Oṛiya literature begins with Upendro Bhanj, who was a brother of the Raja of Gumsar, a petty hill-state in the south of Orissa, which even to the present day is celebrated as the home of the purest form of the language. This voluminous poet composed a great number of religious works, many of which are still highly esteemed. His date is not exactly known, but he is supposed to have lived about three hundred years ago. I have a list of thirty of his productions, two of which are rhyming dictionaries, the Śabdamâlâ and Gîtâbhidâno; the rest are episodes from the ancient Pauranic legends, erotic poems, and panegyrics on various gods. They are stated to be generally disfigured by gross indecency and childish quibblings about words, endless repetitions, and all sorts of far-fetched rhetorical puzzles. Dînkrishno Dâs, a poet of the same age, is the author of the Rasakalloḷa, the most celebrated poem in the language; the versification of which is its chief merit, being fluent and graceful; the subject-matter, however, is obscene, and contains very little that is new or original. There are also numerous paraphrases of well-known Sanskrit works, such as the Bhagavadgita, Ramayana, Padma Purana, and Lachhmi Purana.
A few lines are given from Dinkrishno Dâs's popular poem, the Rasakalloḷa, as a specimen of his style :—
कृष्ण कथारे जार स्नेह नाहिं ।
काळ संघातकु देखइ सेहि ।
काळ दण्डरे से घात होइब ।
कष्ट संघातकु सेहि पाइब ।
कहइ कृष्ण कृष्णकुं कथा ॥
केबेहिं होइब नाहिं अन्यथा ॥ ३४ ॥
acknowledge my obligations to the article on Bengali Literature in the Calcutta Review for April, 1871.
