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Chapter 5: The Odia Table Through Time
In 2003, a team of archaeologists led by Professor R.K. Mohanty of Deccan College began excavating a low mound on the north bank of the Malaguni River, a few kilometres from the shore of Chilika Lake in Khurda district. The site was called Golbai Sasan — an unremarkable village name for what turned out to be a window into a world three and a half thousand years old. The Neolithic settlement, dated to roughly 1500 BCE, yielded the kind of evidence that rewrites assumptions: carbonized grains of rice, fragments of browntop millet, the desiccated remains of mung beans and horsegram and pigeon pea, and the bones of cattle, nilgai, chital deer, wild pig, and possibly buffalo. This was not a community scraping by on whatever the forest offered. This was a mixed agricultural economy — deliberate cultivation alongside hunting and gathering — on the coastal plains of what would, millennia later, become Odisha.
What the people of Golbai Sasan ate for dinner three thousand five hundred years ago tells you something that no amount of temple history or literary analysis can: the food culture of this land did not begin with the temples. It did not begin with Jagannath or with the Gajapati kings or with the arrival of Vaishnavism. It began in the dirt. In the decision, made by anonymous Neolithic farmers on the banks of a river that still flows today, to grow rice and millet side by side, to keep cattle and hunt deer, to cultivate pulses that fixed nitrogen in the soil without knowing the word nitrogen. The story of the Odia table is not a story that starts with a grand moment. It starts with a handful of carbonized grain in an archaeological sieve, and it runs, unbroken if constantly altered, to the plate of Pakhala Bhata that an Odia software engineer eats in a Bangalore apartment on a Sunday afternoon, missing home with an intensity that surprises him.
This chapter traces that line — from the Neolithic grain to the Guinness record, from the forest floor to the temple kitchen to the colonial disruption to the modern reinvention. It is a history of what people put in their mouths, which is another way of saying it is a history of everything.
What Ancient Kalinga Ate
The archaeological record, once you know where to look, is more generous than you might expect. Golbai Sasan is not an isolated find. At Suabarei, in Puri district, excavations in 2015-16 under Jeeban Kumar Patnaik of the Archaeological Survey of India revealed a six-metre-deep sequence spanning the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic period. The archaeobotanical analysis there was decisive: rice dominated the plant assemblage, constituting over ninety percent of recovered grains, with horsegram, mung bean, and browntop millet filling out the remainder. A single rice grain from Suabarei was radiocarbon-dated to 3370-3210 calibrated years before present — roughly 1400-1260 BCE. At Gopalpur, another site in the same cultural group, a similar assemblage emerged: rice, pulses, millets, the bones of domesticated and wild animals.
The pattern across these sites is consistent enough to draw a picture. The Neolithic-Chalcolithic people of coastal Odisha, sometime between 2000 and 1000 BCE, had developed a distinct agricultural economy. Rice was clearly the primary crop, but — and this is the detail that matters most for understanding what came later — it was not a monoculture. Millets grew alongside rice. Pulses provided protein and soil nutrition. The diet was supplemented by hunting and, almost certainly, by fishing, though fish bones are notoriously difficult to preserve in the archaeological record. The people of these settlements were not rice people or millet people. They were both. The narrowing would come later, and when it came, it would be a loss.
But before the settled farmers of the coastal plains, there were the original inhabitants of the hills and forests — the tribal communities whose food culture represents the oldest continuous dietary tradition in Odisha and, arguably, in the Indian subcontinent. The Kondh, the Saora, the Gadaba, the Bonda, the Juang — these communities, whose roots in the region predate any Aryan or Sanskritic arrival by millennia, developed food systems based not on cultivation but on an intimate, encyclopaedic knowledge of the forest.
The tribal diet was — and in parts of southern and northern Odisha, still is — built on a foundation of millets, not rice. Finger millet, called mandia in the local dialects, was the staple grain. Little millet, foxtail millet, kodo millet — these were the everyday grains, grown in rain-fed highland fields using shifting cultivation methods that allowed the forest to regenerate. The evidence for millet cultivation in India goes back to the Indian Bronze Age, with mentions in the Yajurveda, one of the oldest texts. In Odisha’s tribal heartlands, millet was not a backup grain. It was the centre of the plate, the way rice would later become for the coastal and valley populations.
Around the millet core, the tribal diet assembled a remarkable diversity of forest foods: wild tubers dug from hillsides — dozens of species, each with its own season, its own preparation method, its own place in the dietary calendar. Wild greens — saag varieties so numerous that no comprehensive catalogue exists, foraged from forest edges and fallow fields. Mushrooms, gathered after the monsoon rains in extraordinary variety — researchers have documented over twenty edible species in northern Odisha alone, collected by Santal, Kolha, and Munda communities from the sal and teak forests of Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar. Bamboo shoots, eaten fresh or fermented for preservation. Game — deer, wild pig, birds, small mammals. And the preparation that most consistently startles outsiders: kai chutney, made from red weaver ants ground with salt, chili, and sometimes garlic, producing a condiment tangy with formic acid that provides both flavour and protein. To an outsider, it is an exotic curiosity. To the communities that make it, it is an ordinary condiment.
This is the foundation. Everything that came after — the temple cuisine, the royal kitchens, the colonial imports, the modern restaurant economy — was built on top of a food culture that already had thousands of years of accumulated knowledge about what the land could provide and how the body should be fed. The tribal kitchen is not a primitive precursor to “real” Odia cuisine. It is the original version, and in the highlands of Koraput and the forests of Mayurbhanj, it is still the living version.
