History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v1.c17: Chapter XII
History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v1.c17
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Chapter XII
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We come next to the histroy of Orissa or Odra as it is called in ancient Sanskrit literature. We have a very interesting history of Orissa from the pen of that gifted author Sir William Hunter and we will follow him generally except in a few points. His research at the date of his writing his history is remarkably thorough while his manner of depicting scenes and events belongs to a higly imaginative writer. Sir William Hunter doubtless based the ancient history of Orissa on the palm-leaf manuscripts preserved in the temple of Jagannath, the most famous temple of Orissa.
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According to Hunter Orissa is the Prakrit form of the word Odra-deśa which is very plausible. Orissa is a strip of land bounded by the Sea on the east and the Vindhya hills on the west. It extends length-wise from the-western most mouth of the Ganges to a remarkable lake in the south called the Chilka lake. This lake has been formed owing to the low level of the land, the water from the sea floing into it at tide-time. It is separated from the sea by a narrow ridge of land formed by the deposit of silt from the mountains brought down by the big rivers of Orissa the chief of which is of course the Mahānadi. In this strip of land owing to its fertility immigrations have come in from time to time. The most ancient one was that of the Aryans whose pioneers, the Brahmins, were conspicuous in founding settlensnts even in Dandakāranya. These Aryan Brahmins soon imposed their religion and their langnage upon the aboriginal people who were non-Aryans and Kaivartas or fishermen by profession. Odra naturally became a prosperous province but like Anga, Vanga and Kalinga it continued to be a banned land for pure Aryans. The Manusmriti mentions the Odras as mlechhas, and it was not considered proper for good Aryans to go to this country.
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After the Vedic Aryans, came the Buddhist. We know that Aśoka when he conquered Kalinga further south slaughtered many people and from that time by a revulsion of feeling became inclined towards the religion of non-slaughter. From his time i. e. about 250 B.C. Buddhism reigned supreme in Orissa for several centuries. Sir William Hunter re'ates on the authosity of the palm-leaf records that this Buddhist native rule was supplanted by a king named Red-Arm (रक्तबाहु) who came about 323 A.D. and his descendants ruled in Orissa till 474 A.D. (Hunter's Orissa Vol. I p 206 )
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Who were these invaders. The temple archives call them Yavanas and Hunter has no doubt that they were so. He has given a most detailed history of the ancient Yavanas or Bactrian Greeks who had kingdoms in the Panjab and who invaded Ayodhya and Magadha under Menander in the second century B. C. It is not improbable that some of these Yavana adventurers sailed down the Ganges and came by sea to Orissa in course of time. That there were Yavana kingdoms in the central parts of India is proved not only from inscriptions but from the Purāṇas themselves Of the Kailakila or Kainkila Yavanas mentioned in the Purāṇas we shall speak later on. Here it will suffice to note that Yavana adventures, it is not strange, founded a kingdom in Orissa in about 320A.D. and continued to rule down to 474 A. D. These Yavanas were a maritime people and it is supposed that under their guidance the Hindus went to Java about this period. Whatever that may be, these Yavanas appear to be Buddhists like the Kāilakila Yavanas of the Central Provinces. The fact is that foreigners whether in past or present times are always partial to Buddhism; because Hinduism is exclusive and there is no ready admission to foreigners in its fold Sir W. Hunter attributes this tendeney to the higher ethical excellence of Buddhism. But it seems that there was nothing to choose between Hinduism and Buddhism of the fifth century A.D. so far as higher doctrines were concerned and superstition was as rempant in Buddhism as in Hinduism at that time. But Buddhism was a proselytizing religion while Hinduism was not and hence Yavanas and Sakas and others turned Buddhists sooner than Hindus. But it must be remembered that caste in the fifth century A.D. was as strong among Buddhists as among the Hindus in spite of the fact that Buddhism started with the denial of caste in the beginning. The sentiment of caste is buried deep down the Indian heart and we see caste at the present day assert itself even among the Christian converts of the south. Under the influence of caste a new people though admitted to Buddhism or even to Hinduism lived as a separate caste bound by interdiction of marriage with others among the hundred and one castes that already existed
