Anantavarman Chodaganga Deva

01Ganga and Chola

He was the son of the Eastern Ganga king Rajaraja Devendravarman and of Rajasundari, a Chola princess, daughter of Virarajendra Chola and granddaughter of Rajendra Chola I; some historians make him instead a grandson of Kulottunga I. The double name Choda-Ganga carried both lines, and later kings of Odisha kept it as a title. He came to the throne in 1078, as a boy, at Kalinganagara, near today’s Srimukhalingam, and his own inscription says he ruled seventy-two years, one of the longest reigns of the Middle Ages. His records are full of boasts, among them that he was lord of ninety-nine thousand elephants, an exaggeration that still shows where his strength lay. The Ronaki stone inscription calls him the first Gajapati.

02From the Ganga to the Godavari

As the Somavamshi kings of the Odisha interior weakened, he pushed north and joined their lands to his own, so that his kingdom ran from the mouth of the Ganga to the Godavari. He moved his capital to Kataka, Cuttack, on the Mahanadi. His Chola kinship did not keep him safe: around 1110 Kulottunga I sent his general Karunakara Tondaiman into Kalinga, and the Tamil war-poem Kalingattupparani sings of the burning of his country, though poems of that kind are generous to their own side. His grants describe a well-ordered state of mandalas, vishayas and villages, with ministers, generals and a Raja Guru, and coins in gold, silver and copper, the madas and fanams. Ananda Bhatta’s Vallala-charitam speaks of his dealings with Vijaya Sena of Bengal.

Place · c. 9th–11th century, Eastern Ganga kingsMukhalingam Temples (Kalinganagara)The old Eastern Ganga capital Kalinganagara on the Vamsadhara, where three Shiva temples show the Kalinga style in its youth, before Bhubaneswar and Puri.Read →

03The temple of Shri Jagannath

Born a Shaiva, devoted to Madhukeshvara of Mukhalingam, he became a Vaishnava, and his Sindurapura grant of 1118 calls him Paramavaishnava; the Sri Vaishnava tradition links this to Ramanujacharya’s visit to Puri, and he is said to have restored the Kurmanatha temple at Srikurmam after the acharya came to Kalinga. At Puri he raised the present temple of Shri Jagannath, over an older shrine, towards the end of the 11th century or in the early 12th; a copper plate of Rajaraja III later set up at Tirumala names Gangeshvara, that is Chodaganga, as its builder. The great deul, about 65 metres high, still rises over the town. His successor Anangabhima Deva III finished the work and organised the temple’s service, and is sometimes counted its second builder. Chodaganga died in 1150.