Odisha

• 1. Introduction

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  Odisha is the state on India's eastern coast where one of the most consequential battles in recorded history reshaped an emperor's soul. In 261 BCE, the Mauryan ruler Ashoka invaded the ancient kingdom of Kalinga, a territory that coincides almost exactly with the borders of the Odisha we know today. His own edicts record that about 100,000 people were killed and 150,000 captured. The bloodshed struck Ashoka so profoundly that he turned pacifist and converted to Buddhism. That single war seeded the identity of a region that would go on to build some of India's most extraordinary temples, nurture a classical dance tradition 2,000 years old, and sit on a fifth of the country's coal reserves. Odisha is spelled differently than it was before 2011, its people speak a language the Indian constitution now recognises as classical, and it is also known by an older name, Utkala, that appears in the national anthem Jana Gana Mana. The questions worth asking are how this coastal state arrived at that convergence of ancient trauma, artistic brilliance, and mineral wealth, and what it has built from all three.

• 2. Kingdoms and Conquest

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  Prehistoric Acheulian tools from the Lower Paleolithic era have been found across Odisha, placing human settlement here far earlier than written records begin. The region surfaces in texts like the Mahabharata and the Vayu Purana under the name Kalinga, described by the ancient scholar Baudhayana as a land that had not yet come under Vedic influence and mostly followed tribal traditions. After Ashoka's conquest in 261 BCE, the region passed to Emperor Kharavela by around 150 BCE. Kharavela, a Jain ruler who may have been a contemporary of Demetrius I of Bactria, conquered a major part of the Indian subcontinent and built a monastery atop the Udayagiri hill. Rulers including Samudragupta, Shashanka, and Harsha each held the region at different points before the Somavamsi dynasty began drawing it into a unified kingdom. By the reign of Yayati II around 1025 CE, that unification was complete, and Yayati II is credited with building the Lingaraj temple at Bhubaneswar.

  The Eastern Ganga dynasty followed the Somavamsis and left two monuments still standing today. Anantavarman Chodaganga began reconstruction of the Shri Jagannath Temple in Puri around 1135, making Cuttack the capital of the region at the same time. About a century later, Narasimhadeva I constructed the Konark temple around 1250. The Gajapati Kingdom came next, and the region resisted Mughal absorption until 1568, when it fell to the Sultanate of Bengal. Mukunda Deva, regarded as the last independent king of Kalinga, was defeated and killed in battle not by a foreign power but by a rebel commander named Ramachandra Bhanja. Ramachandra Bhanja was himself then killed by Bayazid Khan Karrani. Man Singh I, the governor of Bihar, led a force into Odisha in 1591 to wrest control from the Karranis, succeeded in 1592, and in 1751 the Nawab of Bengal Alivardi Khan handed the entire region to the Maratha Empire.

• 3. Colonial Rupture and Reunion

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  Britain's hold on Odisha arrived in two distinct waves. The southern coastal strip came first, absorbed into the Madras Presidency as a result of the Second Carnatic War by 1760. The Puri-Cuttack region fell during the Second Anglo-Maratha War in 1803 and went into the Bengal Presidency, while the north and west joined it shortly after. The resulting administrative fragmentation scattered Odia-speaking people across three different presidencies.

  The Orissa famine of 1866 killed an estimated one million people, a catastrophe that forced large-scale irrigation projects across the region. Out of that crisis grew organised political demand for reunification. In 1903, the Utkal Sammilani organisation was founded specifically to push for consolidation of Odia-speaking areas into a single state. The push succeeded in stages: on the 1st of April 1912 the Bihar and Orissa Province was formed, and on the 1st of April 1936 Bihar and Orissa were split into separate provinces. The new Orissa province came into being on a linguistic basis, the first state in British India organised by language, with Sir John Austen Hubback as its first governor. The 1st of April is now observed as Utkala Divas in commemoration.

  After independence in 1947, twenty-seven princely states signed documents to join Orissa on the 15th of August. Most of the remaining Orissa Tributary States acceded in 1948, after the Eastern States Union collapsed, and the capital shifted from Cuttack to the newly designated city of Bhubaneswar that same year.

• 4. What the Name Carries

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  The Tirumalai inscription of Rajendra Chola I, dated to 1025, contains the earliest known written form of the name that would become Odisha, rendered there as "Odda Visaya." Sarala Das, who translated the Mahabharata into Odia in the 15th century, called the region Odra Rashtra. The inscriptions of Kapilendra Deva of the Gajapati Kingdom, spanning 1435 to 1467, use Odisha or Odisha Rajya on temple walls in Puri.

  For centuries under British rule and beyond, English rendered that name as Orissa. The change came through Parliament: the lower house, Lok Sabha, passed the Orissa (Alteration of Name) Bill and the Constitution (113th Amendment) Bill on the 9th of November 2010. The Rajya Sabha followed on the 24th of March 2011. The stated intent was to bring the English and Hindi spellings into alignment with how the name is written and spoken in the Odia script. Linguists noted, however, that even the new spelling Odisha does not conform precisely to the Hunterian transliteration standard, which is the official national system, under which the correct form would be Orisha. The language itself was simultaneously renamed from Oriya to Odia. Odia holds the status of a classical language of India and is spoken by 82.70 percent of Odisha's population.

