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Chapter 2: Before Jagannath
Before Jagannath became the center, Odisha already had history.
This seems obvious, but it matters because later memory often pulls everything toward Puri. Once Jagannath becomes sovereign, earlier dynasties are remembered through their relationship to the deity: who restored him, who built for him, who served him, who lost him, who brought him back. The older political landscape gets reorganized in hindsight.
The older story forces a slower reading. Odisha did not begin with the great temple at Puri. It passed through older formations: Kalinga under Ashoka’s shadow, Kharavela’s royal assertion, northern and coastal lineages, Buddhist and Brahminical transitions, Bhauma-Kara rule, Somavamsa/Kesari consolidation, and the sacred geographies of Jajpur and Bhubaneswar.
Jagannath did not create Odisha out of nothing. Jagannath inherited a land already full of sacred and political claims.
Kalinga Was Older Than Odisha
The name Odisha belongs to a later regional formation. The older name with wider historical force was Kalinga.
Kalinga enters all-India memory most famously through Ashoka’s conquest in the third century BCE. The Kalinga war matters not only because it transformed Ashoka’s imperial ideology, but because it shows that the eastern coast was already politically significant enough to draw Mauryan force. Kalinga was not a blank periphery. It was a region with enough power, wealth, and strategic value to be worth conquering.
Then comes Kharavela, usually placed in the first century BCE, the great early king of Kalinga known from the Hathigumpha inscription. Kharavela stands before the medieval temple state. His legitimacy was not yet Jagannath-centered. He belongs to an earlier world of royal assertion, Jain association, military campaigns, public works, and inscriptional kingship.
This matters because it prevents a lazy conclusion: Odisha did not become political only when Jagannath became supreme. The region had earlier kingship. But the kind of regional identity that later Odias inherited was shaped more deeply by the medieval temple-state system than by Kharavela’s ancient polity.
Kharavela is memory of ancient greatness. Jagannath is the continuing institution.
The Problem of the Gap
Between Kharavela and the medieval dynasties lies one of the hard problems of Odisha history: continuity.
There were dynasties, inscriptions, religious developments, and regional powers. But later Odia memory did not preserve them as a clean modern chronology. The Madala Panji and related temple chronicles present dynasties in ways that mix memory, myth, genealogy, sacred narrative, and political reconstruction.
This is why names like Bhoja, Bhauma, Kesari, and Somavamsa require care.
Modern historians identify the Bhauma-Karas as a major early medieval dynasty in coastal Odisha, associated with Buddhist and Brahminical patronage, ruling from roughly the eighth to tenth centuries. Later textual memory preserves a Bhoja line that scholars have connected with the historical Bhaumas.
The Somavamsas are another major dynasty, originally connected to Dakshina Kosala and western Odisha, who expanded into coastal and central Odisha. Later chronicle memory often remembers the Kesaris, and scholars connect this Kesari memory with the Somavamsas, especially because late Somavamsa rulers themselves are associated with Kesari names.
The result is not a simple equivalence table, but a layered one:
| Later Memory | Historical Reading |
|---|---|
| Bhoja | Often read as preserving memory of the Bhauma-Karas |
| Kesari | Connected with the Somavamsas |
| Ganga | Eastern Gangas, historically clearer after Chodaganga |
| Gajapati | Suryavamsa Gajapati ideology, then later successors |
The reader must hold two truths together. The chronicles are not reliable modern history in every detail. But they are historically important because they show how Odisha came to remember itself.
Bhauma-Kara and the Religious Field
The Bhauma-Kara period matters because it shows Odisha before the final Jagannath-centered order.
This was a world of multiple religious currents. Buddhism remained significant. Brahminical worship expanded. Goddesses mattered. Regional sacred centers gained power. Rulers patronized different traditions and used religious support to stabilize authority.
The Bhauma-Karas are especially important because they complicate any simple story of Odisha moving in a straight line from tribal religion to Hindu kingship. Odisha’s religious field was plural. Buddhist, Shaiva, Shakta, Vaishnava, and local forms overlapped. Royal houses did not always belong to one neat sectarian identity. They patronized across traditions because rule required broad sacred coverage.
This is one reason Jagannath could later become so powerful. Odisha already had a habit of religious layering. A deity who could absorb multiple traditions fit the region’s political culture.
The Bhauma-Kara memory also matters for the Madala Panji problem. If the later Bhoja line preserves a transformed memory of the Bhaumas, then Odisha’s historical consciousness did not simply forget early medieval rule. It translated it into the categories available to temple chroniclers.
