Fanatic Land: Hunter’s Odisha

In my exploration of the colonial account of Odisha I use as my central text, W. W. Hunter’s two-volume history of Odisha, which was published in 1872. Hunter’s account was one of the last among a long series of colonial reports on the region.Footnote ¹⁴ However, it is probably the most self-conscious accounting of Odisha as a category as this text served as the first two volumes of his monumental Statistical Survey and the Survey of India. In the preface of the piece, he claimed that this account of Odisha was to “exhibit my conception of a statistical and general account of an Indian province.”Footnote ¹⁵ As an exemplary account of an Indian province, Hunter’s history was to provide adequate information about the region for purposes of administration and travel. In his preface, he acknowledges that the nature of British interaction with India had changed by the 1870s and a new account of India and its provinces had to be framed that could respond to the new needs of the British visitors to the inner reaches of the country.Footnote ¹⁶

In writing his new sort of regional history, Hunter sought to cater to the needs of the emergent British colonial official who had to engage with new regions of India every four years. His book was also provoked by the end of the East India Company monopoly over Indian trade. Hunter wrote in his preface that with the end of company monopoly more English capital would be flowing in to fund Indian industry. Using the example of the tea industry in Assam, Hunter warned against the hasty application of capital to India “without sufficient knowledge being accessible to ensure its safe and intelligent application.”Footnote ¹⁷ The book was meant to serve as an introduction to Odisha for the uninformed British investor. Consequently, the book had to serve as a history of Odisha that would not “trouble the reader” with “confused dynastic changes.”Footnote ¹⁸ Rather by dispensing with “the plots and scenic effects of history,” Hunter’s history would introduce the reader to the “essential” features of Odia society and land.Footnote ¹⁹

The volumes consist of detailed accounts of various aspects of social, political, and fiscal life in Odisha that served to illustrate his key arguments about the nature of Odisha as a space and the Odia people. Overarching these descriptions were two central arguments about the region – that the history of Odisha was driven by religion above all other factors and that despite what appeared to be a fairly long tradition of Hindu social customs, Odisha was still the site of primitive “land making” – that in Odisha history is still unfolding.

For Hunter, religion was a primary vector in Indian history. The case of Odisha was a particular example of this primacy. In his preface, Hunter apologizes to his reader for giving “to frequent prominence to the religious side of Odisha history” and claims that he has done so “from a firm belief that it forms the key to the right understanding of the people.”Footnote ²⁰ He argued that religion rather than ethnicity drove revolutionary changes in the history of Odisha as “each line of new kings represents a new era of worship and of spiritual belief.” Hunter’s focus on religion comes from an impulse towards writing a people’s history of Odisha rather than tracking the high politics of the Odia past. This was no nationalist history that recounted ancient glories to instill communal pride. Rather, as this history was to inform the colonial official and the British capitalist with proper knowledge about the people and the land. A history of popular belief and an exploration of the history of state practices framed by religious policies allowed Hunter to have a better sense of how the modern Odia populace have come to take its contemporary shape. In a chapter entitled “The Essentials of History,” Hunter suggested that the central arguments of the book was to show the impact of larger political changes on human existence and beliefs and how they brought upon shift:

Therefore, by writing his detailed history of Odia religious and political past, Hunter hoped to draw out how the community of Odia-speaking people came to be constituted of “diverse ethnical elements.” This treatment of the Odia past was driven by a need to provide a distilled understanding of the essential nature of the Odia population while being challenged by the apparent diversity of the Odia population. By constructing a common history of the adivasi- and Odia-speaking communities, Hunter sought to produce a category of “Odia” people out of a diversity that was not necessarily amenable to this unification. Therefore, the first rationalist argument about a common history of the people of Odisha was borne out of Hunter’s need to populate the modern category of “Odia people” and to render this knowledge useful for imperial governance and the spread of colonial capital into the as yet untouched Odisha. The need to produce neat regional categories what was at the foundation of Hunter’s efforts was what forced the first move towards effacing difference among the population of the Odisha division. The populist impulses of his narrative, which at first glance would appeal to the modern social historian, were not necessarily populist but imperialist. Therefore, our project should not simply be about bringing the adivasi communities into the history of Odisha or India as has been attempted in the history of women or the working classes. Rather, it is more crucial to acknowledge that the process of incorporation of the adivasi into the history of Odisha has always been implicated in the operations of imperial and subsequently nationalist power.

