Place · Chauhan capital & river town · India
Sambalpur
Also known as Sambalpur, Hirakhand, Sambalaka, Samaleswari
The capital of the Chauhan kingdom of western Odisha from the sixteenth century, on the Mahanadi where the river leaves the plateau, with the Samaleswari temple at its centre — a goddess worshipped as an uncarved block of stone rather than as an image, and the tutelary deity of the whole Sambalpuri country.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.467, 83.981
Worth knowing
The Mahanadi gravels here produced diamonds: Tavernier describes the Sambalpur workings on his voyages, and the Great Table diamond is sometimes traced to them. Sambalpur was also the first place in Odisha to rise in 1857, under Surendra Sai, who fought the Company from the forests for seventeen years and died in Asirgarh jail.
Connections (4)
- Craft tradition ofSambalpurī bandhā ikat
Sambalpur is the market and the name; the weaving is done at Barpali, Bargarh and Sonepur in the villages around it. Bandha is tie-resist — the pattern is dyed into the yarn before a thread is woven — so the design exists in the bundle and has to be aligned on the loom thread by thread. A regional capital's name now belongs to a cloth rather than to a kingdom.
- Site adjacencyHuma leaning temple
The leaning temple at Huma and the Samaleswari shrine at Sambalpur were both built under the Chauhan rajas of western Odisha in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, twenty-five kilometres apart on the Mahanadi. One holds a goddess worshipped as an uncarved block of stone; the other leans, with its subsidiary shrines leaning at their own separate angles, and nobody can say why.
- Devotional corpus onNuakhai
Nuakhai's hour is set at Sambalpur. The first rice is offered to the presiding goddess of each locality, and for western Odisha as a whole that is Samaleswari, whose temple fixes the lagna each year and announces it for the region to follow — so the first mouthful is taken at the same moment from Bargarh to Sundargarh. The festival is the clearest assertion of the Kosal country's distinctness from coastal Odisha, and the temple is its centre.
- Site withinHirakud Dam
Hirakud Dam, inaugurated by Nehru on 13 January 1957, is built across the Mahanadi fifteen kilometres upstream of Sambalpur city — the historic capital of western Odisha under the Chauhans of Sambalpur, the headquarters of the modern district and the nearest railhead to the dam. The reservoir and the dam's administrative township fall within Sambalpur district. Sambalpur's ikat weaving, the Samaleswari temple of the Chauhan tutelary goddess and the Chiplima powerhouse of the Hirakud project are the layered sacred, royal and infrastructural landscape of the city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sambalpur”. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (1676), on the Sambalpur diamond workings; N.K. Sahu, History of Orissa; Odisha State Gazetteer, Sambalpur district.
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