Cuttack Riots Through 'Made in Cuttack' Eyes

I was born in Cuttack. I grew up there, during the 1960s-1970s until I finished my studies and took up my first teaching job at Utkal University and Ravenshaw College, my alma mater. Home-born, home-bred, home-spun, I can claim to be Made in Cuttack.

Cuttack taught me multiple truths about life and living – enlightened thoughts, profane beliefs, risqués and hypes, even provocations past and present – as I came of age, and thereafter as a fly-on-the-wall observer on my periodic visits. There are many selves speaking here: my young self, my adult self, and inevitably my old self with its senior moments.

I left Cuttack as the 1970s folded. But I visited Cuttack every year, not as an outsider but as an insider, walking the familiar turf, smelling the aroma of life, burnishing my memories. Living elsewhere, my affection for it didn’t dim. It never felt remote. It remained my home – where I split my time, as if the other cities I lived in were mere bivouacs and rites of passage.

The recent Cuttack riots gutted me. My mind quickly circled back to my growing-up days when we didn’t see or learn to distinguish between an Altaf and Christopher and a Jagannath. All we knew was Holi was a fun-filled festival when everyone joined in. Christmas was when eating cake with friends was commonplace. Eid was, invited or uninvited, we demanded biryani and mutton chops from our Muslim friends. Dussehra was the time to flock to listen to Oriya (now Odia) singing maestros like Akshay Mohanty or Sikander Alam or Pranab Patnaik on street corners. Hindu-Muslim bhaichara was the trope. We rejoiced.

Truth be told, this was only epidermal. Beneath the surface quiet hummed the majoritarian’s demur of other religions that showed up in few communal flare-ups post-partition: the first provoked by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Rourkela (1964) that killed 72 people; then in Cuttack (1968) following a Supreme Court judgment allowing processions to pass before a mosque. But the Cuttack riot was controlled without fatalities, although Muslim properties were damaged. “The central RSS leadership declared Orissa as a separate prant (province) in 1970,” writes Pralay Kanungo, and Cuttack became “an important centre of Hindutva politics.” In 1992, the Ramjanambhoomi agitation triggered riots in Cuttack, but chief minister Biju Patnaik swiftly quelled them.

Things changed, society morphed. On my periodic visits home, I found temples sprouting on public land. So glaring that the Orissa high court ordered their demolition. The same orthodoxy that Mahatma Gandhi encountered during his attempts to visit Puri’s Jagannath Mandir with his Dalit and Muslim associates in 1921, 1925, 1934 and 1938, and refused temple entry, holding prayer meetings outside its perimeter and challenging caste-based entry restrictions, led to Dalit access by 1948, aligning with India’s constitutional abolition of untouchability.

Also read: Why Cuttack, a '1000-Year-Old' Symbol of Amity, Saw Communal Violence Last Weekend

Non-Hindu entry remains prohibited because of past desecrations and traditional rituals. With no live streaming yet available for darshan, non-Hindus can only see their Lord during Rath Yatra – no fault of the Lord, which doubtless, if He were biological, wouldn’t impose such orthodox asinine embargoes. The pronouncement of “Sankaracharya’s – Puri’s glorious non-entity – that since the Harijans are the most loved by God, they need not go into the temples; instead, God himself will come to them” (The Illustrated Weekly of India, 24 July 1988) not only vitiated the outlook in secular India but also helped cement the fossilised mindset of traditionalists and pujakas (priests).

For all its much-vaunted religious punditry, few people today know that the sacred Jagannath Temple was saved from British takeover, not by co-religionists but by a Christian in the 1880s. Hereby hangs a tale. People swore undying loyalty to the King, considered Thakura-Raja (God-King). Raja Dibyasingha Dev’s defiance of LG Richard Temple, prompted the smarting British to imprison Dibyasingha on a trumped-up charge, overnight deport him to Andaman and divest him of superintending Jagannath Temple.

But the British hadn’t reckoned with Dibyasingha’s mother, Suryamani Pattamahadei’s pluck. Suryamani, acting as legal guardian, quickly anointed Dibyasingha’s five-year-old son, Mukunda Dev, as Puri Raja and Superintendent of Jagannath Temple. The Bengal government didn’t accept this; the Treasury stopped the King’s annuity. Queen-mother’s petitions to the local and Bengal governments went unanswered. A legal suit was filed and won by the local government to appoint a Receiver and remove the Raja from charge of the temple. Despairing, Suryamani requested Madhusudan Das, the first Oriya lawyer of a few years vintage, to file the case in the Calcutta high court.

Madhusudan fought pro bono and consulted senior barristers in Calcutta. Barrister Woodruff thought it wasn’t sustainable – the government’s temple take-over wasn’t illegal, notwithstanding British assurances not to, sticking to law’s fundamental tenet.

Madhusudan quipped, “You mean the Christian government pays temple servants?”

Woodruff replied insolently, “You’re a lunatic.”

Most advocates would have crumpled. But Madhusudan wasn’t most advocates. Even with dark narratives swirling around his head, it didn’t feel right. He prepared a brief. From discussions with Woodruff and others, he sensed the matter wasn’t just the law. Woodruff’s argument was irrefutable – no legal bar. Moving forward, he realised it would be a heavy lift to change mindsets. Without external pressure, he sensed the appeal would flounder. All hands on deck, he battened down the hatchet and ingeniously amped his journalistic skills to provide a critical backdrop to the temple’s sanctity. Two letters rich in facts and analysis published in Utkal Dipika he wrote pseudonymously as ‘Lunatic’ exposed British fraud.

