South Odisha & Ganjam · Eastern Coastal Plains

The small things

A beach that is not in the same place twiceThe Rushikulya nesting spit is rebuilt by the river's sediment and the longshore drift, breached in floods and reshaped between seasons. The turtles nonetheless return to it in lakhs. Whatever they are navigating to, it is not a landform — the landform is new.
One of very few arribada beaches on earthSynchronised mass nesting happens at a short list of beaches worldwide — a few in Odisha, one or two in Costa Rica, one in Mexico, and a handful elsewhere. Rushikulya is on that list, and in strong years more than six lakh females have been counted coming ashore inside about a week. In other years the arribada simply does not occur, and nobody can reliably predict which kind of year it will be.
A boundary that was argued into existenceThis plain was administered from Madras for well over a century. It was transferred in 1936 into the new province of Orissa — the first Indian province created on the basis of language rather than conquest or convenience — and the case was made from Paralakhemundi, on the hill edge, by the people the existing line ran through.
A poem written under an alphabet ruleUpendra Bhanja's Baidehisha Bilasa retells the Ramayana with every line beginning with the same syllable. He wrote something like fifty works from a small estate near Bhanjanagar, and his verses are still what Odissi singers sing.
The perfume in a Lucknow paan is grown on this beachGanjam's coastal kewda thickets supply almost all of India's kewda distillate. Only the male flower is used, it has to reach the still within hours of cutting, and the finished rooh leaves the region entirely — to attar blenders in the north, to the paan trade and to sweet manufacturers. The same thickets hold the dunes in place, so the crop is also the coastal defence.
Two GopalpursThe GI-registered Gopalpur tussar is woven at Gopalpur in Jajpur district, in the Mahanadi delta. Gopalpur-on-Sea, in Ganjam, weaves nothing. The names are a coincidence and the confusion is constant.
A Ganjam name on a western Odisha industryThe Bomkai weave is named for a village in Ganjam, but the Bhulia weavers of Sonepur took it up, moved it into silk and made it their commercial mainstay. The GI covers both places. The cotton original from the village that gave it its name is now the harder version to buy.
The sweet was invented somewhere elseChhena poda is credited to a sweet-maker's family at Daspalla in Nayagarh district in the early twentieth century, inland and north of here. Ganjam's real claim is upstream of the recipe: it is the state's largest chhena belt, which is why the sweet is an everyday item on this plain and a treat elsewhere. It still has no geographical indication.
A town that runs on a two-year calendarBerhampur's Budhi Thakurani Jatra is held in alternate years and lasts about a month. Households plan weddings, travel and spending around a biennial cycle, which is an unusual thing for an urban calendar to do.
The same year gave the region a province and a scriptOrissa province was created in 1936. The Sorang Sompeng script for Sora was devised in the same decade, in these hills, by a Sora teacher who wanted the language written in something that was neither Odia nor Telugu. Two answers to the same question, arrived at independently and about fifty kilometres apart.
Shellers work with oiled handsCashew shell liquid is caustic and blisters skin on contact, which is why the nut must be roasted before it can be handled and why hand-shellers coat their hands in oil. The workforce in Ganjam's shelling yards is overwhelmingly women on piece rates.
A fault line with a bath on itTaptapani's spring is not a curiosity attached to a temple; the temple is attached to the spring. Sulphurous water reaches the surface at bath temperature through a break in the scarp, and the shrine, the tank and the road all exist because of a fracture in the rock.

Small local details of South Odisha & Ganjam — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)