Eastern Ganga dynasty

A very long dynasty

The Eastern Gangas appear in Kalinga at the end of the fifth century CE, ruling from Kaliṅganagara at Mukhalingam on the Vamsadhara river, and for their first six centuries they were one regional power among several — contending with the Śailodbhavas, the Bhauma-Karas and the Somavaṃśīs for the Odisha country, and with the Cholas to their south.

The transformation came under Anantavarman Coḍagaṅga, who ruled for seventy years from 1078. He united the coastal country from the Ganga to the Godāvarī, moved the centre of gravity north into the Mahanadi delta, and began the great temple at Puri.

Puri and Konark

The Jagannātha temple at Puri, begun under Coḍagaṅga and completed under his successors, became the pre-eminent shrine of Odisha and one of the four principal pilgrimage sites of the Hindu tradition. The cult of Jagannātha it houses — the three wooden images, renewed at intervals, and the annual chariot festival — is unlike anything else in Indian temple religion, and the Ganga kings' adoption of it made the deity, rather than the king, the nominal sovereign of the country.

Narasiṃhadeva I built the sun temple at Konark in the thirteenth century: a colossal shrine conceived as the sun god's chariot, with twelve pairs of carved stone wheels and teams of horses, set on the shore. The main tower collapsed at some point before the modern period and only the porch survives, but what remains is the high point of Odishan architecture.

The Gangas also fought off repeated invasions from the Delhi Sultanate and Bengal in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which is part of why Odisha's temple tradition survived intact when much of northern India's did not. The dynasty was replaced in 1434 by the Gajapatis under Kapilendra.