Odisha: The Best Kept Secret or Overlooked? The Civilisation That Shaped Asia — and Was Never Properly Credited

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The word ‘juggernaut’ is in English because of Odisha. The Bay of Bengal was once Kalinga Sagar. Discover why the civilisation that shaped Asia remains the world’s most overlooked.

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In This Research Pillar

Table of Contents

1. Odisha: The Best Kept Secret or Overlooked? The Civilisation That Shaped Asia — and Was Never Properly Credited
2. The Sea That Bore Their Name — Kalinga’s 3,000-Year Maritime Civilisation
3. What Conquest Cost — The Kalinga War, Ashoka the Invader, and the River Named Compassion
4. The Kings Who Built It Back — Kharavela the Forgotten Emperor and the Gajapati Dynasty
5. The Stones That Still Speak — Temples, Universities, and the Design of India’s Parliament
6. The Culture That Would Not Die — Language, Dance, Cloth, and the Science of Rice
7. Two Poets Who Changed What Language Can Do — And Who the World Does Not Know
8. The Heroes Nobody Named — Odisha’s Freedom Struggle and Its Forgotten Martyrs
9. My Interpretation
10. About the Author
11. Frequently Asked Questions: Odisha — History, Culture, and Legacy
12. References and Further Reading
13. Read Other Valuable and Related Insights

There is a word in the English language that came from Odisha. You have used it. You probably had no idea where it came from.

Juggernaut. The word for an unstoppable force, a massive overwhelming power that crushes everything in its path. It entered English in the 14th century through the accounts of European travellers who witnessed something that stunned them into inadequacy of language — the Rath Yatra of Lord Jagannath at Puri. The sight of a chariot so vast, pulled by hundreds of thousands of devotees, moving with the irresistible momentum of collective faith. They took the name home. They changed its meaning. They forgot where it came from.

That, in one small linguistic story, is the history of Odisha’s relationship with the world.

The Bay of Bengal — the body of water that connects South Asia to Southeast Asia, that has carried traders and missionaries and sailors and kings across millennia — was known in early Buddhist texts as Kalingodra. The Kalinga Sea. Named after Odisha. That name was erased so thoroughly that the people who live beside it today do not know it ever existed.

This article is about what was erased. What was overlooked. What survived despite everything — the invasions, the colonial delegitimisation, the structural indifference of a world that decided India’s story was really a story about other places. And it is about whether what remains is enough to make the world stop and ask: how did we miss this?

Before we talk about temples and kings, we need to establish something that should be common knowledge and is not. Three thousand years ago, the people of Kalinga — the ancient name for the territory that is now Odisha — were not farmers huddled on a coastline. They were sailors. Maritime traders of extraordinary reach and ambition. And the sea they sailed was named after them.

Kalingodra. The Kalinga Sea. Every early Buddhist text that mentions the waters east of India uses this name. This was not a poetic attribution or a local courtesy. It was a geographical fact reflecting the reality of who dominated those waters. The Kalingan Sadhabas — the merchant mariners of ancient Odisha — sailed Boitas, their massive ocean-going vessels, across what we now call the Bay of Bengal to the islands of Southeast Asia. Their trade routes connected India to Bali, Java, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, and beyond — not occasionally, not tentatively, but systematically, for centuries.

The Roman geographer Ptolemy, writing in the 2nd century CE, mapped the Kalingan coast with the precision of a man who had reliable commercial intelligence: Palur, Chelitalo (modern Puri), Konark, Manikapatna — all listed as significant ports. When archaeologists excavated these sites in the 20th century, they found what Ptolemy’s maps implied: Roman amphorae. Chinese coins. Arab ceramic fragments. Three civilisations leaving their material fingerprints on Odishan soil, because three civilisations were trading there.

Think about that for a moment. In the 2nd century CE — when Britain was a Roman province at the far edge of the known world, when the Americas were 1,300 years from European contact — Odishan ports were conducting triangular trade between Rome, China, and Arabia simultaneously. This was not a peripheral trading post. This was the centre of a global commercial network.

What Kalinga Built in Southeast Asia — Before the Cholas, Before Anyone Else

The standard history of India’s cultural influence in Southeast Asia begins with the Cholas. The Pallava dynasty. The spread of Hinduism and Buddhism through maritime trade and cultural exchange. This history is accurate. It is also incomplete. It forgets what happened before — and who did it first.

The Funan Kingdom — Southeast Asia’s first Hindu kingdom, located in present-day Cambodia — was founded, according to historical tradition preserved in Chinese chronicles, by a merchant named Kaundinya who sailed from Kalinga. He arrived on the Cambodian coast, encountered the local Naga queen Soma, married her, and established the capital at Vyadhapura. He did not come with an army. He came with trade goods, cultural knowledge, and the kind of confident civilisational presence that makes others want what you carry. This is how India spread its civilisation across Southeast Asia — not by conquest but by conversation, commerce, and marriage.

The Sri Lankan chronicle Mahavamsa records something even more striking: the founding of Sri Lanka’s first Sinhalese kingdom — Tambapanni — 2,600 years ago by Prince Vijaya of Kalinga. The genetic and linguistic ties between Sri Lanka and the Odishan coast are not mythological. They are documented in the oldest historical text of Sri Lanka, written by Sri Lankans about their own origin.Burma once had a region called Kalingarat — Kalinga Rashtra. Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument on Earth and the symbol of Cambodia, carries inscriptions in Kalinga script. Its architectural design elements echo the Jagannath temple in Puri. The classical dance traditions of Cambodia, Thailand, and Bali carry the unmistakable choreographic fingerprints of Odissi — the postures, the hand gestures, the narrative themes. When Balinese dancers perform their sacred dances today, they are performing something that originated in the temples of Odisha.