The maritime dimension adds another layer. By the time of the Jataka tales — the Buddhist narrative texts composed between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE — Kalinga was a major maritime trading power. The Jataka stories are full of merchants, the sadhavas, who sailed from the ports of Kalinga across the Bay of Bengal to Suvarnabhumi — the “land of gold,” encompassing modern-day Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Java, and Bali. According to a sixth-century source, Kalinga’s export inventory included elephants, precious stones, ivory, pepper, betel nuts, fine textiles, rice, and forest products. What came back included silk, gold, gems, porcelain, sandalwood, and spices from China and Southeast Asia.
The food implications of this trade are rarely discussed but are significant. The sadhavas who sailed out from ports near modern-day Paradip and Puri, timing their departure to the reversal of the monsoon winds — a tradition still celebrated annually as Bali Yatra on Kartik Purnima — carried provisions for voyages that lasted weeks. They brought back not just luxury goods but ideas, ingredients, and techniques. Coconut cultivation along the coast, the use of specific spice combinations, certain fermentation techniques — these may owe something to centuries of maritime contact. The traditional Odia use of long pepper (pipali), a spice native to eastern India that was traded across the ancient world before black pepper displaced it in European markets, connects Kalinga’s kitchens directly to the spice trade routes that shaped global cuisine centuries before the Columbian exchange.
The Buddhist and Jain Dietary Influence
In 261 BCE, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka invaded Kalinga. The war was devastating — the Ashokan edicts themselves record a hundred thousand killed, a hundred and fifty thousand deported, and many times that number dead from the aftermath of disease and famine. What followed was one of the most consequential dietary shifts in Indian history, and it began right here, on Odia soil.
Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism after the Kalinga war is one of history’s most famous transformations. What is less often discussed is how that transformation rewrote the food rules of an empire. In his First Rock Edict, Ashoka decreed: “Here, in my domain, no living beings are to be slaughtered or offered in sacrifice.” The royal kitchen, which had formerly slaughtered hundreds of animals for court feasts, became vegetarian. Hunting was curtailed. Specific species — parrots, ducks, geese, bats, turtles, squirrels, monkeys, rhinos — were placed under formal protection. Forests were banned from burning to protect the creatures within. Mothers with young and young animals themselves could not be killed.
Kalinga, the very place where the violence had occurred that triggered this dietary revolution, became a laboratory for its implementation. And the effects persisted long after the Mauryan empire dissolved. Buddhism dominated the religious and intellectual life of what is now Odisha for roughly a millennium — from Ashoka’s time through the great monastery complexes of Ratnagiri, Lalitgiri, and Udayagiri, which flourished from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries CE. These three hilltop sites, collectively known as the Pushpagiri complex, housed hundreds of monks, scholars, and students. Their kitchens — though we know less about them than we would like — would have followed Buddhist monastic dietary rules: vegetarian, simple, disciplined, attuned to the principle that food is medicine for the body, not a source of pleasure or attachment.
The Jain presence was even older in some respects. The Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves, carved during the reign of King Kharavela in the first or second century BCE, were residential quarters for Jain monks. Kharavela’s Hathigumpha inscription, seventeen lines of Prakrit carved into the rock face, describes his reign in granular detail — military campaigns, infrastructure projects, religious patronage — but reveals the cultural world in which Jain principles of ahimsa were woven into governance. Jain vegetarianism is, if anything, more rigorous than Buddhist dietary practice: no meat, no fish, no eggs, no root vegetables (because pulling them from the earth kills the plant), no food eaten after sunset (to avoid accidentally consuming insects). These restrictions, practiced by a community that held political and intellectual influence in Kalinga for centuries, left a permanent mark on the food culture.
The combined effect of a millennium of Buddhist and Jain dominance was the creation of a sophisticated parallel vegetarian cuisine in a region that had always been — and would continue to be — a fish-eating culture. This is the paradox at the heart of Odia food: the same culture that considers fish and rice the definitive meal also developed one of India’s most elaborate vegetarian culinary traditions. The two exist simultaneously, not in conflict but in a kind of productive tension that is characteristic of Odia culture more broadly. The Jagannath Temple kitchen is entirely vegetarian. The household kitchen, three hundred metres away, may cook fish every day. Both are authentically Odia. Both are correct. The contradiction is the tradition.
What the monastery kitchens specifically created was a repertoire of techniques for making vegetarian food satisfying and complex without the flavour shortcuts of meat. The slow cooking of pulses with vegetables. The use of spice tempering — the technique of blooming whole spices in hot oil — to create aromatic depth. The emphasis on textures: the crisp and the soft, the smooth and the chunky, in a single meal. The Dalma that every Odia household cooks today — lentils simmered with seasonal vegetables, tempered with panch phutana — is, in all likelihood, a distant descendant of monastery cooking. The absence of onion and garlic in many traditional Odia preparations traces not to some arbitrary taboo but to centuries of Buddhist and Jain influence, where pungent ingredients were considered rajasic — stimulants of agitation and desire, unsuitable for minds seeking clarity.
The Temple Kitchen Revolution
Sometime in the twelfth century — the exact date is debated, as it always is with institutions that have existed longer than most nations — a kitchen fire was lit in the southeastern corner of the Jagannath Temple compound in Puri. Nine hundred years later, by tradition, that fire has never been allowed to go entirely cold.
