RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND MILITARY FEUDALISMas an independent Hindu kingdom was concerned. The payment of tribute
to the sultan was soon stopped. But the Ganga dynasty of Orissa had lost
its glamour in the conflict and visibly declined in subsequent years. Finally,
at the death of the last king of that dynasty, Bhanudeva IV, the grandson of
an officer (nayaka), Kapilendra, seized the throne and founded the
Suryavamsha dynasty in 1435. Kapilendra had to fight for some years
against the followers of the dynasty which he had replaced: he abolished
the salt tax in order to gain popular support. In his inscriptions in various
temples he threatened his adversaries with dire consequences and the
confiscation of their property. After overcoming these initial difficulties,
however, Kapilendra soon became the greatest Hindu ruler of his day,
extending his realm all the way into Bengal in the north and, temporarily,
to the mouth of the Kaveri in the south.
Kapilendra’s successors could not defend such an enormous realm and
Orissa soon lost most of the territories in the south to Vijayanagar and the
Bahmani sultanate. Kapilendra’s sons waged a war of succession from
which Purushottama (1467–97) emerged victorious. He was able to
recover at least all the territory down to the Krishna-Godaveri delta and
Orissa enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity, along with a flourishing
cultural life, in his long reign.
The third ruler of the Suryavamsha dynasty, Prataparudra, had to face
three mighty foes at once. In the north, Hussain Shah (1493–1518) had
founded a new dynasty in Bengal and had rapidly increased his power. In
the south the greatest ruler of the Vijayanagar empire, Krishnadeva Raya,
ascended the throne in 1509. Three years later the sultanate of Golconda
emerged as an independent sultanate which was a much more immediate
threat to Orissa than the more distant Bahmani sultanate had been. In
addition to these external enemies, internal conflict troubled the court of
the Gajapatis. The tributary Garhjat states in the mountainous hinterland
and rebellious generals in the core of the realm destabilised the rule of the
king. Finally, in 1568, the Afghan sultan of Bengal swooped down upon
Orissa just as Firoz Shah had done two centuries earlier. In the wake of this
attack the ferocious general, Kalapahar, marched towards Puri, desecrated
the temple and with the help of a Hindu detected the idols which had been
hidden, took them away and had them burned. This could have been the
end of both Gajapati rule and of the Jagannath cult. But a few decades
later a local princeling, Ramachandra, managed to restore the cult and to
win the support of Akbar, who needed a loyal Hindu ally against the sultan
of Golconda. The descendants of this Ramachandra still live on as rajas of
Puri, spending their time in the shadow of Jagannath as his royal servants.
The close relationship of the Gajapatis with the cult of Jagannath is a
peculiar feature of the history of Orissa. The idols worshipped in the great
temple in Puri are crude wooden logs, they are renewed from time to time
in a special ritual in which tribal priests still play an important role, thus