Most Indians have heard about the Somnath temple which was raided by Mahmud of Ghazni a thousand years ago. Very few know that in the same century, the Chola king from the south raided Odisha and Bengal and took back with him images of Shiva. Even fewer people know that in the 13th century, the Ganga kings of Odisha bravely fought the Muslim invaders of Bengal, and even established a “New Varanasi” in Cuttack, Odisha, since the “Old Varanasi” had been plundered.
Around this time, the giant temple of Purushottama was built, renamed the Jagannatha (lord of the world), and the kings who built it declared themselves to be viceroys of this deity who was the true ruler of the land, the rashtra-devata. It was at this temple that Jayadeva composed his Gita Govinda that introduced Radha into Hinduism. There is some influence of Ramanuja’s Sri Vaishnava Vedanta school on the temple, as indicated by the independent temple to Lakshmi within the complex. But it also has Tantric rituals that give it a very unique local flavour.
Odisha is located towards the northern end of the Coromandel coast of India. The word ‘Coromandel’ comes from Chola Mandala, or the kingdom of the Cholas, who clearly dominated the coast and the region ‘from Kalinga to Kanchi’ for a long time. Odisha’s wealth comes from the Mahanadi River basin. The Chola wealth came from the Kaveri River basin and its control of the lucrative sea routes to Southeast Asia. Between southern Chola and the northern Kalinga, the coast was the rich Godavari and Krishna deltas ruled by the Andhra kings. The kings of Odisha were traditionally known as the Gajapati or the masters of the elephants. The Sultans of Delhi was called Ashwapati, or masters of the horses.
Devdutt Pattanaik is an Indian physician turned leadership consultant, mythologist, author and communicator whose works focus largely on the areas of myth, religion, mythology, and management.
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