The Roshaghara — the temple kitchen — is not a kitchen in any sense that a modern person would recognize. It is a food-production infrastructure covering roughly forty-four thousand square feet, divided into thirty-two rooms, equipped with over two hundred and fifty earthen hearths. Approximately six hundred hereditary Suara cooks work there, men whose families have done nothing else for as many generations as anyone can trace. The raw materials arrive through a supply chain of designated suppliers, inspected not by food-safety officials but by senior servitors whose authority is absolute. The water comes from a specific well. The firewood is a specific species. The earthen pots are made by a specific potter community in a specific village, and each pot is used exactly once — after a single cooking session, it is broken and discarded. A vessel that has served God cannot be reused. Thousands of pots manufactured, used, and destroyed every day. An industrial output of disposable sacred technology.
The system’s daily production is staggering. Fifty-six dishes — the Chhappan Bhog — are prepared and offered to Jagannath, Balabhadra, and Subhadra in six daily offerings that begin before dawn and conclude after midnight. On ordinary days, the kitchen feeds roughly twenty-five thousand people. On festivals, that number can exceed a hundred thousand. No onion enters this kitchen. No garlic. No tomato. No potato. No cabbage, no cauliflower — these are classified as foreign vegetables that did not belong to the kingdom of Odisha. The prohibitions are older than the arrival of most of these ingredients in India and function as a kind of culinary time capsule, preserving a pre-Columbian, pre-Mughal food world within the temple walls while the world outside has absorbed every available influence.
The legend behind the Chhappan Bhog connects it to Krishna’s Govardhan Leela: after holding the mountain aloft for seven days without eating, the devotees prepared fifty-six dishes — eight meals for each day missed — to compensate. The number is theological, but the dishes themselves are a comprehensive culinary programme: rice preparations, lentil stews, vegetable curries, fried items, chutneys, sweets, and seasonal preparations that rotate with the calendar. Kanika — the sweet golden rice fragrant with ghee, cardamom, and cloves. Dalma — the anchor, lentils and vegetables, the daily constant. Khechudi — rice and lentils cooked together into a porridge, the food of simplicity, the food of beginnings. Each dish has its place in the sequence, its theological purpose, its nutritional logic.
But the Roshaghara’s most far-reaching impact was not on theology. It was on the standardization of cuisine.
Think about what the temple kitchen actually did. It created a centralized food institution that operated every single day, following codified recipes, using consistent techniques, producing output at scale, and distributing that output to thousands of people from every caste and region who streamed through Puri year after year. Before cookbooks, before food media, before any modern system of culinary standardization, the Roshaghara functioned as a broadcast tower for Odia cuisine. Pilgrims from Ganjam and Koraput, from Sambalpur and Mayurbhanj, ate Mahaprasad at Puri and carried the taste memory back to their home kitchens. The temple’s food norms — no onion, no garlic, the specific spice combinations, the specific preparations — radiated outward through these human vectors, creating a shared culinary vocabulary across a linguistically and geographically diverse region.
The Mahaprasad system itself was revolutionary in a way that is easy to understate because it has been operating so long that it feels like scenery. Once the food has been offered to Jagannath and sanctified, it becomes Mahaprasad — divine grace in edible form — and is sold in the Ananda Bazaar just outside the Lion Gate. And in the Ananda Bazaar, a Brahmin and a Dalit can eat from the same leaf plate. The food has been sanctified beyond human hierarchy. To refuse to eat with someone because of their caste when the food has been touched by God is to claim that your social status exceeds divine authority.
This is not a symbolic gesture. It is a structural feature of the temple’s daily output. A functioning, continuous, institutionalized system of inter-caste commensality operating since the medieval period. The food speaks what the society often cannot. And it speaks it every day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, to anyone who walks through the gate. The Ananda Bazaar is, in practical terms, a noisy, chaotic, fly-troubled market. But the principle it enacts — daily, for centuries — is one of the most radical in Indian religious history.
The seva system that organized the kitchen’s workforce — hereditary families assigned to specific tasks: cooking, water-carrying, firewood supply, pot-making, serving — created a parallel economy and social structure within the temple. These families passed their knowledge not through recipes but through practice, through the hand that learned how to shape a pot or stir a curry or stack the earthen vessels in the exact configuration that produces the temple’s most famous culinary mystery: the seven pots stacked vertically over a single fire, where the top pot — farthest from the flame — cooks first, and the bottom pot — closest to the fire — cooks last. Food scientists have attempted to explain this through convection modelling and the specific thermal properties of the clay. No one has replicated it outside the temple context. The cooks do not need an explanation. They need the right clay, the right wood, and the pattern their fathers taught them. The knowledge is in the hands, not in a textbook.
Medieval and Gajapati Era Food
When Sarala Das sat down to compose his Odia Mahabharata in the mid-fifteenth century, during the reign of the Gajapati king Kapilendra Deva, he did something that scholars of food history should pay more attention to: he localized the epic. Sarala Das did not merely translate the Sanskrit Mahabharata into Odia. He rewrote it, inserting the customs, landscapes, and daily practices of fifteenth-century Odisha into a story set in mythological time. His characters eat like Odias. They observe Odia rituals. They live in a world that his audience — farmers, traders, artisans, the ordinary people of Gajapati-era Odisha — would recognize as their own, dressed in the garments of epic narrative. The vocabulary, the folk etymology, the community language are all calibrated to be comprehensible to ordinary people. More than 154 folktales from the living oral tradition are embedded in the text.