This argument emerges from a curious juxtaposition of two parallel histories of Odisha in Hunter’s text: one, the unprepossessing history of the upper-caste Odia population and, two, the history of the primeval tribal population caught in an equally primeval landscape:

In another curious turn, immediately after expressing his wonder at the untimely primeval antics of nature in Odisha, he mentioned the inhabitants of Odisha in archaeological terms – as organic remains – as sediments of times past, present only to illustrate their own impotence.

By mentioning the endless strata of races, dynasties, and creeds, Hunter acknowledges the diversity of the Odia people. However, through the use of the term “strata,” he imposed a civilizational and temporal hierarchy within the various “races” in Odisha with the Bengalis as the topmost alluvial layer. However, his subsequent emphasis on the aboriginal peoples to the exclusion of all other “races” and “creeds” seems to justify his initial claim about the lack of cultural achievement in Odisha. Through the use of metaphor of museums and archaeological soil sediments, Hunter portrayed the people of Odisha as a class of people stuck in the past. He saw the aboriginal inhabitants of Odisha as the remnants of an earlier stage of human development that has long since disappeared in Europe.

This juxtaposition of races between the Odias of the Odisha plains and the adivasis of the hilly regions of Odisha is echoed in early reports by administrators writing back to the central government as they came to encounter the newly acquired province in 1803.Footnote ²⁴ When the British acquired most of the Odia-speaking areas they came to take on existing spatial divisions as their framework for understanding their new acquisition. The fertile coastal belt of present-day Odisha was called Mughalbandi as it used to be Mughal crown land. Areas covering the Odisha Eastern Ghats were called Garjat and consisted of the princely states. Early accounts of Odisha underlined the differences between the Mughalbandi and the Garjat by drawing attention to contrast between the relatively “civilized” and affluent population of the Mughalbandi and the “uncivilized,” poverty–stricken, and politically oppressed adivasi population of the Garjat.Footnote ²⁵

Accounts of the Mughalbandi areas were dominated by narratives of Puri and its centrality in the revenue and political structures in Odisha.Footnote ²⁶ Hunter’s vision of Odisha as a land driven by religious changes drew from this colonial preoccupation with Puri. In both administrative and missionary circles, Puri came to serve as an exemplary heterotopia of “native idolatrous fanaticism.” As the colonial government came to be more and more embroiled in the administration of massive temple complexes, the annual influx of pilgrims into Odisha from other parts of India and the institution of pilgrim taxes, they came to be faced with a growing anxiety in England and among colonial officials about how this fanaticism could mark an otherwise secular colonial state.Footnote ²⁷ Within missionary discourse both in India and in England, the annual Rath Yatra came to serve as an exemplar of unbridled, irrational, and fatal religious fanaticism in India.Footnote ²⁸ Finally, the institutional preoccupation with the religious nature of Odisha also drew from the incipient colonial state’s engagement with a very complex political and revenue structure that was grounded in Puri through unique networks of ritual, fiscal, and symbolic power that bound together the princely states with the temple establishment.

