Chapter 2: Ancient Kalinga

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There is a rock on a hillside eight kilometers south of Bhubaneswar, near the village of Dhauli, where the Daya River bends through a broad floodplain before draining into the Chilika lagoon. The rock face has been carved with an elephant emerging from its surface — half-relief, half-suggestion — its trunk curled downward in a gesture that Buddhist iconography reads as compassion. Below the elephant, etched into the stone in Brahmi script more than two thousand years ago, are words addressed to the officers of a conquered province. The words belong to Emperor Ashoka, and they are an apology.

“All men are my children,” the edict reads. “What I desire for my own children, and I desire their welfare and happiness both in this world and the next, that I desire for all men.”

The battlefield the elephant overlooks is the place where, in 261 BCE, somewhere around a hundred thousand people were slaughtered and a hundred and fifty thousand deported — numbers Ashoka himself recorded, in his own edicts, with a candor that has no parallel in the ancient world. A king who carved his guilt into stone and placed it at the scene of his crime. This is not a standard imperial gesture. But then, nothing about Kalinga’s story follows the standard script.

The land that would one day become Odisha enters recorded history not as a footnote to someone else’s empire, but as the kingdom that broke an emperor’s certainty. That is the founding paradox: the most celebrated moment in Kalinga’s ancient past is its defeat. And yet, within a generation of that defeat, a local king would rise to reclaim everything that was lost, inscribe his victories on cave walls a few miles from Ashoka’s edicts, and build a kingdom whose merchant ships would carry its culture across the Bay of Bengal to the shores of Southeast Asia. Defeat, recovery, and reach — this is the arc of ancient Kalinga, and it still shapes how Odisha understands itself.

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Before Ashoka: Kalinga Among the Great Kingdoms

The name appears early. The Mahabharata mentions Kalinga as one of the kingdoms of eastern India. The Vayu Purana and the Matsya Purana list it among the ancient janapadas. Buddhist canonical texts — the Jatakas — refer to Kalinga repeatedly, placing it among the powerful states of the subcontinent well before the Mauryan period. In the Kalingabodhi Jataka, Kalinga is ruled by a king called Kalinga, and the story’s geographical markers correspond to the eastern coastal region between the Mahanadi and the Godavari rivers. The Mahagovinda Suttanta, one of the longer discourses in the Digha Nikaya, lists Kalinga alongside Anga, Magadha, Kasi, Kosala, Avanti, and Gandhara — the great realms of the ancient Indian world.

In the Buddhist tradition, Kalinga’s early history is entangled with the figure of King Brahmadatta. Various Jataka tales set stories in Kalinga during Brahmadatta’s reign, somewhere between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE. The historicity of these accounts is debatable, but their consistency is not. Kalinga appears in them as a settled, organized, and militarily significant kingdom — not a peripheral tribal region, but a state that could rival Magadha.

The geography of ancient Kalinga was roughly coterminous with modern Odisha, plus the northern districts of Andhra Pradesh — extending from the Mahanadi delta in the north to the Godavari in the south, bounded by the Bay of Bengal to the east and the Eastern Ghats to the west. This is a critical detail. The territory was not a narrow coastal strip; it included the fertile river deltas of the Mahanadi, the Brahmani, and the Baitarani, the dense forests of the highlands, and a long, continuous coastline with natural harbors at the mouths of major rivers. It was a geography that lent itself equally to agriculture and maritime trade — a kingdom that could feed itself and export its surplus across the sea.

When the political map of ancient India crystallized into the sixteen Mahajanapadas — the “great realms” that the Buddhist texts enumerate — Kalinga was counted among them in several reckonings, though not in all canonical lists. The variation itself is instructive. Kalinga was powerful enough to be named alongside Magadha and Kosala, yet independent enough to remain outside the Gangetic power system that would eventually produce the Nanda and Mauryan empires. It existed on the margins of the great northern Indian political narrative, not because it was minor, but because it was oriented differently — eastward, toward the sea, rather than westward, toward the Indo-Gangetic heartland.

This orientation would define everything that followed.

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The Kalinga War: The Conquest That Conquered the Conqueror

By the middle of the third century BCE, the Mauryan Empire under Ashoka controlled nearly the entire Indian subcontinent. The empire stretched from Afghanistan to Bengal, from the Himalayas to the Deccan. One significant gap remained: the eastern seaboard. Kalinga.

