Sarala Devi, Jagatsinghpur

The 15-century Sarala Devi temple at Jhankad in Jagatsinghpur district, Odisha, 70 kilometres from Bhubaneswar — the shrine of the goddess Sarala (a Durga-Saraswati composite) that produced the 15-century Odia poet Sarala Das (c.1430-1500), who composed the first Odia-language Mahabharata (c.1484) under the goddess's patronage. The Sarala Mahabharata is the first major literary work in the Odia language and the oldest surviving regional Mahabharata rendering in any Indian language — a foundational text of Odia literary identity. Sarala Das was a Shudra (farmer-caste) poet whose vernacular Odia Mahabharata broke the Brahminical Sanskrit monopoly on epic literature. The temple is a working Shakta pilgrimage with the annual Dussehra festival in October drawing 100,000 pilgrims. The Odisha government manages the shrine through the Sarala Devi Trust.