On this page
English only · Odia translation in progress
Chapter 7: Body as Instrument
In March 2015, a ninety-two-year-old woman named Sashimani Devi died in a small house near the Jagannath Temple in Puri. No national newspaper carried the news on its front page. No television channel interrupted its programming. The Prime Minister did not tweet. She was, by the metrics that matter to modern India, nobody. She was also the last Mahari — the last temple dancer of Lord Jagannath — and with her death, a continuous performance tradition that stretched back at least eight centuries fell permanently silent. Not metaphorically silent. Actually silent. There is no Mahari dancing for Lord Jagannath today. There is no one left who can.
Sashimani Devi had been born into the tradition. She had been dedicated to the temple as a child, trained in the ritual dances that accompanied the deity’s daily schedule, performed the Badasinghara seva — the final ritual of the night, when Jagannath retires to sleep and the dancer offers the last devotional performance of the day. She had danced in the inner sanctum before the wooden deity with its vast, unblinking eyes, in a space where no audience sat because the audience was God. By the time scholars and cultural organizations came looking for her in the 1970s and 1980s, she was already elderly, already the last. They recorded what they could. They documented the footwork, the hand gestures, the songs from the Gita Govinda that she still remembered. They filmed her dancing. But film is not transmission. A recording is not a lineage. When she died, what died with her was not merely a set of movements but an entire model of artistic vocation — a way of being in which the body was simultaneously instrument, prayer, and offering.
This chapter is about what happens when the body becomes an instrument of culture. Not a passive vessel for inherited tradition, but an active site where civilization encodes its deepest convictions about beauty, devotion, gender, power, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Odisha’s performing arts — from the refined geometry of Odissi to the martial acrobatics of Chhau, from the village storytelling of Daskathia to the all-night drama of Prahlad Natak — represent one of the most diverse ecosystems of embodied culture in India. They have been nearly destroyed, deliberately reconstructed, exported to the world, and fought over with an intensity that reveals how much is at stake when a civilization’s body language is on the line.
The Devadasi’s Art
To understand the Mahari tradition, you must first discard the two simplistic stories that are usually told about it.
The first story, favored by cultural nationalists, goes like this: the Maharis were sacred artists, priestesses of extraordinary sophistication, keepers of an ancient tradition of devotional dance that was cruelly suppressed by puritanical colonial rulers and misguided Indian reformers. In this telling, the Mahari is a victim of cultural ignorance — her art destroyed by people who could not understand it.
The second story, favored by progressive reformers, goes like this: the devadasi system was institutionalized exploitation of women, a religiously sanctioned mechanism for sexual servitude dressed up in the vocabulary of devotion. In this telling, the abolition of the system was a moral imperative, and anyone who mourns the Mahari tradition is romanticizing oppression.
Both stories contain truth. Neither is adequate. The Mahari tradition was simultaneously a system of extraordinary artistic achievement and a social institution embedded in patriarchal structures. Holding both facts in the mind at once is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is precisely why most accounts collapse into one story or the other. But the real history demands that you sit with both.
The institution dates to at least the twelfth century, to the reign of King Anantavarman Chodaganga Deva, who built the present Jagannath Temple at Puri and established the elaborate ritual protocols that governed its daily worship. The Maharis — the word derives from “Maha Nari,” great woman, or from “Maha Ripu Hari,” she who destroys the great enemy (desire) — were women formally dedicated to the service of Lord Jagannath. Their dedication was ritualized: a ceremony that bound them to the deity as, in theological terms, his consort. They were, in the vocabulary of the tradition, married to God.
This was not a metaphor. The Maharis lived in designated quarters near the temple complex. Their daily schedule was governed by the temple’s ritual calendar. They danced during the morning and evening aarti, during festivals, during the great occasions of the Jagannath liturgical year. Their repertoire drew heavily from Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda — that twelfth-century Sanskrit poem of devastating lyrical beauty and frank eroticism, dramatizing the love between Radha and Krishna. The poem had been incorporated into the temple’s ritual since at least the fifteenth century, when the Gajapati king Prataprudra Deva decreed that it be performed daily. The Mahari’s body, moving through the ashtapadis of Jayadeva’s verses, became the site where sacred text was translated into devotional action.
The Maharis were not a homogeneous group. They belonged to at least six categories: Bhitara Gauni (who danced inside the inner sanctum), Bahara Gauni (who danced in the outer temple), Nachuani, Patuari, Raj Angila, Gahana Mahari, and Rudra Ganika — each with distinct roles, privileges, and ritual functions. The hierarchy was precise, codified, and fiercely maintained.
What is often erased from the reformist narrative is the social position these women actually held. In medieval Odisha, Maharis were among the most educated women in society. They were literate — a rarity in any pre-modern community, and especially so for women. They owned property. They had legal standing. Temple records from the Gajapati period show Maharis receiving land grants, participating in economic transactions, and exercising a degree of autonomy that was exceptional for women of any class in medieval India. Their status derived not from marriage to a man or from family lineage but from their relationship with the deity and their command of a sacred art. They were artists of the highest caliber, trained from childhood in a discipline that demanded mastery of rhythm, expression, storytelling, and the Sanskrit literary tradition.
Notably, the Odia Mahari tradition differed in important ways from devadasi systems elsewhere in India. Unlike in parts of South India, where the devadasi institution was more explicitly entangled with patronage systems that included sexual relationships with temple functionaries and local elites, scholars have noted that the Maharis of Puri were expected to maintain celibacy upon their dedication. The theological logic was consistent: if you are married to God, you are not available to men. This does not mean the system was free of exploitation — no institution that dedicates children to a lifelong vocation before they can consent is free of exploitation. But it does mean that the colonial equation of Mahari with prostitute was not merely culturally insensitive. It was factually wrong.
