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Chapter 10: The Great Unraveling
On March 19, 2015, a ninety-two-year-old woman named Sasimani Devi died in a small house near the Jagannath Temple in Puri. She had been ill for some time, and her death was not unexpected. What was extraordinary about her passing was what it closed. Sasimani Devi was the last Mahari — the last devadasi — of the Jagannath Temple. She had been dedicated to the deity as a child, married to the wooden god at the age of twelve, and for the rest of her life she was considered the human consort of Lord Jagannath. She had danced the Gita Govinda in the inner sanctum. She had performed rituals that no other woman in the temple was permitted to perform. According to the temple’s Record of Rights, about twenty-five Maharis served the deity a century earlier. By the Odisha Gazette of 1956, nine remained. By 1980, four. After Sasimani, none.
The tradition did not end because the temple collapsed or the deity was forgotten. It ended because the world around the temple changed so thoroughly that the tradition could no longer reproduce itself. Colonial law had criminalized the Mahari system as prostitution. Post-independence reformers had condemned it as exploitation. The social ecosystem that had produced Maharis — the families who dedicated daughters, the temple economy that sustained them, the ritual calendar that gave their art meaning — had dissolved, piece by piece, across a century and a half. Sasimani Devi’s death did not kill the tradition. It simply confirmed that the tradition had already died. She was the last breath of a body that had been cooling for generations.
This is the pattern of cultural unraveling: not a single catastrophic break, but a slow, compounding erosion. One generation cannot pass something to the next. The next generation, never having received it, does not know what to mourn. Within three generations, what was once a living practice becomes a line in a history book, or a photograph in a museum, or nothing at all. This chapter is about that process — the forces that disrupted the transmission of Odia culture, the ironies of what was preserved and what was lost, and the question of whether what survives in the twenty-first century still carries the meaning it once held.
The Colonial Cut
The British did not arrive in Odisha intending to dismantle its culture. They arrived intending to extract its revenue, and the cultural dismantling was a side effect so thorough that it might as well have been the purpose.
The East India Company took control of Odisha in 1803, absorbing it into the Bengal Presidency, and for the next century treated the region with the particular contempt reserved for territories considered too poor to be interesting and too quiet to be dangerous. The administrative merger with Bengal was itself a cultural act: it placed a distinct linguistic and cultural region under the authority of Bengali-speaking administrators who regarded Odia as a dialect of Bengali rather than a language in its own right. The battle for Odia linguistic identity — the fight to establish that Odia was a separate language deserving its own educational institutions, its own bureaucratic recognition, its own printed literature — would consume decades of intellectual energy that might otherwise have gone toward cultural production.
But the deepest colonial cut was economic, and its cultural consequences were devastating. The temple was the center of Odia cultural life — not just as a place of worship, but as an employer, a patron, a redistributor of wealth, and an institution of artistic production. The Jagannath Temple in Puri was the archetype, but every significant temple in Odisha functioned as a micro-economy. Temples owned land. The revenue from that land — from the nishkar grants, the devottara and debottar endowments — paid for the maintenance of the deity, the feeding of pilgrims, and crucially, the sustenance of artists. The Maharis who danced, the musicians who played, the chitrakaras who painted Pattachitra, the stone carvers who maintained the temple fabric, the weavers who produced ritual textiles — all were supported, directly or indirectly, by the temple economy. Art was not a luxury bolted onto the religious structure. It was integral to the system. You could not run the Jagannath Temple without dancers, in the same way you could not run it without cooks. Both were performing seva, service to the deity, and both were funded by the same endowment system.
The British disrupted this at every level. The Regulation IV of 1817 and subsequent revenue settlements stripped temples of their traditional land rights or brought them under colonial revenue administration. The pilgrimage tax that the British had initially collected from visitors to the Jagannath Temple — they found it already in operation and kept it going because it was profitable — was eventually abolished under pressure from Christian missionaries who objected to the colonial state profiting from “idolatry.” But the abolition of the tax, paradoxically, weakened the temple’s finances further. The British took administrative control of temple affairs through a series of regulations culminating in the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1904, which gave the colonial state bureaucratic authority over temple structures that local Hindu communities had managed for centuries. The logic was preservation. The effect was dispossession.
When the temple economy weakened, art starved. Not metaphorically. Actually. The Maharis lost their land grants. The chitrakaras lost their commissions. The stone carvers lost their maintenance contracts. These were not abstract economic losses. They were the disappearance of the material conditions that made cultural production possible. A Mahari who cannot eat cannot dance. A painter who cannot buy pigments cannot paint. The British did not ban Odia art. They defunded it.
Simultaneously, the introduction of English education created what amounted to a cultural partition within Odia society. The founding of Ravenshaw Collegiate School in Cuttack in 1868 — named after T.E. Ravenshaw, the Commissioner of the Orissa Division who pushed for its creation after the catastrophic famine of 1866 — gave Odisha its first institution of Western higher education. The school, which grew into Ravenshaw College and eventually Ravenshaw University, was designed to produce the English-educated clerks and administrators that the colonial bureaucracy required. It succeeded. And in succeeding, it created a class of Odias whose intellectual formation was in English, whose cultural reference points were Victorian, and whose relationship to traditional Odia culture became increasingly that of observers rather than practitioners.
This is not to condemn English education. Many of the greatest champions of Odia culture were products of it. But the structural effect was a split: an English-educated urban elite who could articulate Odia identity in the language of the colonizer, and a vast majority who continued to live within traditional cultural forms but lacked the institutional power to protect them. The elite studied Odia culture. The majority lived it. The gap between studying and living would widen with every generation.
Then came the moralists. The British brought with them Victorian sexual ethics — a framework in which the body was shameful, desire was sinful, and the proper relationship between men and women was one of rigid, publicly performed propriety. They encountered a culture that had Konark. The Sun Temple’s erotic sculptures — couples in every stage of courtship, intimacy, and union, carved in stone with a frankness that would make a modern viewer blush — embodied a theology in which kama was not opposed to moksha but a stage on the path toward it. The tantric traditions that had influenced temple art across Odisha treated sexuality as a sacred energy to be understood and channeled, not suppressed. Sir Richard Temple, a British administrator who saw similar sculptures at Khajuraho, wrote that they were “so indecent, so offensive to modern taste, that one cannot but wonder how they could have ever adorned a religious building.” The British did not wonder for long. They criminalized.
The Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 together reframed the Mahari-devadasi tradition as prostitution. The women who had been the human consorts of the deity, the keepers of a dance tradition that was the direct ancestor of what the world now calls Odissi, were reclassified as sex workers. The passage of Section 372 and 373 of the IPC homogenized the diverse, complex practices of temple-dancer communities across the subcontinent under a single label: criminal. The nuance of the Mahari’s role — part ritual specialist, part artist, part embodied devotee — was flattened into a colonial legal category. By the time post-independence reformers took up the cause, the framing was already set. Even sympathetic reform understood the devadasi system primarily as “exploitation” rather than as a complex institution that contained both exploitation and artistic genius, both patriarchal control and female artistic agency.
And then the famine. The Na Anka famine of 1866 — Na Anka because it fell in the ninth regnal year of Gajapati Divyasinghadeva — killed roughly one million people, approximately one-third of Odisha’s population. The British response was catastrophically slow. Rice had been exported from the province at an average of 20,000 tonnes per year in the six years preceding the famine, draining the reserves that might have buffered against crop failure. When the monsoon of 1865 failed, there was nothing to fall back on. The mortality was concentrated among the most vulnerable: landless cultivators, weavers, artisans — precisely the classes that carried the practical knowledge of Odia material culture. You cannot teach your daughter to weave a Sambalpuri saree if you are dead. You cannot teach your son to carve stone if he has fled to Calcutta in search of food. You cannot transmit the oral tradition of your village’s particular songs, your family’s particular recipes, your community’s particular ritual knowledge, if the community itself has been halved by starvation.
The famine did not only kill people. It killed transmission lines. It created gaps in the generational chain that could never be fully repaired. The human sufferings entered folklore and oral memory — Odia consciousness still carries the scar — but the specific knowledge that died with specific people is unrecoverable. We do not even know what was lost, because the people who could have told us are the ones who died.
But colonial disruption was not entirely destructive, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging this. The printing press arrived. The Cuttack Printing Press was founded in 1837 by Baptist missionaries, and Fakir Mohan Senapati — the father of modern Odia prose fiction — established the Balasore Utkal Printing Press in 1868, explicitly to preserve and develop the Odia language. The technology that the British brought enabled Odia literature to escape the fragility of palm-leaf manuscripts and enter the age of mass reproduction. Senapati’s Chha Mana Atha Guntha (1899), the first Odia novel and the first Indian novel to address the exploitation of landless peasants by feudal landlords, was a product of this collision between colonial technology and indigenous consciousness. Without the printing press, Odia literature might have remained trapped in scribal traditions vulnerable to the same forces that were destroying other oral and manuscript-based cultural forms.
And the Satyabadi school movement lit a fire. In 1909, Gopabandhu Das — Utkalmani, the Gem of Odisha — founded the Satyabadi Bana Vidyalaya near Sakhigopal in Puri district. It was an open-air school modeled on the ancient gurukul system but infused with nationalist purpose. Students learned agriculture and carpentry alongside literature and philosophy. Caste was explicitly rejected — all students were admitted regardless of background. Gopabandhu and his companions — Nilakantha Das, Godabarish Mishra, Acharya Harihar Das, Krupasindhu Mishra, known collectively as the Pancha Sakha of modern Odisha — created an institution that was simultaneously a school, a cultural revival center, and a political incubator. When Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1921, Gopabandhu converted Satyabadi into a National School, severing all ties with colonial funding. His newspaper, The Samaj, became a vehicle for Odia cultural and political consciousness.
The colonial period, then, was not a simple story of destruction. It was a story of simultaneous destruction and creation, of cultural forms being killed by one set of colonial forces while new forms of cultural resistance were being born through another. The net effect, though, was a rupture. A break in the continuity of transmission that had sustained Odia culture for millennia. What came after independence was built on that broken foundation.
Independence and Its Ironies
On August 15, 1947, Odisha became part of a free India. On April 1, 1936, it had already become a separate province — the first linguistically organized state in British India, carved out of the Bihar and Orissa Province in recognition of Odia linguistic distinctiveness. Independence should have been the beginning of cultural renewal. In some ways it was. In others, it introduced new forms of flattening that the colonial period had not imagined.
The nation-building project required, or believed it required, a unified “Indian culture.” The architects of independent India — Nehru, with his cosmopolitan modernism; the constitution-makers, with their commitment to a pan-Indian identity — faced a genuine problem: how to forge a single nation from a subcontinent of extraordinary cultural diversity. The solution, never explicitly articulated as policy but pervasive in institutional practice, was a hierarchy. Some cultural forms were elevated to “national” status. Others were classified as “regional.” Still others were labeled “folk” or “tribal” and consigned to the margins of institutional attention.
This hierarchy had consequences for Odisha. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, founded in 1952 as the national academy for music, dance, and drama, became the arbiter of what counted as “classical” — and therefore worthy of serious institutional support — versus what counted as “folk” — and therefore interesting but peripheral. In 1958, Odissi was recognized as India’s eighth classical dance form, a victory that required decades of advocacy by gurus like Kelucharan Mohapatra, Pankaj Charan Das, and Deba Prasad Das, who had painstakingly reconstructed the dance from its fragmented sources in temple sculpture, surviving Mahari practice, and the Gotipua tradition.
The recognition was a triumph. It saved Odissi from extinction and launched it on a trajectory toward global reach. But consider what the category “classical” implies. It implies codification — a fixed vocabulary of movements, a standardized grammar, a curriculum that can be taught in institutions. The process of making Odissi “classical” necessarily involved selecting certain elements and discarding others. The Mahari tradition in its full complexity — its ritual context, its improvisational character, its integration into the rhythms of temple service — could not survive the transition to the proscenium stage intact. What was preserved was the dance. What was lost was the life within which the dance had meaning.
