On this page
English only · Odia translation in progress
Chapter 2: Why The British Wanted Odisha
The British did not conquer Odisha by accident. They wanted it because geography made it necessary.
Odisha sat between Bengal and the Northern Circars. Bengal was already the Company’s great base in the east. The Northern Circars connected the Company to the Madras side. Between them lay the Odisha coast, controlled by the Marathas. As long as that strip remained outside British control, the Company’s eastern possessions were not continuous.
This was the strategic reason behind conquest: Odisha was the missing corridor.
Ganjam Comes First
The southern doorway opened before the northern conquest.
Ganjam came under formal English possession in the 1760s through the wider politics of the Northern Circars. But formal possession did not mean real control. The region was disturbed by zamindars, hill chiefs, rival claimants, and local houses that did not accept Company authority easily.
Narayan Deo of Parlakimedi resisted the English in 1767-1768. When the Company tried to install arrangements through its own nominees, he returned from the hills and disrupted them. Other zamindars and chiefs in Ganjam also resisted, negotiated, fled, or rebelled.
Ghumsar became another difficult centre. Its ruler Vikrama Bhanja resisted payment and used the terrain to harass Company detachments. British troops suffered from sickness, difficult movement, surprise attacks, and local support networks.
This early southern history matters because it shows that resistance did not begin in Khurda in 1817. The southern estates had already been resisting Company interference for decades.
Parlakimedi As A Warning
Parlakimedi was not only a zamindari dispute. It was a lesson in how local society reacted when an outside power tried to control succession, revenue, and management.
British officials wanted a manageable estate. Local people wanted rule through their own house and their own accepted structures. When the Company displaced, confined, or manipulated rulers and diwans, local peons, Bisois, and supporters rose.
The people of Parlakimedi did not simply behave as a disorderly crowd. They repeatedly showed attachment to their own ruling house and hostility to alien management.
This became one of the strongest themes of early resistance: the right to be ruled by one’s own recognized authority, not by a distant system that understood neither local custom nor local legitimacy.
Mayurbhanj And The Northern Edge
In northern Odisha, Mayurbhanj also appears as a zone of resistance and maneuver.
The Raja of Mayurbhanj, Damodar Bhanj, fought both the English and the Marathas in the late eighteenth century. His resistance was not strong enough to produce a provincial uprising, but it shows the same fractured pattern: one chief fights, another watches, another negotiates, and no wider unity forms.
The British were learning from all this. They understood that conquest would not depend only on battlefield strength. It would depend on information, route knowledge, diplomacy, bribery, and pre-emptive handling of chiefs.
The Maratha Question
The British wanted Odisha from the Marathas long before 1803.
After the Company consolidated in Bengal, Maratha claims, especially chauth, became a political issue. Negotiations took place over payments, cessions, and the possibility of acquiring Odisha. These efforts did not immediately succeed, but they reveal British intention.
The Company was not merely reacting to war. It had already imagined Odisha as a necessary link.
When the Maratha confederacy weakened, the opportunity came. The death of Nana Fadnavis, the Treaty of Bassein in 1802, and the Second Maratha War opened the way for Lord Wellesley’s aggressive policy.
Odisha became one front in a larger campaign to break Maratha power.
The Preparation Was Political
The conquest of Odisha was prepared before troops marched.
The British maintained factories and agents who gathered information. Balasore was useful politically as well as commercially. Agents at Balasore, Cuttack, and near the Ganjam frontier watched routes, postal lines, officers, chiefs, and military possibilities.
Travel accounts and route surveys were not neutral curiosities. They helped future military movement. The British knew the road from Ganjam to Puri and Cuttack. They knew where local chiefs might obstruct movement. They knew whom to conciliate and whom to pressure.
Bribery and diplomacy were part of preparation. British authorities tried to win over Maratha officers and local elements before the campaign began. Their instructions included conciliation of inhabitants, protection of Brahmins and pilgrims, respect for the Jagannath temple, and negotiations with zamindars whose cooperation could smooth the army’s passage.
This is the Company’s method: make conquest look like order arriving.
Jagannath Had To Be Handled
The British understood that Puri could not be treated like an ordinary town.
When Lt. Col. Harcourt advanced from the Ganjam side in 1803, he sent messages to the priests of Jagannath before entering Puri. The temple had to be reassured. British protection had to be presented as respectful, not sacrilegious.
This was not just religious sensitivity. It was political intelligence. The British knew that mishandling Jagannath could turn conquest into resistance.
Odisha’s sacred geography had survived Afghan, Mughal, Maratha, and local conflicts. Any new ruler had to place himself carefully before it.
The 1803 Campaign
The British attacked from multiple directions.
Harcourt moved from the Ganjam side. Captain Morgan moved by sea toward Balasore. Forces from the north moved through the Balasore route. The plan was to take Puri, Cuttack, Balasore, and the main routes before the Marathas could form serious resistance.
The campaign was fast. Puri was occupied in September 1803 without resistance. Cuttack was entered in October. Barabati fort fell after bombardment. Balasore was taken. The Marathas retreated and were defeated near the Badamul pass.
Compared with later resistance inside Odisha, the conquest itself was surprisingly smooth. The Maratha army did not mount a deep defence. Some officers had been neutralized. Local chiefs waited. The British had prepared well.
The Treaty of Deogaon in December 1803 transferred Cuttack, including Balasore, to the Company.
Odisha was conquered.
But the difficult part began after conquest.
The Corridor Becomes A State
For the Company, Odisha began as a corridor: a coastal link between Bengal and the Northern Circars.
For Odias, it became something else: the arrival of a new administrative order.
The British did not only take military possession. They brought courts, revenue settlements, police, salt monopoly, new currency demands, treaty obligations, estate management, and surveillance over chiefs. They wanted not merely tribute, but governable order.
That difference explains the next half-century.
The Marathas had often demanded revenue and tribute without transforming every level of local society. The British wanted to regularize. They wanted a system. The trouble was that their system did not fit Odisha.
Once the conquest was over, the first promises of British rule began to break, especially around Khurda.