Modern history asks: who ruled, when, and where?
Temple memory asks: how does this dynasty fit into the sacred story that leads to Jagannath?
Both questions matter, but they are not the same question.
Somavamsa/Kesari: The First Medieval Regional Frame
The Somavamsas matter because they united, for a few generations, western Odisha and central/coastal Odisha. This was a major step toward a regional kingdom.
Their original base lay in Dakshina Kosala, in the western zone. Their expansion into coastal Odisha created a political bridge between inland and deltaic worlds. This matters because Odisha has always been more than the coast. Any durable Odia state had to connect the Mahanadi delta, the uplands, the forested interior, and the older sacred centers.
The Somavamsa/Kesari phase also connects strongly to Bhubaneswar and the Lingaraja-centered sacred geography. The temple landscape of Bhubaneswar is not just architecture. It represents a royal-sacred order before Puri’s final supremacy.
If Jagannath later becomes the supreme state deity, it is not because Odisha had no prior centers. It is because Puri eventually won the position that other centers had also been able to claim.
This makes the Somavamsas crucial. They show a regional Odisha taking shape before the Eastern Gangas.
Viraja, Lingaraja, Purushottama
Three sacred centers help make sense of the pre-Ganga and early Ganga field:
Viraja at Jajpur.
Lingaraja at Bhubaneswar.
Purushottama-Jagannath at Puri.
Each had a different history and constituency. Jajpur had old prestige. Bhubaneswar had temple density and Shaiva power. Puri eventually gained the decisive political role under the Gangas and Anangabhima III.
The rise of Jagannath must be seen in relation to these other deities. The state deity of Odisha was not selected in a vacuum. Puri’s rise involved the ability to integrate and subordinate other sacred centers.
That integration could be theological, ritual, or political. Jagannath could be associated with Vishnu/Purushottama while still containing non-classical elements. Lingaraja and Viraja could remain important but no longer define the top of the state hierarchy. The kingdom could contain many sacred centers while recognizing one supreme overlord.
This is exactly what a regional state needs: not a flat religious map, but a ranked one.
The Tribal and Frontier World
Before the Gangas, and long after them, Odisha’s frontier zones remained full of tribal and local powers.
This is not background. It is the ground itself.
The coastal temple state depended on its relationship with interior chiefs. Feudatory rajas in central Odisha, hill states, Bhuiyan, Juang, Kondh, Saora, and other communities were not outside the story. They were part of the political ecology.
A chief becomes a raja not simply by claiming descent, but by ritualizing power: adopting a tutelary deity, inviting Brahmins, building a capital, arranging sacred geography, receiving recognition, and placing tribal or local goddesses into a courtly order.
That local process mirrors the larger regional one. What happened at Puri with Jagannath also happened, in smaller forms, in feudatory courts across central Odisha.
This is why Odisha’s state formation cannot be separated from tribal society. The state did not replace the tribal world. It negotiated with it, absorbed parts of it, ranked it, and sometimes depended on it for legitimacy.
Why “Before Jagannath” Still Leads to Jagannath
The point of this chapter is not to reduce everything before Puri to a prelude. That would be wrong. Kalinga, Kharavela, Bhauma-Karas, Somavamsas, Viraja, Lingaraja, and local deities all have their own importance.
But the later Odia political imagination does pull these strands toward Puri. The Madala Panji and related chronicles reorganize dynastic memory around the Jagannath temple. They preserve, distort, compress, and reframe older history so that the story becomes continuous.
That continuity was not purely factual. It was political.
A kingdom that had broken in 1568 needed a memory of older wholeness. The Khurda/Puri rajas and temple establishment needed a history in which the present ritual order had deep roots. The chronicles helped create that continuity.
So “Before Jagannath” has two meanings.
First, historically, there was a real Odisha before Jagannath’s supremacy.
Second, in later memory, that earlier Odisha was pulled into the Jagannath-centered story.
Understanding Odisha requires both: the actual sequence of power, and the remembered sequence through which Odisha explained itself.
The Compression
If chapter 1 gave the model, this chapter gives the inheritance.
The Gangas did not enter an empty land. They entered a region with ancient Kalinga memory, Kharavela’s prestige, Bhauma-Kara/Bhoja traces, Somavamsa/Kesari consolidation, major sacred centers, and a living tribal-frontier world.
Their achievement was not merely conquest. It was reorganization.
That reorganization becomes decisive when Chodaganga builds, Anangabhima dedicates, and Jagannath becomes not just a god of Puri but the sovereign of the Odia kingdom.