Journey
East India — Odisha & Kalinga landscapes
Kalinga is the one place Ashoka says changed his mind, and the coast below it carried a Buddhist monastic landscape, an early fortified city, a maritime trade to Southeast Asia and a lagoon. This runs the delta, the monasteries and the fort towns rather than the great temples at Puri and Konark.
Stops (15)
- Dhauli · 261 BCE
The rock at Dhauli above the Daya, carrying Ashoka's separate Kalinga edicts — the ones that do not mention the war — with a carved elephant above them and a modern peace pagoda on the hill behind. The battle that produced the thirteenth rock edict is placed somewhere on this plain.
- Sisupalgarh · 4th century BCE – 4th century CE
Sisupalgarh, a square fortified city with a rampart circuit of over a kilometre a side, eight gateways and a laterite-lined water system, two kilometres from Dhauli. It is the best-surveyed early historic urban plan in eastern India and is generally identified with Kalinganagari. It is the best-surveyed early historic urban plan in eastern India and is generally identified with the Kalinganagari of the inscriptions.
- Udayagiri & Khandagiri caves · 2nd century BCE
The Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves, cut for Jain ascetics under Kharavela, whose Hathigumpha inscription is the principal source for the Mahameghavahana dynasty and claims campaigns as far as Magadha. It is the earliest substantial historical inscription in Odisha. Kharavela's inscription also records his repair of a city's gates and embankments, usually taken to mean Sisupalgarh three kilometres away, and claims campaigns reaching Magadha in answer to the Mauryan conquest.
- Pushpagiri · 6th–11th century
Pushpagiri, the monastic landscape on the hills of Jajpur district, identified with the Pushpagiri that Xuanzang describes. Ratnagiri, Lalitagiri and Udayagiri belong to the same complex of hills, and together they are the largest Buddhist monastic concentration in eastern India after Bihar. Ratnagiri, Lalitagiri and Udayagiri belong to the same group of hills, and together they are the largest Buddhist monastic concentration in eastern India after Bihar.
- Jajpur · the Biraja seat
Jajpur on the Baitarani, the Kesari capital and the seat of Biraja, counted among the Shakta pithas, with a group of Saptamatrika sculptures in the open beside the river. It is also the district in which the Buddhist hills stand, so both networks occupy one small area. Both the Buddhist hills and the Shakta seat occupy one small district, thirty kilometres apart.
- Cuttack · from the 10th century
Cuttack on an island between the Mahanadi and the Kathajodi, the Odia capital for nine hundred years under the Kesaris, the Gangas, the Afghans, the Mughals, the Marathas and the British. The Jobra stone revetment that protects it from the Mahanadi is an eleventh-century flood defence still in use. The eleventh-century Jobra revetment that keeps the Mahanadi off the island is still in use.
- Barabati Fort · 14th century onward
Barabati Fort at Cuttack, of which the moat, the gate and a large earthen platform survive. It was the Ganga and then the Gajapati citadel, taken by the Mughals, then the Marathas, then the British in 1803, and quarried for its stone in the nineteenth century. It was quarried for its stone through the nineteenth century, which is why so little stands.
- Chilika Lake · the lagoon
Chilika, the largest brackish lagoon in Asia, with a mouth to the Bay that has been artificially reopened twice, an island shrine to Kalijai, and the Irrawaddy dolphins. It was the sheltered water behind the Kalinga coast, and the Bali Jatra festival at Cuttack still commemorates the sailings east. The Bali Jatra at Cuttack, with paper boats floated every Kartika Purnima, is what survives of the sailings east.
- Sambalpur · western Odisha capital
Sambalpur on the Mahanadi where the river leaves the plateau, the Chauhan capital of western Odisha from the sixteenth century, with the Samaleswari temple at its centre — a goddess worshipped as an uncarved block of stone. The Mahanadi gravels here produced diamonds that Tavernier came to see, and the town rose first in Odisha in 1857 under Surendra Sai.
- Sambalpurī bandhā ikat · the tie-dyed thread
Sambalpuri bandha, the tie-resist weaving of the villages around Sambalpur, in which the pattern is tied and dyed into the yarn before a thread is woven — so the design exists in the bundle and a double-ikat sari has to be aligned on the loom thread by thread. It is the same technique family as Gujarati patola and Indonesian ikat.
- Huma leaning temple · c. 1670
The leaning temple at Huma on the Mahanadi below Sambalpur, whose whole structure tilts and whose subsidiary shrines lean at their own separate angles in their own directions — which is why the tilt is read as deliberate rather than as subsidence. The Kudo fish in the river below are fed and never caught, so a stretch of the Mahanadi has been unfished by custom for three centuries.
- Hirakud Dam · 1947–1957
Hirakud, twenty-six kilometres of embankment across the Mahanadi and the longest earthen dam in the world when it was finished — the first of independent India's great multipurpose projects. It submerged some two hundred and fifty villages and displaced twenty-two thousand people, mostly Adivasi, and the spires of drowned temples reappear when the water is low.
- Khiching · Bhanja capital
Khiching in Mayurbhanj, where the Kichakeshwari temple stands built of dressed chlorite laid without mortar, dismantled and rebuilt stone by stone in the 1920s from its own collapsed material. It is the best surviving monument of northern Odisha's own architectural line, and the town simply stopped when the Mayurbhanj rajas moved their seat to Baripada.
- Similipal · the sal forest
Similipal, two and a half thousand square kilometres of sal on the Mayurbhanj plateau and the catchment of a dozen rivers, holding the largest wild elephant population in eastern India and a documented population of melanistic tigers found nowhere else — which is what a single gene variant in a small isolated population looks like.
- Bhitarkanika · the mangrove delta
Bhitarkanika, where the Brahmani, Baitarani and Dhamra meet the Bay — the second largest mangrove system in India and the one with the country's largest saltwater crocodiles. Gahirmatha on its seaward edge is the world's largest olive ridley rookery, with several hundred thousand turtles coming ashore over a few nights.