The British colonial administration, applying Victorian moral categories to a tradition they made little effort to understand, classified the Maharis as temple prostitutes. The logic was simple: women who were not married to men, who danced, who were associated with a temple, must be fallen women. The Anti-Nautch movement of the late nineteenth century — driven by both British missionaries and Indian social reformers who had internalized colonial moral categories — targeted temple dance traditions across India. In Odisha, the campaign merged with broader efforts to “purify” Hindu practice. The Orissa Hindu Religious Endowments Act and the broader Devadasi Prohibition Act of 1947 effectively banned the dedication of women to temples.
The intent was to end exploitation. The effect was to criminalize a complex artistic and religious tradition without distinguishing between its exploitative and its generative dimensions. The daughters of Maharis, facing the stigma that colonial and reformist discourse had attached to their inherited profession, abandoned dance entirely. Some took up nursing. Some disappeared into anonymity. By the time India gained independence, the Mahari tradition was functionally dead. A handful of elderly women — Sashimani Devi, Kokilaprabha Devi, Harapriya Devi — still lived in Puri, still remembered fragments of the repertoire, still carried in their aging bodies the movement vocabulary of centuries. But they had no students. The temple had discontinued the ritual role of the dancer. The tradition was measured in individual lifespans, and those lifespans were running out.
The moral tragedy deserves to be stated plainly: a sophisticated art form, embedded in a theological system, practiced by educated and propertied women, was destroyed by a morality — first colonial, then reformist — that could not distinguish between autonomy and degradation. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater. And the baby, in this case, was one of the oldest continuous dance traditions on the subcontinent. What was lost was not merely a set of dance steps but an entire model of female artistic vocation, independent of male authority, sanctioned by the highest religious institution in the land. Nothing comparable has replaced it.
Gotipua — The Boy Dancers
While the Mahari tradition was being strangled by colonial morality and reformist legislation, a parallel tradition — humbler, more resilient, rooted in village culture rather than temple institution — was quietly preserving much of what would have otherwise been lost.
The Gotipua tradition emerged in the sixteenth century, during the reign of King Ramachandra Dev I of Khurda, in a period when Vaishnavism under the influence of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was transforming the religious landscape of eastern India. The word tells its own story: “goti” means single, “pua” means boy. Gotipua dancers were pre-pubescent boys, dressed in female attire and ornaments, who performed devotional dances depicting the love stories of Radha and Krishna. The tradition was based not in the temple sanctum but in the akhada — the village gymnasium or training center — and performances took place in village squares, at festivals, before local audiences rather than the deity.
The origin story carries its own martial subtext. Ramachandra Dev is said to have established akhadas — training gymnasiums — in every street of Puri, ostensibly to train boys as guardians of the Jagannath Temple against military invasion. The dance training was layered on top of physical conditioning, gymnastics, and martial discipline. The akhada was both gymnasium and dance studio, and the boys who trained there were expected to be as physically formidable as they were artistically accomplished. This martial-artistic hybrid is not unique to Odisha — the Kerala tradition of Kalaripayattu and Kathakali shares a similar DNA — but the Gotipua akhada was its distinctive Odia expression.
Why boys instead of women? The answer lies in the same social forces that were constraining the Mahari tradition. As restrictions on women’s public performance tightened — first through social pressure, later through colonial legislation — the Gotipua tradition offered a mechanism to continue the dance without violating the emerging proprieties. Boys performing female roles was an accepted convention across Indian performance traditions. It allowed the movement vocabulary, the musical repertoire, and the devotional content of the older tradition to survive, transferred to different bodies in different spaces.
The Gotipua style is more acrobatic than the Mahari repertoire. It includes bandha nritya — “bound-body” or “tied-body” dance — in which the young dancer’s body is bent into extreme postures: backbends, inversions, full-body arches that exploit the extraordinary flexibility of pre-adolescent physiology. The effect is spectacular. Bodies curved like drawn bows, held in suspension, defying the ordinary limits of the human frame. The daily routine in the akhada was rigorous: the boys rose at five in the morning to practice singing and pakhawaj drumming, followed by an oil massage of the entire body to maintain flexibility, then hours of physical training in different bandha postures and dance sequences, alongside whatever academic studies the village could provide.
The tradition centered in villages near Puri, particularly Raghurajpur — the same village now famous for its Pattachitra painting tradition, sitting on the banks of the river Bhargavi. In these villages, Gotipua training was a community institution. Boys began training at ages five or six, performed through adolescence, and retired from dancing when their voices broke and their bodies lost the prepubescent flexibility the form demanded. The transition was absolute: one year you were the star of the akhada, the next year your body could no longer do what the dance required. Some transitioned to mardala drumming or vocal accompaniment. Most returned to village life and other vocations.
The historical significance of the Gotipua tradition is incalculable, and it can be stated in a single sentence: without Gotipua, there would be no Odissi.
When the scholars and artists of the mid-twentieth century set out to reconstruct Odissi as a classical form, the Gotipua akhadas were a living archive. The boys were still dancing. The gurus who trained them still remembered the compositions, the rhythmic patterns, the expressive techniques that connected the village tradition to the temple tradition that had been suppressed. And three of the four architects of modern Odissi — Kelucharan Mohapatra, Pankaj Charan Das, and Deba Prasad Das — were themselves Gotipua dancers in their youth. Their bodies carried the movement vocabulary that their minds would later systematize into a classical grammar. The village akhada was the bridge. Without it, the gap between the stone sculptures of Konark and the concert stages of the twentieth century would have been unbridgeable.
The Reconstruction of Odissi
By the late 1940s, the situation was this: the Mahari tradition was extinct or nearly so. The Gotipua tradition survived in scattered villages. The temples of Bhubaneswar, Puri, and Konark preserved a visual record in thousands of sculptural panels depicting dancers in poses of extraordinary precision. The Abhinaya Chandrika — a text on dance theory composed by Maheshwara Mahapatra under the royal patronage of the Kingdom of Khemundi, containing 284 verses codifying mudras, pada bhedas, rhythmic patterns, and compositional structures — preserved a theoretical framework. And a handful of individuals recognized that these fragments, taken together, might constitute the material from which a classical dance form could be reconstructed.
