History of Odisha

Since its earliest known history, the land that roughly corresponds to present-day Odisha has gone by various names, most notably Utkala (or Okkala), Kalinga, and Odra Desha (or Oddaka), which appeared in ancient literature as designations for particular tribes. The ancient Greeks knew the latter two groups as Kalingai and Oretes. Those names eventually became identified with specific territories.

At the dawn of Indian history, Kalinga was already a famous and formidable political power. Buddhist sources refer to the rule of King Brahmadatta in Kalinga at the time of the Buddha’s death, sometime between the 6th and the 4th century bce. In the 4th century bce the first Indian empire builder, Mahapadma Nanda, founder of the Nanda dynasty, conquered Kalinga, but the Nanda rule was short-lived. In 260 bce the Mauryan emperor Ashoka invaded Kalinga and fought one of the greatest wars of ancient history. He then renounced war, became a Buddhist, and preached peace and nonviolence in and outside India. In the 1st century bce the Kalinga emperor Kharavela conquered vast territories that collectively came to be called the Kalinga empire.

In the 1st century ce Kalinga emerged as a maritime power. Its overseas activities possibly involved the establishment in the 8th century of the Shailendra empire on the Southeast Asian island of Java (now in Indonesia). Kalinga was ruled by the powerful Bhauma-Kara dynasty during the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries, followed by the Soma kings until the 11th century. Construction of the 11th-century temple of Lingaraja at Bhubaneshwar, the greatest Shaiva monument of India, was begun by the Soma king Yayati.

Kalinga enjoyed a golden age under the Ganga dynasty. The Ganga ruler Anantavarman Chodagangadeva (1078–1147) ruled from the Ganges River to the Godavari River with Cuttack as his capital. He began the construction of the temple of Jagannatha (“Lord of the World”) at Puri. Narasimha I (1238–64) built the Sun Temple (Surya Deula) of Konark, one of the finest specimens of Hindu architecture. In the 13th and 14th centuries, when much of India came under the rule of Muslim powers, independent Kalinga remained a citadel of Hindu religion, philosophy, art, and architecture.

The Gangas were succeeded by the Surya dynasty. Its first king, Kapilendra (1435–66), won territories from his Muslim neighbours and greatly expanded the Kalinga kingdom. His successor, Purushottama, maintained those gains with difficulty. The next and the last Surya king, Prataparudra, became a disciple of Chaitanya, the great Hindu mystic, and became a pacifist. After Prataparudra’s death in 1540, the kingdom’s power declined, and in 1568, when King Mukunda was killed by his own countrymen, it lost its independence to the Afghan rulers of Bengal.

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It was sometime between the 11th and 16th centuries that the name Kalinga fell into disuse. In its place arose the old tribal name Odra Desha, which was gradually transformed into Odisha (or Uddisha, or Udisa), which in English became Orissa; that spelling persisted until the original Odisha was reinstated in the early 21st century. The language of the region came to be known as Odia.

The Mughal emperor Akbar wrested Odisha from the Afghans in 1590–92. When the Mughal Empire fell in the mid-18th century, part of Odisha remained under the nawabs (provincial governors of Mughal India) of Bengal, but the greater part passed to the Marathas, who ruled much of South India between the 16th and 19th centuries. The Bengal sector came under British rule in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey (near present-day Palashi), and the Maratha sector was conquered by the British in 1803. Although after 1803 the British controlled the entire Odia-speaking area, it continued to be administered as two units. It was not until April 1, 1936, that the British heeded calls for unification on a linguistic basis and constituted Orissa as a separate province. However, 26 Odia princely states remained outside the provincial administration. After the independence of India in 1947, the territory of Orissa was expanded to include all the princely states except Saraikela and Kharsawan, which were absorbed by Bihar. Orissa became a state of India in 1950.

Between the establishment of the state and 2000, Orissa’s government was largely controlled by the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). The only exceptions to the Congress Party’s five decades of dominance were in 1967–72, 1977–80, and 1990–95 and during several short periods of rule by the central Indian government. In 2000, however, the regional Biju Janata Dal (BJD) party, led by its founder, Naveen Patnaik, won a plurality of seats in state legislative elections. With its coalition partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the BJD formed a coalition government, with Patnaik as chief minister. The BJD severed its ties with the BJP for the 2009 state elections and won an overwhelming majority of seats in the legislature that year. During this term, the state’s name was formally changed from Orissa to Odisha to better reflect the name’s pronunciation in the Odia language. The BJD continued to gain seats in the 2014 elections, though it lost a few seats in the 2019 elections. Patnaik remained as chief minister until 2024, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won majority in the state elections and Mohan Charan Majhi became the chief minister.