इतिहास
This plain has almost never been the centre of anything, and its periodisation follows the borders other people drew across it. In the ancient period it was the southern march of Kalinga, with the Eastern Ganga capital at Kalinganagara sitting on the Vamsadhara at its lower end. Its medieval period begins in the fourteenth century, not with a conquest but with the branching of Eastern Ganga cadet lines into the hill-foot chiefships — Khemundi, Ghumsur, Chikiti — that actually governed here. Its modern period begins in 1768, when Paralakhemundi came under British influence and the plain began to be administered from Madras rather than from Cuttack. That is the single most consequential fact about the region: a hundred and sixty-eight years under a Telugu-administering presidency, ended on 1 April 1936, which is why the speech, the naming and the account books all read in two directions. Above the scarp the arrangement was different again — Kondh and Sora villages were governed by their own mutha heads and bisois, and the plain rajas' writ stopped where the ghat began.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
प्राचीनc. 3rd century BCE – c. 1300 CE
The Rushikulya plain carried one of the two places in Kalinga where Ashoka had his separate edicts cut, which means the Mauryan administration reached this far south and thought it worth addressing the people here directly. For most of the following millennium the plain was frontier: the Sailodbhava kings held Kongoda in the north, and from about the eighth century the Eastern Gangas ruled from Kalinganagara at Mukhalingam on the Vamsadhara, at the plain's southern end. When that dynasty moved its centre north to the Mahanadi delta in the twelfth century, the region lost its capital and never acquired another; what it kept was a scatter of hill-foot forts and the temple sites on Mahendragiri.
मध्यकालीनc. 1300 – 1768
Authority here fragmented into hill-foot chiefships held by cadet branches of the Eastern Gangas and by Bhanja lines, each controlling a short river and the ghat road behind it — Paralakhemundi on the Mahendratanaya, Ghumsur on the upper Rushikulya, Chikiti and Khallikote on the coast. None was large. All of them depended on an arrangement with the hill above them, because the forest produce, the pack routes and the manpower were up there and were not theirs to command. Over the plain itself passed a succession of larger powers that taxed it without settling it: the Gajapatis, then Golconda from the later sixteenth century, then Mughal and Nizam authority over the Northern Circars, with French and English factories on the coast from the early eighteenth century.
आधुनिक1768 – 1947
For the whole modern period this plain was the northernmost district of the Madras Presidency, and almost everything distinctive about it follows from that. Revenue, courts, schooling and printing came through Telugu; Odia-speaking villages were administered in a language their officials did not write; and the resulting argument — that the Odia tracts were split between three presidencies and neglected by all three — became the region's politics for a generation. Above the scarp the same administration ran into the hills, where the Ghumsur risings of the 1830s and the two decades of operations that followed brought the Kondh country under direct supervision for the first time. The period ends with the plain changing province rather than changing hands.
शासक और सेनापति
Madhavaraja II Sainyabhita Madhavaraja शासक c. 619
Issuer of the Ganjam copper plates of 619, which fix the earliest secure date in the region's records and show a settled land-grant administration behind the Chilika end of the plain.
राजवंश: Sailodbhava. राजधानी: Kongoda
Narasingha Deva of Khemundi Raja संस्थापक from 1309
Founded the Khemundi chiefship as a junior branch of the Eastern Gangas. Every later ruling family of the Paralakhemundi country traces itself to this division, which is how a plain with no capital came to have half a dozen small courts.
राजवंश: Eastern Ganga cadet line. राजधानी: Khemundi
Subarnalinga Bhanu Deba Raja शासक 1520–1550
Divided the territory among his sons, creating the Bada Khemundi and Paralakhemundi estates. The partition is why the British found several small zamindaris here instead of one state.
राजवंश: Khemundi line. राजधानी: Khemundi
Jagannatha Gajapati Narayana Deo II Raja of Paralakhemundi शासक 1736–1771
Ruled through the decades in which the Northern Circars passed from Golconda and Nizam authority to the Company, and under whom Paralakhemundi came under British influence in 1768.
राजवंश: Paralakhemundi (Eastern Ganga descent). राजधानी: Paralakhemundi
Dhananjaya Bhanja Raja of Ghumsur शासक died 31 December 1835
The last effective Raja of Ghumsur. His death without an accepted succession, in the middle of a revenue dispute with the Madras government, set off the risings that brought the hill tract under direct administration.
राजवंश: Bhanja of Ghumsur. राजधानी: Ghumsur
The bisoi and the mutha head Hill offices of the Kondh and Sora tracts प्रशासक pre-colonial into the 20th century
Above the scarp there was no court. A cluster of villages formed a mutha under its own head, and a bisoi held a hereditary charge over a group of muthas, answerable to the plain raja for tribute and for the ghat road and to nobody for anything else. When the Company tried to administer the hills directly in the 1830s and 1840s it was these offices, not a kingdom, that it collided with.
Dora Bisoi Bisoi विद्रोही died 1846
Hereditary hill officer under Ghumsur who led the Kondh villages against the Company force from 1836. Surrendered to the British in 1837 after being given up by the Raja of Angul, and died in prison at Ootacamund in 1846.
राजधानी: The Ghumsur hills
Krushna Chandra Gajapati Narayan Deo Maharaja of Paralakhemundi प्रशासक 1892–1974
Succeeded to the estate in 1913 and put it behind the campaign for a single Odia-speaking province, giving evidence and money to a case argued from the hill edge rather than from the coast. Orissa was constituted on 1 April 1936 and he served as its first Prime Minister from 1937.
राजवंश: Paralakhemundi. राजधानी: Paralakhemundi