The word “reconstructed” matters. Odissi, as it is performed today, is not a tradition handed down in unbroken succession from teacher to student across centuries. It is a deliberate, conscious, scholarly reconstruction — an act of cultural archaeology performed not in a laboratory but in the dance studio. This does not diminish it. If anything, it makes the achievement more remarkable. But it does mean that the Odissi the world sees on stage today is the product of specific choices made by specific people in a specific historical moment.
The central figure in this reconstruction was Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra (1926—2004), and it is genuinely difficult to overstate his importance. Born in Raghurajpur — the Pattachitra village, the Gotipua village — he entered the akhada as a boy. He trained as a Pattachitra painter. He became a mardala drummer of exceptional skill, eventually joining the Annapurna Theatre in Puri as a musician and choreographer. These three trainings — dancer, visual artist, percussionist — converged in a single sensibility that would shape everything he later created.
What Mohapatra did was systematic in a way that few artistic reconstructions have ever been. He researched the Jagannath Temple archives. He consulted the surviving Mahari practitioners — Sashimani Devi and others — documenting whatever they could remember or demonstrate of the old repertoire. He studied the Gotipua techniques in which he himself had been trained. He spent hours at Konark and Bhubaneswar, analyzing sculptural panels, matching stone postures to living movement. He drew on the Abhinaya Chandrika and other texts. From these disparate sources, he synthesized a coherent system: a grammar of movement built around the interplay of tribhanga (the three-bend, flowing, sinuous posture) and chowka (the grounded, symmetrical, wide-legged stance drawn from the seated posture of Lord Jagannath himself). He created a concert repertoire organized into a progressive sequence of items — mangalacharan (invocation), batu nritya (pure dance), pallavi (lyrical elaboration), abhinaya (expressive narrative), and moksha (liberation).
The painter’s eye gave his choreography its sculptural quality — every moment, arrested, could be a Konark panel. The drummer’s instinct gave it rhythmic precision that was almost mathematical. The Gotipua dancer’s body memory gave it the physical vocabulary that connected the reconstruction to its living roots.
Guru Pankaj Charan Das (1919—2003) brought something different and equally essential. His connection to the Mahari tradition was not scholarly but biographical. He was born prematurely in Puri while his mother was staying with a Mahari — a family friend named Ratna Prabha Devi — and was left in her care as an infant. He grew up in a Mahari household. The movements, the songs, the devotional interiority of the temple dance tradition were not things he researched but things he absorbed through proximity, through the osmosis of daily life with a woman who danced for God. As he later said, the Mahari dance had no stylized hand gestures and postures in the way classical dance would later codify them. It was the outpouring of a soul to her husband, who happened to be God himself.
Where Mohapatra’s Odissi was sculpted, precise, and architecturally organized, Pankaj Charan Das’s style pulsed with bhakti rasa — devotional feeling as the primary organizing principle. He was the one who brought Odissi out of the temple precincts, the one who first demonstrated the dance publicly. He joined the Utkal Sangeet Mahavidyalaya in Bhubaneswar in the early 1960s as a senior faculty guru and choreographed numerous pallavis. He received the Padma Shri in 1992. He is sometimes called the “Father of Odissi” — a title that captures his chronological priority even if it understates the collective nature of the reconstruction.
Guru Deba Prasad Das (1932—) brought yet another emphasis. A former Gotipua dancer from a Karana family near Cuttack, he had worked at the Annapurna Theatre alongside Mohapatra and Pankaj Charan Das. His style was robust and distinctive — rooted in the sculptural, with an emphasis on the physical grandeur of the poses. He established what is sometimes called the Deba Prasad Gharana, a lineage that maintained its own interpretive independence from the Mohapatra school. He was, among the four founders, the one most attuned to the monumental quality of the dance — the sense that Odissi at its best should have the weight and permanence of stone.
Guru Mayadhar Raut (1930—2025) was the fourth pillar. A founding member of Jayantika, the association that would codify Odissi’s grammar, Raut made specific innovations that became integral to the form: he was the first to introduce Mudra Vinyoga (the systematic use of hand gestures) into Odissi pedagogy in 1955, and the first to incorporate Sanchari Bhava (transitory emotional states) into Odissi dance items. He was also the first to present the Gita Govinda’s ashtapadis on stage as Odissi compositions, portraying shringara rasa — the erotic-devotional sentiment — with a refinement that connected the concert stage to the temple tradition where Jayadeva’s verses had been performed for centuries.
The institutional breakthrough came in 1958, when these gurus, along with scholars like Dhirendra Pattnaik, formed Jayantika — an association dedicated to codifying the grammar and repertoire of Odissi. Over a series of meetings spanning several years, Jayantika brought together practitioners who had been working somewhat independently. The codification process was itself a series of negotiations: which elements of the Mahari tradition to foreground, which Gotipua techniques to incorporate, how to reconcile different gurus’ approaches, how to translate a tradition rooted in temple ritual and village festival into the format of a concert performance on a proscenium stage.
In 1964, the Sangeet Natak Akademi — India’s national academy of music, dance, and drama — officially recognized Odissi as the eighth classical dance form of India. The recognition was a milestone that placed Odissi alongside Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Manipuri, and Mohiniyattam. But it was also a simplification. The designation “classical” came with expectations about codified grammar, standardized repertoire, established guru-shishya lineage, and a body of theoretical literature. Odissi met these criteria, but the process of meeting them had involved choices that were, inevitably, also exclusions. What had been fluid became fixed. What had been diverse became standardized. What had been ritual became performance. The gain was coherence and transmissibility. The loss was the organic, unruly, context-dependent life that characterizes any tradition that has not yet been codified.
