, he created characters who were products of their times but universal in their emotion. His short story Rebati (1898), translated in to thirty languages all over the world, is a subtle commentary on gender, education and superstition, themes that resonate even today. Senapati’s contribution to the novel is monumental. Of his four masterpieces Cha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third, 1902), is widely recognised as India’s first novel on peasant exploitation. Preceding even Prem Chand’s Godan ( Gift of a Cow,1936), it was written long before Marxian ideas took roots in India, it’s a searing account of ruthless oppression of landless peasants in India. The other writer of eminence is Gopinath Mohanty. His empathetic portrayal of tribal life in Odisha in his landmark novel Paraja ( Citizens,1945) won him the Jnanpith award in 1974. Manoj Das, the bilingual master story teller completes the troika, whose stories Graham Greene considers have “the same quality as RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days, with perhaps an added mystery”.
Revered as the principal architect of modern Odissi dance, Kelucharan Mohapatra ensured that Odissi emerged not merely as a revived dance style but as a sophisticated, codified and spiritually grounded classical tradition. Among his celebrated choreographies are adaptations of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda. His greatest legacy are his disciples like Sanjukta Panigrahi whose luminous performances and deep emotional expressiveness brought Odissi to national and international prominence.
In the field of music, Balakrishna Das is celebrated as Odissi musicologist, vocalist and renowned music guru. His proximity to Ghulam Ali and mastery of Hindustani music inspired him to make Odia traditional music more beguiling and effective. In the field of cinema, Jharna Das was a trail blazer. By bridging literature and cinema, classical arts and modern media, performance and public service, she helped lay the foundations of Odia cinema and broadcasting. Dinanath Pathy would be fondly remembered as a visionary Odia painter, art historian, scholar, curator and writer whose life was devoted to the preservation, documentation and global promotion of Odisha’s artistic heritage. Akshya Mohanty captures the popular genre of musicians who sang romantic ballads with equal felicity as devotional songs.
Rama Devi, Sarala Devi, Kuntala Kumari and Nandini Sathpathy are some of the women figures highlighted in the essays. Rama Devi is a beacon of women’s liberation, a distinguished freedom fighter and social reformer. Kuntala Kumari was a trail blazing Odia poet, physician, editor, and social reformer from colonial Odisha. Sarala Devi belonged to that first generation of Indian women who claimed a decisive role in public life. Nandini Sathpathy as the only female Chief Minister of Odisha earned the sobriquet of the “Iron Lady of Odisha”. She is also remembered for her literary achievements and showcasing of the cultures within the state.
Of all the politicians, Parichha has upheld Naba Krushna Chowdhury(1901-1984) who left behind a legacy of simple life and moral integrity he displayed as the Chief Minister of Odisha. He showed steadfast commitment to the underprivileged and implemented significant reforms and progressive policies. The politician, Mehtab, brought in to journalism rare integrity. Biju Patnaik, a politician whose biography had been authored earlier by Parichha, believed that industrialisation flows from the fountain of political power and he brought to politics a rare flash of colour, dynamism and was the tallest politician Odisha.
Madhusudan Das, remains the ultimate talisman of intellect, courage, compassion, whom Gandhi adored. Gandhi visited Odisha eight times, beginning with 1921, and in August 1925 when he came at the invite of Madhusudan Das to see his Utkal Tannery. Along with Madhu Babu, Pandit Gopabandhu Das wears the pride of place as the tallest Gandhian, who embraced his ideas of Khadi and Swadeshi and promoted cottage industries as a means for economic independence. His life stands as a luminous example of self-less service, incredible sacrifice and humanism that encompassed every aspect of Odisha’s journey – social, educational and cultural. Quite justifiably both Madhu Babu and Gopabandhu Das carry the epithet of Utkal Gaurav and Utkal Mani.
Parichha is highly respected for his clarity, sense of balance and insight. His choice of icons is both eclectic and discerning. Ideally, he could have included Sunanda Patnaik, who represented the best of classical music or Kanta Kabi Laxmikant Mohapatra who wrote an iconic patriotic song. All the same, his careful research brings out rare nuggets, which are both delicious and nostalgic. Hopefully, the secular culture that Odisha prides itself on will continue to thrive as will the independent spirit like that of writer Fakir Mohan, visionary like Madhusudan or Gandhian like Naba Krushna. The Icons of Odisha is an invaluable addition to any literary tapestry.
Satya Narayan Misra is a Professor Emeritus and Author of seven books, the latest, Against the Binary, waspublished in December 2024. He is a regular columnist and reviewer of books for several leading newspapers in Odisha and national news digital platforms like Scroll.in and The Wire.
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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