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To return to the Yavanas who conquered Orissa, they were Buddhists and ruled the country according to the chronicles till 474 A. D. These Yavanas or Greeks have left Buddhistic monuments in caves and in images of gods and men with Greek profiles unmistakably detectable as stated by archæolgists a fact which well fits in with the view that these rulers were really Bactrian Greeks. This dynansty was overthrown by one Yayāti Kesari according to the palm-leaf records in 474 A.D. The kings of this Kesari line were worshippers of Śiva as elsewhere; though of course they reverenced Vishnu also as the All-preserver "For 150 years Buddhism and Śiva worship struggled for victory when the contest practically ceased. The reigning monarch was a worshipper of the all-Destroyer with Bhuvanesvara the temple city of Śiva as his capital. Year after year the Buddhist hermits in their cave-dwellings gazed across the five miles of fruit-bearing groves towards the great tower of Śiva slowly rising in the distance. Of the 7000 shrines which clustered rouud it, not more than 500 or 600 survive. They exhibit every stage of Orissa art from the rough conceptions of the sixth century through the exquisite designs and the ungrudging artistic toil of the 12th, the exquisite friezes, scrolls, and carvings which adorn these long deserted walls," (Hunter's Orissa Vol. 1 pp. 233-234 )
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The chronicles and Sir W. Hunter place the rise of the Śaivite dynasty of Kesari kings in 474 A. D. But they place the success of Bhuvanesvara 150 years later i. e. in about 624 A.D. It seems that this must be put a little later still. As we have said before, Orissa was conquered by Harsha and was held under him. When Hiuen Tsang visited the land, Buddhism was still supreme there. He records "The people reverence the law. There are a hundred monasteries and 50 temples. There were myriads of Buddhists" (The fertility of the land also is noticed by the Chinese traveller who remarks that the fruit here were larger than elsewhere). It seems, therefore, that the Kesari dynasty though established was not yet powerful and was subordinate to Harsha. They must have asserted themselves and their religion, as elsewhere in India, after Harsha's death.
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The dates of the building of the Bhuvanesvara temple given by the palm-leaf records also support this theory. 'The founder began the lofty fane about 500 A. D. Two succeeding monarchs laboured on it and the fourth completed it in A. D. 657." Thus the completion of the temple of Śiva at Bhuvanesvara took place after Harsha's death. A slab inscription further recounts that a pious princess built another cloud-reaching temple with four beautiful halls to Lord Śiva. "The only event by which the palm-leaf records relieve the monotonous list of kings of the ninth century is the erection of a Śiva temple in Puri, the city which was destined, later on, to become the centre of the rival worship of Vishnu. This Mārkandesvara temple in Puri was built by Kundala Kesari in 811-829 A. D. (Purushottama Chandrikā p. 31 quoted by Hunter p. 237 ).
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The Kesari kings were not only great builders of stupendous temples to Śiva-temples the adornments of which are more decorous than those which in a sense disfigure the later temples of Vishnu in Orissa; but they were also great restorers of the Brahmin religion. They invited and settled a colony of Brahmins from northern India in much the same way as orthodox kings in Bengal and elsewhere did later on. "The local legends and the palm-leaf records alike relate that the founder of the long-haired or Lion line imported ten thousand Brahmins from Oudh and endowed them with lands round Jaipur on the sacred Vaitarani river. They professed the royal religion and were Śaivites to a man. They found already settled Brahmins who were, however, once Buddhists. These latter were allowed to retain the title of Brahmins but they were interdicted all intercourse with the new settlers. They were of course denied the Jus Connubi from the first and these nominal Brahmins formed a distinct caste which by degrees sank into the mass of the peasant population." "They are still found in Orissa as good cultivators and are known as Laukika Brahmins and still wear a dirty Brahmanical thread over their half naked body" (Hunter's Orissa Vol. I p. 239). This settlement of Northern Brahmins and the consequent division of Orissa Brhmins into Laukika and Vaidika is typical of the social evolution of the higher classes throughout India with its sub-divisions of castes which appear at first inexplicable but which show how centuries of profession of the Buddhistic faith differentiated Brahmins from Brahmins and Kshatriyas from Kshatriyas and led to the present strange prohibition of marriage and even food between subdivisions of the same chief caste or Varna.
