South Odisha & Ganjam · Eastern Coastal Plains
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.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
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.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 261 BCE | Ashoka's separate rock edicts are cut at Jaugada, on the Rushikulya near the fortified early historic settlement identified with Samapa — one of only two such sites in Kalinga. |
| 619 CE | The Ganjam copper plates of Madhavaraja II are issued from Kongoda, the Sailodbhava seat behind the Chilika end of the plain, and give the earliest firm date in the region's administrative record. |
| c. 8th–11th century | The Eastern Gangas rule from Kalinganagara, identified with Mukhalingam on the Vamsadhara at the plain's southern end; the temples there are the region's largest early stone complex. |
| c. 10th–11th century | Stone temples are built on and below the Mahendragiri massif, at 1,501 m the highest point in the region and a pilgrimage site named in earlier literature. |
| 1078 | Anantavarman Chodaganga's accession begins the shift of Eastern Ganga power to the Mahanadi delta. The Vamsadhara plain becomes a march rather than a centre. |
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.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1309 | The Khemundi line is established by Narasingha Deva, a son of the Eastern Ganga ruler Bhanudeva II; Paralakhemundi later becomes its principal seat. |
| 1520–1550 | Subarnalinga Bhanu Deba divides the Khemundi territory among his sons, producing the Bada Khemundi and Paralakhemundi estates that the British later dealt with separately. |
| c. 1571 | The chiefships of this stretch are reduced to tributary status under Golconda as Qutb Shahi power extends up the coast. |
| 1687 | Golconda falls to the Mughals and the Northern Circars pass to imperial and then to Nizam administration, with the plain's chiefs paying tribute and otherwise left alone. |
| 1753 | The Circars are granted to the French, who hold Ganjam briefly before the English establish themselves on this coast at the end of the Seven Years' War. |
| 1765 | The Northern Circars are granted to the East India Company by imperial firman; the plain begins to be governed from Madras. |
| 1768 | Paralakhemundi comes under British influence, ending the estate's practical independence and setting the pattern for the other chiefships of the plain. |
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.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1835–1837 | The Ghumsur risings. On the death of Raja Dhananjaya Bhanja on 31 December 1835 the succession dispute drew in the Kondh villages of the upper Rushikulya; a Company force under George Edward Russell entered the tract on 11 January 1836 and fought a two-year campaign in the hills. |
| 1845–1861 | A special agency is established in the Kondh hills to end the meriah rite and the associated taking of children for it. The agency's officers, moving through villages that had never before been administered, provoked intermittent resistance across the tract for the better part of two decades. |
| 1846–1855 | Chakra Bisoi leads the hill resistance across the Ghumsur, Kalahandi and Kandhamal borders. He was never taken; he disappears from the record about 1855. |
| 1866 | The Na'anka famine reaches Ganjam. The mortality of that year became the standing evidence in the argument that the Odia districts were being administered from too far away. |
| April 1930 | Salt is made at Huma on the Ganjam coast as part of the civil disobedience movement, organised by Biswanath Das, Niranjan Patnaik and Sarala Devi. |
| 1 April 1936 | Ganjam and the Paralakhemundi tract are transferred from the Madras Presidency into the new province of Orissa. The Telugu-majority mandals at the southern end stayed with Madras, which is why the language boundary and the administrative boundary still do not coincide. |
| 1942 | Quit India brings arrests in Berhampur, Aska and the Rushikulya towns; Berhampur jail also held prisoners from the hill districts. |
Rulers and commanders
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.
Dynasty: Sailodbhava. Seat: Kongoda
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.
Dynasty: Eastern Ganga cadet line. Seat: Khemundi
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.
Dynasty: Khemundi line. Seat: Khemundi
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.
Dynasty: Paralakhemundi (Eastern Ganga descent). Seat: Paralakhemundi
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.
Dynasty: Bhanja of Ghumsur. Seat: Ghumsur
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.
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.
Seat: The Ghumsur hills
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.
Dynasty: Paralakhemundi. Seat: Paralakhemundi
The history of South Odisha & Ganjam from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (8)