In colonial accounts, Puri came to serve as what Michel Foucault has termed a colonial heterotopia of compensation. Even as these accounts were products of the everyday experience of rule, they also served to justify colonial rule in Odisha. As Odisha came to be defined as a religious land consisting of the fanatically religious coastal belt or the Mughalbandhi and the civilizationally backward and politically oppressed Garjat, the civilizational mission of British imperialism came to be clarified into a two-part program of disciplining Jagannath-centered Hinduism in the coastal areas and modernizing the Garjat areas. As a tourist guide book on Odisha published in 1900 argues that two kinds of people would find Odisha of particular interest – anyone interested in popular Hinduism and ethnographers interested in studying primitive tribes.Footnote ²⁹

Divine Native Land

The centrality of Puri and the Jagannath cult in the rhetoric of Odia linguistic politics has long been established.Footnote ³⁰ By the late nineteenth century, Odia poets had begun depicting Utkal or Odisha as a region that was “eternally victorious in the field of religion,” as it was able to accommodate multiple streams of Hindu faith.Footnote ³¹ Where the colonial accounts saw Odia religiosity as an instance of fanaticism, Odia nationalist readings of the status of religion are much more positive – it serves as marker of identity and an essential nationalist myth. This nationalist myth performed a number of political labors. It served as an instance of historical pride in Odia traditions and as well as a means to illustrate how Odisha was a microcosmic version of the larger Indian nation.

At the end of Chapter 3, I discussed how the movement for a separate province of Odisha had to base their territorial arguments on the assumption that colonial Odisha was a product of artificial boundaries. According to such claims, colonial Odisha was artificial Odisha. Leaders argued that the colonial state needed to reform boundaries to bring together the area that was natural Odisha. One of the most sustained efforts to define and justify the existence of natural Odisha was written in 1919 by Niranajan Pattnaik and Chakradhar Pradhan in a book entitled The Oriya Movement: Being a Demand for a United Orissa.Footnote ³² Written with the explicit purpose of making the case for Odisha for the colonial government, this book drew on the reigning definitions of Odia community that were being put forward in the Odia public sphere of the time. The authors argued that, in spite of apparent differences among people within the projected province (which included districts from the Madras Presidency, the Bengal Presidency and the Central Provinces), they shared “social manners and customs peculiar to themselves.”Footnote ³³ Unsurprisingly, the foundation for this claim came from Hunter’s discussion of the Odia character. Writing almost fifty years after Hunter had penned his history, Pattnaik and Pradhan argued that:

This description of the Odia character accounted for the common identity of the Odia people despite the administrative divisions among them. However, in taking on Hunter’s account of the fundamentally religious nature of the Odia-speaking people, the authors also had to acknowledge Hunter’s ascriptions of abject, superstitious natures to the Odia people. As per Hunter’s description, popular memory of the Odia past is populated by shifts in religious beliefs of the community rather than political revolutions. This makes the Odia community seem like an apolitical and insular lot. While this insularity and apathy to political movements could curry favor with the colonial demands in the service of the movement for the formation of a separate province of Odisha, it also meant that the claim to a separate province was based on the separation between the Odia community and the people of the rest of India. Furthermore, in the subsequent discussion, the authors argued that the Odia people were different from the neighboring Telegu-speaking people because the Odias were Vaishnav and the Telegus were Shaivas.Footnote ³⁵ This proposition assumes that all the people being claimed as Odia were Hindu and Vaisnav. It assumes that the adivasi communities of Odisha who constituted almost a fourth of this population were also part of this Hindu/Vaishnav faith community.

To counter this problem of insularity and the internal difference within the Odia community, the authors sought to focus on the religious landscape of Odisha:

This focus on the sacred geography of Odisha allowed the authors to situate the province within the broader fabric of the Indian national community without undermining the distinctiveness of the Odia community. The experience of “vivisection” was portrayed as a positive force that trained Odias in espousing a “living fundamental sense of Unity,” which could encompass religious and caste difference within the community, and serve as the foundation for a much stronger claim for separate statehood.

This narrative of punya bhumi and Odia religious exceptionalism was not novel in the 1910s and 20s. Narratives centering Odia religiosity had featured in Odia poetry of the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, poets such as Radhanath Rai and Phakirmohan Senapati wrote about the geography of the province and imbued their descriptions with religious motifs and ascriptions. In his travelogue Utkal Bhramanam, Rai described Odisha as a “holy land” and a “gateway to heaven.”Footnote ³⁷ For Rai, the holiness was an essential feature of the land of Odisha.Footnote ³⁸ A succinct example of such poetry is Madhusudan Rao’s Utkal Sangeet.