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Bhuvaneśvara was the old capital of the Kesari line raised within the shadow of Buddhistic remains. The settlement at Jaipur was a new religious capital. Between them lay the delta of the Mahānadi. The Jaipur colony flourished. It was visited according to Cunningham by Hiuen Tsang though this seems doubtful; but in the sixteenth century the great battle between the Mahomedans and the Hindus was certainly fought under its walls and the city was taken by the Mahomedans and was as usual devastated. "Its ruins attest its ancient grandeur. Its dilapidated temples and colossal images retain an inviolate sanctity in the mind of devout Hindus. To the annalist it possesses a higher interest as the greatest and best-attested settlement of priests from the north planted by royal authority to impose a new dynastic creed on the Indian population.” (p. 241 ditto.)
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Some of these ruins and thrown down images are graphically described by Sir W. Hunter and we will notice them in brief. They are still well preserved for “even the icono-clast fury of Islam and the vandalism of the English public works department have failed to obliterate the artistic magnificence of the Lion line. A well proportioned column rises above the jungle and bears traces of the impotent fury of the Mussulman troops. The Afghans tried to drag it down by chains and teams of elephants; but the barbarian conquerors of the sixteenth century found themselves unable to destroy the graceful Hindu creations of the tenth. They, however, managed to pull down the sacred Vulture (गरुड) which crowned its capital and the exquisite shaft lifts its dishonoured head in witness against a creed which sought the glory of God in the destruction of the finest works of man” (ditto p. 267).
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The most important and colossal statues were also preserved owing to their being thrown down on their faces. They lay prone for more than two centuries when in 1866 they were raised and set up by a spirited English magistrate; and have been placed on the river bank amid most of the public buildings. “Three statues each of one enormous block of chlorite towering even in their sitting posture far above the heads of puny mortals represent the queen of Heaven (Indrāni) the Earth goddess who took upon herself a mortal form to become the wife of the Boar incarnation (Vārāhi) and the goddess of Destruction (Kāli).
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These colossal monoliths must have been dragged across the river-intercepted delta from the mountains a hundred miles off and their hard blue stone still bears witness to the fine chiselling of the Hindu Art of 900 to 1000 A. D. The queen of Heaven, a four-armed goddess, sits in calm majesty with an admirably cut elephant as her footstool. A muslin drapery falls in delicate curves to her feet and is fastened by a girdle at the waist. Her hair towers up in a cone of curls inter-woven with jewels with a single massive tress hanging down upon either shoulder. The Earth goddess sits with her infant son on the knee and like the other two consists of a colossal monolith eight feet high by four in breadth. She has four arms also and the little finger of her left hand proves that Hindu ladies of that remote period wore rings. She sits on a finely carved buffalo the artistic lines of whose head and muzzle are striking. A temple to her husband the Boar incarnation crowns a time-worn flight of stairs leading up from the river.
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"The most striking, however, of the three monoliths is the wife of the all-Destroyer—a colossal naked skeleton with the skin hanging to the bones and the veins and muscles standing out in ghastly fidelity. This appalling symbol of human decay has her hair brushed back under a snake fillet, with a death's head over the forehead and the distended hood of the cobra as a canopy above. Her serpent tresses fall down in twisted horror over her cheeks. An endless string of skulls winds round her neck, her breast, her loins and her whole body. She sits upon a small figure of her husband and the whole rests upon a lotus-leafed pedestal." Figures of the seven mothers and another statue of the goddess of destruction with the demons Sumbha and Nisumbha thrown down at her feet adorn a beautiful gallery carved on this very bank (H. O. Vol. 1 268-269). These and other sculptures testify to the great skill of Hindu workers during the Kesari rule in Orissa and bear witness to the great imagination of these sculptors and the mechanical skill of ancient engineers who could transport such big stones a hundred miles in those days before the introduction of modern mechanical appliances.