The Gajapati period (1434-1541 CE) represents the high-water mark of Odia political and cultural sovereignty, and the food culture of the era reflects that confidence. Kapilendra Deva’s empire stretched at its peak from the Ganges to the Kaveri. The court at Cuttack was a centre of patronage for literature, architecture, and religious life. The Gajapati kings, devout Vaishnavites and fierce patrons of the Jagannath cult, reinforced the temple food traditions through royal sponsorship while maintaining what must have been a considerably more elaborate court cuisine.
The Panchasakha poets — the five saints of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Odisha who translated Sanskrit sacred texts into Odia and created a literary tradition accessible to ordinary people — provide indirect evidence of the food world of their time. Achyutananda Das, the most prolific of the five, wrote on subjects ranging from spirituality and yoga to Ayurveda. Balarama Dasa’s Jagamohana Ramayana and Jagannath Das’s Bhagavata in Odia brought sacred narratives into a linguistic world where food metaphors, cooking imagery, and the rhythms of the kitchen could serve as vehicles for spiritual instruction. The very act of translating these texts into the vernacular was, in its way, a kind of Mahaprasad — taking something reserved for the Sanskrit-literate elite and distributing it to everyone.
What the court ate versus what the village ate would have been, as in any medieval society, starkly different in elaboration though perhaps not fundamentally different in ingredients. The court had access to imported luxuries — the spices, dried fruits, and aromatics that trade brought. The village had the seasonal produce of its fields and forests, the fish from its rivers and ponds, the rice from its paddies. The common grammar was the same: rice at the centre, pulses and vegetables around it, fish when available, sweets for celebration, fermented preparations for preservation and the summer heat. But the court could afford refinement — the multiple courses, the carefully balanced flavours, the sweet rice and the elaborate chutneys — while the village ate with the economy that limited resources impose.
The Mughal period, which arrived in Odisha in 1568 when the Afghan general Kala Pahar led a destructive invasion and Odisha eventually became part of the Bengal Subah by 1593, brought surprisingly little culinary change compared to what it wrought in North India. The reason is the temple. The Jagannath kitchen’s food norms, already deeply embedded in household practice across coastal Odisha, created a cultural immune system against foreign food influence. Where the Mughal court’s food culture — rich, meat-heavy, laden with cream and dried fruits, built around the tandoor and the slow-braised curry — transformed the cuisines of Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, it left Odisha largely untouched. The Mughals ruled the region politically but did not penetrate its kitchen.
The Marathas, who succeeded the Mughals in Odisha after 1751, had a different relationship with the region’s food culture. They were Hindu, they were devotees, and they paid particular attention to maintaining the Jagannath Temple and its rituals. If anything, Maratha rule reinforced the temple food tradition rather than challenging it. The Maratha administration improved the temple infrastructure and encouraged pilgrimage — which meant more people eating Mahaprasad, more exposure to the temple’s culinary norms, more standardization.
This is a point worth pausing on, because it runs counter to a pattern seen almost everywhere else in India. In most of the subcontinent, centuries of Mughal and then Maratha rule fundamentally altered food culture — the biryani, the kebab, the haleem, the roganjosh, the entire Awadhi culinary tradition are products of this encounter. In Odisha, the encounter happened, but the kitchen barely noticed. The temple food norms, deeply internalized by centuries of practice and pilgrimage, created a kind of culinary conservatism that absorbed political change without culinary change. The rulers changed. The food did not. This is either a remarkable case of cultural resilience or a remarkable case of cultural insularity, and the truth is probably that it is both.
The Colonial Period
The most dramatic transformation of the Odia table did not come from any Indian dynasty. It came from the other side of the planet.
Consider what the Odia kitchen looked like in, say, 1750, before the British period had fully begun. The primary spice for heat was long pepper (pipali), which had been used in Indian cooking for millennia, supplemented by black pepper, which was primarily a southern Indian crop that reached Odisha through trade. The souring agent was tamarind, raw mango, or the natural tartness of fermented preparations. The vegetables were indigenous: gourds of every kind, brinjal, banana (cooked as a vegetable), papaya, pumpkin, yam, various tubers. There were no potatoes. No tomatoes. No chili peppers. These are all New World crops — plants that originated in the Americas and did not exist in Asia until Portuguese traders brought them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Portuguese, who established a presence on India’s western coast in the early 1500s, introduced chili peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, cashews, pineapples, papayas, guavas, peanuts, corn, pumpkin (certain varieties), and tobacco. Of these, the chili pepper was the most consequential for Indian cooking — and for Odia cooking in particular. Before the chili, the heat in Indian food came from black pepper and long pepper, both of which produce a warm, aromatic burn quite different from the sharp, bright heat of capsaicin. The Portuguese introduction of the chili, sometime in the early sixteenth century, transformed the flavour profile of Indian cuisine more fundamentally than any other single event in culinary history. In Malayalam, the red chili is still called kappal mulagu — “the pepper that came in the ship.”
The transformation took time. Chili peppers did not replace long pepper overnight. But by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chili had become so thoroughly integrated into Odia cooking that most people assumed it had always been there. The same is true of the potato and the tomato — relatively late arrivals that now feel essential. The Jagannath Temple kitchen’s prohibition on potatoes, tomatoes, and other “foreign vegetables” is often interpreted as religious conservatism, but it is also, viewed from another angle, an accurate preservation of what the pre-Columbian Odia kitchen actually looked like. The temple kitchen, by refusing to adopt these ingredients, has maintained a food tradition that is genuinely older than anything a typical household kitchen now practices.
But the deepest colonial impact on Odia food culture was not an ingredient. It was a catastrophe.