Three distinct styles emerged from the reconstruction, and they remain recognizable today. Kelucharan Mohapatra’s lineage — the dominant school, carried forward by his son Ratikant Mohapatra, his daughter-in-law Sujata Mohapatra, and the institution of Srjan in Bhubaneswar — is characterized by lyrical precision, sculptural beauty, and meticulous musicality. Pankaj Charan Das’s lineage carries the devotional intensity of the Mahari tradition, with a quality of interiority and spontaneity that the more structured Mohapatra school sometimes lacks. Deba Prasad Das’s lineage emphasizes the sculptural, the monumental, the physical grandeur of the dance. These are not rigid boundaries. Students cross lineages. Styles bleed into each other. But the productive plurality of the reconstruction — the fact that Odissi is not one thing but a conversation between several related visions — is itself one of the art form’s strengths.
Odissi Goes Global
The performer who carried the reconstructed Odissi from the temple towns of Odisha to the concert halls of the world was Sanjukta Panigrahi (1944—1997).
Born in Berhampur, Ganjam district, into a traditional Brahmin family, Panigrahi began training under Kelucharan Mohapatra at the age of four — one of the earliest disciples of a guru who was himself still in the process of systematizing the form he would teach. She grew with the dance as it grew. She was not learning a completed tradition but participating in its construction, and this gave her performances a quality of ownership and intimacy that later students, learning a codified system, would find harder to achieve.
Panigrahi’s technical command was formidable, but what distinguished her was something less quantifiable: a capacity for emotional depth that audiences found overwhelming. When she danced the ashtapadis of the Gita Govinda, the reconstruction disappeared. What remained was the dance itself — the tribhanga in motion, devotion made flesh, the stone women of Konark stepping off the wall and into the light. She performed across India and internationally — in the United States and the Philippines in 1969, in the United Kingdom in 1983, at the Delphi International Festival in Greece in 1989, in France for an eleven-week tour, and across Europe. She taught at the International School of Theatre Anthropology in Bologna, Italy, in 1986, 1990, and 1992, introducing Odissi to an international community of performers and scholars. She received the Padma Shri in 1975 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1976.
Her husband, Pandit Raghunath Panigrahi (1932—2013), was an Odissi music guru, vocalist, and composer whose renditions of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda became definitive. The Sanjukta-Raghunath partnership — dancer and singer, wife and husband, student and collaborator — was one of the great creative partnerships in Indian classical arts. Together, from the 1960s through the 1990s, they traveled the length and breadth of India and the world, performing together and popularizing a dance form that had, just decades earlier, existed mainly in the memories of elderly women and village boys.
Sanjukta Panigrahi died in 1997 at the age of fifty-two. The loss was felt across the Odissi world with an intensity that reflected what she had represented: not merely a great dancer but proof that the reconstruction worked, that what had been assembled from fragments could live and breathe and move an audience to tears.
The generation that followed carried Odissi further. Sonal Mansingh, trained initially under Kelucharan Mohapatra and other gurus, became one of India’s most visible cultural ambassadors — a performer of formidable presence who received the Padma Vibhushan and was later nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Kumkum Mohanty, another early disciple of Mohapatra, ran the Geeta Govinda institute in Bhubaneswar and shaped a generation of dancers. Madhavi Mudgal, born in 1951 to a culturally inclined Delhi family, saw Sanjukta Panigrahi and Kumkum Mohanty perform in Delhi and was drawn to Odissi with a force she later described as immediate and overwhelming. She trained under Kelucharan Mohapatra and carried the dance to the Edinburgh International Festival, the Cervantino Festival in Mexico, and stages across Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia.
Then there was Protima Bedi — and with her, the story takes one of its most unexpected turns. Born in 1948, Protima Gauri Bedi was a Bombay model and actress, famous in the 1970s for a streak of provocative public behavior that made her a tabloid fixture. Her turn to Odissi in the 1980s seemed to many like an act of reinvention, but it became something more serious. She trained rigorously and in 1989 began building Nrityagram — a dance village on the outskirts of Bangalore, designed as a residential gurukul where dancers could live, train, and perform in a community devoted entirely to the art. Nrityagram was inaugurated on 11 May 1990 by Prime Minister V.P. Singh. It was conceived as India’s first free dance gurukul, encompassing multiple classical forms and martial arts traditions including Chhau and Kalaripayattu. Protima formally handed over the institution to her successor in 1997, after the suicide of her son. In August 1998, she died in the Malpa landslide while on a pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar. She was forty-nine. Nrityagram survived her, and continues today as one of India’s most respected dance institutions — a living experiment in whether the gurukul model can sustain classical art in the modern world.
Sharon Lowen’s position in the Odissi world is unique and instructive. An American from Detroit who came to India in 1973 as a Fulbright scholar with degrees in Humanities, Fine Arts, Asian Studies, and Dance from the University of Michigan, she trained under Kelucharan Mohapatra from 1975 and made India her permanent home. She became one of Odissi’s leading exponents — performing, teaching, and writing about the form with an authority that initially startled those who believed classical Indian dance could only be authentically embodied by Indian bodies. Lowen’s career raises a question that the Odissi community has never fully resolved: who owns the dance? If a form was reconstructed from stone and text and fragmentary memory, does it belong to the community that reconstructed it, or to anyone who commits their body and life to its practice? Lowen’s answer, delivered through decades of performance and pedagogy, has been to make the question irrelevant by the quality of her work.
Today, Odissi is taught and performed in over thirty countries. Academies in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and cities across Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia train students of every nationality. Ratikant Mohapatra and Sujata Mohapatra continue the Kelucharan legacy at Srjan in Bhubaneswar; their daughter Preetisha represents the third generation. The annual Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra Award Festival, now in its thirty-first year, draws performers from around the world. The stone women of Konark have traveled further than the artisans who carved them could have imagined.