And what about the forms that did not get classified as “classical”? Gotipua — the tradition of young boys dressed as girls performing acrobatic devotional dance — remained “folk.” The Sambalpuri dance traditions — Dalkhai, Rasarkeli, Nachnia — remained “folk.” Pala and Daskathia, the oral storytelling traditions that had carried narrative and moral instruction across centuries, remained “folk.” The institutional hierarchy meant that Odissi received funding, international touring opportunities, and prestige. The folk forms received occasional grants and anthropological documentation. The difference was not of artistic merit. It was of bureaucratic classification. And classification, in a nation-state, determines survival.
Nehruvian modernization carried an implicit message about traditional culture that was never stated as policy but was legible in every Five-Year Plan and every public sector investment: the future belonged to industry, science, and rational planning. The past — with its temples, its rituals, its inherited knowledge — was not exactly condemned, but it was placed in a category marked “heritage,” which in practice meant “things to be preserved in museums while the real work of nation-building happens in factories.”
The Rourkela Steel Plant was the embodiment of this logic in Odisha. Established in 1959 with West German assistance in the tribal heartland of Sundargarh district, it was one of Nehru’s “temples of modern India.” The metaphor was deliberate and revealing: the steel plant was to replace the temple as the center of civilizational aspiration. To build it, more than thirty villages were displaced and approximately 13,000 to 16,000 of their mostly Adivasi inhabitants were forcibly resettled across roughly 8,000 hectares of acquired land. The anthropologist B.K. Roy Burman, sent as Assistant Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to study the displacement in 1960, documented the social dislocation in clinical detail: communities scattered, kinship networks broken, traditional livelihoods destroyed.
What came to Rourkela instead was India in miniature. The steel plant drew workers from across the country. Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, and Odia communities established themselves in the company township. By the late 1960s, the township could accommodate 24,000 of its 37,000-strong workforce, and it had become a cosmopolitan bubble in western Odisha — a place where Hindi was the lingua franca, where food fairs featured cuisine from every corner of India, where the cultural landscape was national rather than local. The tribal communities who had been displaced to make this possible watched from the margins. In the 1960s, Odia and Adivasi workers accused Punjabi unionists of favoring their Punjabi compatriots for skilled positions while ignoring the grievances of local workers. Modernity had arrived, and it spoke every language except the ones that belonged here.
The Death of the Joint Family
The joint family was not merely a domestic arrangement. It was infrastructure — cultural infrastructure as fundamental to the transmission of Odia identity as the temple, the village, or the language itself. And its dissolution, which accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century, severed transmission lines that no institution, no school, no digital platform has been able to replace.
Think about what the joint family actually did. Not in the sociological abstract — “it provided social security” — but in the specific, granular, irreplaceable detail. The grandmother told the grandchild the Laxmi Purana every Thursday during Manabasa Gurubara. Not a generic version. Her version. The one she had learned from her grandmother, with the particular emphases, the particular digressions, the particular vocal cadences that carried the emotional texture of the tradition. The mother-in-law taught the new bride the family’s specific method of making Chhena Poda — the exact ratio of chhena to sugar, the precise kneading technique, the judgment of when the charcoal was at the right temperature, knowledge that was embodied in the hands rather than written in any book. The grandfather sang bhajans at the evening Bhagavata Tungi, the village gathering where men read from the Bhagavata Purana and discussed its meanings. The uncle taught the nephew how to identify the particular plants used in household remedies. The aunt demonstrated the specific way to drape a saree for festival occasions. The older cousin showed the younger cousin the steps of Dalkhai during Raja Parba.
Every one of these transmissions required proximity. Physical, daily, sustained proximity over years. The grandmother did not teach the Laxmi Purana in a single sitting. She taught it through repetition across dozens of Thursday evenings, through corrections that came in the moment of performance, through the osmotic absorption that happens when a child simply grows up in the presence of a practiced elder. The mother-in-law’s cooking knowledge could not be written down because it was not propositional knowledge — it was not “add 200 grams of sugar.” It was the feel of the dough between the fingers, the sound the mixture made when it was properly blended, the smell that indicated the right degree of caramelization. This is what philosophers call tacit knowledge: knowledge that can only be transmitted through shared practice, through doing alongside someone who already knows.
The joint family was the institution that made this shared practice possible. Three generations under one roof meant that knowledge flowed downward continually, not in formal lessons but in the ambient texture of daily life. The child who grew up hearing the Laxmi Purana every week did not need to be taught it. She absorbed it the way she absorbed the rhythms of speech, the taste preferences of the family kitchen, the social knowledge of who was respected in the village and why.
Urbanization broke this. The pattern was simple and devastating: a young man got a government job or an engineering position in Bhubaneswar, or Cuttack, or later Bangalore or Hyderabad. He moved. He married. His wife came to live with him in a two-bedroom apartment in a new colony, not in the ancestral house with his parents, grandparents, uncles, and cousins. His children grew up with two adults instead of twelve. The grandmother was a voice on the telephone, then a face on a video call, then a memory.
The 2011 Census showed that joint families constituted only about 33 percent of Indian households, a substantial decrease from earlier decades. In Odisha, the decline was slower than in highly urbanized states — rural communities and agrarian lifestyles continued to favor joint family structures longer than elsewhere. But the direction was unmistakable. And with every family that nuclearized, another set of transmission lines went silent.
What is being lost is not always visible until it is gone. Consider recipes. Not the recipes in cookbooks or on YouTube channels — those are codified, standardized versions of dishes that existed in as many variations as there were families. The particular way your grandmother made Enduri Pitha — the specific proportion of rice flour to blackgram, the precise steaming time she knew from decades of practice, the particular turmeric leaf she preferred and why — that recipe existed in her hands and in her hands alone. When she died, if no one had spent enough time beside her in the kitchen to absorb her method, that recipe died with her. Multiply this by every grandmother in every village across the state, and you begin to understand the scale of what has been lost. It is not that Enduri Pitha has disappeared. You can buy it anywhere. It is that ten thousand particular versions of it — each one a family’s small claim on the tradition, each one slightly different, each one carrying the accumulated adjustments of generations — have disappeared. The dish survives. The diversity within the dish does not.
The same is true for songs. For the specific bhajans that were sung in a particular family’s Bhagavata Tungi tradition. For the particular version of Rama Nataka that a village’s performing troupe had developed over decades. For the stories — not the canonical stories from the Puranas, which are written down and safe, but the local stories, the family stories, the village stories that explain why a particular pond is sacred or how a particular family came to this village or what happened during the famine that everyone remembers. These oral traditions were not backed up. They existed in living memory and in living performance. When the living community dispersed, the traditions dispersed with it.