Every November, on the banks of the Mahanadi at Cuttack, Odishan families float paper boats — Boitas — on the river. This is Boita Bandana. A festival that commemorates the ancient voyages of the Sadhabas. Three thousand years after those voyages, the memory is still alive, still practised, still passed from parent to child on the banks of the same river from which the original sailors departed.

When was the last time you heard of a culture so connected to its maritime past that it still floats symbolic boats in memory of sailors who sailed three millennia ago? This is what living civilisation looks like.

The Bay of Bengal was once Kalinga Sagar — the Kalinga Sea. Cambodia’s first kingdom was founded by a man from Kalinga. Sri Lanka was founded by a prince from Kalinga. Angkor Wat carries Kalinga’s script. The sea, the kingdoms, the dance — all bearing Odisha’s name. And yet who knows this?

For India’s complete maritime civilisational legacy, see India Civilisation Achievements History: 5 Pillars (P9 Pillar).

261 BCE. The most powerful military force on earth at that moment — the Mauryan army under Emperor Ashoka — marched into Kalinga. What followed is one of the most documented acts of mass violence in ancient history, and also one of the most consequential spiritual transformations.

But let us begin where most accounts do not. With Kalinga’s freedom.

After the collapse of the Nanda Empire and the rise of the Mauryas, Kalinga had declared its independence. For decades, it governed itself — not as a centralised monarchy but, most historians now believe, as a decentralised republic. A confederation of principalities, tribal communities, merchant councils, and Kshatriya assemblies, making collective decisions in shared governance. This is why, when Ashoka came, the entire civilian population mobilised to fight. When a king surrenders, the war ends. When a republic’s people fight, they fight until the last.

The Daya River. Its name means compassion in Sanskrit. This is where the final battle of the Kalinga War was fought — on the banks of a river named for the quality whose absence enabled the carnage. When the battle ended, the Daya ran red. Ashoka stood on the Dhauli Hills and looked at what he had done. His own Rock Edict XIII, inscribed in stone and still readable today, records what he saw: 100,000 killed in battle. 150,000 deported as prisoners of war. Many times more dead from the famine and disease that followed. Between 20% and 35% of Kalinga’s total population wiped out.

Ashoka was broken by it. He converted to Buddhism. He built hospitals. He sent his son Mahinda and daughter Sanghamitta to spread the Dharma across Asia. He became the great apostle of non-violence whose edicts and emissaries shaped the moral philosophy of China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. The world knows and celebrates this transformation.

What the world does not ask — what Odisha has always known — is this: who paid for it?

One hundred thousand Odishan lives paid for Ashoka’s enlightenment. One hundred and fifty thousand more were taken from their homes and marched into exile. An entire free republic was destroyed so that one emperor could have the crisis of conscience that made him famous. Ashoka’s transformation was real. His remorse was documented in his own words. And none of that changes the fact that Kalinga did not invite this transformation. Kalinga was the price of it.

There is a detail in the landscape of Bhubaneswar that carries this history in stone. On the Udayagiri Hills, the Hathigumpha inscription of King Kharavela — who came after Ashoka and rebuilt everything — faces directly toward Ashoka’s Rock Edicts at Dhauli. Six miles separate them. Two inscriptions, looking at each other across the landscape. One records the victory of Magadha over Kalinga. The other records Kalinga’s recovery and eventual triumph. The land itself holds both sides of the story. History books have tended to quote only one.

Ashoka’s transformation was real. His remorse was genuine. And 100,000 people from Odisha paid for it with their lives. The world celebrates the transformation. Odisha remembers the price. Both things are true. Only one is usually told.

King Kharavela — First Among India’s Forgotten Greats

After Ashoka’s devastation, Kalinga lay broken for generations. Cities destroyed. Infrastructure dismantled. Population decimated. The Mauryan Empire had done what it came to do — not merely conquer but comprehensively subjugate. And then, in the 1st century BCE, a king of the Mahameghavahana dynasty ascended the throne of a recovering Kalinga and did something extraordinary: he rebuilt it all. And then went further than it had ever been.

His name was Kharavela. And he is barely known outside Odisha.

We know his story year by year, because he recorded it himself — in 17 lines of Prakrit in Brahmi script, carved into the overhanging brow of a cave at Hathigumpha on the Udayagiri Hills near Bhubaneswar. The inscription faces Ashoka’s edicts at Dhauli. This was not accidental. It was a statement.

Year 1: He repaired Kalinga’s infrastructure — gardens, reservoirs, embankments. The work of a ruler who knew that a damaged people need practical care before they need conquest.

Year 2: He launched a military campaign that defeated the formidable Satavahana dynasty.

Year 3: He organised grand celebrations of music, dance, and culture.

Year 5: He extended an ancient canal into his capital.

Year 8: He captured the mountain strongholds of Gorathagiri and Rajagriha, the fortified heart of Magadha.

Year 10: His suzerainty extended across Bharatavarsha — the Indian subcontinent.

Year 12: He propagated Jainism, honoured saints, and collected sacred texts.