But the politics of authenticity hum beneath the global success. Debates about preservation versus evolution, about purity versus innovation, about who gets to define what “real” Odissi looks like, dominate seminars and social media feeds in the Odissi community. The gurus of the founding generation retained their claim as the “founder-guardians” of the form, presiding over its structure, its grammar, its permissible innovations. This authority was gendered in a way that carries its own irony: Odissi, which traces its origin to the Mahari — women who danced — became a form codified and propounded primarily by male gurus. The devadasis who had been the inheritors and preservers of the tradition received little acknowledgment in the reconstruction narrative. The urban women practitioners who took the form to the world’s stages did so under the authority of male teachers. The question of whether this pattern replicates the very power dynamics that destroyed the Mahari tradition in the first place is one that the Odissi community has only recently begun to confront.
Chhau — The Masked Dance
Three hundred kilometers north of Puri, in the forested hills of Mayurbhanj district, a completely different relationship between body and art has been maintained for centuries.
Chhau dance — the name likely derives from the Sanskrit “chhaya” (shadow or image) or from a military-camp term — is a tradition that shares territory across three regions: Seraikela in Jharkhand, Purulia in West Bengal, and Mayurbhanj in Odisha. Each has its own variant. The Seraikela style uses delicate, minimalist masks and emphasizes lyrical movement. The Purulia style uses large, brilliantly colored masks and thrives on high energy and spectacle. Mayurbhanj Chhau is the only one performed without masks — the dancer’s own face carries the expression, which means the choreography is far more intricate in its demands on facial as well as physical performance.
The martial origins are not metaphorical. Mayurbhanj Chhau traces its roots to the paika tradition — the warrior class of Odisha — and to the indigenous martial arts of the region’s tribal communities. The basic movement vocabulary is built from combat: leaps, spins, the controlled violence of a warrior’s body channeled into aesthetic form. Chauka and dhap — the fundamental stances — are borrowed directly from the fighting positions. The stylized gaits of birds and animals that form part of the repertoire (the peacock’s strut, the eagle’s swoop, the deer’s startled leap) were originally hunting movements. The transformation from martial exercise to performance art happened gradually, receiving particular impetus during the eighteenth century under the Bhanja dynasty kings of Mayurbhanj, who patronized the tradition and encouraged its theatrical development.
The themes are drawn from the epics — episodes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, stories of Shiva and Parvati, the exploits of local deities — but the treatment is spectacular rather than contemplative. Where Odissi is interiority made visible through the subtlety of facial expression and hand gesture, Chhau is exteriority at full volume: raucous music, vigorous dancing, acrobatic leaps, combat sequences that blur the line between choreography and actual physical contest. Performances take place at night, in open-air spaces called akhadas or asars, lit by torches or string lights, with the performers emerging from darkness into the ring of light like warriors entering an arena. The primary instruments are the mohuri (a double-reed instrument producing a penetrating, pipe-like sound) and the shehnai, accompanied by dhol and dhamsa drums that drive the rhythm with percussive force.
The training happens in akhadas that serve the same function as the Gotipua akhadas of coastal Odisha — gymnasiums-cum-studios where young men (and it is almost exclusively men) learn the movements under the direction of gurus or ustads. The social composition is different from Odissi: while Odissi’s reconstruction was largely a project of urban educated elites and semi-urban artisan communities, Chhau performers come predominantly from Scheduled Caste and tribal communities. The dance is embedded in the social fabric of communities for whom the Mahabharata is not literature but living narrative, for whom the gods are not philosophical abstractions but active presences in daily life.
In 2010, UNESCO inscribed Chhau dance on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The inscription covered all three variants — Seraikela, Purulia, and Mayurbhanj — recognizing what practitioners had always known: that this tradition, for all its apparent rusticity compared to the refined aesthetics of classical dance, embodies a complex and ancient art. The UNESCO recognition brought international attention and some funding, but the fundamental economics of the tradition remain precarious. Chhau performers are not concert artists who sell tickets. They are village men who farm, labor, and perform during festivals. The spring festival of Chaitra Parva is the high season; the rest of the year, the akhadas sustain themselves on whatever local patronage and government grants they can secure.
Sambalpuri and Folk Dance
If Odissi is the classical language and Chhau the martial dialect, the folk dances of western Odisha are the vernacular — the everyday speech of communities expressing themselves through the body.
The distinction is more than stylistic. Classical dance is individual, performed on a stage for an audience, demanding years of specialized training. Folk dance is communal, performed in a shared space by a community for itself, learned through participation rather than formal instruction. The aesthetic values differ accordingly. Odissi prizes the refinement of the individual body — the perfect tribhanga, the precisely articulated mudra, the dancer’s capacity to embody a raga through the quality of her movement. Sambalpuri folk dance prizes the communal body — the circle of dancers moving in synchrony, the call-and-response between lead singer and group, the collective energy that transforms a gathering of individuals into a single rhythmic organism.
Dalkhai is the most celebrated of the western Odisha folk dances, and its cultural embedding is specific enough to serve as an example of how folk performance works when it has not yet been extracted from its context. Dalkhai is performed by women — from tribal communities like the Mirdha, Kondh, Gond, Khadia, and Binjhal, as well as non-tribal communities like the Kulta, Mali, and Gouda — during the period from Saptami to Dussehra. The name itself refers to a branch from a tree that is worshipped as Goddess Durga or Shakti by unmarried girls wishing long life for their brothers. The ritual context is specific: a sand image of Goddess Durga is constructed on a riverbank, placed under a tree, and offerings are made. The dance happens at the riverside, can last up to thirty-six hours in its traditional form, and the songs — sung by the young unmarried women called Kuanris who initiate the performance — address themes of love, nature, social commentary, and devotion with a directness that the refined registers of classical dance would never permit.