The strategic logic of the invasion was straightforward. Kalinga controlled the land routes connecting northern India to the Deccan and the south. Its ports facilitated trade that bypassed Mauryan territory entirely. An independent Kalinga was not just a gap in the imperial map — it was an economic and military alternative to Mauryan dominance. Ashoka’s grandfather Chandragupta had reportedly attempted to conquer Kalinga and failed. The Hathigumpha Inscription of Kharavela, written a century later, would reference a canal originally built by the Nanda kings — suggesting that even the pre-Mauryan Nanda dynasty had interests in the region. Kalinga was not a target of opportunity. It was unfinished business.

The war came in the eighth year of Ashoka’s reign, approximately 261 BCE. The primary — and effectively the only — source for what happened is Ashoka himself. His Thirteenth Major Rock Edict, inscribed at multiple locations across the empire, is a document without precedent in the ancient world. No other conqueror carved his regret into stone.

The edict reads, in part:

“When Kalinga had been conquered, Beloved-of-the-Gods felt remorse, for when an independent country is conquered the slaughter, death, and deportation of the people is extremely grievous to the Beloved-of-the-Gods, and weighs heavily on his mind… Even those who are not affected suffer when they see friends, acquaintances, companions, and relatives affected. These misfortunes befall all, and this weighs heavily on the mind of the Beloved-of-the-Gods.”

The numbers Ashoka provides are staggering even by modern standards: one hundred thousand killed in the war, one hundred and fifty thousand deported, and many times that number who perished from the war’s consequences — famine, displacement, the collapse of social order. Whether these figures are precise or conventional expressions of enormity is debated by historians. What is not debated is that Ashoka chose to record them. He did not minimize. He did not reframe the conquest as liberation. He called it what it was: slaughter.

The Thirteenth Rock Edict then makes the turn that has echoed through twenty-three centuries:

“Beloved-of-the-Gods considers the greatest of all victories to be the victory of Dhamma.”

This is the moment — real, mythologized, or some irreducible combination of the two — that transformed Ashoka from a Mauryan emperor into a figure of world-historical significance. The Kalinga War did not just add a province to an empire. It is said to have converted a king from violence to non-violence, from territorial ambition to the propagation of dharma. It is the founding story of Buddhist statecraft. And for Odisha, it is something more intimate: the origin myth.

The Separate Kalinga Edicts, found at Dhauli and Jaugada (in modern Ganjam district), are addressed specifically to the administrators — the mahamatras — of the conquered territory. They are distinct from the edicts found elsewhere in the empire. Their tone is different: more paternalistic, more anxious. “All men are my children,” Ashoka writes, in language found only in these Kalinga-specific edicts. The implication is unmistakable. The emperor felt he owed a particular debt to this particular province. The administrators of Kalinga were to be held to a higher standard of justice precisely because the conquest had been so unjust.

At Dhauli, the edicts are carved on a massive rock outcropping that overlooks the Daya River — the traditional site of the battlefield. The elephant carved above the inscriptions is the only sculptural element found at any of Ashoka’s edict sites. It is unique to Dhauli. Some scholars read it as the Buddha’s symbol. Others see it as a representation of Ashoka himself, the powerful animal choosing gentleness. Either way, it watches over the floodplain where the killing happened, a sentinel of stone that has not moved in twenty-three hundred years.

At Jaugada, deep in the southern part of old Kalinga territory, a second set of Separate Kalinga Edicts was carved. The duplication was deliberate — Ashoka wanted his instructions to reach the administrators of both northern and southern Kalinga. The existence of two administrative centers suggests that even after conquest, Kalinga was large enough and complex enough to require a bifurcated governance structure.

What did Kalinga gain from its catastrophic defeat? A strange and powerful thing: narrative centrality. Every other kingdom that Ashoka conquered is a footnote. Kalinga is the protagonist. The defeated land became the pivot on which the conqueror’s entire moral transformation turned. In the centuries that followed, as Ashoka’s legend grew and Buddhism spread across Asia, Kalinga’s name traveled with it — not as a subject territory, but as the place that changed everything. There is a deep irony here, and it is one that Odisha has internalized. The land’s most famous ancient moment is its worst hour, and yet that worst hour made it central to one of the greatest stories ever told about the possibility of human transformation.

