Chapter 4: Centuries of Turmoil

---

In 1568, a general known as Kalapahar rode into Odisha at the head of an Afghan army and did something that no conqueror before him had managed: he broke the spine of Gajapati independence. Temples that had taken generations to raise were defaced or destroyed. The great temple of Konark, already showing signs of structural distress, may have suffered further damage during these raids. The political order that had sustained Odisha’s golden age --- the Eastern Ganga and Gajapati dynasties, the temple-state complex, the elaborate ritual economy of Jagannath worship --- began its long, irreversible unraveling. Kalapahar’s invasion did not simply transfer power from one dynasty to another. It dismantled the institutional architecture that had held Odisha together for five centuries.

What followed was not a new order but the absence of one. For the next three hundred years, Odisha would be ruled by outsiders who saw it as a resource to be extracted, a territory to be taxed, a backwater to be neglected. The Afghan and Mughal intrusions, the Maratha predation, the British colonial extraction, and finally the famine of 1866 --- these were not separate catastrophes. They were chapters in a single, continuous story of a civilization being slowly ground down by forces that had no interest in its survival.

This chapter traces that grinding. It is not comfortable reading. But it is necessary, because the Odisha that exists today --- its poverty, its politics, its collective psychology, its fierce attachment to language and identity --- cannot be understood without understanding what happened here.

---

Under the Shadow of Distant Empires

The Afghan intrusions of the sixteenth century opened a door that the Mughals walked through. By the early seventeenth century, Odisha had been absorbed into the Mughal Empire as a subah --- a province nominally under Delhi’s authority. On paper, Odisha was part of the largest and wealthiest empire in the world. In practice, it was one of the most neglected corners of that empire.

The reasons were geographic and strategic. Odisha sat at the empire’s eastern periphery, far from the centers of Mughal power in Delhi, Agra, and Lahore. It lacked the strategic importance of the northwest frontier, the revenue richness of Bengal, or the political significance of the Deccan. Mughal governors were posted to Odisha as they might be posted to any provincial backwater --- without great enthusiasm and with limited investment. The administration collected revenue but built little. Roads remained poor, irrigation infrastructure was minimal, and the elaborate temple economies that had sustained the region under the Gajapatis were disrupted without equivalent replacements.

Yet something remarkable survived. The Jagannath cult, which by this time had become the central organizing institution of Odia identity, adapted and persisted under Muslim rule. This was not simple tolerance --- it was a complex negotiation. Mughal emperors and their governors, whatever their personal religious convictions, recognized the political utility of not antagonizing the Jagannath tradition. The temple at Puri continued to function, its rituals continued, its pilgrimage economy continued. Some Mughal administrators even patronized the temple, understanding that control of the Jagannath institution was a more effective governance tool than its destruction.

This accommodation reveals something important about the Jagannath tradition’s resilience. It was not merely a religious practice that happened to survive foreign rule. It was an institutional system --- economic, social, political --- that was robust enough to outlast the political orders built on top of it. Dynasties rose and fell. The temple endured. The annual Rath Yatra continued. The Mahaprasad was still prepared and distributed. The sevayat system, with its intricate hierarchy of ritual duties and associated land grants, continued to organize social life.

But survival is not the same as flourishing. Under Mughal suzerainty, Odisha stagnated. The creative energy that had produced the temples of Bhubaneswar, the Sun Temple at Konark, the literary renaissance of Sarala Das --- that energy dissipated. Odisha entered a period that historians struggle to narrate because so little happened that was generative. It was governance as extraction, empire as indifference.

And then it got worse.

---

The Maratha Period: Government by Plunder

In 1751, the Bhonsle chiefs of Nagpur gained control of Odisha. The Marathas had been expanding eastward for decades, and Odisha fell into their sphere not through conquest in any grand military sense but through the gradual assertion of power over a territory that had no effective defender. The Mughal hold had weakened; the local rajas were fragmented and too weak to resist. Odisha passed from one distant overlord to another.

What followed was, by most accounts, catastrophic.

The Marathas did not govern Odisha. They harvested it. The Bhonsle administration treated the province as a revenue source, nothing more. There was no investment in infrastructure, no attempt at administrative development, no interest in the welfare of the population. Taxation was predatory and unpredictable. When revenues fell short of expectations, Maratha agents resorted to outright plunder. Villages were burned, populations displaced, livelihoods destroyed.

The poet Gangaram, writing in the contemporary period, left some of the only vernacular accounts of what Maratha rule looked like from the ground. His poems describe a landscape of terror: raids on villages, the burning of granaries, the abduction of women, the destruction of the small agricultural surpluses that were the difference between subsistence and starvation for most of Odisha’s population. These poems are not formal histories --- they are cries from a society being systematically brutalized.