On the night of September 17, 1865, the monsoon rains that Odisha’s rice crop depended on stopped earlier than expected. The harvest failed. And because the colonial administration had been exporting massive quantities of rice from Odisha to feed other parts of British India — extraction being the point of the whole enterprise — there were no reserves. No stored grain. No buffer against failure. The famine that followed, in 1866, is known in Odia memory as Na Anka — the “Nine Number Famine,” named for the ninth regnal year of Gajapati Divyasinghadeva in which it occurred. At least one million people died — roughly a third of the population of Odisha. By some estimates, overall deaths across the affected region reached four to five million over two years.
The horror of what people ate during the Na Anka belongs to the darkest chapters of colonial history. People ate leaves, bark, grass. They ate the seed grain that should have been saved for the next planting. Families sold their children. There are documented accounts of cannibalism. The British administrator T.E. Ravenshaw, who later became the Commissioner of Odisha and whose name is memorialized in Ravenshaw University in Cuttack, described scenes of starvation so extreme that they permanently altered his administration’s approach to famine response — though not enough, and not fast enough.
The Na Anka permanently scarred Odia food culture in ways that are difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore. A population that had experienced starvation at that scale developed a different relationship with food — a relationship marked by anxiety about scarcity, by an intense cultural value placed on rice as the guarantee of survival, by food preservation practices that reflected the memory of a time when there was nothing to preserve. The tradition of storing dried fish, dried greens, pickles, and fermented preparations — always part of Odia food culture — took on a sharper urgency after 1866. The phrase “atita kala” — the time of scarcity — entered the vocabulary as a permanent reference point. To waste rice, in an Odia household, is not merely impractical. It is a transgression against the memory of those who had none.
Beyond the famine, British colonialism brought its own food culture to Odisha’s urban centres: tea, biscuits, white bread, tinned goods, the aesthetic of the colonial table with its china plates and cutlery and courses served in a specific order. The educated Odia elite of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, navigating the social pressures of colonial society, adopted these practices to varying degrees — the tea-and-biscuits habit especially, which became embedded in middle-class Odia life with a thoroughness that survived independence by many decades. The afternoon chai, the glucose biscuit, the tin of Britannia Marie — these are colonial legacies that Odia households absorbed so completely that they no longer feel colonial. They feel like home. The colonizer’s table manners faded. The colonizer’s snacks stayed.
The Green Revolution and Its Consequences
In the early 1950s, before the Green Revolution had begun, a team from the Central Rice Research Institute at Cuttack conducted the Jeypore Botanical Survey in the undivided Koraput district — the tribal heartland of southern Odisha that sits on the Eastern Ghats plateau, at altitudes ranging from five hundred to sixteen hundred metres, with microclimatic diversity that supports an extraordinary range of cultivation. Between 1950 and 1955, the survey team collected approximately 1,740 indigenous paddy varieties from this single region, including pigmented rice landraces — red, black, and purple varieties with distinct flavour profiles, nutritional properties, and adaptation to specific soil and weather conditions.
Read that number again. One thousand seven hundred and forty varieties. From one district.
Across India as a whole, the pre-Green Revolution rice diversity is estimated at over a hundred and ten thousand varieties — a genetic library of adaptation and resilience built over millennia by farmers whose breeding method was simple observation: this grain does well in flooded fields, that one tolerates drought, this one resists the pest that appears in October, that one has a fragrance that fills the kitchen. Each variety was a data point in an ongoing experiment conducted by millions of unnamed researchers working the same problem — how to grow rice in this specific place, with this specific soil, under this specific sky — for generation after generation.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, with its promise of high-yield varieties, chemical fertilizers, and modern irrigation, collapsed this diversity with breathtaking speed. The new seeds produced more grain per acre. They responded to fertilizer in predictable ways. They could be grown on a timeline that suited government procurement schedules. What they could not do was taste like anything, resist pests without chemical inputs, tolerate the specific microclimate of a particular village’s paddies, or provide the nutritional complexity of indigenous varieties. But yield was the metric, and yield won.
By the 1990s, when M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation conducted a follow-up survey of the same Koraput region, the number of rice landraces in active cultivation had collapsed to approximately 350. From 1,740 to 350 in forty years — a loss of eighty percent. Across India, the picture was worse: from over a hundred and ten thousand varieties to roughly six thousand extant today. A loss of over ninety-three percent. The geneticist Debal Deb, one of the most important figures in Indian rice conservation, has called this “the largest destruction of genetic biodiversity in the history of agriculture.”
What was lost was not merely variety. It was a system of knowledge. Each indigenous rice variety embodied the accumulated observation of generations of farmers about how a specific plant interacted with a specific environment. When the variety disappeared, the knowledge disappeared with it — the knowledge of when to plant, how much water it needed, what pest it resisted, what soil it preferred, what it tasted like, what it meant in the kitchen. A rice variety is not just a genome. It is a relationship between a plant and a community. When the variety goes, the relationship goes, and no gene bank can preserve a relationship.
The millet story follows the same trajectory but with an additional cruelty. Millets — finger millet (mandia), little millet (suan), foxtail millet, kodo millet — were the staple grains of Odisha’s tribal communities for millennia. They were not inferior alternatives to rice. They were the primary grain, grown in rain-fed highland fields where rice could not easily grow, consumed as porridge (jau), as flatbread, as steamed dumplings, as fermented drinks. Finger millet, in particular, is a nutritional powerhouse: high in calcium, iron, and fibre, with a lower glycemic index than rice. The Gadaba tribe’s fermented finger millet drinks — Landa and Pej — were not just beverages. They were staple foods, consumed daily, providing hydration, nutrition, and the beneficial gut bacteria that come with fermentation.