The musical instruments — dhol, tasha, nishan (a large cylindrical drum), tamki, and muhuri — produce a sound world entirely different from the bansuri and mardala of Odissi. The costumes are Sambalpuri sarees, bangles, katriya, bandriya, nose ornaments, and color scarves. The movements are communal rather than solo: circles of dancers, interlocking arms, rhythmic footwork driven by the drums. There is nothing of the tribhanga’s sinuous curve here. The body language is earthy, direct, rhythmically insistent — the vocabulary of a community that works the land and dances on it.
Rasarkeli is the romantic counterpart — a playful dance performed by young women during festivals, its songs exploring themes of love and courtship. Jhoomar is a group dance performed by both young women and men, characterized by hip and waist movements and associated with the festivals of Chaitra Parva, Karam Puja, and Kali Puja. Karma dance, performed by tribal communities in districts like Mayurbhanj, Sundargarh, Bolangir, and Dhenkanal, is a ritualistic celebration in honor of Goddess Karma Sani or Karma Rani — the Queen of Fate. During the month of Bhadra, a branch of the Karam tree is cut, carried in ceremonial procession to the dancing ground, planted at the center, and boys and girls dance around it in circles, wearing bright sarees, shell jewelry, and colored turbans adorned with peacock feathers.
These folk traditions have a complex and not entirely comfortable relationship with the Sambalpuri music industry that has grown around them. The songs of Jitendra Haripal — the singer whose voice became the sound of western Odisha for a generation — sit at the intersection of folk tradition and commercial production. His most famous song, Rangabati, written by Mitrabhanu Gauntia and composed by Prabhudatta Pradhan, became perhaps the most recognizable Odia song anywhere in the world after its release. Sung as a duet with Krishna Patel, Rangabati was ubiquitous at marriage processions and immersion festivals throughout the 1970s and 1980s and has since been covered, sampled, and remixed across genres. The song earned Padma Shri awards for three different people involved in its creation — Haripal in 2017, Gauntia in 2020, and Patel subsequently — a remarkable testament to the cultural weight a single folk-rooted composition can carry.
But the relationship between folk tradition and the music industry is always a negotiation over ownership and context. When Dalkhai is performed at a riverside during Dussehra by unmarried village women worshipping Durga, it is one thing. When a “Dalkhai dance” is performed on a festival stage by trained dancers in standardized costumes for a paying audience, it is something else entirely. The movements may be the same. The meaning is not. The gap between the two is the gap between lived culture and cultural display, and it widens every year as urbanization pulls young people away from the village contexts where these dances had their reason for being.
The Storytelling Traditions
Odisha’s performing arts are not limited to what the body does in silence or in response to music. The state possesses a remarkably rich tradition of performance arts that combine narrative, music, and drama in forms that predate the modern distinctions between “dance,” “theater,” and “music.”
Pala is the most elaborate of the narrative performance traditions. Performed by a group of five or six people, the form centers on a gayaka — a lead singer-narrator — accompanied by several co-performers called palias who serve as chorus, commentators, and dramatic foils. A bayaka provides drum accompaniment. The gayaka narrates stories drawn from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata Purana, and local mythology, using lyrical verses, humorous anecdotes, and expressive gestures. The palias respond with rhythmic beats, dramatic expressions, and interjections that keep the performance lively and interactive. The form is thought to have developed in the sixteenth century, with roots in Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis — some scholars trace connections between Pala and Sufi storytelling traditions, and the form has historically promoted communal harmony in its choice of themes and performance contexts. Performances can last through the night, held in village open spaces during festivals and religious occasions, with the audience gathered around the performers in a circle of shared attention.
Daskathia is Pala’s leaner, more portable cousin — stripped down to its essentials. The name comes from two Odia words: “Dasa” (devotee or performer) and “Kathia” (the wooden clappers that punctuate the performance). Two performers are all it takes: the gayaka, who carries the narrative weight with expansive gestures and modulated tones, and the palia, who serves as both chorus and comic foil, interjecting with commentary, questions, and witticisms. The gayaka holds a pair of wooden sticks called ramtali; the palia holds the dasakathi. The percussive punctuation of wood on wood creates the rhythmic scaffold on which the story is built. No stage. No set. No costume beyond a simple dhoti and chadar. The art lies entirely in the performers’ command of narrative, voice, timing, and the capacity to hold an audience for hours with nothing but the human body and two pieces of wood.
Daskathia originated in the Ganjam district of southern Odisha — specifically, according to tradition, from the village of Khandara — as a sixteenth-century offshoot of the Pala tradition. Its content was initially devotional: stories from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Bhagavata Purana, and local myths centered on Lord Jagannath. Over time, it expanded to incorporate social commentary, historical narratives, and current events. A skilled Daskathia performer is simultaneously a priest, a comedian, a social critic, and a one-man theater — a combination that makes the form uniquely adaptable to whatever the community needs from its storytelling.
But Daskathia is dying. A 2022 report in The Print described its “fight for survival,” documenting how the performers are aging, the village audiences are shrinking, and the economics of rural entertainment have shifted irreversibly toward television, smartphones, and recorded music. The districts of Ganjam and surrounding areas where Daskathia once thrived now offer few contexts in which a two-person storytelling performance can compete for attention. Initiatives to revive the form exist — government grants, festival appearances, documentation projects — but the fundamental problem is structural: Daskathia evolved for a world in which village entertainment was scarce and communal. That world no longer exists.
Prahlad Natak — also known locally as Raja Nata, the “dance of the king” — is an altogether different beast. This is full-scale open-air musical theater, performed continuously through twelve to fourteen hours, usually through the night, in the Ganjam district of southern Odisha. The repertoire is a single story: the tale of the demon king Hiranyakashipu and his devotee son Prahlad, who is rescued by Vishnu’s Narasimha avatar. One story. One night. Twelve hours. Nearly two hundred songs composed in thirty-five ragas and multiple talas of Odissi music. Actors accompanied by harmonium, trumpets, mardala, conch, cymbals, and mukhaveena.
