Kalinga

Kalinga is a historical region and ancient kingdom on the east coast of India, broadly the land between the Ganges and Godavari rivers, with its core in today's Odisha and northern Andhra Pradesh. It is best known for the bloody conquest by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka around 261 BCE, but for some two thousand years it remained a political idea, claimed by a long line of dynasties whose kings called themselves "Lord of Kalinga".

The name comes from a people, the Kalingas, who appear in the Mahabharata as one of several kindred tribes of eastern India, alongside the Angas, Vangas, Pundras and Suhmas. Its frontiers moved with the power of its rulers: at times it reached the Ganges in the north, the Amarkantak hills in the west and the Godavari, or even the Krishna, in the south, with the Bay of Bengal as its eastern edge. An early capital was Dantapura, near modern Srikakulam.

According to the later Hathigumpha inscription, a ruler called Nandaraja had once dug a canal there, which is usually taken to mean that the Nanda kings of Magadha held Kalinga for a time in the 4th century BCE. The Greek envoy Megasthenes, as quoted by Pliny, described the Calingae as living nearest the sea along the Ganges, with a royal city named Parthalis and a king guarded by 60,000 foot soldiers, 1,000 horsemen and 700 elephants.

Ashoka invaded Kalinga in the eighth year of his reign, probably in 261 BCE, in what became the Kalinga War. The decisive fighting is thought to have taken place near the Dhauli hills on the Daya River, after which the capital Tosali became the seat of a Mauryan province. One modern estimate puts the dead at nearly 250,000. Ashoka's own edicts record his remorse at the slaughter and his turn towards non-violence and "victory through dharma"; he fought no further wars of conquest. Kalinga broke away again in about 224 BCE, as the Maurya Empire weakened.

Under the Mahameghavahana dynasty, Kalinga rose again. Its most famous king, Kharavela, who reigned in the 2nd or 1st century BCE, styled himself supreme lord of Kalinga. His rock-cut Hathigumpha inscription lists, year by year, his military campaigns, public works, patronage of the arts and support for Jainism, while presenting him as respectful of all religions.

In the 4th century CE the region came under the suzerainty of the Gupta Empire. Afterwards a series of local houses, among them the Matharas, Pitrbhaktas, Vasishthas and Nalas, each took the title Kalingadhipati. The Shailodbhavas claimed lordship of "all Kalinga" in the 7th century; the Bhauma-Karas ruled from the 8th to the 10th century; and the Somavamshis, between the 9th and 12th centuries, added Kalinga to their lands.

From the 11th century the Eastern Ganga dynasty became the leading power, calling themselves lords of the three Kalingas. Anantavarman Chodaganga moved the capital from Kalinganagara to Cuttack in the 12th century and built the Jagannath Temple at Puri; in the 13th century Narasimhadeva I raided Bengal and raised the Sun Temple at Konark. In 1434–35 Kapilendra Deva overthrew the last Ganga king and founded the Gajapati Empire, which some contemporaries still called Kalinga. After 1540 power fragmented under the Bhoi dynasty and the many smaller states of the interior.

Kalinga's ports looked east. Tradition links Kalinga to Kaundinya, co-founder of Funan in Cambodia, and to early merchant settlements in lower Burma; the historian R. C. Majumdar argued that the Shailendra dynasty of Java may have come from Kalinga. The words Keling or Kling, derived from the name, are still used in parts of South-East Asia for people of Indian origin, now often with a pejorative sense.

Our maps draw a state labelled "Kalinga" in eastern India on the 1 BCE, 100, 200 and 300 maps, and again in 900 and 1000, years when the region was ruled by successive regional dynasties rather than a single continuous kingdom; the outlines are approximate. By 1100 our maps give the area to the Western Chalukya Empire.