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Kharavela: The King Who Wrote His Resume on a Cave Wall

Less than a century and a half after Ashoka’s armies laid waste to Kalinga, a king named Kharavela sat on a restored Kalingan throne and commissioned one of the most extraordinary inscriptions in Indian history.

The Hathigumpha Inscription — seventeen lines in Prakrit, carved in Brahmi script on the brow of the Hathigumpha (Elephant’s Cave) at Udayagiri, just outside modern Bhubaneswar — is Kharavela’s autobiography. It is a year-by-year account of his life and reign, from his education as a prince to his military campaigns, administrative achievements, and acts of religious patronage. No other Indian king of the pre-Common Era period left anything comparable. The inscription is damaged in places, and scholars have debated its readings for over a century, but its broad contours are clear.

Kharavela belonged to the Chedi dynasty (also called Mahameghavahana). He was a Jain — a significant detail in a period when Buddhism, Jainism, and early Hinduism coexisted and competed across the subcontinent. The inscription describes his upbringing: trained in writing, arithmetic, law, and all the arts expected of a prince. At fifteen, he became Yuvaraja (crown prince). At twenty-four, he was consecrated king.

Then the campaigns began.

In the second year of his reign, Kharavela sent his armies westward, “disregarding” Satakarni — a reference almost certainly to the Satavahana king who controlled the Deccan. In the fourth year, he attacked and defeated the Rathikas and Bhojakas. In the fifth year, he extended a canal that had originally been excavated by the Nanda king three centuries earlier — a pointed claim of continuity with the pre-Mauryan past. In the eighth year, he besieged the fortress of Gorathagiri (likely in what is now Madhya Pradesh or Bihar), causing the “king of Rajagriha” (Magadha) to submit. In the eleventh year, he destroyed an unnamed city and “brought to his knees” a confederacy of Tamil kings. And in the twelfth year — the climactic event — he marched against Magadha itself and forced its king to prostrate before him.

The twelfth-year entry contains a detail that resonates like a struck bell. Kharavela, the inscription claims, recovered from Magadha a Jain image — the Kalinga Jina — that had been carried away by a Nanda king. Some scholars read the inscription as claiming that treasures taken during the Mauryan conquest were also recovered. The textual damage at this point in the inscription makes certainty impossible, but the intent is unmistakable: Kharavela was declaring that what the great northern empires had taken from Kalinga, he had taken back. The account had been settled.

The Udayagiri-Khandagiri cave complex where the inscription is found is itself a monument to Kharavela’s reign. Twin hills — Udayagiri (Sunrise Hill) and Khandagiri (Broken Hill) — face each other across a narrow valley. Their surfaces are carved with dozens of caves, originally hewn as residential cells for Jain monks. The Rani Gumpha (Queen’s Cave) at Udayagiri is the most elaborate — a two-story structure with carved friezes depicting royal processions, elephants, trees, and scenes that appear to show episodes from the king’s life. The Hathi Gumpha itself is a natural cave whose overhang provided a ready surface for Kharavela’s great inscription.

The caves are functional rather than ornamental. They are not temples. They are living quarters — simple chambers with stone beds, carved into the rock for monks who had renounced the world. That a conquering king’s most enduring monument is a residential complex for ascetics tells you something about the Jain model of royal patronage: the king’s power is demonstrated not by palaces for himself but by shelter for those who have abandoned power entirely.

Kharavela’s reign is generally dated to the late second or early first century BCE. After him, the historical record of Kalinga becomes fragmentary. The Chedi dynasty fades. Smaller kingdoms rise and fall. But Kharavela’s inscription had already accomplished something permanent: it established that Kalinga was not merely a victim of Mauryan imperialism. It was a kingdom capable of striking back, of forcing Magadha to submit, of reclaiming its stolen heritage. Ashoka’s edicts told one story — the conqueror’s remorse. Kharavela’s inscription told the other — the conquered land’s revenge. Between them, cut into rock faces just a few kilometers apart near modern Bhubaneswar, the two inscriptions form a diptych of defeat and restoration that has no parallel in the ancient world.

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Maritime Kalinga: The Sailors Who Carried a Civilization

The ruins of Kalinga’s political power can be visited in an afternoon — Dhauli, Udayagiri, a few scattered archaeological sites. But the ruins of Kalinga’s maritime reach are scattered across an ocean. They are found in the temples of Java, the dances of Bali, the script traditions of Southeast Asia, and the annual festival that still brings the people of Cuttack to the banks of the Mahanadi every November.