The performance is spectacular and deliberately overwhelming. A wooden platform with a prop throne represents Hiranyakashipu’s court. The acting is melodramatic in the best sense — operatic voices, vigorous dancing, acrobatic fight sequences, moments of broad comedy interspersed with passages of genuine devotional intensity. Scholars have compared it to Kerala’s Theyyam, Assam’s Ankia Bhaona, and Karnataka’s Yakshagana — it belongs to the same family of all-night ritualistic theater traditions that combine classical and folk elements in performances that blur the line between entertainment and worship. The audience does not sit in assigned seats. People come and go through the night, sleeping children draped over parents’ shoulders, chai sellers working the periphery, the performance flowing onward regardless — a river of story that the community dips into and out of as the hours pass.
Prahlad Natak survives in Ganjam, but its vitality is diminishing. The traveling troupes that once went from village to village are fewer. The audience that once stayed through the night increasingly has other options for nighttime entertainment. The young men who once sought places in the troupes now seek jobs in Surat.
Jatra is the popular theater tradition of eastern India — shared with Bengal, Assam, and Bangladesh — and in Odisha it remains one of the most commercially successful performance forms, even as the other traditions decline. The word means “journey,” reflecting the nomadic nature of the performing troupes that travel from location to location. Jatra companies perform epic four-hour plays preceded by a musical concert often lasting an hour, designed to attract audiences. The themes draw from epics, history, and increasingly from social issues. The style is melodramatic, emotionally direct, and musically extravagant — the opposite of everything Odissi’s aesthetics value, and beloved for precisely that reason. Permanent Jatra troupes have formed throughout coastal and northern Odisha, and the form has become a commercialized industry with its own star system, production values, and touring infrastructure. If Odissi is the classical music of Odisha’s performative culture, Jatra is the Bollywood.
Mughal Tamasha is the most unusual of Odisha’s theatrical traditions — a form so specific in its geography, language, and subject matter that it stands alone in the annals of Indian theater. Believed to have originated in the village of Sangat in the Bhadrak district — a commercial hub during the Mughal and Maratha periods, connected to other regions by waterways — the form was reportedly created by the poet Banshi Ballav Goswami in 1728. Its most striking feature is its multilingualism: actors deliver dialogues in five languages — Odia, Bengali, Hindi, Persian, and Urdu — in a single performance. The central character is a Mughal mirza (prince) notorious among his subjects for misrule and extravagant demands. The tone is satirical, the humor bawdy, the social commentary sharp. Despite its satirical treatment of Mughal rule, the form has historically promoted communal harmony between Hindu and Muslim communities — a polyglot theatrical space where religious boundaries dissolve in shared laughter. Mughal Tamasha is peculiar to the Bhadrak area and is not performed in any other part of Odisha. It is, in 2026, a dying art form.
Music — The Sound of Odisha
Every dance needs its music. But Odissi music is not merely accompaniment to Odissi dance. It is a classical tradition in its own right — distinct from both Hindustani (North Indian) and Carnatic (South Indian) systems, though influenced by both — with its own ragas, its own compositional forms, its own theoretical foundations.
The distinctiveness crystallized around the figure of Jayadeva. His Gita Govinda, composed in the twelfth century, was not merely a literary masterpiece but a musical one: the verses were meant to be sung, set to specific ragas and talas that were native to the Odra-Magadhi musical tradition of eastern India. The ragas Jayadeva indicated — Mangala Gujjari, Vasanta, Karnaata, Desa, Gunjakri, and others — do not correspond exactly to their Hindustani namesakes. They are Odissi ragas, with their own characteristic melodic movements, ornamentations, and emotional associations. To this day, every night during the Badasinghara ritual at the Jagannath Temple, the Gita Govinda is sung set to traditional Odissi ragas and talas. The performance tradition that Jayadeva inaugurated has never been entirely broken, even as the dance tradition that accompanied it was shattered and rebuilt.
The compositional forms of Odissi music are numerous and distinctive. Champu alternates between prose and verse in a single composition — a literary form translated into musical structure. Chhanda compositions are metrical and rhythmically rich, composed by combining bhava (theme), kala (time), and swara (tune), often performed in praise of deities. Chautisa is an acrostic form in which each stanza begins with a successive letter of the Odia alphabet. The prabandha, one of the oldest forms, is a structured composition with defined sections. These forms evolved in the medieval courts and temples of Odisha and maintain their identity even as individual ragas have been influenced by the Hindustani tradition over centuries.
The primary instrument is the mardala — a barrel-shaped drum played with both hands, producing a range of tones from deep bass to sharp treble. The mardala is to Odissi what the mridangam is to Bharatanatyam and the tabla is to Kathak: the rhythmic backbone, the timekeeper, the conversational partner of the dancer’s feet. Other instruments include the bansuri (bamboo flute), sitar, violin (a nineteenth-century addition that has become thoroughly naturalized), and harmonium. The vocal tradition is paramount. Odissi music is fundamentally sung music, and the singer’s role is not merely accompaniment but interpretation: the voice carries the text, the melody, and the emotional arc that the dancer’s body renders visible.
The devotional music tradition extends far beyond the concert stage. The medieval Odia poets — the Panchasakha (Five Friends): Balaram Das, Jagannath Das, Achyutananda Das, Ananta Das, and Jasobanta Das, writing in the sixteenth century — produced an enormous body of devotional poetry that became the foundation of Odia congregational singing. Jagannath Das’s Odia Bhagavata — the first rendering of the Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana in the Odia language — is recited and sung in homes across Odisha to this day. Salabega, the seventeenth-century Muslim devotee of Jagannath, composed bhajans of such devotional intensity that they became integral to the Jagannath tradition despite — or because of — their origin in a poet who was barred from the temple by virtue of his birth. His “Ahe Nila Saila” is sung during the Rath Yatra, and legend holds that the chariot of Jagannath paused before Salabega’s house in recognition of his devotion.
