Before the Centenary Arrives - Odisha @ 2026

The new year has begun, but not with the urgency that usually accompanies beginnings. There are no sharp turns here, no sudden clarity. Only a sense of standing at a quiet edge—aware that something is forming, even if it has not yet learned how to appear.

ParibhaAsha enters 2026 in this in-between state.

There is work happening—reading, writing, conversations that stretch longer than planned, ideas that refuse to settle quickly. There is also an absence that is harder to explain: the absence of visible impact, of material proof, of things that can be easily pointed to. This absence is often misunderstood as inertia. It is not. It is the early condition of cultural work that resists spectacle.

Photo by Soubhagya Maharana

Every institution is built more than once. The version most people recognise is the public one—outputs, platforms, announcements, artefacts. But there is an earlier construction that rarely receives language. It happens quietly, through disagreement, hesitation, re-reading, and the discipline to delay conclusions. It is slow because it must be.

That is where we are.

Time, Measured Differently

In exactly ten years, Odisha will complete one hundred years as a political state. The date is already fixed in the calendar of the future. The centenary will arrive with commemorations, retrospectives, celebrations, and critiques. Institutions will prepare logos and slogans. Archives will be revisited. Narratives will be consolidated.

But culture does not experience time the way calendars do.

The languages spoken in this region are older than the state that now administers them. The rituals practised here have survived multiple political formations, some by adapting, some by receding into smaller circles, some by becoming unrecognisable to themselves. Many stories have passed through generations without ever being written down. Others were written, printed, forgotten, and are now being “rediscovered” in fragments.

When we speak of Odisha at one hundred, we are not speaking of a beginning or an arrival. We are speaking of a moment of pause—a chance to ask what kind of cultural memory will be carried forward into the next century, and what will already have slipped beyond reach.

This is not a question of pride. Nor is it a question of loss. It is a question of continuity.

The Limits of Binary Thinking

Much of the public conversation around culture today is structured through binaries. We are asked to choose between preservation and progress, between tradition and modernity, between authenticity and corruption. These oppositions feel intuitive. They are also deeply misleading.

Photo by Parij

Most cultures do not move in straight lines. They survive through overlap—through contradiction, compromise, and quiet negotiation with changing conditions. Traditions rarely disappear because they change. More often, they disappear because they are not allowed to.

When culture is frozen into idealised images of the past, it loses the ability to respond to the present. When the future is imagined only as a rejection of what came before, it loses access to accumulated wisdom. Both positions flatten complexity in different ways.

ParibhaAsha does not work from the belief that the past was pure or that the future must be radically cleansed of it. We find such certainty unhelpful. What interests us instead is the space in between, where meanings are contested, where practices shift, where continuity is negotiated rather than assumed.

Culture as a Working System

Culture is often spoken of as memory or identity. Sometimes as heritage, sometimes as pride. Rarely is it treated as what it actually is: a working system.

It shapes how people speak, learn, disagree, remember, and imagine. It determines which stories circulate widely and which remain marginal. It decides what is taught early, what is deferred, and what is considered too complex to pass on at all.

Photo by Parij

Seen this way, culture is neither static nor innocent. It is shaped by power, access, language, technology, and forgetting as much as by reverence. To engage with it seriously is to accept that it cannot be reduced to slogans or curated into neat timelines.

This is uncomfortable work. It resists easy celebration. It also resists moral certainty.

2026 as Orientation

This year, ParibhaAsha is not working towards arrival. It is working towards alignment.

Alignment of method with intent.

Alignment of pace with responsibility.

Alignment of tools with the kinds of questions we want to ask.

There is pressure, always, to move faster—to make culture legible through numbers, platforms, and visible outputs. Sometimes that pressure is justified. Often it is not. Cultural systems, once built carelessly, are difficult to repair.

So this year is being treated as a year of calibration. Of choosing what not to do. Of resisting the urge to make everything immediately visible. Of allowing ideas to mature before they are named.

This does not mean nothing is happening. It means something is being prepared.Any long view of culture must also reckon with the shorter, cyclical rhythms that shape public life.

Narratives That Govern More Than Governments

Political narratives will, inevitably, shape how Odisha approaches its centenary. Elections do more than change governments; they shift attention. They decide which parts of the past are spoken about, what feels urgent in the present, and what kinds of futures are presented as desirable or realistic. With two general elections ahead—in 2029 and again in 2034—the years leading to 2036 will see these narratives change more than once. This matters. Political decisions shape policies, determine priorities, and influence how ideas reach people on the ground.

But they do not work alone.

What lasts is shaped elsewhere—in how people receive these ideas, argue with them, adapt them, or carry them forward in daily life. Laws and programmes may set direction, but it is people who decide what becomes part of lived practice and what fades with time. To think seriously about Odisha at one hundred, then, is not to step away from politics, but to look beyond it—to recognise that the centenary will reflect not only what was governed, but what people chose, again and again, to hold together despite changing political seasons.

Looking Toward the Centenary

Photo by Ganta Srinivas

When Odisha turns one hundred, there will be many narratives competing for attention. Some will look backwards with nostalgia. Some will look forward with confidence. Others will attempt to simplify history into lessons that fit the present moment.

ParibhaAsha is not positioning itself to author a definitive account of that future. That would be neither possible nor desirable. What we are interested in is something more modest, and perhaps more difficult: contributing to the conditions under which cultural memory remains accessible, legible, and open to reinterpretation.

Not frozen.

Not weaponised.

Not reduced to binaries.

If that work remains partially invisible in the present, that is acceptable. Cultural infrastructure often becomes recognisable only after it has done its work.

Staying with Questions

As 2026 unfolds, there will be essays, research, experiments, and conversations emerging from this space. Some will feel unresolved. Some will contradict earlier assumptions. Some may take time to find form.

Photo by Akash Mitra

ParibhaAsha does not move with certainty. It moves with attentiveness. It stays with questions longer than is comfortable. It resists neat conclusions when the subject demands care.

If culture is something you approach not as inheritance to be defended or discarded, but as a system to be understood—patiently, critically, and without haste—then this space may be useful.

We continue to remain answerable for the work.