The nuclear family is not incapable of cultural transmission. Parents teach children things all the time. But the bandwidth is radically reduced. Two adults, working full-time, raising children in an urban apartment, simply cannot replicate the immersive cultural environment that a multi-generational household provided. The child’s cultural education becomes scheduled rather than ambient — a weekend Odissi class here, a festival visit there — rather than the continuous, unconscious absorption that happened when the child simply grew up inside the culture. The difference is the difference between studying a language in school and growing up speaking it. You can become fluent either way. But the depth is different.
Caste in the Modern Age
The official narrative of modern India is that caste is declining — weakened by urbanization, education, constitutional provisions, and the democratic process. The reality, certainly in Odisha, is different. Caste has not declined. It has mutated. It has shed some of its most visible manifestations — the prohibition on inter-caste dining, the restriction of certain occupations to certain castes — while retaining, and in some cases strengthening, its grip on the domains that actually determine life outcomes: marriage, political power, social networks, and economic opportunity.
Open any Odia matrimonial website and the mutation is visible. Shaadi.com’s Odisha section allows you to filter by caste. JeevanSathi.com has a dedicated Khandayat matrimonial page. MarriageDuniya, OriyaMatch, MatchFinder — every major platform serves the caste-endogamous marriage market with the efficiency of modern technology applied to an ancient social logic. Khandayat boy seeks Khandayat girl. Brahmin family seeks Brahmin alliance. The language is polite, the interface is slick, the underlying architecture is the same one that has organized Odia society for centuries. The Khandayats — Odisha’s largest and most politically influential caste, with a warrior-landowner heritage — “prefer to marry within their community,” as one matrimonial site puts it, with the matter-of-fact tone of describing a dietary preference rather than a system of social segregation.
The public performance of caste-lessness exists alongside this private reality without any sense of contradiction. The same urban professional who will tell you sincerely that “caste doesn’t matter anymore” will, when it comes time to find a spouse for their son or daughter, work within caste lines with a precision that would impress a medieval genealogist. This is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is a genuinely held dual consciousness: the modern self that believes in equality, and the familial self that operates within inherited social structures. The two selves coexist without acknowledging each other, like parallel processes running on the same hardware.
In politics, the mutation is different but equally revealing. Odisha has historically been an outlier in Indian caste politics. Caste has “never been a factor in Odisha politics unlike in the northern Indian states like Bihar and UP or southern states like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu,” as analysts have noted. Naveen Patnaik governed for twenty-four years without building an explicitly caste-based coalition in the manner of a Lalu Prasad Yadav or a Mayawati. But this absence of overt caste mobilization did not mean caste was absent from Odia politics. It meant it operated through other channels: through the selection of candidates, the distribution of development funds, the appointment of bureaucrats, the informal networks that determine who has access to power and who does not.
The BJP’s arrival in Odisha has accelerated the explicit politicization of caste. The OBC question — Other Backward Classes, the vast middle of the caste hierarchy that is neither Brahmin/Khandayat at the top nor SC/ST at the bottom — has become a live political issue. There is “little unity among OBC communities in the state,” as observers have noted. “Some consider themselves a part of the Kshyatriyas, some are land owning communities and money lending communities, and consider themselves Baniya, and portray a sense of being superior to ‘lower’ castes.” The demand is shifting from “protection of culture” to “proportion of power” — from the older Odia politics of linguistic and cultural identity to the newer Indian politics of caste-based entitlement. Whether this represents progress or regression depends on which model of politics you believe serves justice better. What it certainly represents is a mutation of caste into forms that are adapted to democratic competition.
The Kandhamal violence of 2008 revealed how caste intersects with religion in ways that can become lethal. The violence — triggered by the murder of VHP leader Lakshmanananda Saraswati, which Maoist leader Sabyasachi Panda claimed responsibility for but which Hindutva organizations blamed on Christian missionaries — resulted in at least 39 Christians killed, over 395 churches burned, between 5,600 and 6,500 houses destroyed, and more than 60,000 people displaced. The underlying fault line was not simply Hindu versus Christian. It was Kandha (Scheduled Tribe) versus Pana (Scheduled Caste), a caste-based antagonism that predated the religious overlay by centuries. The Pana community’s conversion to Christianity, and the consequent question of whether they could claim both SC reservation and religious minority status, had created a combustible mixture of caste resentment, religious anxiety, and competition for scarce state resources. The violence was not an eruption of primitive hatred. It was a modern conflict, organized through modern communication, exploiting modern legal categories, fought over modern stakes.
Does caste travel? Does it survive the journey from Odisha to Bangalore, to Surat, to San Francisco? The evidence is clear: it does. Among the professional diaspora, the matrimonial networks operate with the same caste parameters as at home. The biodata PDFs that circulate among Odia parents in Bangalore list height, complexion, caste, and salary with equal specificity. Among the laboring diaspora in Surat’s textile mills, caste determines which mess hall a worker can eat in, which room they can rent, which employer will hire them. As one investigation documented, migrants from Odisha “carry with them the caste structures that exist in their villages, with the most marginalised finding it difficult to find work, a room or even an entry into an ‘upper caste’ mess.” Caste is not a feature of place. It is a feature of people, and people carry it wherever they go.
Urbanization’s Price
Bhubaneswar is the case study, because Bhubaneswar is where the transformation is most legible. The city has lived three lives in a single century, and each life has overwritten pieces of the one before.
The first Bhubaneswar was Ekamra Kshetra — the ancient temple town, the seat of 2,500 years of Hindu culture, with an estimated seven hundred temples clustered in what is now called Old Town. The landscape was organized around sacred geometry: temples, tanks, groves, and the narrow alleys of the sahis — the neighborhoods where sevayats (temple priests) and their families lived in intimate proximity to the deities they served. The mutts (monastic institutions) and dharamshalas (pilgrim rest houses) gave the town an architectural rhythm that was legible and humane. Big old trees shaded the lanes. Ponds and wells adjoined the temples, serving both ritual and practical functions. The Lingaraj Temple, the Mukteswar Temple, the Parasurameswar Temple — these were not isolated monuments. They were nodes in a living urban fabric, connected to each other and to the communities that maintained them by a web of ritual, economic, and social relationships.
