Odia

01Ganga stones and Jagannath’s records

Odia words and phrases appear in Kalinga inscriptions from the 10th century, and a stone of the Eastern Ganga king Vajrahasta at Urajam, dated 1051 CE, is generally taken as the first inscription in the language. Under the Gangas, who built the Jagannath temple at Puri and the Sun temple at Konark, Odia became the language of temple records. The Madala Panji, the chronicle kept by the Jagannath temple on palm leaf, is written in it.

02Sarala Das and the Panchasakha

In the 15th century, under the Gajapati king Kapilendra Deva, Sarala Das wrote the Mahabharata in Odia, retelling it freely with the places and customs of Odisha. In the 16th century the five Panchasakha poets, Jagannatha Dasa, Balarama Dasa, Achyutananda, Ananta and Yashovanta, brought the Puranas to ordinary people; Jagannatha Dasa’s Odia Bhagavata is still kept and read in village bhagavata gharas across the state.

03The round script and today

Odia letters are almost all curves. The usual explanation is that a straight stroke cut with an iron stylus along a palm leaf would split it, so scribes bent every line. Odisha became a separate province on 1 April 1936, the first formed on the basis of language, and that day is kept as Utkala Dibasa. Odia was declared a classical language in 2014, and the 2011 Census counted 3,75,21,324 speakers.

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