Madhusudan Rao, often celebrated as one of the founders of modern Odia literature, wrote a number of poems that described Odisha or Utkal as a land of religious syncretism. The poem exhorts the readers to remember “mother Utkal” and her glories. The reason for this remembering is to push Odias to work towards the regeneration of the impoverished state of Odisha. While this narrative arc is a rather common nationalist trope, the means through which Rao makes his case is quite inspired. The poem begins with an attempt to make the abstract notion of the region real to the readership. Unlike other such poems that were published later, this concretization of the abstract notion of Odisha is not done through a description of the Odia landscape.Footnote ³⁹ In the absence of an actual province, which covered the areas that Rao would have liked to be included in the province of Odisha, Rao had to resort to a different way to make Odisha real to his readership. Therefore, the first section of the poem had a description of Odisha that provided a religious narrative about the land. Odisha is described as a land “victorious in the field of religion.” Rao lists all the different religious sects that congregate in Odisha and describes how this congregation is sanctified during the annual pilgrimage to Puri. This reference to Puri is part of a nationalist narrative trope that recurs in definitions of the Odia community for the next sixty years. Rao’s discussion of Odia dharma allows him to enter into a more urgent discussion about the underdeveloped state of the Odia people and their economic deprivation. Towards the end of the poem, Rao inverts the discussion of dharma in to a discussion of karma or labor in the interests of mother Utkal. By beginning with the centrality of dharma to the imagination of mother Utkal and ending the need for karma for the development of mother Utkal, Rao is arguing that in this moment, the importance given to religion needs to be applied to labor for the province of Odisha.

Gopabandhu Das’ famous 1920 speech, which insisted that the Odia community be defined in terms of a shared sacred land rather than a shared language, needs to be read within the context of this conflation of religion and Odia geography during the late nineteenth century. Das argued that the instance of the annual pilgrimage to Puri illustrated the unity of the Odia-speaking people as all differences of religion, caste, language, and regional belonging fell away in the act of pilgrimage. The pilgrimage of Puri and inclusion of adivasis in the religious praxis of Jaganath cult illustrated the ethic of “expansive humanism” of the Odia people. This expansive humanism both indexed the particularity of the “Odia” people and allowed them to transcend their particular regional identity and embrace the broader national community.

Das’ reference to Puri works for him on two registers: Puri as a regional heterotopia that incites the Odia people to buy into an ethic of inclusive humanism that will transcend social differences and Puri as a national heterotopia in which pilgrimage to Puri allows the individual visitors to transcend national differences in general. In his formulation, Puri becomes a local space where one’s place in the nation could be affirmed. It worked both as an ideological beacon as well as an actual space of national pilgrimage. Das’ cosmopolitanism is hard to pin down. While it can be said that it seems to pivot on liberal transcendence of particular identities, it is not based on a liberal critique of actual social difference within the Odia community. The absolute social difference between the Odias and the adivasis is never disavowed. While the colonial rhetoric on Odisha underlined fanatic religiosity as well as a civilizational paradox of the coexistence of classical Hinduism with “primitive” adivasis, Das’ formulation overturns both these claims into an exemplary social praxis that should be emulated by the rest of India. The underlying assumptions about Odia exceptionalism, however, are carried over from the colonial discourse on Odisha.

Eternal Holy Land: Gandhi’s Odisha

Perhaps it could be possible to label Das’ cosmopolitanism as a Gandhian cosmopolitanism that was based on a commitment to absolute difference and a commitment to the local. Das’ cosmopolitanism is possible not only because of the inclusive ideological imperative of the cult of Jaganath that could be exported out into the Indian nation but also because of the actual place of Puri, which serves as a transformative space in which all distinctions are lost – a place to be travelled to for this transformation. A place of pilgrimage.

In Gandhi’s writings on Odisha and Puri, this transformative possibility of Puri recurs.