Year 13: He inscribed the Hathigumpha record — and then, we believe, abdicated his throne.

In 13 years. One single reign. He did all of this in 13 years.

But what distinguishes Kharavela from mere military conquerors is not the scale of his victories. It is what he did after the Satavahana campaign, when his army had captured the enemy royal family and the entire Satavahana court lay at his mercy. He granted them Kshama — forgiveness. He restored the defeated king to his throne as a vassal, chose stability and peace over humiliation and plunder. A conqueror who forgives. In an age when victors took heads, Kharavela returned thrones.

His maritime reach extended to Sri Lanka, Java, and Suvarnabhumi — modern Thailand. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Roman merchant’s guide to Indian Ocean trade, noted that Kharavela’s name was venerated like a god among seafaring merchants across the eastern oceans. A Roman document, about an Odishan king. Almost nobody knows this.

Kharavela was the first Indian ruler to assume the title Maharaja. He was what the tradition calls a Chakravartin Samrat — an Emperor of the Universe — and a Rajarshi — a royal sage. A man who could defeat Magadha on the battlefield and then spend the same year organising poetry festivals. And when he had achieved everything, he walked away from the throne.

Why is he not in every Indian history textbook? Why does Chandragupta Maurya, who also conquered much of India, have his story told in every schoolroom, while Kharavela — who rebuilt what Chandragupta’s grandson destroyed — is relegated to a footnote?

The answer is one this article has already given: history is written by those who survive to write it. Ashoka’s empire produced the inscriptions that defined the historical record. Kharavela’s Kalinga left one magnificent inscription — and then the chain of transmission was broken by what came after. The historical record is not neutral. It is shaped by power. And Odisha, whose story was repeatedly interrupted by those with greater power to write history, has been paying the price ever since.

The Gajapati Dynasty — The Emperor Who Swept the Street

A thousand and a half years after Kharavela, Odisha would produce another dynasty of extraordinary consequence — and another story almost nobody knows.

The Gajapati Empire, founded by Kapilendra Deva in 1434 CE, was the most powerful Hindu kingdom in India at the time of its greatest extent. Its territory stretched from the lower Ganga in the north to the Kaveri in the south — encompassing what is now Odisha, large parts of Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and portions of Tamil Nadu. Kapilendra Deva campaigned successfully against the Bahmani Sultanate, the Vijayanagara Empire, and the Bengal Sultanate — simultaneously. He was not merely a regional power. He was the dominant military force on the Indian subcontinent.

His title — Sri Sri (108 times) Gajapati Gaudeshwara NabaKoti Karnata Kalabargeswara — meaning the lord of Bengal, of Karnataka and Vijayanagara, the lord of Gulbarga, and of nine crore subjects — was not braggadocio. It was a precise description of territorial reach. And this title is still recited at the Rath Yatra in Puri. Every year. By the current Gajapati Maharaja. Connecting medieval imperial grandeur to a living present through an unbroken chain of ritual memory.

Under Kapilendra Deva, the great Odia poet Sarala Das composed the Mahabharata in Odia — the first major translation of the epic into an Indo-Aryan regional language, bringing the story from Sanskrit into the language of common people. A democratisation of sacred knowledge, enabled by a king who understood that civilisation is not only military conquest but cultural transmission.

His grandson Prataparudra Deva (1497–1540 CE) was the dynasty’s most spiritually significant ruler — and the source of one of the most extraordinary stories in the entire history of Indian kingship.

Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu — the great Bengali Vaishnava saint and reformer who came to Puri and lived there for his final years — repeatedly refused to meet Prataparudra. As a man of the renounced order, he was forbidden contact with worldly rulers. Prataparudra, who was the most powerful king in contemporary India, desperately sought his blessing. Every request was refused. And then, during the Rath Yatra, the great chariot festival — when the streets of Puri were filled with millions of chanting devotees and the enormous chariots moved through the Grand Road — Chaitanya looked up and saw something that changed his mind.

The king of the Gajapati Empire — the ruler of an empire from the Ganga to the Kaveri, the most powerful Hindu sovereign of his age — was on his knees. He had changed from royal robes into the clothes of a sweeper. He was bent over the chariot, cleaning the road before Lord Jagannath with a gold-handled broom, sprinkling sandalwood water on the ground. Sweeping the path. For the Lord.

Chaitanya, seeing this, wept. He granted the king his darshan — his presence, his blessing. He recognised in this act of royal humility something more profound than any philosophical discourse: the dissolution of the boundary between power and devotion, between king and servant, between the crown and the broom.

This ritual — the Chhera Pahara — has been performed continuously since Prataparudra’s time. Every year, before the Rath Yatra begins, the current Gajapati Maharaja of Puri — the direct descendant of that dynasty — changes into the clothes of a sweeper and cleans the road before Lord Jagannath’s chariot with a gold-handled broom. The most powerful ruler becoming the most humble servant. The emperor sweeping the street. In public. Before millions.

What other dynasty in world history institutionalised this? What other tradition made royal humility not an aspiration but a requirement — a duty performed publicly, annually, as the precondition for the divine to move through the city?

The king of the most powerful Hindu empire in medieval India dressed as a sweeper and cleaned the street before Lord Jagannath’s chariot. He did it every year. His descendants do it still. No other dynasty in world history made humility a royal duty — not aspiration, not sermon, but annual public practice.