But here we must pause and note a historiographical complexity that matters. Much of what we know about Maratha rule in Odisha comes through two filters, both of which distort. The first filter is the colonial one. British historians, writing after the East India Company’s conquest of Odisha in 1803, had every incentive to portray the Marathas as uniquely savage rulers. If the Marathas were barbarians, then British rule was liberation. W.W. Hunter’s influential Orissa (1872), while containing genuinely valuable documentation, was written within this framework. The Maratha atrocities were real, but the emphasis placed on them served a colonial purpose.

The second filter is the nationalist one. Indian historians responding to the colonial narrative sometimes overcorrected, suggesting that the Marathas were fellow Indians and therefore their rule could not have been as bad as the British claimed. This too distorts. A farmer whose village has been burned cares very little whether the soldiers holding the torches share his nationality or his religion. Oppression does not acquire a gentler character because the oppressor is a compatriot.

The truth, as best as the evidence allows us to reconstruct it, lies in the space between these narratives. Maratha rule in Odisha was genuinely oppressive --- predatory taxation, chronic insecurity, the destruction of agricultural infrastructure. But it was not uniquely or exceptionally savage by the standards of eighteenth-century Indian power politics. The Marathas treated Odisha the way they treated many peripheral territories: as a revenue pump to fund their military campaigns elsewhere. The problem was not that the Marathas were unusually cruel. The problem was that Odisha was unusually vulnerable --- already weakened by centuries of Mughal neglect, politically fragmented, lacking the military capacity to resist or the economic resilience to absorb shocks.

Fifty years of Maratha rule left Odisha economically broken and politically shattered. The traditional land tenure systems had been disrupted. Agricultural productivity had declined. The population was impoverished. The local rajas, who might have provided some institutional continuity, had been reduced to vassals or irrelevancies. When the British arrived in 1803, they did not conquer a functioning state. They occupied the wreckage of one.

---

British Conquest and the Architecture of Extraction

The East India Company’s takeover of Odisha came in 1803, as part of the broader Anglo-Maratha Wars. The Second Anglo-Maratha War brought British forces into eastern India, and Odisha was absorbed into the Company’s territories almost as an afterthought --- a piece of land that happened to lie between Bengal (which the Company already controlled) and the Maratha domains (which the Company was in the process of dismantling).

This casualness would define British engagement with Odisha for decades. The province was folded into the Bengal Presidency and administered from Calcutta by officials who regarded it as one of the least important territories under their charge. There was no separate administrative apparatus for Odisha, no dedicated governance structure, no recognition that this was a distinct region with its own language, culture, and needs. Odisha was, in the eyes of the colonial bureaucracy, a poor and backward appendage of Bengal.

The British brought with them a new system of land tenure that fundamentally restructured Odisha’s relationship with its own soil. The Permanent Settlement, which had been applied to Bengal in 1793, was extended in modified forms across the territories the Company acquired. Traditional land arrangements --- the complex web of rights and obligations that connected rajas, intermediaries, cultivators, and warrior classes --- were replaced with a system designed for one purpose: the efficient extraction of revenue.

Under the new system, land became a commodity in a way it had not been before. Zamindars (landlords) were given proprietary rights to land in exchange for fixed revenue payments to the colonial government. If they failed to pay, the land was auctioned. This created a class of revenue intermediaries whose relationship to the land was contractual rather than customary, financial rather than social. The cultivators at the bottom of this system found themselves with fewer protections and less security than they had under the traditional arrangements, however imperfect those had been.

For one group in particular, the new system was devastating.

---

The Paika Rebellion: The Warriors Who Fought Back

The Paikas were a hereditary warrior class who had served the rajas of Khurda for generations. In exchange for military service, they received land grants --- rent-free or reduced-rent holdings that sustained them and their families. They were not merely soldiers. They were a social institution, a caste with defined rights, obligations, and identity. Their land grants were not wages; they were the material foundation of a way of life.

The British colonial revenue reorganization swept all of this away. The new land tenure system did not recognize the Paikas’ traditional claims. Their land grants were revoked or reassessed under colonial revenue categories. Men who had been warriors and landholders found themselves dispossessed --- not by defeat in battle but by the stroke of an administrative pen. They lost not just their land but their social position, their identity, their place in the order of things.