The second Bhubaneswar was born in 1948, when the city was selected as the capital of the new state of Orissa. The German architect Otto Konigsberger designed the master plan for the new capital in 1946, and the plan made a fateful decision: it built the new city away from the old one. The new Bhubaneswar was planned for bureaucrats and government employees — wide roads, institutional buildings, residential colonies organized by rank. Old Town was simply not part of the master plan. It was left outside the development framework, outside the amenities of modern urban life, a medieval temple town surrounded by an expanding modern city that had turned its back on it.
The separation was physical and psychological. New Bhubaneswar looked north, toward the airport, the railway station, the national highway. Old Bhubaneswar looked inward, toward its temples and its rituals. The two existed in parallel, but the resources, the political attention, and the cultural prestige all flowed to the new city. Old Town decayed, not from neglect exactly, but from the absence of the investment that the rest of the city was receiving.
The third Bhubaneswar arrived with liberalization. The post-1990s boom brought IT companies, malls, highways, and gated communities. Infosys, TCS, Tech Mahindra set up operations in the Info City and Info Valley complexes. Chandrasekharpur and Patia became premium residential zones — luxury apartments, private swimming pools, landscaped gardens, security systems. In 2016, Bhubaneswar was selected as India’s number-one Smart City. The transformation was rapid and disorienting.
What was gained is real: jobs, connectivity, healthcare, educational institutions, an economy that gives young Odias a reason to stay in the state rather than migrate to Bangalore. But what was lost is equally real.
The temple-tank-grove landscape has been systematically dismantled. Bhubaneswar’s transformation into what observers call a “concrete jungle” has depleted its trees, ponds, and open spaces. The seasonal rhythms that once organized city life — the temple festivals, the agricultural calendar, the monsoon rituals — have been overlaid by the rhythms of office commutes and shopping-mall sales. The sahi culture — the neighborhood intimacy where everyone knew everyone, where a child could walk from one end of the sahi to the other and be watched over by a dozen families — has been replaced by the anonymity of apartment complexes where neighbors may not know each other’s names.
And then there is the supreme irony of the Ekamra Kshetra Heritage Project. In December 2019, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik announced a comprehensive development plan for Old Town, aimed at securing UNESCO World Heritage status. The project would beautify the area around the Lingaraj Temple and make it worthy of international recognition. The execution was devastating. Two months of demolition drives destroyed previously unknown tenth-century temples. The ASI protested that the BMC and OBCC were conducting demolitions “without obtaining prior permission of the competent authority” within the prohibited zones of 26 Centrally Protected Monuments. Hindu seers wrote open letters to the Supreme Court seeking a stay on what they called “unjustified destruction of heritage structures” — mathas set up by great acharyas, structures with material and spiritual significance being razed in the name of heritage beautification. Ancient trees were felled. Archaeological debris, potentially containing priceless sculptures, was carted away and not recovered.
The pattern is almost too perfect to be merely ironic: in the attempt to celebrate its heritage, the city destroyed pieces of the heritage it was trying to celebrate. This is not corruption or incompetence (though both may have played a role). It is a symptom of a deeper confusion — the inability of a modernizing society to hold two things at once: the desire to move forward and the desire to preserve what was.
The new Bhubaneswar — its malls, its IT parks, its gated communities with names like “Mahadev Greens” and “Sainihomz” — could be anywhere in India. The architectural language is generic: glass and steel, pastel-painted concrete, faux-classical entrance columns. Nothing about these buildings says Odisha. Nothing about the commercial strips says this place is different from that place. The old Bhubaneswar was unmistakably itself — its temples, its tanks, its alleys carried a specificity of place that was legible to anyone who entered. The new Bhubaneswar is interchangeable. It has gained efficiency and lost identity. Whether that is a trade worth making depends on what you think a city is for.
Migration and the Diaspora
There are two Odia diasporas, and they share almost nothing except the state they left behind.
The first is the professional diaspora: IT workers in Bangalore and Hyderabad, engineers and doctors in the United States, middle-class professionals in the Gulf states and Europe. This diaspora is organized, visible, and culturally active. There are an estimated six hundred thousand Odias in Bangalore alone, and they have built an institutional ecosystem to maintain their connection to home. The Odisha Society of the Americas (OSA), the Odisha Society of the United Kingdom (OSUK), the Odia Society of Singapore (OSS), the World Odisha Society (WOS) — these organizations sponsor cultural events, maintain WhatsApp groups, organize festival celebrations, and provide a social infrastructure for Odia identity in cities where Odias are a minority.
The Rath Yatra is the anchor event. The Odisha Samaj UAE has been hosting Rath Yatra for fifteen years, drawing more than a thousand devotees from across all seven emirates. In North Carolina, the Hindu Society of North Carolina builds a twenty-six-foot-tall chariot for its annual procession — one of the largest in the Americas. In Paris, a four-hour procession winds through city streets, ending with performances of Indian art forms and devotional music. In Auckland and Wellington, the New Zealand Odia Society celebrated Rath Yatra 2025 with gatherings that united Odias from across the country. As one organizer in the UAE put it: “For fifteen years, this celebration has brought a sense of home to the Odia community here. It is about preserving identity, building community, and passing on traditions to the next generation.”
Nuakhai, the harvest festival of western Odisha, has undergone its own diaspora transformation. Juhar Parivar Bangalore hosted its twenty-fifth Nuakhai Mahotsav in 2025, attracting over ten thousand attendees with cultural programs and food stalls. In Delhi, the Juhar Nuakhai Delhi group organizes multi-day celebrations at JLN Stadium, explicitly designed to sustain the “socio-cultural and spiritual significance” of the festival for professionals from western Odisha who have moved to the capital. During the pandemic, these organizations shifted to hybrid models — Zoom sessions for ritual demonstrations, virtual greetings — extending reach to remote family members while maintaining the annual rhythm.