Odisha is one of the densest concentrations of sacred architecture on Earth. Not just temples — living temples, functioning temples, temples that have been in continuous ritual use for centuries. The golden triangle of Bhubaneswar, Puri, and Konark contains more significant sacred architecture in a 60-kilometre radius than most countries have in their entire territory.

Konark — The Sun in Stone

The Konark Sun Temple is among the most remarkable structures human beings have ever built. Constructed in the 13th century CE by King Narasimhadeva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, it is designed as the chariot of the Sun God — 24 wheels representing the hours of the day, seven horses representing the days of the week, the entire structure a precise solar calendar in stone. It is so precisely oriented that the first rays of the rising sun strike the main entrance directly at dawn. The stone carving — every inch of the exterior covered in intricate sculpture — represents the absolute peak of Kalinga architectural tradition. UNESCO recognised it as a World Heritage Site.

And yet the Taj Mahal receives ten times the international visitors. Why? The Taj Mahal is beautiful. Konark is technically staggering. The Taj Mahal was built by a Mughal emperor with the resources of an empire at its height. Konark was built by an Odishan king as an act of devotion to the sun. One is a tomb. The other is an observatory, a temple, a calendar, and a work of sculpture all at once. Both are magnificent. Only one is known.

Jagannath — Lord of the Universe

The Jagannath Temple in Puri is one of the four Char Dham — the four sacred pilgrimages that Adi Shankaracharya established in the 8th century as the spiritual geography of Hinduism. One in the north (Badrinath), one in the west (Dwarka), one in the south (Rameshwaram), one in the east — Puri. Jagannath is not merely Odisha’s deity. He is one of Hinduism’s most universal divinities — Lord of the Universe, who breaks caste and gender boundaries, who comes out of his temple every year to be seen by everyone.

The Rath Yatra — the annual chariot festival — is the largest chariot procession in the world. The word juggernaut entered English because of it.

The Chhapan Bhog — 56 sacred offerings made to Lord Jagannath daily — is the foundation of east Indian cuisine, and the kitchen of the Jagannath temple, staffed by 400 cooks working at 200 hearths, feeds over 10,000 people every single day. It has done so continuously for centuries. No day off. No festival exception. Every day, 10,000 people fed.

The Chausathi Yogini Temples — The Sacred Feminine and the Parliament’s Blueprint

Here is a fact that stops conversations. The circular design of India’s Parliament building — the Sansad Bhavan, the legislative house of the world’s largest democracy — was inspired by a 9th century tantric goddess temple in Odisha.

The Chausathi Yogini Temple at Hirapur, 20 kilometres from Bhubaneswar, was built in 864 CE by Queen Hiradevi of the Bhouma dynasty — a woman. It is a circular, roofless, open-to-the-sky structure housing 64 yoginis — forms of the divine feminine — arranged in niches around the inner wall. The architectural principle is unique in Indian temple design: circular, hypaethral, open to all five elements. The same principle that Edward Lutyens and Herbert Baker would later use for the circular colonnade of the Indian Parliament.

This temple is 25 feet in diameter. The Parliament of India seats hundreds. And yet the architectural DNA runs directly from the first to the second — from a queen’s devotional offering to a nation’s democratic house. What does it mean that India’s democracy is housed in a building whose circular design traces back to a 9th century tantric goddess temple built by an Odishan queen?

It was rediscovered in 1953. Sitting 20 kilometres from the capital of Odisha. Undiscovered for centuries. The first of its kind in India — and it was found only in 1953.

There is a second Yogini temple at Ranipur-Jharial in Balangir district — built in the 9th or 10th century, 50 feet in diameter, its yoginis uniquely depicted in dance postures, each one poised at the beginning of a movement. Of the four surviving Yogini temples in all of India, two are in Odisha. Half the surviving tradition of this ancient sacred feminine architecture lives in Odisha.

Pushpagiri Vihar — Odisha’s Own Nalanda

While Nalanda and Takshashila receive the recognition they deserve as the world’s first great universities, a third institution of equal importance — located in Odisha’s own Jajpur district — remains largely unknown. Pushpagiri Vihar — the Hill of Flowers — functioned from the 3rd century BCE to the 11th century CE. 1,400 years of continuous scholarship. Mentioned by Xuanzang. Associated with an Ashokan Mahastupa. Connected to China, Korea, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Southeast Asia through the transnational Buddhist knowledge network.

A 2025 peer-reviewed paper in the American Journal of Political Science and Leadership Studies described Pushpagiri as a vital node in the transnational knowledge network that shaped Buddhist civilisation across Asia. It was Odisha’s contribution to the world’s intellectual heritage — and it has been overlooked in almost every account that celebrates Nalanda.

Odia — The First Indo-Aryan Classical Language

On February 20, 2014, the Union Cabinet of India made a decision that had been 70 years in the making. Odia was recognised as a classical language of India — the sixth such recognition, joining Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. But here is the distinction that matters: Odia is the first and only Indo-Aryan language to receive this status. Every other classical language recognised before it is either Sanskrit (the root language) or Dravidian. Odia stands alone as the first daughter of the Indo-Aryan family to be acknowledged as classical.

The criteria are rigorous: a literary history of 1,500–2,000 years, an independent literary tradition not borrowed from another language, and a substantial body of ancient literature. Odia’s literary tradition traces to the 3rd century BCE. Its script evolved from the ancient Kalinga Brahmi, the same script in which Kharavela carved his inscription and in which the founding texts of Sri Lanka were written. It has been shaped by centuries of devotional poetry, philosophical inquiry, royal inscription, and popular song. It has 45 million speakers. And its most celebrated poet — Upendra Bhanja, the Kabi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — is described by scholars thus: apart from Sanskrit, no other Indian language has a poet to compare with him.

