ଓଡ଼ିଶୀ

Odissi is named after Odisha (formerly Orissa), the eastern Indian state on the Bay of Bengal. The dance form traces its lineage to the devadasi tradition — temple dancers who performed as devotional service to the deity Jagannath. Inscriptions at the Brahmeshvara temple in Bhubaneswar, dated to the eleventh century, describe dance performances. The sculptures at the Konark Sun Temple, built around 1250 CE by King Narasimhadeva I, depict dancers in positions that correspond exactly to modern Odissi choreography. The stone recorded what memory might have lost.

The Mughal conquest of Odisha in 1568 disrupted the temple tradition. Islamic rulers prohibited dance in Hindu temples. The devadasis were displaced. The dance migrated from temples to courts, and a parallel tradition of male dancers called gotipuas — boys dressed as girls — preserved the movement vocabulary. When the British arrived, they imposed the Anti-Nautch movement of the late 1800s, which classified temple dancing as prostitution and banned it entirely. Odissi was officially dead.

The reconstruction began in the 1940s and 1950s. Kelucharan Mohapatra, a musician and dancer, studied the Konark sculptures, consulted surviving gotipua dancers, and analyzed the Abhinaya Chandrika, a fifteenth-century Odia text on dance. He and a small group of scholars literally rebuilt the dance from archaeological and textual evidence. The Indian government recognized Odissi as a classical form in 1964. A tradition that had been banned by two empires was rebuilt from stone, text, and the memory of old men.

Odissi is characterized by the tribhanga (three bends) — the body deflects at the head, torso, and hip, creating an S-curve that mirrors the Konark sculptures. The movement is fluid, grounded, and sculptural. Every pose has a counterpart carved in sandstone eight hundred years ago. The dance and the temple confirm each other.