For instance, in an article in Indian Opinion written in 1903 where he argued for a better sense of community among Indians in South Africa, Gandhi noted:

We know from Gandhi’s other writing not to confuse this argument for a more cosmopolitan political ethic with a Nehruvian argument for denial of particular identities. But then, what work does “we are not, and ought not to be” doing in this claim. I would argue that there the “ought not to be” emerges from the diasporic status of the South African Indians. If South Africa has to be considered a “great Puri,” then travel to South Africa effaces difference amongst the Indians. By corollary then, Puri, in Gandhi’s reading, can transform its visitors precisely because they visit. In some ways, it can be read as a philosopher’s stone of equality. The act of pilgrimage to Puri is transformative. It is a local place that enables Indian cosmopolitanism.

While it is clear that Puri served as an idealized cosmopolitan space in Gandhi’s thought, other readings of Puri as well as Odisha interrupt this reading of the place. Most prominent of these is the question of poverty and famine in Odisha. Many of Gandhi’s visits to Odisha coincided with some of the worst famines of the twentieth century. Hence, the recurring reference to the inescapable “shadow of Odisha” that “haunts” him points us to a different reading of the exemplary status of Odisha and its place in the Indian nation. In many of his references to Odisha, Gandhi comments on how the poverty in Odisha is emblematic of Indian poverty in general even as it remains the most spectacular form of this poverty, with his references to starving bodies, orphans and destitution. In his requests for financial support for the Odisha public, Gandhi’s use of the term daridranarayan points to his alternative reading of the relationship between Odisha and India. It has been argued that Gandhi’s understanding of the nation pivoted on a political praxis of seva to the daridranarayan, as Ajay Skaria has argued, “through the weaving of Khadi, a darshan of the daridranarayan was instituted as constitutive of the Gandhian nation.”Footnote ⁴¹ In his definition of the darshan of God, Gandhi suggests that such a darshan is possible only when we look into the hearts of the people: “The darshan of God is fraught with difficulties. He dwells in the hearts of thirty crores of people. If you wish a glimpse of him there then you should merge yourself with their hearts. These thirty crores include all the skeletons of Odisha, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, men, and women.”Footnote ⁴² This juxtaposition of the “skeletons of Odisha,” with other groups that are defined on entirely different registers, suggests the centrality of a certain reading of poverty and its locus in Odisha to the Gandhian logic of the nation.

Conclusion

I would like to conclude with two issues that this chapter incites. First, what happened to the inclusive promise of Puri? As the events of the 1930s with the failure of Gandhi’s temple entry program in Puri suggests the inclusive ability of the Jaganath cult had some real limits.Footnote ⁴³ The question of dalit temple entry in Puri continues to be a point of contention even today. Furthermore, even within Odia definitions of Odisha, while elite claims for the horizontal brother hood of the Jaganath cult enabled them to claim adivasi areas as part of the new province of Odisha, critiques of the provincial state’s treatment of the adivasis in the past sixty years suggests that such claims could just be read as the basis for elite hegemony in Odisha.

Second, what does this discussion reveal regarding the early twentieth-century ideas about national cosmopolitanism in India? Puri as a site of pilgrimage enabled the imagination of a nation of multiregional people who were transformed into national subjects on their arrival in Puri. The subsequent linguistic organization of the India where regional linguistic interests were avowed allowed the imagination of Puri as a shared religious space that undoes regional differences to endure. However, what were unable to endure were the utopian claims of Gopabandhu Das, Madhusudan Rao, and Gandhi that Puri as well as Odisha was a space in which caste Hindus, Muslims, and adivasis were equal. While we can argue that this was due to the fact the claims themselves were fallacious at their inception, perhaps it should also be noted that the conduct of the postcolonial Odia regional state also contributed to the failure of Puri’s inclusive promise. The endurance of a multiregional/multilingual notion of Indian cosmopolitanism at the expense of the figure of the adivasi does demand that we investigate the roots of this endurance and its price more carefully. The next two chapters of this book attend to this investigation of how the figure of the Adivasi was incorporated into the Odia community and, subsequently, into the Indian community during the reorganization of Indian provinces.