Odissi — Dance Encoded in Stone

The stone sculptures at Konark and the Lingaraja Temple in Bhubaneswar are the world’s most extraordinary dance notation system. Every posture of Odissi — the 2,000-year classical dance tradition of Odisha — is encoded in those stones. The tribhanga — the triple-bend posture unique to Odissi, where the neck, torso, and knee each deflect in alternating directions — appears in sculptures carved a thousand years before any living practitioner was born.

When the Odissi revival happened in the 20th century, its teachers did not reconstruct from memory alone. They read the stones. The temples were the textbooks. The sculptures were the syllabi. This is a civilisation that was so confident in its art that it encoded it in architecture — knowing that even if all the practitioners died, the stone would remember.

Odissi is now practised globally. Performed in concert halls in London, New York, and Tokyo. Taught in dance studios across Europe and America. Its influence on the classical dances of Bali, Cambodia, and Thailand — carried there by Kalinga’s maritime civilisation — is still visible in the choreography of those traditions. One dance tradition. Multiple continents. Thousands of years. And it began in the temples of Odisha.

The Sambalpuri Saree — Geometry in Thread

The Sambalpuri saree is one of the most technically demanding textiles in the world. It is made through bandha — the ikat technique, in which threads are tied and dyed before weaving, so that the pattern exists in the threads before the fabric exists. The weaver must visualise the finished design in reverse, planning the colour of each thread across the entire width of the warp before a single shuttle passes. The patterns — geometric, intricate, mathematically precise — are not drawn onto fabric. They are calculated into thread.

GI tagged. Worn at state ceremonies. Exhibited in international textile exhibitions. Woven in villages in western Odisha by communities for whom this is not a craft but an inheritance — knowledge passed from generation to generation, encoded not in writing but in the hands of weavers who learned by watching and doing. And Nuapatna, in Cuttack district, produces the silk ikat sarees associated specifically with the Jagannath temple tradition — cloth woven as sacred offering, as much devotional act as technical achievement.

Pakhala — The Probiotic Science of Odishan Ancestors

On March 20 every year, something remarkable happens across Odisha: World Pakhala Day. An entire state celebrates fermented rice.

Pakhala is rice soaked in water and allowed to ferment overnight. It is Odisha’s most beloved food — eaten across the state from the simplest household to the most sophisticated kitchen, from the coast to the tribal highlands. It is cooling in the intense heat of Odisha’s summer. It is infinitely adaptable — eaten with fried fish, roasted vegetables, curd, raw onion, green chilli, whatever the season and the household provide.

And it is, by modern nutritional science, a fermented food of remarkable health value. The fermentation process produces beneficial bacteria — natural probiotics, before the word probiotics existed. The fermented water is one of the rare plant-based sources of Vitamin B12. The process reduces the glycaemic load of the rice. It is, in other words, exactly what Ayurveda and traditional knowledge said it was: a food that nourishes the gut, cools the body, and sustains health across the heat of summer. The ancestors who developed Pakhala did not have microbiology. They had 3,000 years of observation. They arrived at the same answer.

Upendra Bhanja — The Emperor of Poets

There is a town in Odisha named Bhanjanagar. Not after a king. Not after a battle. After a poet.

Upendra Bhanja — Kabi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — lived in the 17th century and contributed 32,300 words to Odia language and literature. He authored between 52 and 100 works, of which only 20–25 survive, many others lost to the absence of a printing press in an era when manuscripts were hand-copied on palm leaves. He wrote the first dictionary in Odia literature — Gita Abidhan.

His masterwork Baidehisha Bilasa — a retelling of the Ramayana — is written with every single line beginning with the letter Ba. Not a few lines. Every line of an entire epic. The technical demands of such a Chitrakavya — maintaining poetic beauty, emotional depth, narrative coherence, and the constraint of identical initial letters across thousands of verses — are simply staggering. He wrote Subhadra Parinaya with every line beginning with Sa. Kala Koutuka with every line beginning with Ka. Each poem a different constraint. Each one flawlessly executed.

The scholarly verdict: apart from Sanskrit, no other Indian language has a poet to compare with him. The literary epoch he created is called Bhanja Yuga — the Age of Bhanja. An entire era of Odia literature named after one man. And outside Odisha, outside the circles of Odia scholarship, he is almost entirely unknown. The obscurity of this incomparable poet, as one scholar notes, may be attributed to the lack of proper research. What other way to read that sentence than as an indictment?

Bhima Bhoi — The Deepest Blind Poet on Earth

Now consider the most extraordinary literary figure Odisha produced. A figure whose story is so improbable that if it were offered as fiction it would be rejected as too dramatic.

Bhima Bhoi was born between 1846 and 1850 in a Kandha tribal family in Sambalpur district. His parents died when he was young. By the age of 12 he was grazing cattle for a village landlord, wandering forests, drinking from mountain streams. He lost his sight in childhood — most likely to a smallpox epidemic. He never attended school. He never learned the alphabet. He never read a single text. He was barred from entering Hindu temples because of his caste.