A man pulls his damaged auto-rickshaw in the aftermath of the violent clashes at Dargha Bazar area in Cuttack, Odisha on October 7, 2025. Photo: PTI

In the first letter, machinations to deprive the King of his throne were symbolically represented through a dream. The second spoke about baseless allegations against the King. There was no evidence in the government’s affidavit vindicating temple mismanagement. The letters tore into the affidavit conveying people’s deep disappointment in depriving the King of temple management.

Although relevant, there was no legal scope to present these historical evidences before the high court. Publishing them in English in a newspaper, Madhusudan drew the attention of judges and top officials, also influencing the Statesman, Englishmen’s favourite newspaper.

The barristers argued the case, but Madhusudan drove it from behind. Calcutta high court struck down the government order. The government sought mutual settlement. Utkal Dipika wrote: “Madhusudan Das, Commissioner Metcalfe, and Secretary of Bengal Nolan at whose behest the case was filed, met and agreed for a settlement… This was possible due to Madhusudan’s endless efforts, brilliance and care... invoking the adage – ‘Call Madhusudan (Legendary Hindu God) in time of crises!’ – true in letter and spirit.” Winning the century’s most sensational and touchstone case, Christian Madhusudan was deified by all Hindus. But that’s another story, and for another day.

It often puzzles me why despite such ennobling events, Cuttack remains the same – religious, calcified, traditional beliefs re-dressed in modern clothing. Oriya tracts of 19th-century sought to divvy Hindus and Muslims. The myth of Kalapahara – dominant in coastal Orissa – about a Brahmin ‘tricked’ into marrying a Muslim princess, changing religion, and destroying temples, is relevant. “Of the miracles of Kalapahara, one was this,” writes Biswamoy Pati in his book Situating Social History: Orissa (1800-1937), “wherever… the sound of his drum reached, the hands and feet, the ears and noses of the idols worshipped by the Hindus, fell off their stone figures, so that even new stone-idols, with hands and feet broken, and noses and ears cut-off, are lying at several places in that country.”

In early 20th-century, the importance attached to cows struck a discordant note. Go Mahatmya (Cow’s Importance), a tract distributed gratis, focused on businessmen trading in hides, and using outcasts to cruelly poison and kill cows for their skin. Pati draws attention to the importance attached by the Oriya press in 1920 to shifting of a Cuttack beef stall as a nuanced example of invoking religious differences, suggesting communal polarisation and shaping popular memory. Invoking Kalapahara even today for teensy damages to temples brought on by natural decay is “a metaphor that illustrates deeper processes which had their roots in the 19th-century.” How much of this overhang still remains is hard to measure; they are hypodermal, evading surface reality.

Syncretic religion has been a part of Orissa’s popular culture: from Jagannath to pirs (scattered across Cuttack City) and Salabeg (Muslim saint-poet and Jagannath’s ardent devotee) to shared social, religious and cultural practices. However Muslims’ image was press-ganged in late 19th-century. Several complex interactions, including post-1857 colonial policy, conditioned the shift in identity of ‘villains’ across time from ‘Maratha marauders’ to ‘Muslim invaders’.

We didn’t sense this growing up. Nor can I forget the Ekoisia celebrations of my newborn nephew. Jagannath Mahaprasad was standard fare. My mother tiptoed over to me, whispering if she’d get home food for my Muslim friend. The latter overheard, and matched Ma’s concern. ‘Mausi, you needn’t bother—Sudhansu and I will have Mahaprasad together from the same plate!’

Also read: Cuttack’s Tradition Is of Brotherhood – and Hindutva Cannot Erase it

John Beames, Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer, no-nonsense administrator and scholar, who spent nine years in Orissa (1869-78) including as Cuttack collector loved Cuttack and wrote glowingly about it in his Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian. Yet Beames was so struck by its ways that he wrote “Orissa is… the home of the most bigoted, Brahmin-ridden Hindus in all India.”

I think beyond and across – interrogating. If a savarna, or born into majoritarian religion, take time off to understand how your blindly beholden beliefs hurt; and reflect on who and where they pinch: How would you feel if you’re born on the other side of the caste/religious divide, and without your prenatal determination? A benign world, after all, is One Big Family Square of Humanity (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam – Hinduism’s primary liturgical language) where in the human concourse, everyone’s equal, seen as equal, treated as equal regardless of religious denomination, respecting, not merely tolerating other religions, as the Creator framed it to be.

So time to tamp down this culture of impunity rolling out inexorably at warp-speed, capturing imagery of “love jihad” and “bulldozer justice” to distort societal mores in New India’s double-engine Sarkar states. How much this succeeds is for the public at the University of Life to shape; it cannot be left to the “so-called educated” and gentrified “elites” who (mostly) today gulp WhatsApp University’s playbook of cacophonous regurgitations as God’s offerings and viral narratives. The trajectory of how these wrinkles eventually even out is hard to predict. 

On my last visit to Cuttack from mid-2024 to early-2025, I felt a tectonic shift panning out. I sensed aloneness even amid a rumbling gaggle of people – the Graham Staines brutal burning of 1999 loomed, as if it was a future foretold. Sometimes I shut down to better navigate the day. Often it doesn’t work that way. When you strike a Faustian bargain, trawling the past and looking into the future, you hope to gain a few small bits, and get by on a free pass. It’s like riding an illusion until it hits you hard, teases you aloud, and whispers it’s nothing but a hallucination.

Now, with riots gutting Cuttack, caught between my two selves, my mind lumbers, toggling one or the other, but to no avail, pinching myself and wondering surreally: Was this the Cuttack I grew up in?

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