In 1817, this accumulated dispossession exploded into open rebellion. Bakshi Jagabandhu Bidyadhar Mohapatra Bharamarbar Ray, the military commander of the Raja of Khurda, led the Paikas in an armed uprising against the East India Company. The immediate trigger was the confiscation of Jagabandhu’s own estate at Killa Rorang in 1814 --- but the deeper cause was the systematic dismantling of an entire social order.

The rebellion was centered in Khurda, the traditional seat of the Gajapati kings and the most important center of Odia political identity outside Puri. From there it spread across the region, drawing in not just Paikas but peasants, tribals, and others who had suffered under the new colonial dispensation. For a time, the rebels controlled significant territory. They attacked colonial outposts, disrupted revenue collection, and challenged the Company’s authority in a way that took the British genuinely by surprise.

The Company responded with overwhelming military force. The rebellion was crushed. Jagabandhu, after years as a fugitive, surrendered in 1825. The British imposed punitive measures on the Khurda region and further consolidated their administrative control over Odisha.

But the Paika Rebellion carries a significance that transcends its military outcome. It predates the 1857 Rebellion --- which is conventionally called India’s “first war of independence” --- by a full forty years. Odia historians have long argued, with considerable justification, that the Paika Rebellion deserves recognition as one of the earliest organized resistance movements against British colonial rule in India. In 2017, the Government of India officially acknowledged this, though the debate about the rebellion’s place in the national narrative continues.

The deeper significance, for Odisha, is what the rebellion reveals about the mechanics of colonial dispossession. The Paikas did not rebel because they were ideologically opposed to British rule in the abstract. They rebelled because the British revenue system destroyed the material basis of their existence. This is a pattern that would repeat throughout colonial Odisha’s history --- and beyond it. From the Paikas to the tribal communities displaced by post-independence dams and mines, the fundamental dynamic is the same: a state reorganizes land rights in the interest of extraction, and the people whose lives depended on the old arrangements are left with nothing.

---

Na’Anka Durbhiksha: The Year the Land Ate Its People

There is no way to write about the Odisha famine of 1866 with appropriate restraint. The facts themselves are beyond restraint.

Approximately one-third of Odisha’s population died. One million people, in a province of roughly three million, perished from starvation and the diseases that follow it. To grasp the scale, imagine a disaster that killed every third person in your city, your neighborhood, your family. Imagine walking through streets where every third house has been emptied not by departure but by death. This is what happened in Odisha in the year that Odias still call Na’Anka --- the Nine, named because the famine fell in the year ending with nine in the Odia calendar (Anka).

The monsoon of 1865 was poor. Rainfall was significantly below normal across the province. This was the natural trigger, the meteorological event that set the catastrophe in motion. But meteorology does not explain what followed. Droughts happen. Famines --- famines of this magnitude --- require human systems to amplify a natural shock into a civilizational catastrophe.

The systems that amplified the drought of 1865 into the famine of 1866 were entirely of human construction.

Consider first the matter of rice. W.W. Hunter, the British statistician who documented the famine with a thoroughness that makes his account simultaneously invaluable and unbearable, recorded a fact that should stop any reader in their tracks: in the six years preceding 1866, Odisha had exported an average of 20,000 tonnes of rice per year. The province was not food-deficient. It was a food exporter. The rice that could have kept its people alive had been systematically shipped elsewhere --- to feed markets in Calcutta, to generate profits for merchants, to satisfy the logic of an economic system that treated food as a commodity rather than a necessity of survival.

When the rains failed in 1865, the rice continued to leave. Merchants, anticipating scarcity, hoarded their remaining stocks to drive up prices. The poor, who spent most of their income on food even in good years, found the price of rice climbing beyond their reach months before starvation actually set in. By the time people began dying in significant numbers, the economic machinery of death had been running for months.

Then consider transport infrastructure --- or rather, its absence. Odisha in 1866 had virtually no modern transport connections. There were no railways linking the province to the rest of India. The roads were few and poor, many of them impassable during the monsoon season. Even if someone in Calcutta or Bombay had wanted to send food to Odisha, there was no efficient way to get it there. The province was, in terms of logistics, almost as isolated as if it had been on an island.

This isolation was not an accident of geography. It was a product of colonial investment priorities. The British had built railways and roads where they served British commercial interests --- connecting cotton-growing regions to ports, linking administrative centers, facilitating the movement of troops. Odisha, with its relatively small revenue contribution and its perceived unimportance, had received almost nothing. The transport infrastructure that could have saved a million lives had never been built because it was not profitable to build it.

And then there was ideology --- the cold, lethal logic of laissez-faire economics as practiced by the colonial administration. When reports of distress began reaching Calcutta, the response from colonial officials was shaped by a set of beliefs about the proper role of government in the economy. The market, according to this ideology, was self-correcting. Government intervention in food markets would distort prices, discourage private enterprise, and ultimately do more harm than good. The poor were dying, yes, but this was --- in the Malthusian framework that informed colonial thinking --- nature’s way of correcting an imbalance between population and resources.