And from this position — blind, illiterate, tribal, untouchable by the standards of his society — he composed over 300 philosophical texts. His method was singular: he would play a traditional percussion instrument called the Khanjani, and simultaneously compose and sing verses in four completely different musical ragas at the same time, while four disciples sat around him transcribing his spoken words on palm leaves with iron styluses. He was composing four different poetic streams simultaneously. Without sight. Without literacy. Without any of the tools that literate civilisation considers prerequisites for intellectual achievement.

John Milton lost his sight at 44, after decades of Cambridge education and published writing, with family scribes to support him. Surdas was born into a Brahmin family with the resources and community of the Bhakti movement around him. Bhima Bhoi had a Khanjani and four disciples.

The philosophical content of what he produced surpasses both. The 27th chapter of his masterwork Stuti Chintamani contains the line that may be the most radical statement of compassion in any Indian literature:

“ପ୍ରାଣୀଙ୍କ ଆରତ ଦୁଃଖ ଅପ୍ରମିତ ଦେଖୁଦେଖୁ କେବା ସହୁ, ମୋ ଜୀବନ ପଛେ ନର୍କେ ପଡ଼ିଥାଉ ଜଗତ ଉଦ୍ଧାର ହେଉ।”

“Seeing the boundless sorrow and suffering of living beings, who can bear to sit idly? Let my own soul go to hell forever, if it means the salvation of the world.”

— Bhima Bhoi, Stuti Chintamani, Chapter 27

Milton’s greatest line is about pride: ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ Bhima Bhoi’s greatest line is about the complete dissolution of the self into universal compassion. He is willing to go to hell — not to reign there, not to avoid humiliation, but so that the world might be saved. The man who was refused entry to temples chose to love the world that refused him so completely that he was willing to sacrifice his own soul for its salvation.

He died in 1895 at the age of 45. No authentic portrait of him exists — he lived so removed from vanity that he was never drawn or photographed. He lives only through the echo of his verses. Across the villages of Odisha, people still gather to play the Khanjani and sing his hymns — 130 years after his death. Unknown to the world. Alive in the villages.

India’s freedom struggle has its celebrated names. Gandhi. Nehru. Bhagat Singh. Rani Lakshmibai. Subhas Chandra Bose. These names are in every textbook, every museum, every street sign across the nation. They deserve their recognition. But the freedom struggle was not fought only by the nationally celebrated. It was fought in every district of every state of a subcontinent — by people whose names were never recorded nationally, whose sacrifices were never calibrated into the official accounting of heroism.

Odisha produced three figures whose stories demand to be told alongside the celebrated names. They are not footnotes. They are evidence.

Veer Surendra Sai — The King Who Would Not Bow

Born in 1809 in Khinda village, Sambalpur district, Surendra Sai was the rightful heir to the throne of Sambalpur — a direct descendant of Madhukar Sai of the Chauhan dynasty. When the last Maharaja died without an heir in 1827, the British refused to recognise Surendra Sai’s succession — because he was a man of independent thinking who refused to be a puppet — and installed instead a widow queen as their preferred instrument. Surendra Sai was 18 years old. He took up arms.

What followed was 37 years of resistance — the longest sustained individual resistance against British rule in the entire history of India’s freedom struggle. He spent 17 years in Hazaribagh Jail from 1840 to 1857. When the 1857 Uprising broke out and sepoys broke open the Hazaribagh prison, Surendra Sai walked out, raised an army of 1,500 men, and continued fighting through guerrilla warfare from the forests of western Odisha until 1862.

He surrendered under a peace arrangement. When the British officer who negotiated the peace died, his successors suspected Surendra Sai of renewed plans for rebellion. In 1864, he was captured by treachery — a British spy named Dayanidhi Meher drugged him with sweets laced with intoxicants during a festival. He was tried, acquitted by the court, and then re-arrested under Regulation III of 1818 — a colonial law that allowed indefinite imprisonment without trial or conviction. He was sent to Asirgarh Fort.

He spent 20 years there. He lost his eyesight in prison. He died in Asirgarh Fort on February 28, 1884, never seeing freedom. Sambalpur was one of the last territories occupied by the British Empire — largely because of him. His fight kept western Odisha free longer than any other region.

A statue of Veer Surendra Sai stands in the Indian Parliament. His name is on a university and a medical college in Odisha. And outside Odisha, barely anyone knows who he was. Bhagat Singh was 23 when he died — and the world knows his name. Surendra Sai fought for 37 years, spent 37 years in prison, and died blind in a fort far from home. Who decided which story got told?

Baji Rout — Twelve Years Old

The youngest martyr of India’s entire freedom struggle was from Odisha. His name was Baji Rout. He was 12 years old.

October 11, 1938. Nilakanthapur Ghat, Dhenkanal district. The Prajamandal movement — a people’s uprising against the tyrannical rule of the local king — was active in the region. Baji Rout, a member of the movement’s youth wing, was keeping watch by the Bali river at night. British police arrived and ordered him to ferry them across the river. He refused. He was a child standing on a riverbank in the dark, facing armed police, and he refused.

They shot him. A 12-year-old child. Killed for refusing to carry his oppressors across a river.

India knows Bhagat Singh. India knows Rani Lakshmibai. India should also know Baji Rout. The 12-year-old from Odisha who made the same choice as every celebrated freedom fighter — to refuse — and paid the same price.