Kalinga was one of the great maritime civilizations of the ancient world. This is not a provincial boast. The evidence is archaeological, textual, linguistic, and cultural, and it stretches from the ports of the Mahanadi delta to the islands of the Indonesian archipelago.

The earliest evidence of Kalingan seafaring comes from the Jataka tales, which describe merchants — sadhabas — sailing from the ports of Kalinga to distant lands. The Baveru Jataka describes Indian merchants reaching Babylon (Baveru). Other Jatakas describe the perilous sea voyages of traders from Kalinga — storms, shipwrecks, landfalls on unknown shores. These are literary accounts, not shipping manifests, but they reflect a culture in which long-distance maritime trade was a familiar, if dangerous, part of life.

The sadhabas — the Odia merchant-sailors — became a distinct social and cultural class. They sailed in boitas, large ocean-going vessels built from the timber of the coastal forests. The monsoon winds were their engine. From October to December, the northeast monsoon carried ships from the Indian coast toward Southeast Asia. From April to June, the southwest monsoon brought them back. This biannual rhythm structured not just commerce but culture, ritual, and family life. The departure of the boitas became a ceremonial event. The return was a celebration.

The scale of the trade was substantial. Indian — and specifically Kalingan — merchants carried cotton textiles, spices, metalwork, and religious culture to the ports of Southeast Asia. They returned with gold, tin, camphor, and aromatic woods. But the most durable export was not material. It was civilizational. The merchants, monks, and Brahmins who traveled on the trade routes carried with them Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions, architectural styles, legal codes, and systems of writing.

The evidence of this cultural transfer is still visible. The temple complexes of Java — Borobudur (Buddhist, ninth century) and Prambanan (Hindu, ninth century) — are not imitations of Indian temples. They are products of an Indianized culture, a Southeast Asian civilization that had absorbed Indian religious frameworks and architectural grammar and made them its own. The court of the Javanese Sailendra dynasty used Sanskrit inscriptions. The Khmer Empire at Angkor drew on Indian cosmological models. The scripts of Java, Bali, and parts of mainland Southeast Asia descend from Brahmi — the same script used in Ashoka’s edicts and Kharavela’s inscription.

How much of this was specifically Kalingan, as opposed to broadly “Indian”? The question is debated, but several threads point specifically to Kalinga. The Kalingattupparani, a Tamil text, describes Kalinga’s maritime activities. Chinese sources from the early centuries CE refer to an Indianized kingdom called “Kling” or “Keling” in Southeast Asia — a name that derives from Kalinga. In the Malay world, the term “Keling” persisted for centuries as a general term for people of Indian origin, though its usage eventually narrowed and in some contexts became pejorative. The very existence of the term, however, testifies to the prominence of Kalingan traders in the region.

Archaeological work has revealed further connections. Rouletted ware — a distinctive type of pottery found at Sisupalgarh (the ancient fortified city near Bhubaneswar) and other Kalingan sites — has been discovered in Southeast Asian archaeological contexts. Beads of carnelian and agate, types associated with Indian craft traditions, appear in burial sites across island Southeast Asia. The trade was not abstract. It left physical traces in the ground.

Perhaps the most vivid surviving tradition of the maritime heritage is Bali Yatra — the “Voyage to Bali” — celebrated annually in Cuttack on Kartik Purnima, the full moon day of the month of Kartik (usually November). On this day, miniature boats made of banana stems, paper, and cork are floated on the Mahanadi. The boats are called boitas, after the ancient trading vessels. Children carry them to the river. Families gather at the ghats. A vast trade fair — one of the largest open-air markets in India — sets up along the riverbank for days.

The festival is a living archive. It encodes in ritual a memory that predates writing: that once, from this river, great ships sailed east into the open ocean, carrying Kalinga’s merchants, monks, and culture to lands so distant that their names became legend. The boitas that children float on the Mahanadi are toys. The boitas they represent were ocean-going vessels that connected Odisha to a world that most modern Odias have never visited. The gap between the toy boat and the ocean vessel is the measure of what was lost — and what the festival insists on remembering.