The professional diaspora preserves food, festivals, and language. Pakhala is made in Bangalore apartments. Chhena Poda is ordered from specialty Odia sweet shops that have sprung up in IT corridors. Odia is spoken at home, even when the children respond in English. The preservation is real. But what the diaspora cannot preserve is the daily texture of place. The sound of conch shells at dusk from the neighborhood temple. The smell of incense and dhupa drifting through the sahi. The casual encounter with an acquaintance at the mandi. The quality of light on the Mahanadi at a specific hour of a specific season. These sensory experiences — which are, in aggregate, what it means to live in a place rather than merely to come from it — are what the diaspora loses first and mourns longest.
The second diaspora is invisible. It is the laboring Odia: the textile workers in Surat, the brick kiln workers in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the construction workers in Kerala, the domestic workers scattered across Indian cities. This diaspora is massive, exploited, and almost entirely absent from the cultural conversation about Odia identity.
The numbers are staggering. Ganjam district alone sends approximately seven hundred thousand migrants to Surat’s powerloom industry. Of Surat’s 44.6 lakh population, eight to eight and a half lakh are Odias, eighty percent of them from Ganjam. They operate the powerlooms that supply ninety percent of India’s polyester fabric. They work twelve-hour shifts for twenty to twenty-five thousand rupees a month. Ganjam receives approximately 120 crore rupees per month in remittances — money that has reduced multidimensional poverty in the district from 22 percent in 2015-16 to 6 percent in 2019-20. The migration works, economically. It feeds families. It builds houses. It sends children to school.
But the cultural cost is immense and unacknowledged. From the western districts — Bolangir, Nuapada, Kalahandi, Boudh, Sonepur, Bargarh — over sixty thousand families, roughly two lakh individuals, migrate each year to neighboring states for brick kiln work alone. Another forty to fifty thousand work in brick kilns near Cuttack and Bhubaneswar. These are not IT professionals choosing a lifestyle. These are bonded laborers recruited through the dadan system — debt bondage mediated by middlemen called sardars who advance small sums at usurious interest rates, trapping workers in cycles of obligation. Violence is endemic. Workers report fourteen to eighteen-hour days. They cannot stay away from work even when ill. Verbal and physical abuse are routine. Women and children are not spared.
When Odia Samaj organizations celebrate Rath Yatra in Dubai, these workers are not present. When diaspora WhatsApp groups share nostalgic photographs of village ponds and temple festivals, these workers are too exhausted or too far from connectivity to participate. The laboring diaspora preserves nothing culturally because it has no surplus — no surplus time, no surplus energy, no surplus social space — with which to maintain cultural practice. The textile workers in Surat do not celebrate Nuakhai with ten thousand attendees and cultural programs. They celebrate by calling home, if they can, and eating whatever approximation of home food they can manage in a shared room with eight other workers.
The two diasporas together tell the full story of what Odisha exports: the talent and the labor, the professionals and the bodies, the people who leave by choice and the people who leave because staying would mean starvation. Both carry Odia identity. But the forms in which they carry it are so different as to be almost unrecognizable to each other.
Digital Odia Identity
In 2011, a group of food enthusiasts and social media activists declared March 20 as “Pakhala Dibasa” — World Pakhala Day. There was no government proclamation. No institutional endorsement. No cultural authority gave permission. A community of Odias, connected by social media, simply decided that their traditional fermented rice dish deserved a day of collective celebration, and the celebration happened. Within a few years, Pakhala Dibasa had become one of the most visible expressions of Odia cultural identity online. Every March, social media floods with photographs: families gathered around thalis of Pakhala with fried fish and saga, restaurant specials featuring gourmet Pakhala platters, diaspora Odias making Pakhala in their Bangalore and Bay Area kitchens. In 2023, fifty-five Odia food bloggers coordinated a social media campaign around the hashtag #amaodiapakhalapasara — “our Odia Pakhala tradition.” The campaign was executed with the coordination and reach of a marketing blitz, except there was no brand behind it, no budget, no corporate sponsor. Just a distributed network of people who shared a cultural attachment to fermented rice.
Pakhala Dibasa is revealing because it demonstrates something that the nostalgic narrative of cultural decline often misses: culture does not only erode. It also adapts, finds new media, invents new forms of expression. The tradition of eating Pakhala is old. The tradition of celebrating it collectively on a designated day, mediated by social media, is new. The new form carries some of the old meaning — connection to place, to family, to the sensory experience of a specific food — while adding new layers: collective identity performance, digital solidarity, cultural assertion in a national media landscape that routinely ignores Odisha.
Social media has become the new commons for Odia cultural expression. The Rasagola controversy — the years-long GI tag battle between Odisha and West Bengal over who owns the rasgulla — became a flashpoint of digital Odia identity. When Bengal received its GI tag for “Banglar Rasogolla” in 2017, the reaction on Odia social media was swift and fierce. The argument was not just legal but existential: the rasagola’s connection to the Jagannath Temple’s Niladri Bije ritual — where Lakshmi offers rasagola to Jagannath upon his return from the Rath Yatra — meant that the sweet was not merely a confection but a sacred cultural artifact. Odisha received its own GI tag for “Odisha Rasagola” in 2019, with the registry recognizing both variants as distinct. But the real victory was cultural: the controversy mobilized thousands of young Odias who might never have articulated their Odia identity so forcefully without the provocation of a perceived cultural theft.
Odia meme culture has emerged as a distinct digital subculture. Content creators began with pop culture memes in the Odia language, adapted to Odia sensibilities and cultural references. By 2018-19, Odia memes had evolved from formulaic templates to what observers describe as “actual content” — commentary on local politics, social norms, and cultural quirks that resonated because they drew on a shared understanding that only insiders could fully grasp. Memes referencing local proverbs, cultural figures, or the specific texture of Odia social life carry layers of meaning that are invisible to outsiders. This is the nature of all insider culture: its meaning is proportional to the insider knowledge required to decode it.
Instagram and YouTube have spawned a generation of Odia content creators whose work straddles the line between cultural preservation and cultural performance. Food channels like Ama Ghara Toka showcase Odia cuisine with production values and cultural commentary. Travel creators document temple towns, tribal markets, and festival celebrations for audiences that include both nostalgic diaspora Odias and curious non-Odias. The OTV Insight awards, Odisha’s digital creator recognition program, have categories for food creators, travel creators, and cultural creators — evidence that the digital Odia cultural ecosystem has become sufficiently developed to support specialization.