The Mahalaxmi bhajan tradition — devotional songs sung during the festival of Manabasa Gurubara in the month of Margashira, when Goddess Lakshmi is worshipped in Odia homes — represents a different stream: domestic rather than temple-based, female rather than male-dominated (the songs are traditionally sung by women of the household), cyclical rather than occasional. The Manabasa songs create a sonic architecture for a specific festival month, embedding devotional practice in the rhythms of the household calendar.
Modern Odia music sits on these foundations but has moved in its own directions. Akshaya Mohanty (1936—2002) — singer, composer, music director — was the pivotal figure in the transition from classical-devotional to modern popular music in Odia. With no formal musical training, he introduced modernity to a tradition with deep roots in Odissi classical and folk music, bringing in newer, more urban themes. He pioneered the Odia ghazal tradition in the 1960s, adapting Urdu poetic structures to the Odia linguistic and cultural context. He composed ballads based on popular legends — Kanchi Abhijana, Randipua Ananta, Konaraka Gatha — that became a new genre in Odia music. He sang in 129 Odia films and composed music for 75 more. His album Kalankita Nayaka, released in 1984, was the first Odia album marketed as a ghazal collection. Mohanty’s versatility and willingness to experiment fundamentally shaped the direction of popular Odia music in the second half of the twentieth century, opening a space between the classical tradition and the film industry where artistic ambition could coexist with popular appeal.
The Politics of Revival
A pattern emerges from every tradition discussed in this chapter, and it is worth naming explicitly because it illuminates something structural about how culture survives — and what it costs.
The pattern goes like this: a performing tradition evolves over centuries within a specific social context — temple, village, tribal community, royal court. The tradition is embedded in that context. It draws its meaning, its audience, its economic support, and its reason for existing from the social matrix that surrounds it. Then the context is disrupted — by colonialism, by social reform, by urbanization, by economic change, by the sheer gravitational pull of modernity. The tradition weakens. Its practitioners age. Its audiences disappear. It approaches extinction.
Then the revival arrives. Urban elites, academics, cultural organizations, government agencies — people who are not themselves from the tradition’s original context — recognize the tradition’s value and mobilize to save it. They document. They fund. They create festivals and academies. They put the tradition on stage for new audiences. They seek UNESCO recognition. They write books and make films. The tradition survives.
But it survives as something different from what it was.
The Mahari who danced for Jagannath in the inner sanctum of the Puri temple and the Odissi dancer who performs at a Sangeet Natak Akademi festival in Delhi are not doing the same thing, even if some of the movements are identical. The Mahari’s audience was God. The Odissi dancer’s audience is a ticketed public. The Mahari’s vocation was a complete life — a social identity, a ritual function, an economic arrangement, a theological relationship. The Odissi dancer’s vocation is an art practice — embedded in a career, supported by institutions, evaluated by critics, transmitted through academies. The difference is not one of quality. Some modern Odissi dancers are incomparably more technically accomplished than any Mahari likely was. The difference is one of context, and context is not a decoration on top of the art. It is part of what the art means.
The same applies across all the traditions. The Daskathia performer who told stories in a village where he was the primary entertainment medium occupied a different position in the social ecosystem than the Daskathia performer who demonstrates the art at a government-sponsored folklore festival. The Dalkhai dance performed by unmarried women worshipping Durga at a riverside during Dussehra means something different from the “Dalkhai performance” staged for dignitaries. The Chhau dance performed in an akhada on a spring night for the village’s own celebration is not the same event as the Chhau performance at the Republic Day parade, even if the steps are the same.
This is not an argument against revival. The alternative to revival is extinction, and extinction is worse. The Mahari tradition was not revived, and it is gone — totally, permanently, irretrievably gone. Sashimani Devi is dead. No one can learn what she knew from anyone living. The Odissi revival, for all its compromises and transformations, kept the movement vocabulary alive in living bodies. That matters enormously. The question is not whether revival is better than extinction. It obviously is. The question is whether the revival narrative — the story of rescue and preservation — can be honest about what is lost in the process.
What is lost is social context. The web of relationships, economic arrangements, ritual functions, and community meanings that gave the tradition its original life. When a tradition is extracted from its context and placed on a stage, what the audience sees is the art, denuded of the life that produced it. This can be beautiful. It can be moving. It can be technically magnificent. But it is also, inevitably, a kind of taxidermy — the form preserved, the life gone.
The funding politics compound the asymmetry. Government support for the performing arts in India flows through institutions — the Sangeet Natak Akademi, state culture departments, ICCR, the zonal cultural centers — that have their own aesthetic preferences, their own definitions of what counts as “classical” versus “folk” versus “tribal.” Classical forms receive institutional support, festival platforms, international touring opportunities, and academic prestige. Folk and tribal forms receive documentation grants, occasional festival slots, and the condescending label of “intangible heritage” — a phrase that manages to simultaneously acknowledge a tradition’s value and mark it as a museum piece. The disparity is not accidental. It reflects the class composition of the gatekeeping institutions: the people who decide which traditions get support are, overwhelmingly, from the same urban, educated, upper-caste communities that led the revival movements. They fund what they recognize. What they do not recognize — the tribal dance that has no codified grammar, the village storytelling form that has no written text, the street theater tradition that has no guru lineage — receives less support, less prestige, and less institutional protection against the forces of modernization that are steadily erasing it.
The question that hangs over all of Odisha’s performing arts in 2026 is whether any institutional mechanism can replicate what organic social context once provided. Can government grants substitute for the village audience that once sustained Daskathia? Can festival stages substitute for the temple precinct where the Mahari once danced? Can academies substitute for the akhada where Gotipua boys once trained? The honest answer, based on the evidence of the last seven decades, is: partially. The art survives, altered. The context does not. And the gap between the surviving art and the vanished context is the space in which Odisha’s performing traditions must now make their meaning — dancing, as it were, on a stage that was not built for them, before an audience that was not the one they were created to face.
Source Research
The raw research that informs this series.