The maritime tradition also shaped Odia identity in ways that persist long after the trade routes closed. The idea that Odisha was never landlocked in imagination, that it was once a civilization whose reach extended across the Bay of Bengal — this is not mere nostalgia. It functions as a counternarrative to the more recent history of colonial neglect, economic underdevelopment, and political marginalization. When Odias invoke Kalinga’s maritime past, they are saying something about the present: that the current condition of the state is not the natural condition. That there was a time when this land was not peripheral but central — a hub, not a hinterland.

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The Long Middle: From Kharavela to the Temple Builders

After Kharavela, the political history of the region enters a long period of relative obscurity — at least from the perspective of monumental inscriptions and imperial chronicles. This does not mean nothing happened. It means the written record thins, and the story must be reconstructed from coins, copper plate grants, scattered inscriptions, and the evidence of buildings.

Several dynasties held portions of the old Kalingan territory between roughly the first century CE and the seventh century CE. The Satavahanas, based in the Deccan, exercised influence over southern Kalinga. The Guptas, at their imperial peak in the fourth and fifth centuries, claimed suzerainty over parts of the region — an inscription of Samudragupta at Allahabad lists Kalingan rulers among those who paid him tribute. The Matharas, the Pitrbhaktas, and the Nalas were among the smaller dynasties that governed fragments of the territory. The picture is one of political fragmentation without cultural decline — a region too large and too varied for any single dynasty to hold together, but continuously productive in art, religion, and trade.

The transformation that reshaped the region most profoundly during these centuries was religious. Ancient Kalinga had been a stronghold of Jainism under Kharavela and of Buddhism in the centuries following Ashoka. The great Buddhist sites at Ratnagiri, Udayagiri (the Buddhist Udayagiri in Jajpur district, not to be confused with Kharavela’s caves near Bhubaneswar), and Lalitgiri — collectively known as the “Diamond Triangle” of Odishan Buddhism — flourished from the early centuries CE through the medieval period. Ratnagiri, in particular, became one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in India, rivaling Nalanda. Its remains include massive stupas, monastery complexes, and some of the finest Buddhist sculpture found anywhere.

But by the seventh and eighth centuries, the religious landscape was shifting. Shaivism — the worship of Shiva — was rising as the dominant religious force in the region, supported by royal patronage and Brahmanical networks. The transition was not a sudden replacement. Buddhism and Jainism persisted for centuries as living traditions, and the cultural exchange between the three religions produced a distinctive synthetic character in Odishan art and architecture. But the political wind was shifting toward Hindu kingship, and with it came the great age of temple building.

The Bhauma-Kara dynasty, which ruled from roughly the eighth to the tenth century CE, represents a fascinating transitional moment. The Bhauma-Karas were Buddhist in origin — several of their early rulers bore Buddhist titles. Yet during their reign, Shaiva temples began to proliferate in and around Bhubaneswar. The dynasty is also notable for producing several female rulers — queens who governed in their own right, not merely as regents. Tribhuvana Mahadevi, who ruled in the late ninth century, is among the most prominent. The existence of ruling queens in early medieval Odisha complicates any simple narrative about gender and power in pre-modern India.

The Somavamshi dynasty, which succeeded the Bhauma-Karas in the tenth century, accelerated the Shaiva turn. Under Somavamshi patronage, Bhubaneswar became what it still calls itself: the Ekamra Kshetra, the Temple City. The Lingaraj Temple — the crowning achievement of the Kalinga style of temple architecture, with its soaring 180-foot deula (tower) — was built during this period, probably completed around 1000 CE. At its peak, Bhubaneswar reportedly contained over seven hundred temples. Many have been lost to time, weather, and neglect, but hundreds survive in various states of preservation, forming one of the densest concentrations of early medieval Hindu temples anywhere in India.

The Somavamshis also laid the political groundwork for the dynasty that would take Kalinga to its medieval zenith: the Eastern Gangas. When the Ganga kings rose to power in the eleventh century, they inherited a region that had been politically fragmented for a millennium but culturally continuous — a land that had never lost the memory of Kalinga’s ancient greatness, even when no single king could claim to embody it.

That inheritance would produce the Sun Temple at Konark and the Temple of Jagannath at Puri — monuments that belong to a later chapter. But the foundation was laid here, in the long centuries between Kharavela and the Gangas, when the religious character of the region shifted, the architectural grammar was refined, and the political ambition of Kalingan kingship was kept alive by one dynasty after another, each claiming, in its own way, to be the restorer of what Ashoka had destroyed and Kharavela had reclaimed.