• 5. Land Between Mountain and Sea

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  Odisha's coastline runs for 485 kilometres along the Bay of Bengal, a stretch that begins near the Subarnarekha River in the north and extends south to the Rushikulya River. Six major rivers, the Subarnarekha, Budhabalanga, Baitarani, Brahmani, Mahanadi, and Rushikulya, have deposited fertile silt across the coastal plain over millennia. The stretch between Puri and Bhadrak juts visibly into the sea, making it especially exposed to cyclonic activity.

  Three-quarters of the state is covered in mountain ranges. The highest point is Deomali at 1,672 metres in Koraput district, followed by Sinkaram at 1,620 metres and Golikoda at 1,617 metres. The National Rice Research Institute, recognised by the Food and Agriculture Organization as a rice gene bank, sits on the banks of the Mahanadi in Cuttack. Chilika Lake, a brackish water lagoon with an area of 1,105 square kilometres on the east coast, connects to the Bay of Bengal through a 35-kilometre-long narrow channel and forms part of the Mahanadi delta. In the state's western reaches, the Hirakud Dam in Sambalpur district is the longest earthen dam in the world and forms the largest artificial lake in Asia.

• 6. Wild Odisha

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  Gahirmatha Beach, within the Bhitarkanika National Park in Kendrapara district, is the world's largest nesting site for olive ridley sea turtles. In 2013 the Indian Coast Guard launched Operation Oliver to protect that population. The Bhitarkanika sanctuary also holds large numbers of saltwater crocodiles and Asian water monitors, the second-largest lizard species on earth. Chilika Lake, visited each winter by birds from as far as the Caspian Sea, Lake Baikal, Central Asia, and the Himalayas, supports a small population of the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin alongside finless porpoises, humpback dolphins, and spinner dolphins in nearby coastal waters.

  Simlipal National Park covers 2,750 square kilometres of Mayurbhanj district and shelters around 55 mammal species, more than 300 bird species, and some 60 species of reptiles and amphibians. Around 130 species of wild orchid have been reported from Odisha; 97 of those are found in Mayurbhanj district alone. The Chandaka Elephant Sanctuary, a 190-square-kilometre protected area near Bhubaneswar, once held about 80 elephants in 2002, but by 2012 that number had fallen to roughly 20 as urban expansion, overgrazing, and poaching drove the herds away. A 2016 census counted around 2,000 elephants across the state as a whole, suggesting that numbers outside the sanctuary have held steadier than those within it.

• 7. Odissi: Body as Temple

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  Archaeological evidence places Odissi dance as the oldest surviving classical dance form in India, with an unbroken tradition of 2,000 years. The Natyashastra of Bharatamuni, possibly written around 200 BCE, mentions it. During the British period the form nearly disappeared, but after independence a small group of gurus, including Kelucharan Mohapatra and Pankaj Charan Das, carried out a deliberate revival that pulled Odissi back from the edge of extinction.

  The dance draws its visual vocabulary directly from the carvings of the Konark Sun Temple. Its defining posture is the tribhangi, which divides the body into three bends at the head, torso, and hips. The chauka stance provides the second structural foundation. A traditional recital moves through a set sequence: the Mangalacharan invocation, the Batu Nritya section of pure technique, the Pallavi with its elaborate rhythmic patterns, the Abhinaya section of expressive storytelling, and a concluding Moksha representing spiritual liberation.

  Dancers perform in Sambalpuri or Bomkai silk saris with silver jewellery made in Odisha's traditional style. The music draws on Odissi classical ragas and talas, blending elements of Hindustani and Carnatic traditions, with the mardala, a traditional percussion instrument, alongside flute, sitar, and violin. The dance is traditionally an act of devotion to Lord Jagannath and tells stories from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the Gita Govinda, the same text authored by Jayadeva, one of the most celebrated writers associated with Odisha.

• 8. A State in Motion

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  Odisha contains a fifth of India's coal, a quarter of its iron ore, a third of its bauxite, and most of its chromite. The Rourkela Steel Plant was the first integrated public-sector steel plant in India, built with German collaboration. In 2009 the state ranked second among domestic investment destinations in India, with a 12.6 percent share of total national investment that year. The Make in Odisha Conclave of 2022 generated investment proposals worth 10.5 trillion rupees, with the metals and ancillary sector alone accounting for 5.5 lakh crore of that figure. Bhubaneswar was the first city named to the Indian government's smart cities programme in January 2016.

  Odisha's poverty rate stood at 57.15 percent in 2004-2005, nearly double the national average at the time. Since then the state has cut that figure by 24.6 percentage points. Odisha's literacy rate of 72.87 percent as of the 2011 Census sits just below the national average of 74.04 percent, with the gap between Khordha district at 86.88 percent and Nabarangpur district at 46.43 percent illustrating how unevenly that progress has landed. The Odisha Rasagola earned a Geographical Indication tag in 2019, after a long dispute with West Bengal over which state can claim the origin of the syrupy sweet, settled in Odisha's favour on the strength of historical references in Odia texts and the distinct colour, texture, and taste of the Odisha version. The state that Ashoka's war once defined by destruction now holds one of the highest fiscal health index rankings in India for 2025.