The Green Revolution’s emphasis on rice and wheat as the pillars of food security, reinforced by a Public Distribution System that distributed only rice and wheat, systematically devalued millets. Farmers who grew millets could not sell them at government procurement prices. Schools that served midday meals used rice, not millets. The social stigma followed: millet became “poor people’s food,” “tribal food,” something to be left behind as one moved up the social ladder. The grain that had nourished the highlands for three thousand years was displaced not by a better grain but by a policy framework that could not see it.
The Odisha Millets Mission, launched by the state government in 2017, represents one of the most significant attempts to reverse this damage. The programme’s model is ambitious: revive millet cultivation among tribal farmers, create demand by incorporating millets into the Public Distribution System and the Integrated Child Development Services programme, and build a market for millet products in urban centres. In four years, the mission expanded to eighty-four blocks across fifteen districts, reaching over a hundred and ten thousand farmers. The area under ragi cultivation in mission districts increased from 3,116 hectares to nearly 44,000 hectares. Millets have returned to government ration shops, to school midday meals, to the plates of children who had never tasted the grain their grandparents considered essential.
But the revival is still fragile. The global designation of 2023 as the International Year of Millets brought attention and marketing. Koraput’s traditional farming system received recognition from the FAO as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2012 — one of only three in India. Yet the structural incentives still favour rice: the procurement system, the pricing, the consumer preferences of an urbanizing population. The millet revival is real, but it is swimming against a current that has been flowing for half a century.
Regional Food Geographies in Historical Context
To speak of “Odia cuisine” as a single thing is like speaking of “European cuisine” — technically defensible, practically useless. The state’s geography — five hundred kilometres of coastline, river deltas, central valleys, western plateaus, southern highlands, northern forests — produced regional food cultures so distinct that a cook from Berhampur would find a kitchen in Sambalpur almost foreign. These differences are not accidents of taste. They are products of specific histories, specific ecologies, specific encounters with power and trade and deprivation.
The Coastal Corridor: Puri-Bhubaneswar-Cuttack-Berhampur
This is the Odisha that most people mean when they say “Odia food.” It is the kitchen most shaped by the temple, most connected to the sea, and most visible to the outside world.
The temple influence is pervasive. The absence of onion and garlic in many coastal Odia preparations — Dalma, Khechudi, Kanika, and dozens of others — is a direct inheritance from the Jagannath kitchen. The cooking technique of tempering with panch phutana — the five-spice blend of mustard, cumin, fenugreek, nigella, and fennel — creates the aromatic signature that immediately identifies a dish as coastal Odia. The cooking medium is mustard oil in many preparations, with ghee reserved for sweets and special occasions. Coconut appears constantly — grated, ground into paste, extracted as milk — reflecting a coast where coconut palms are as common as telephone poles.
The fish culture is equally deep. The coastline, the rivers — Mahanadi, Brahmani, Baitarani — and above all Chilika Lake, Asia’s largest brackish water lagoon, provide a protein source that is woven into the daily fabric of coastal life. Machha Besara — fish in mustard paste gravy — is the default preparation, the taste baseline against which other fish dishes are measured. Machha Ghanta — fish heads cooked with vegetables in a rich gravy — is the celebratory dish, appearing at weddings and festivals. The Chilika Lake’s prawns and crabs, cooked with mustard and coconut in preparations that have no exact parallels anywhere else in Indian coastal cuisine, represent a local food tradition so specific to its geography that it cannot be transplanted.
The sweet tradition — Rasagola, Chhena Poda, Rasabali, Chhena Jhili — is chhena-based, reflecting the dairy economy of the coastal and central regions. Each sweet belongs to a specific town: Rasagola to the temple tradition, Chhena Poda to Nayagarh, Rasabali to Kendrapara, Chhena Gaja to Sonepur. The geography of sweets maps onto the geography of the state with a precision that suggests each confection is not just a recipe but an expression of a place.
Western Odisha: Sambalpur-Bargarh-Bolangir-Kalahandi
Cross the Mahanadi and travel west, and the kitchen changes. The spice levels rise. The temple influence fades. The plate itself looks different.
Western Odisha’s food culture reflects a different ecology and a different history. The climate is drier, the rainfall less reliable, and the agricultural base consequently more diverse. Millets and wheat appear alongside rice in a way that is rare on the coast. The protein sources shift: more chicken, more mutton, less fish — the distance from the sea and from major river systems makes fish a luxury rather than a default. The cooking is more robust, with higher chili heat and a spice profile that has more in common with neighbouring Chhattisgarh than with coastal Odisha.
Ambil is the signature preparation — a fermented rice-and-vegetable dish that serves the same cooling function as Pakhala on the coast but with a sharper, more acidic character. In the western districts, the fermented rice water of Pakhala is replaced by a thicker preparation using rice paste or gram flour as a thickener, with vegetables added in batches based on their cooking time. The essential addition is bamboo shoots — locally called kardi — which western Odia communities consume year-round, stocking dried and fermented bamboo shoots as a pantry staple. Ambil was once standard even at wedding feasts, though the rise of professional catering has pushed it toward the margins, replaced by easier-to-make relishes.
The sweets of western Odisha are denser, less ethereal than their coastal cousins. Chhena Gaja from Sonepur — rectangular blocks of chhena fried until golden and soaked in heavy sugar syrup — is a sweet that means business, with none of the delicate sponginess of a coastal Rasagola. It is a confection that reflects a landscape: harder, drier, more assertive.
