Kalinga Before Ashoka (7th BCE - 3rd BCE)

AUTHOR Mini Menon
PUBLISHED 12 January 2020
BOOKMARK

There is a story that the Sri Lankans hold dear. It goes back to somewhere around the 6th BCE when a banished prince, the grandson of a princess of Kalinga (who had eloped with a lion), made his way to the island deep south with a band of 700 men. He defeated the local inhabitants the yakkhas and went on to rule Sri Lanka as King Vijaya. By now, he had taken the title of his father and grandfather (the lion) and that is how his people came to be known as the Sinhalese. This story is mentioned in the Buddhist text Mahavamsa and the earlier Deepavamsa which chronicle the history of the people of Sri Lanka. They were both written somewhere between the 3rd and 5th CE - roughly 900 years later. The earliest reference to Kalinga in Indian texts comes from the Puranas where Bali the king of the Anavas is said to have divided his kingdom among his five sons Anga, Vanga, Kalinga, Pundra and Sushma. The splintered kingdom came to be named after the sons. Anga’s capital was Malini close to present-day Bhagalpur and included the region of Munger. Vanga was further east corresponding to the present day Dacca and Chittagong areas, Pundra was northern Bengal, Sushma comprised of the area of Burdwan in present-day West Bengal and Kalinga - included coastal Odisha and the northern part of present-day Andhra. The Mahabharata too mentions Kalinga. The Kaurava Prince Duryodhana’s wife Bhanumathi is said to have been a princess of Kalinga. Interestingly, there is no reference to Kalinga in the period of the 16 Mahajanapadas around 800-600 BCE. But legends and myths aside, every person who has read Indian history would be familiar with Kalinga, the kingdom covering most of present-day Odisha - thanks to one of the most famous wars in Indian history that was fought over it - the great War of Kalinga, which we are told transformed the ambitious and cruel Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, to a pious Dhamma (Dharma) preaching beacon of peace. But why was Kalinga such a coveted prize for Ashoka? And how did this region, on the eastern edge of peninsular India, manage to put up such a big fight? While literary records are silent on these questions, today, thanks to decades of painstaking excavations by teams of archaeologists, across the broad expanse of ancient Kalinga, stretching in its prime from Tamralipti in present-day West Bengal, to Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh, we are getting a clearer picture. The Geography of Kalinga Tucked away, with a cover of thick forests around it and a network of rivers and rivulets draining into the Bay of Bengal, the area of present-day coastal Odisha was ideal for habitation and settlement. The rich alluvial soil allowed communities to thrive and there are many sites here dating back to the early neolithic period. Further inland, the rich mineral deposits (in the North and West) helped communities take the leap as chalcolithic cultures evolved and eventually the use of iron became prolific. While there is evidence of numerous mesolithic and neolithic sites across the state, recent archaeological excavations give us a sense of how early agricultural settlers evolved with the use of copper in the chalcolithic (copper age) period. The evidence of chalcolithic cultures in Odisha became well known after the excavation of Golbai in coastal Odisha. It was further strengthened in 2013 when archaeologists found the remains of an adult human being who might have lived around 4,000 years ago in the Banga village near Harirajpur, around 15km from Bhubaneswar. What was interesting is that the site yielded a lot of tell-tale signs of a chalcolithic site - pottery sherds, stone artefacts, animal bones, copper fragments and living areas indicative of ancient habitation. The copper ornaments on the skeleton also indicated that the skeleton belonged to someone of local importance, probably a chieftain. This discovery made at Banga as well as other sites showed the evolution of cultures in Odisha as It threw light on the emergence of early farming communities, their settlements and exploitation of natural resources. Professor of Anthropology at the Utkal University Kishor Kumar Basa who was part of the team that studied the site along with Archaeologist R.K. Mohanty, from the Deccan College, believes that sites like this provide a background to the emergence of urban settlements. Besides, they indicate the continuous evolution of communities in the area. In fact, he says that many of these sites simply evolved into urban settlements and the early urbanisation of Odisha has to be looked at in context of sub-regional specificities - the rich alluvial soil of the coast, the abundance of minerals in the north and the large supply of semi-precious stones in the south. It is interesting to note that even toda ...