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But the skill of Orissa ancient engineers is still more exhibited in the bridge which they have built over the southern branch of the Mahānadi. "The earlier kings of the Kesari line held their court sometimes at Bhuvaneśvara the city of temples to Śiva and sometimes at Jaipur the city of his priests on the holy river. But a warlike prince who reigned from 953 to 961 A. D. perceived the military strengh of the tongue of land where the Mahānadi first divides itself into several branches and founded Cuttack which is still the capital of the province. He shut up the river by means of a masonry embankment, several miles long, which at present consists of enormous blocks of hewn stone in some places 25 feet high. His successor strengthened the new capital by an outlying fortress on the southern bank of the river, while a century later the reigning king built the massive bridge by which pilgrims enter Puri at this day. The bridge consists of masses of red stone called laterite (which is soft when first quarried but grows harder by exposure to the air) and spans 290 feet of water-way by means of eighteen arches the central one being 18 feet high by fourteen feet broad. "The Hindu architects of that day did not know how to turn an arch but they had a device of their own scarcely less skilful, applied equally to the lofty towers of temples and to the humblest gate-way. It is what may be called the inverted stair"; each stone lay projecting out from that below. Thus was the Mahānadi bridge built by skilful engineers of the Hindus of the 10th and 11th century A. D.
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Beyond their prosperity and their great temples and buildings we have little to record of the politics of the Kesari line of kings of Orissa. As the palm-leaf records show, this dynasty began in about 500 A. D. but their real power and independence began with 657 A. D. the date of the completion of the Bhuvaneśvara temple to Śiva after Harsha's death. They were orthodox worshippers of Śiva and invited thousands of Śaivite Brahmins of Oundh and settled them at Jaipur where they are still to be found in the enjoyment of lands given to them in fee by devout kings more than a thousand years back. These kings continued to rule down to 1132 A. D. according to the palm-leaf records in their capital Cuttack (which was built about 1030 A. D.) when a revolution took place and the Kesari line of kings came to an end. A religious revolution also happened about this time and in a sense Buddhism reared its head again in the form of Vaishnavism. Both this religious change and political revolution belong to the third portion of our period, and we finish this history of Orissa here to return again to it in the third volume of our history.
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The Kesari line rule thus lasted from about 500 to 1132 A. D. a period of about 600 years which is very long indeed. But we have said that in outlying territories such long-lived dynasties are not uncommon as for instance in Assam. The palm-leaf records of Jagannath are, however, not wholly reliable and there are other records which contradict them as shown by Sir William Hunter himself. According to the palm-leaf records the Kesari line consisted of 44 kings from 500 A. D. to 1132 A. D. ( not an improbable period viz. 600 years for 44 kings) when it gave place to the Ganga line of kings. But the other records place a sun-worshipping line between the Kesari line and the Ganga line. These other records according to Hunter are not quite reliable ; but the fact cannot be denied that there must have been a sun-worshipping line of kings sometime before the introduction of the Vishnu worship of Jagannath. For we have in Orissa the most beautiful temple of the sun that exists in India or anywhere else and also a monolith pillar still standing which is almost a wonder of the world. This history of the sun-worshippers too we reserve to our second volume.
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As there is very little political history to record, we refrain from giving a list of the Kesari kings which Hunter has assidously collected and given in an appendix. Orissa must have been more than once conquered during this period by kings from the north, and we have an actual mention in the Nepal inscription of Jayadeva that Harshadeva of Assam did conquer Odra. Yet such conquests either from the north or the south were always temporary and only nominal and the indepndence of the Kesari line was not interfered with. These kings themselves cared very little for external conquests though perhaps Kongadu of Hiuen Tsang i. e. Ganjam in the south and Tāmralipti or Midnapur in the north may often have formed part of the kingdom of Orissa, under the Kesari kings.
Linked texts (2)
- Mānava Dharmaśāstra — Manu & Bhṛgu, Sanskrit
- Purāṇa — Sanskrit