What western Odisha’s food culture represents, historically, is a kitchen less captured by the Jagannath Temple’s normative force. The temple’s vegetarian, no-onion-no-garlic orthodoxy weakens with distance from Puri, and western Odisha sits at the far edge of that radius. The result is a food culture that is recognizably Odia — the rice centrality, the use of mustard, the fermented preparations — but inflected by regional self-sufficiency and by cultural exchange with Central Indian neighbours that the coastal kitchen has not experienced in the same way.
The Southern Highlands: Koraput-Rayagada-Malkangiri
This is where the food tradition diverges most radically, because this is tribal Odisha, and the tribal kitchen runs on a different operating system.
The staple is mandia, not rice — or was, before government ration shops and the economics of market integration pushed rice into even the most remote highland kitchens. In the traditional tribal diet, finger millet is processed in several ways: ground into flour for flatbreads and dumplings, cooked as a thick porridge called jau (finger millet blended with warm water, consumed as the everyday staple before work), fermented into alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Mandia tampa — finger millet cooked in warm water with broken rice — is the basic porridge. Mandia Sijha Pitha — steamed dumplings wrapped in banana leaves — are the highland’s answer to the coastal Pitha tradition, adapted to a different grain and a different ecology.
The forest provides what the field cannot: wild tubers of dozens of species, dug from hillsides with a knowledge so specific that each species has its own season, its own preparation method, its own toxicity profile (some wild tubers require extensive processing to remove harmful compounds). Wild greens — more species than any botanist has comprehensively catalogued — foraged from forest edges and monsoon-fed meadows. Wild mushrooms, gathered with the knowledge of which are edible and which will kill you — a knowledge system with no margin for error, transmitted orally, tested empirically, one generation at a time.
The southern highlands are also where you find what can only be called living archaeology of food. The FAO’s designation of Koraput’s traditional agriculture as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2012 recognized what food historians already knew: this is one of the world’s oldest continuously practiced food production systems. The Jeypore tract — the traditional name for the undivided Koraput district — is recognized by rice researchers as a centre of genetic diversity and a secondary centre of origin for cultivated rice. The 340-plus rice landraces still maintained in the region, the eight species of minor millets, the nine species of pulses, the sacred groves that preserve plant genetic resources — these are not quaint survivals. They are a functioning system of food production and knowledge management that has been operating for millennia.
The Northern Forests: Mayurbhanj-Keonjhar
The northern districts are forest country, where the sal and teak woods that once covered most of interior Odisha still survive in patches large enough to sustain a forest-dependent food culture.
The tribal communities here — Santal, Kolha, Munda, Ho, Khadia, Bhuyan — have food traditions that centre on what the forest provides: wild mushrooms in extraordinary variety during and after the monsoon (researchers have documented over twenty edible species in the region, harvested and sold in local weekly markets), bamboo shoots preserved through fermentation for year-round use, forest tubers, wild yams, and leafy greens that have no names in English and barely have names in mainstream Odia. The Santal food tradition, in particular, represents a culinary system adapted to a landscape of forests, rivers, and small-scale agriculture — rice where irrigation permits, millets on higher ground, fish from streams and ponds, and everything the forest offers to those who know where to look.
The invisibility of this food culture to the broader world is itself a form of loss. A cuisine that is not documented, not celebrated, not written about, not economically valued, is a cuisine that will not survive the migration of its practitioners to cities where the forest’s produce is unavailable and its knowledge is unnecessary. When a young Santal woman moves from Mayurbhanj to Bhubaneswar for a garment factory job, she does not bring the forest with her. The mushroom knowledge, the tuber knowledge, the seasonal calendar of what the forest provides — this stays behind, and with each generation that leaves, the library shrinks.
Modern Food Identity
On March 20, 2026 — just days before this writing — the Odisha Tourism Department organized a Pakhala Parba at Panthanivas in Bhubaneswar and set a Guinness World Record for the largest serving of Pakhala: 1,174 kilograms, prepared using 850 kilograms of rice along with curd and traditional ingredients, served to over two thousand people from underprivileged communities in under two hours. Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi hailed the achievement. News outlets across Odisha covered it. Social media erupted.
The event crystallizes something important about the current moment in Odia food identity: the transformation of a survival food into a cultural symbol. Pakhala Bhata — fermented water rice, the food of poor farmers, the food you ate when you could not afford fresh rice for every meal — is now a Guinness record, a tourism product, and the centrepiece of a global cultural movement. Pakhala Divas, observed on March 20 since its grassroots emergence around 2011, has grown from social media campaigns into a phenomenon that engages the entire Odia diaspora. In Bangalore and Hyderabad, in London and New Jersey, Odias post photographs of their Pakhala meals with a fervour that is part celebration, part protest, part performance of belonging.
The protest element is real, even when unstated. In a nation where culinary prestige flows toward the rich, the elaborate, the metropolitan — where the food conversation is dominated by biryanis and butter chickens and artisanal dosas — Pakhala Divas is an assertion that the simplest food of one of India’s poorest states is worth celebrating. It is pride that is also defiance. And the science has validated what poverty discovered: the overnight fermentation of rice in water produces beneficial bacteria, increases B-vitamin bioavailability, reduces glycemic index, and creates a probiotic food that is easily digestible. What poverty stumbled upon, nutrition science has confirmed.