But here is the tension that defines digital Odia identity: the new generation performs Odia identity in English. The Instagram reel about Pakhala has an English caption. The YouTube documentary about Odissi is narrated in English with Odia subtitles. The tweet defending Odisha’s claim to the rasagola is written in English, perhaps with a hashtag in Odia script for flavor. The medium is English. The content is Odia. And the question this raises is whether cultural identity can survive the loss of its language as the primary medium of expression. Whether being Odia in English is the same as being Odia in Odia.
The answer, almost certainly, is: it is not the same. But it is not nothing either. It is something new — a hybrid identity that draws on both Odia cultural content and English-medium expression, that maintains emotional connection to Odia traditions while operating within the linguistic framework of globalized India. Whether this hybrid is a bridge (connecting the old culture to new audiences) or a dilution (replacing depth with performance) depends on what happens next. If the English-medium Odia identity leads some of its practitioners back to the language, back to the texts, back to the deeper layers of the tradition, then it serves as a gateway. If it becomes self-sufficient — if performing Odia identity on Instagram becomes a substitute for living within Odia cultural practice — then the digital expression is a memorial, not a continuation.
What Survives
Not everything is being lost. This must be said clearly, because the narrative of cultural decline can become its own form of distortion — a romanticism of the past that blinds us to the vitality of the present.
The Odia kitchen is adapting. Pakhala, once the food of the poor and the rural, has been rebranded as “probiotic fermented rice” — and the rebranding is not wrong. The fermentation process does enrich rice with probiotics, beneficial microorganisms that promote gut health. Contemporary chefs are experimenting with brown rice and quinoa Pakhala. Leading hospitality brands in Bhubaneswar offer elaborate “Gourmet Pakhala Thalis” featuring up to twenty traditional side dishes. Chhena Poda, the caramelized cheese dessert that Sudarshan Sahu accidentally invented in a village wood-fired oven in Nayagarh in 1947, is now available on Amazon, shipped nationally by gourmet producers who use the word “artisanal” without irony. The dish has survived. It has found new markets, new audiences, new modes of production. Whether a Chhena Poda produced in a commercial kitchen and shipped in vacuum packaging carries the same meaning as one baked in Sal leaves over charcoal by a village confectioner is the question that haunts every act of cultural adaptation.
Odissi is global. Online dance schools serve students from Mauritius to Mexico, from France to Fiji, from Kenya to South Korea. The dance form that nearly died when the Mahari tradition was criminalized is now taught on five continents. Srjan, the institution founded in the Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra tradition, attracts students from around the world. Nrutyayan in Bhubaneswar teaches students of French, Spanish, German, Malaysian, and American nationality. The trajectory from temple ritual to global art form is one of the most remarkable cultural survival stories of the twentieth century.
Sambalpuri textiles are fashion. The saree that village women wore to the weekly mandi — woven with traditional bandha (ikat) techniques, incorporating motifs of shankha, chakra, and phula with deep symbolic meaning rooted in Odia culture — now appears on urban runways, in designer boutiques, in Instagram posts tagged #handloomfashion. The designs are being incorporated into modern silhouettes, fusion wear, contemporary fashion statements. The weavers, at least some of them, are finding markets that pay better than the old village economy. The craft is surviving.
Tribal art is in galleries. Saora paintings, the ikon murals that the Sora people of southern Odisha created as sacred objects for religious ceremonies, have found a second life as decorative art. The International Indian Folk Art Gallery sells Saora art. Contemporary Saora artists experiment with acrylics and canvas, with modern elements entering their imagery. The Museum of Tribal Art and Artefacts in Bhubaneswar celebrates the life and culture of Odisha’s sixty-two tribal communities. The transition from sacred object to commodity, from ritual practice to museum exhibit, is both a preservation and a transformation.
But here is the argument that must be made honestly, even if it is uncomfortable: survival is not the same as continuity. A Sambalpuri saree on a Bangalore runway is not the same object as a Sambalpuri saree on a village woman walking to the mandi. Same thread. Same technique. Same motifs. Different meaning. The village woman’s saree was embedded in a web of relationships: to the weaver she knew by name, to the market where she bought vegetables from the same vendor every week, to the neighbors who would recognize her particular saree as appropriate for a particular occasion, to the ritual calendar that determined which textiles were worn when. The runway saree is embedded in a different web: fashion trends, consumer identity, aesthetic appreciation, perhaps a vague sense of “supporting handlooms.” Both webs are real. But they are not the same web.
A Saora painting in a gallery is not the same as a Saora painting on a village wall. On the wall, it was an ikon — a sacred image created by a ritual specialist to house and propitiate spirits, embedded in the Sora community’s relationship with the non-human world, painted at specific times for specific reasons with specific spiritual consequences. In the gallery, it is beautiful. It is admired. It is purchased. But the spirits have left it. The meaning that made it sacred rather than merely decorative has been subtracted in the transfer from one context to another.
And meaning, not thread, is what culture is actually made of. The question is not whether Odia culture survives. Cultures always survive in some form. The question is whether what survives still carries the meaning it originally held. Whether the form, emptied of its original context, refilled with new meanings appropriate to new circumstances, is the same culture in a new shape or a new culture wearing an old costume.
There may not be a clean answer. The honest answer is probably: both. Simultaneously. The Odissi performed on a stage in Tokyo carries some of the Mahari’s devotion, refracted through Kelucharan Mohapatra’s reconstruction, through the grammar of the proscenium stage, through the aesthetic sensibility of a Japanese audience. It is not what Sasimani Devi performed in the inner sanctum. It is not nothing either. It is something real, something alive, something that would not exist if the original tradition had not existed — but something that the original tradition might not recognize as its own.
The Churning Continues
Odisha’s culture has never been static. That is perhaps the most important thing to understand about it, and the thing most easily forgotten in moments of anxiety about change.
