The Dharmapada Tradition Revisited

The traditional account of Dharmapada represents the identity consciousness of the Oriyas from the middle of the nineteenth century to the first phase of the twentieth century by repudiating the charge that the Oriya people could not make or complete the stupendous Konarka temple and that they did not possess such masterly skill. When the past is not properly seen, and so denied, in the present, traditional accounts help in articulating the past. The traditional account of Dharmapada is a significant example of the connection between the distant and hard-to-believe past and the present. The tradition from the 1930s onwards asserted the social and cultural identity of the Oriyas. It was appropriated from a different context, the Samba Purana, and had many phases of construction. The Dharmapada tradition forms a significant part of the common artistic tradition of South India (which has been presented in this article in the contexts of the temples of Belur and Simhachalam). No doubt the major aim of the formation of this account in the beginning was to assert the fact of completion of the stupendous temple of Konarka by the artisans of Orissa. However, from the nationalist phase of the 1920s, it was reconstructed to mobilize the young men and women of Orissa. Young, self-sacrificing Oriya men and women were needed for the new Orissa-in-the-making, and the Dharmapada tradition of this phase accordingly highlighted the spirit of self-sacrifice. The efforts of the Oriya nationalists to inspire the Oriya youth in the first two decades of the twentieth century found an interesting finishing point in the Dharmapada tradition, which is now accepted as an unmistakable marker of Oriya identity, just like the Jagannatha cult.