The British did not create the drought. But they created every condition that transformed the drought into a genocide-scale famine. They built an export economy that drained Odisha’s food surplus. They failed to build the transport infrastructure that could have enabled relief. They maintained an ideological commitment to non-intervention that prevented them from acting even when the scale of the catastrophe became undeniable. And when they finally did act, it was too late.

By the time relief measures were organized, the roads into Odisha were lined with the dead and dying. Contemporary accounts describe scenes that read like dispatches from a war zone or a plague. Entire villages were depopulated. Bodies lay unburied because there was no one left with the strength to bury them. Survivors, skeletal and desperate, crowded into the towns where relief operations were belatedly established, only to die there of cholera and other diseases that swept through the weakened population.

Hunter’s documentation of the famine is meticulous and damning. He traced the chain of failures: the delayed recognition of the crisis by distant administrators in Calcutta, the inadequacy of the relief measures that were eventually organized, the continued export of grain even as people starved. His account makes clear that this was not a natural disaster. It was an administrative catastrophe, a failure of governance so complete that it constituted, in effect, a mass killing by negligence.

The Na’Anka Durbhiksha did not remain a provincial tragedy. It became a national argument. Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi intellectual and early nationalist leader, seized upon the Odisha famine as evidence for his “Drain Theory” --- the proposition that British rule was systematically extracting wealth from India and impoverishing its people. The fact that India had exported over 200 million pounds of rice to Britain during the very period when a million Indians were dying of starvation was, for Naoroji, proof that colonialism was not merely bad governance but organized theft. The Odisha famine became one of the foundational exhibits in the case against British rule, a data point that no amount of imperial rhetoric about civilizing missions and benevolent governance could explain away.

The colonial government, embarrassed by the scale of its failure, produced the Famine Commission Report of 1867 and eventually the Indian Famine Code of 1880. These documents established protocols for identifying famine conditions and organizing relief. They represented a genuine, if belated, institutional response. But they also served a political function: by codifying famine response procedures, the government could present the catastrophe of 1866 as a one-time failure that had been corrected by systemic reform. The reality was more complicated. Famines continued across India --- most notably in 1876-78 and 1896-97, under conditions depressingly similar to those in Odisha --- because the fundamental dynamics of colonial extraction had not changed.

In Odisha itself, the famine left a scar that has never fully healed. Na’Anka entered the language not just as a historical reference but as a cultural marker --- a word that carried within it the full weight of collective memory. Folk songs about the famine persisted for generations, passed from grandmother to grandchild, keeping alive the memory of a time when the land itself seemed to have turned against its people. But the songs also carried a quieter, more dangerous knowledge: that it was not the land that had turned against them. It was a system. A system that valued their rice more than their lives.

---

Aftermath: Reform, Education, and the Seeds of Nationalism

The famine forced the colonial government to pay attention to Odisha in a way it had not before. In the decades following 1866, there was some investment in infrastructure --- roads, canals, basic irrigation works. These were improvements, but they were improvements within an extractive framework. The purpose of colonial infrastructure was to make the colony more efficiently administerable and more reliably productive. The roads built after 1866 would carry both relief supplies and export goods. The irrigation canals would protect against famine, yes, but they would also increase agricultural output available for taxation and trade.

One institution established in this period would have an outsized impact: Ravenshaw College, founded in Cuttack in 1868 and named after Thomas Edward Ravenshaw, the colonial administrator who had overseen the famine relief efforts. The college became the intellectual center of Odisha for the next century --- the place where young Odias encountered Western education, debated ideas, formed political consciousness, and began to articulate what it meant to be Odia in a colonial world. The irony was not lost on anyone: the college that would produce Odisha’s nationalist leaders was named after a colonial administrator and owed its existence to the guilt that followed a colonial catastrophe.

Modern education brought with it a new kind of threat --- or rather, it made visible a threat that had existed for some time. As educated Odias engaged with colonial institutions, they encountered the claim, advanced by certain Bengali scholars and administrators, that Odia was not a real language at all. It was, these scholars argued, merely a dialect of Bengali --- a provincial variant of a proper language, unfit for administration, education, or serious literary production.

This was not simply an academic dispute. It was a claim with immediate political consequences. If Odia was merely a dialect of Bengali, then there was no basis for a separate Odia administrative identity. Bengali could be the medium of education in Odia-speaking areas. Bengali officials could staff the colonial bureaucracy in Odisha without being considered outsiders. The linguistic claim was, at its core, a power claim --- an attempt to subsume Odia identity within a larger Bengali cultural sphere.