The Eram Massacre — India’s Second Jallianwala Bagh

April 13, 1919. Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar. British troops under General Dyer blocked the exits of an enclosed garden and opened fire on an unarmed crowd. 379 officially dead. Possibly over 1,000. An act of colonial brutality so shocking that it became the turning point in India’s freedom movement and is remembered globally to this day.

September 28, 1942. Melana Ground, Eram village, Bhadrak district, Odisha. The Quit India Movement. 5,000 unarmed villagers gathered under the leadership of Kamala Prasad Kar to protest British colonial rule. DSP Kunjabihari Mohanty led a police force that blocked every exit from the gathering ground. Without warning. Without dispersal order. Without any opportunity to flee.

Three hundred and four rounds were fired in a matter of minutes. Twenty-eight people died on the spot. One died shortly after. Fifty-six were severely injured. Among the dead: Pari Bewa — the only female martyr of the freedom movement in all of Odisha. She was there because she believed in freedom. She did not leave because there was nowhere to go.

The site is called Rakta Tirtha — Pilgrimage of Blood. It is revered in Odisha as a sacred site of sacrifice. The local people built a memorial. Commemorations are held. The memory is kept alive by those who know.

Outside Odisha? Almost nobody has heard of it.

The same pattern. The same method — blocked exits, unarmed crowd, indiscriminate firing. Twenty-three years apart. One is in every Indian history textbook, every documentary, every political speech about colonial brutality. The other is a Pilgrimage of Blood that the world forgot to visit.

Why? What determines which massacres become history and which become footnotes? Who has the power to decide which deaths get mourned globally and which get mourned only by the villages that produced the martyrs?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that the title of this article asks: Was Odisha kept secret? Or was it overlooked? And if it was overlooked — by whom, and why, and for how long?

Jallianwala Bagh is in every textbook. Eram is not. Both were massacres of unarmed civilians. Both were British. Both happened in the same freedom movement. The difference is not in the events. The difference is in who wrote the history afterward.

I was born in Odisha. The land of Kalinga. I grew up with the Jagannath tradition — the Rath Yatra, the Chhapan Bhog, the prayers that filled the household and the seasons. I have carried this civilisation in my body my entire life. And I have spent years watching the world not know what I carry.

This article is not nostalgia. It is not pride for its own sake. It is the attempt to state a precise historical and civilisational claim with the evidence that claim deserves.

Odisha gave the world the word juggernaut. The Bay of Bengal was Kalinga Sagar. Cambodia’s first kingdom was founded from Kalinga’s shore. Sri Lanka was founded by Kalinga’s prince. The Indian Parliament’s circular design traces to a 9th century tantric temple built by an Odishan queen. The most philosophically radical statement of compassion in Indian literature came from a blind tribal orphan who grazed cattle and was barred from entering temples. Odisha’s Jallianwala Bagh happened in 1942 and is unknown to most Indians. Its 12-year-old freedom fighter is unknown outside Odisha. Its king who fought the British for 37 years and died blind in prison is barely a footnote.

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. And the pattern has a name: systematic erasure. Not always malicious. Sometimes simply the consequence of who survives with the resources to write history and whose story gets told in the process. The Mauryan empire left more inscriptions than Kharavela’s Kalinga. The British documented what served them. The nationalist movement celebrated what had national reach. Odisha — a state with the wrong geography, the wrong language, the wrong position in the emerging national story — fell through the gaps.

In KUTUMB: When Guests Became Masters, I traced how India’s civilisation has always been defined by its capacity to absorb, include, and transform. Odisha embodies this capacity in its most complete form. It received Buddhism from Ashoka — the man who destroyed it — and sent Pushpagiri’s scholars to carry Buddhist wisdom across Asia. It received the Jagannath tradition from tribal, Vedic, and Buddhist streams simultaneously and synthesised them into one of India’s most universally beloved deities. It received the Sanskrit epic tradition and gave it back to common people through Sarala Das and the Gajapati patronage. Every wave that arrived in Odisha was absorbed and transformed into something that the world received without knowing where it came from.

In the JAGANNATH (yet to be published) book I am writing, the Chhapan Bhog — the 56 sacred offerings to Lord Jagannath — is explored as the foundation of east Indian cuisine. This is not a culinary footnote. It is a civilisational fact: the sacred offering shapes the secular kitchen. What is offered to the divine becomes the language in which a people feed themselves. Odisha’s temple tradition and Odisha’s food tradition are not separate stories. They are one story, told in the language of rice and fire and devotion.

The title of this article is a question: The Best Kept Secret or Overlooked? I want to end with a different question. Not about what Odisha was. About what we do now.

A rising India — the world’s fourth-largest economy, the fastest-growing major economy, the world’s largest democracy — is recovering its civilisational history with the confidence of a nation that no longer needs to apologise for existing. This is the right moment. Not because Odisha’s greatness is new. But because a claim made from strength is heard differently than the same claim made from suppression.

The Eram martyrs died for freedom. Baji Rout died for freedom. Veer Surendra Sai fought 37 years for freedom. They got it, eventually — not the freedom they personally lived to see, but the freedom their resistance helped make possible. What they did not get was the recognition that sustains a civilisation across generations: the knowledge, passed to children and to the world, that this happened here, that these people existed, that this land produced this.

Odisha is not the best kept secret. Odisha is the answer to a question the world forgot to ask.