The class dynamics remain complicated. The Pakhala served at upscale Bhubaneswar restaurants — garnished with fried fish, presented in designer bowls, priced at several hundred rupees — is not the same Pakhala that a farmer’s wife sets out on a leaf plate at noon. The ingredients may overlap, but the social meaning is entirely different. One is cuisine. The other is subsistence. The celebration risks aestheticizing what was, for most of its history, a condition of deprivation.
Meanwhile, the restaurant economy in Bhubaneswar is attempting something that has never been done in Odia culinary history: the codification and commercial presentation of “Odia cuisine” as a distinct category. Until 2001, there was not a single organized Odia cuisine restaurant in the state capital. Dalma, the first dedicated Odia restaurant, opened that year and proved that there was a market — that Odias would pay to eat their own food in a restaurant setting, an activity that had previously been considered unnecessary (why eat out what your mother cooks at home?) or vaguely embarrassing (why spend money on Dalma when you can make it for free?).
The success of Dalma spawned imitators and competitors, and the Bhubaneswar restaurant scene now includes multiple establishments dedicated to Odia cuisine. But the codification process introduces distortions. A cuisine that was always regional — different in Sambalpur and Berhampur, different in Koraput and Cuttack — gets flattened into a restaurant menu that presents a single “Odia” experience. The dishes that survive the codification are the ones that translate well to restaurant service: Dalma, Pakhala, Chhena Poda, Machha Besara. The dishes that do not survive — the hyper-local preparations, the seasonal specialties, the forest foods, the millet preparations of the highlands — disappear from the public definition of Odia cuisine even as they continue to be cooked in the kitchens where they originated.
The diaspora kitchen adds another layer. An estimated seven hundred thousand Odias work in Surat alone. Hundreds of thousands more are in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, and the Gulf states. What do they cook? Rice and Dalma, mostly. Pakhala when the weather is hot and the homesickness is sharp. Fish when they can find it, though the fish in Bangalore’s markets tastes nothing like the fish from the Mahanadi. They carry with them the ingredients they can get — mustard oil, panch phutana spice blend, dried fish — and adapt to the ingredients they cannot. A food writer based abroad noted that cooking Odia food with foreign vegetables and fish may be disputed by purists as authentic, but the farther you go from Odisha, the more you realize how subtle and understated its food is, how much its identity depends on specific ingredients from specific places.
The Odia diaspora’s food experience is a version of a universal story — the immigrant cooking their way home through available ingredients — but with a particular poignancy. Odia cuisine has no international profile. There are no Odia restaurants in London or New York the way there are Bengali or Kerala restaurants. The cuisine is invisible outside the state and, to a remarkable degree, invisible within India. An Odia in Bangalore cannot easily explain to colleagues what Odia food is, because the reference points do not exist in the national food conversation. This invisibility is both the problem and, potentially, the opportunity. A cuisine that has not yet been discovered by the national food media has not yet been distorted by it either.
The tension between preservation and evolution is the defining dynamic of Odia food identity right now. On one side: the temple tradition, the indigenous varieties, the millet revival, the tribal food systems — forces of conservation that argue for protecting what exists. On the other side: urbanization, the restaurant economy, the diaspora, the food media, social media — forces of change that are redefining what “Odia food” means, who gets to define it, and how it is consumed.
The temple kitchen, with its nine-hundred-year-old fire, its disposable clay pots, its prohibition on tomatoes and potatoes, its food that cooks from top to bottom, represents one pole. The Guinness record Pakhala, with its 850 kilograms of rice, its tourism department sponsorship, its social media documentation, represents the other. Between these two poles, in the actual kitchens of actual Odias — the grandmother in Cuttack who still makes Dalma without a recipe, the tribal farmer’s wife in Koraput who grinds mandia for the morning jau, the software engineer in Hyderabad who orders panch phutana on Amazon because no local store carries it — the food culture continues to do what it has always done: adapt, absorb, resist, remember, and feed whoever shows up.
The Odia table has been changing for three and a half thousand years. It changed when rice overtook millet. It changed when Buddhism introduced vegetarian discipline. It changed when the temple kitchen standardized a cuisine and broadcast it through pilgrimage. It changed when the Portuguese brought the chili pepper that now seems inseparable from the food. It changed when a million people starved in 1866 and the survivors developed a new relationship with every grain of rice. It changed when the Green Revolution replaced a thousand varieties with a handful of hybrids. It is changing now, as the millet comes back, as the restaurant codifies, as the diaspora adapts, as the Guinness record is set and posted to Instagram.
Through all of it, the grammar persists: rice at the centre, the seasonal calendar governing the vegetables, the fermented preparation for the heat, the sweet alongside the savoury, the restrained spicing that asks the ingredient to speak rather than the spice to shout. The food that the people of Golbai Sasan ate three and a half millennia ago — rice, millet, pulses, the meat of the animals they hunted — is not so distant from the food that an Odia family eats today. The ingredients have shifted. The proportions have changed. But the underlying logic — grow what the land gives, eat what the season provides, waste nothing, offer the best to God before you feed yourself — that logic has survived everything history has thrown at it.
Whether it survives what modernity is throwing at it — the monocultures, the processed foods, the loss of indigenous knowledge, the urbanization that severs the connection between kitchen and field — is the open question. The answer will be written not in policy documents or cultural festivals or Guinness records, but in what an Odia grandmother cooks for dinner tonight, and whether her granddaughter knows how to make it.
Next: Thread, Stone, Leaf — the material culture of Odisha, from Sambalpuri ikat to temple sculpture to the economics of craft survival.
Source Research
The raw research that informs this series.