The response to this threat produced the first stirrings of modern Odia nationalism. Writers, scholars, and public intellectuals mounted a defense of Odia as a distinct language with its own literary tradition stretching back centuries. Fakir Mohan Senapati, whose novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third) would become one of the landmarks of Indian realist fiction, was also a fierce advocate for the Odia language. The language preservation movement was not merely cultural. It was political. To defend the language was to defend the existence of a people as a distinct community with claims to self-governance.

But the structural problem went beyond language. The Odia-speaking population was administratively fragmented across three colonial jurisdictions: the Bengal Presidency, the Central Provinces, and the Madras Presidency. In each of these, Odias were minorities, subject to the cultural and administrative domination of larger groups. A Ganjam Odia was under Madras rule, competing with Telugu speakers. A Sambalpur Odia was under the Central Provinces, surrounded by Hindi speakers. An Odia in Cuttack or Puri was under Bengal, facing the Bengali cultural establishment. Odias were minorities everywhere, with no territory where they were the majority and could shape their own institutions.

This fragmentation was the deepest wound the colonial period inflicted on Odia identity --- deeper, in some ways, than the famine itself, because it was ongoing. The famine killed a third of the population in a single catastrophic year. The administrative fragmentation eroded Odia identity slowly, continuously, over decades. Every year that an Odia child was educated in Bengali or Telugu rather than Odia, every appointment of a non-Odia administrator to an Odia-speaking district, every bureaucratic decision made in Calcutta or Madras without Odia input --- each of these was a small act of cultural erasure.

It was this accumulated erasure that would eventually produce the movement for a separate Odia province --- the subject of the next chapter. But the point to register here is that the movement did not emerge from nothing. It emerged from three centuries of systematic deprivation: Maratha plunder, colonial extraction, famine devastation, and administrative fragmentation. By the early twentieth century, Odisha was one of the poorest, most neglected, most divided regions in India. Its people had endured everything a succession of indifferent and extractive rulers could impose on them. What they had not lost --- what, remarkably, they had preserved through it all --- was the conviction that they were a people. A people with a language, a culture, a history, and a right to govern themselves.

---

The Weight of Three Centuries

There is a narrative about Odisha that one hears constantly in contemporary Indian discourse: Odisha is poor. Odisha is backward. Odisha is neglected. Sometimes this narrative is deployed sympathetically, as an argument for more central investment. Sometimes it is deployed dismissively, as an explanation for why Odisha does not matter as much as Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu or Karnataka in the national conversation. Either way, the “neglected state” label sticks.

What this chapter has tried to show is that the neglect is not a branding problem or a matter of modern self-pity. It is a historical fact with specific, traceable causes. From the Afghan disruption of the sixteenth century through the Mughal indifference of the seventeenth, from the Maratha devastation of the eighteenth century through the British extraction of the nineteenth, Odisha was subjected to a continuous process of impoverishment that left it, by the early twentieth century, among the most deprived regions in all of India.

Think of it in terms a software engineer might use: a system subjected to three centuries of resource extraction without corresponding investment in maintenance will eventually degrade to a state where even basic functions fail. The “technical debt” accumulated by Odisha over this period --- in infrastructure, in institutions, in human capital, in economic capacity --- was staggering. The famine of 1866 was not an aberration. It was the predictable failure mode of a system that had been running on depleted resources for generations.

Or think of it in terms an investor might use: Odisha’s “balance sheet” by 1900 showed centuries of withdrawals and almost no deposits. The Maratha period was a leveraged buyout that stripped assets and loaded debt. The British period was a management that paid itself handsomely while allowing the underlying business to deteriorate. The famine was the bankruptcy filing.

The people of Odisha were not passive victims of this process. The Paikas rebelled. The Jagannath tradition survived. The language was defended. Folk memory preserved what official history tried to erase. But the structural damage was real, and its effects persisted long after the specific rulers who inflicted it had gone.

When Odisha finally achieved its identity as a separate province in 1936, it inherited this balance sheet. The “neglected state” narrative that continues to shape Odia political consciousness today is not a story Odias tell themselves to explain away their problems. It is a diagnosis. The patient was systematically weakened over three centuries. Recovery would take time, investment, and --- most importantly --- the ability to govern themselves. That ability, denied for three hundred years, was what the separate province movement set out to reclaim.

The churning was far from over. But the ocean had revealed its poison. What remained to be seen was whether it would also yield the nectar.