1. Sharma, N. (2025). Rediscovering Pushpagiri: A Forgotten Beacon of Ancient Indian Knowledge and Buddhist Scholarship. American Journal of Political Science and Leadership Studies, 2(10), 42–51. https://semantjournals.org/index.php/AJPSLS/article/view/2917

2. Wikipedia (2025). Pushpagiri Vihara. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puspagiri_University

3. Wikipedia (2025). Hathigumpha Inscription. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathigumpha_inscription

4. Wikipedia (2026). Odia Language — Classical Status 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odia_language

5. itihaas.ai (2025). Kharavela of Kalinga — Hathigumpha Inscription. https://itihaas.ai/en/artifacts/hathigumpha-inscription

6. Historyofodisha.in (2023). The Suryavamsi Gajapatis. https://historyofodisha.in/the-suryavamsi-gajapatis/

7. OdishaBytes (2024). Ten Freedom Fighters of Odisha. https://odishabytes.com/ten-freedom-fighters-of-odisha-you-should-remember-on-78th-independence-day/

8. VeerGatha.com. Prataparudra Deva — The Devout Gajapati King. https://veergatha.com/biography/medieval/prataparudra_deva

9. Wikipedia (2026). Veer Surendra Sai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veer_Surendra_Sai

10. OdishaBytes (2023). Veer Surendra Sai: A Valiant Fighter Against British Imperialism. https://odishabytes.com/veer-surendra-sai-a-valiant-fighter-against-british-imperialism

11. Wikipedia (2026). Chausath Yogini Temple, Hirapur. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chausath_Yogini_Temple,_Hirapur

12. Delhi-Fun-Dos (2024). A Unique Yogini Temple That Inspired Indian Parliament Design. https://delhi-fun-dos.com/a-unique-yogini-temple-that-inspired-indian-parliament-design/

13. Minhaj-i-Siraj (1260 CE). Tabaqat-i-Nasiri. Translated: H.G. Raverty, Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881. (Primary source for destruction of Nalanda — connected to Odisha’s knowledge disruption.)

14. Ashoka’s Rock Edict XIII (261 BCE). Standard translation: N.A. Nikam and Richard McKeon, The Edicts of Asoka. University of Chicago Press, 1959.

15. Abhijit Chavda (YouTube). How Kalinga Spread Indian Civilization to SE-Asia. (Video summary on Boita Bandana, Funan Kingdom, Angkor Wat connection.)

16. The Graphic Earth (YouTube). Kalinga War: The Deadliest War in Indian History Explained. (Video summary — Kalingodra, republic theory, Daya River, 600,000 soldiers, Ptolemy’s ports.)

17. The Frustrated Indian (YouTube). The Maharaja of Kalinga — Perhaps the Greatest Indian King Ever. (Video summary — Kharavela year-by-year achievements, maritime empire, Kshama.)

18. Objectiveias.in (2024). Gajapati Dynasty (1434–1541 CE). https://objectiveias.in/history-of-odisha/gajapati-dynasty-1434-1541-ce/

19. Itihaas.ai (2025). Upendra Bhanja — Kabi Samrat. https://grokipedia.com/page/Upendra_Bhanja

20. Bhagirathi Nepak (1998). Kabi Samrat Upendra Bhanja. (Documentary source for Bhima Bhoi’s life, Stuti Chintamani, the Khanjani method.)

21. Wikipedia (2026). Eram Massacre. (Confirm with local Odishan historical records — Rakta Tirtha.)

22. Anantam IAS (2025). Jagannath Rath Yatra: History, Rituals and Significance. https://anantamias.com/rath-yatra/

23. Narayan Rout, KUTUMB: When Guests Became Masters. Amazon India.

24. Narayan Rout, Yogic Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence. BFC Publications, 2025.

25. Narayan Rout, FLUXIVERSE: The Dance of Science and Spirit. Amazon India.

Odisha’s civilisational story connects to India’s broader heritage, the history of knowledge and destruction, and the inner sciences that emerged from this soil. These articles from TheQuestSage.com deepen the conversation:

• India Civilisation Achievements History: 5 Pillars (P9 Pillar) — The complete civilisational argument — India’s contributions to mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and the world.
• The World’s First Universities: Nalanda, Takshashila, and Pushpagiri (P9 C2) — Pushpagiri’s full story — the Hill of Flowers, Xuanzang’s testimony, and what was lost in 1193 CE.
• The Knowledge That Was Lost: 3 Historical Disruptions (P9 C17) — Why India’s — and Odisha’s — contributions are less known than they should be, and who is responsible.
• Utkal Diwas: Significance and Celebration
• Advaita Vedanta and Modern Science: 5 Places Where They Agree (P-Darshan C2) — The philosophical tradition that emerged from this soil — and that the founders of quantum physics needed to understand their own discoveries.
• Yogic Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence: 5 Dimensions (P7 Pillar) — The inner science of Odisha’s yogic and tantric tradition — and its relevance to the age of artificial intelligence.
• Purushartha: 4 Goals of Human Life (TheQuestSage.com) — The philosophical framework that gave Odishan civilisation its coherence — Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha as a complete grammar of human life.
• Artha and Dharma: 5 Things Ancient Indian Economics Knew (P11 C5) — Kautilya — Takshashila’s most famous graduate — and the economics that sustained Odisha’s civilisational wealth.
• The Economy of Human Life: 5 Questions Modern Economics Cannot Answer (P11 Pillar) — What Odishan civilisation’s Lakshmi Principle says about wealth — and why the world needs to hear it.

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