The Austric peoples who cultivated rice in the river valleys and propitiated spirits in sacred groves were not replaced by the Dravidian peoples who built terraced farms in the highlands. They were layered over. The Dravidian layer was not erased by the arrival of Indo-Aryan speech and Brahmanical religion. It was absorbed, modified, and incorporated. Buddhism did not destroy what came before it; it grew alongside and through it, leaving traces in the Jagannath synthesis that puzzle scholars to this day. The Bhakti movement did not negate tantra; it domesticated some of its energies and channeled others underground. The Ganga dynasty did not discard the cultural inheritance of the Bhauma-Kara; they built on it, literally, stacking new temples on the foundations of old ones.
Every generation in this three-thousand-year history has experienced change that must have felt, to the people living through it, like the end of something. When the Kalinga empire fell to Ashoka in 261 BCE, the culture of a maritime warrior kingdom was disrupted — and from the disruption emerged a Buddhist flowering that produced Dhauligiri, Ratnagiri, and Lalitgiri. When the Muslim invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries destroyed or damaged temple infrastructure across northern Odisha, the Gajapati kings responded by consolidating the Jagannath cult into a deliberately syncretic institution that could absorb the shock. When the Mughals, then the Marathas, then the British arrived, each wave of external power imposed its own disruptions, and each time the culture found ways to persist, adapt, encode its essential knowledge in forms the new power could not easily erase — in kitchen practices, in festival rhythms, in the structure of the language itself.
The pattern is not one of resistance, exactly. It is not that Odia culture fought off every threat and emerged unchanged. That would be a lie. It changed. It always changed. The pattern is one of absorption and sedimentation. Each new layer — tribal, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, colonial, modern — was absorbed into the existing structure, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently, but always incompletely. Nothing was fully erased. Nothing was fully preserved. What remained was a palimpsest — a text written over other texts, where the older writings are still partially legible beneath the new.
The question that the present moment poses — and it is a genuine question, not a rhetorical lament — is whether the rate of change has finally exceeded the rate at which meaning can be transmitted. The previous disruptions, however violent, occurred within a world where the fundamental unit of cultural transmission — the multi-generational community living in place, speaking a shared language, practicing shared rituals — remained intact. Even the famine of 1866, which killed a third of the population, left the surviving two-thirds in their villages, in their families, in their language. The disruption was catastrophic but spatially contained. The transmission infrastructure, though damaged, was not dismantled.
What is happening now is structurally different. Urbanization does not just kill people; it relocates them. Migration does not just displace bodies; it dissolves communities. The nuclear family does not just reduce household size; it eliminates the ambient cultural environment that made unconscious transmission possible. Digital media does not just provide a new platform for cultural expression; it substitutes performance for practice, English for Odia, the curated image for the lived experience. Each of these forces individually might be manageable. Together, they create a rate of change that the old transmission systems were not designed to handle.
Think of it this way. A river can absorb a sudden flood and return to its course. It can absorb a dam and find new channels. It can absorb pollution and, over time, clean itself. But if you simultaneously flood it, dam it, pollute it, and divert its tributaries, the river that survives — if it survives — is not the same river. It flows in a different direction, through different terrain, carrying different sediment. It is still water. But it is different water.
Odisha’s culture is still flowing. The Rath Yatra still rolls through Puri and through the streets of Dubai and North Carolina. Pakhala is still eaten — and now photographed, hashtagged, and celebrated on a designated global day. Odissi is danced in Tokyo and Nairobi. Sambalpuri sarees are worn on runways and on village roads. The Odia language is spoken at home in Bangalore apartments and typed in Odia script in Instagram comments. The culture is alive.
But it flows through different terrain now. The temple economy that sustained artists for a thousand years is gone. The joint family that transmitted knowledge through ambient proximity is dissolving. The village community that anchored identity to place is being dispersed by migration. The oral traditions that required living communities to survive are being lost faster than they can be recorded. The language itself is losing ground to English and Hindi among the urban young.
What remains is a civilization that has been churning for three millennia and has not stopped. The churning produces both poison and nectar — Samudra Manthana, the mythological precedent, was explicit about this. The Halahala, the terrible poison, emerged from the ocean alongside the Amrita, the nectar of immortality. Shiva drank the poison to save the world, and the poison turned his throat blue. He did not reject the churning because it produced poison. He absorbed the poison and let the churning continue.
The unraveling of Odia culture is real. The losses are real — specific, irreversible, and accumulating. The adaptations are also real — creative, unexpected, and sometimes genuinely beautiful. Whether the thread between generations can stretch across a gap this wide without breaking is not a question that can be answered from the outside, by analysis or commentary. It is being answered right now, in the daily choices of millions of people: the Odia mother in Bangalore who insists her children speak Odia at home; the Ganjam textile worker in Surat who calls his village on Nuakhai; the food blogger who posts a Pakhala recipe in Odia script; the Odissi student in Nairobi who learns the tribhangi pose without ever having seen the Konark temple; the grandmother in a Cuttack village who still recites the Laxmi Purana every Thursday to an audience of one.
The answer is not known. It is being lived. And perhaps that has always been the case — not just for Odisha, but for every culture that has ever existed. The conviction that the present moment is uniquely dangerous, that the current rate of change is unprecedented, that this time the thread will break — that conviction has been felt by every generation facing upheaval. And every time, the culture has surprised the pessimists. Not by surviving unchanged. By surviving changed. By becoming something that the previous generation would not fully recognize but that the next generation would call, simply and without qualification, home.
The land between the Eastern Ghats and the Bay of Bengal has been churning human culture for longer than almost any place on earth. The Kuliana hand axes, the Ushakothi cave paintings, the Munda rice fields, the Kondh terraces, the Buddhist monasteries, the Hindu temples, the Jagannath synthesis, the colonial printing presses, the Satyabadi classrooms, the Rourkela steel furnaces, the Bhubaneswar IT parks, the Surat powerloom sheds, the Bangalore apartments, the Instagram feeds — these are all layers of the same sediment. Each layer was deposited by people who were trying to live, trying to make sense of their circumstances, trying to pass something on. The sediment is thick now, and it is shifting. What it will settle into, no one alive can say. But the churning itself — the process of absorbing, adapting, layering, losing, recovering, transforming — is not a crisis. It is the process. It is what this civilization has always done. It is what it is doing now.
Source Research
The raw research that informs this series.