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The Legacy: Why Kalinga Still Matters

Ancient Kalinga bequeathed to modern Odisha something more durable than monuments or inscriptions. It bequeathed a way of understanding the self.

Consider the three founding stories. First: the Kalinga War, in which the land’s worst defeat became the moral pivot of an empire. Second: Kharavela, in which a local king rose from the ashes of conquest to force the northern empires to submit. Third: the maritime tradition, in which Kalingan merchants and monks carried their civilization across the ocean to shape cultures they would never fully control. Defeat that transforms the conqueror. Recovery that humbles the old oppressor. Reach that extends far beyond political borders.

These are not merely historical episodes. They are narrative structures that continue to organize Odia identity.

The Kalinga War story carries a particular weight. It is, at its core, the story of suffering that produces meaning. Kalinga did not merely lose a battle — its loss changed the course of an empire. This is not the usual narrative of the conquered. Most defeated peoples are footnotes. Kalinga became the turning point. There is a deep consolation in this, and also a danger. The consolation is that suffering was not pointless. The danger is that the story can be used to ennoble suffering itself, to suggest that being conquered is somehow a higher achievement than conquering. Odisha’s modern political culture — with its frequent invocations of being “neglected” or “left behind” — sometimes echoes this ancient pattern. The idea that the state’s suffering has a kind of moral superiority can become, if one is not careful, an excuse for accepting conditions that ought to be changed rather than narrated.

Kharavela’s story operates differently. It is a story of agency, not endurance. It says: what was taken can be recovered. What was lost can be reclaimed. The treasures carried off to Magadha were brought back. The canal built by foreign kings was extended by a local one. The narrative insists that subjugation is temporary and that Kalinga possesses, within itself, the capacity to restore its own greatness. This is the more energizing of the two founding myths, and it is no accident that Kharavela’s name has been invoked repeatedly in modern Odia politics — by leaders seeking to position themselves as restorers of the state’s lost glory.

The maritime tradition adds a dimension that neither the war story nor the Kharavela story provides: global reach. The sadhabas and their boitas say that Kalinga was never a provincial backwater. It was connected — to Java, to Bali, to Sumatra, to the wider world of the Indian Ocean. This is the narrative that challenges the “neglected state” identity most directly. If Odisha was once a hub of international trade, a civilization whose cultural exports shaped entire regions of Southeast Asia, then its current economic marginalization is not destiny. It is an aberration. Something happened between then and now — colonialism, famine, political neglect — that disrupted a trajectory of outward engagement and global participation. The maritime story implies that the natural state of Odisha is connection, not isolation.

All three narratives converge at a single point: Kalinga was significant. Not a peripheral region that history happened to. Not a territory that mattered only when empires deigned to notice it. A kingdom with its own agency, its own reach, its own capacity to shape the course of events far beyond its borders.

This is what the name carries. When Odias say “Kalinga,” they are not simply referring to a historical polity that existed before the common era. They are invoking a self-understanding: that this land has always been more than its current circumstances suggest. That its story is not one of perpetual peripherality but of interrupted centrality. That the churning — the manthana — began a very long time ago, and has never fully stopped.

Stand at Dhauli, on the hillside where Ashoka’s elephant looks out over the floodplain. The river still bends where it bent twenty-three centuries ago. The fields are still green. Traffic moves on the highway below. The inscription is still legible, if you know Brahmi. And the question it poses — whether conquest can truly be redeemed by remorse, whether the victor’s transformation justifies the suffering of the vanquished — is still unanswered. It was unanswered when Ashoka carved it into the rock. It is unanswered now.

A few kilometers away, on the face of the Elephant’s Cave at Udayagiri, Kharavela’s answer is carved in a different script but the same stone: take it back. Whatever they took, take it back. Whatever they destroyed, rebuild it. Whatever they claimed was theirs, prove it was always yours.

And on the Mahanadi, every November, children float small boats made of banana stems and paper into the current. The boats drift downstream, toward the sea, toward Bali and Java and the islands where Kalinga’s merchants once traded and Kalinga’s monks once taught. The children do not know, most of them, the full history behind the ritual. But the river knows the way. It has always known the way.

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Next: Chapter 3 — The Temple Builders