Kabi Samrat Upendra Bhanja: Language, Desire, and the Architecture of Feeling

Kabi Samrat Upendra Bhanja (c.1670–1740) stands at the confluence of two eras — the twilight of the medieval Odia courtly imagination and the dawn of vernacular self-awareness. A scion of the Ghumusar royal house, he renounced administrative power to build something more enduring: a linguistic empire.

His relationship with Odia was both technical and transcendental. He treated words not as instruments but as living organisms — capable of colour, music, and scent. In works like Baidehisha Bilasa and Labanyabati, he pushed the Odia lexicon into new territory, weaving Sanskrit precision with vernacular cadence. His Gīta Abidhan lexicon itself demonstrates a linguistic consciousness that predates modern philology — a recognition that language could be systematised yet remain sensuous.

Bhanja’s poetics thus become architecture: words arranged like arches, syllables functioning as pillars, rhythm serving as scaffolding. His poems are not read; they are entered — spatial, multi-sensory, designed to be experienced as much as interpreted.

The Erotics of Knowing: Desire as Epistemology

The critical discourse on Bhanja often circles around his treatment of śṛṅgāra rasa — the aesthetic of love. Traditionalists found his eroticism excessive, while modernists mistook it for indulgence. Yet a deeper reading, supported by studies like “Nayaka Nayika in Upendra Bhanja’s Literature” (2024), reveals something far more intricate.

For Bhanja, desire was not merely sensual but epistemic — a way of knowing the world. His lovers do not just long for each other; they long for comprehension, for union between word and meaning, self and cosmos. His poetics transform kāma into a metaphor for cognition, where the act of seeing, touching, or naming becomes a ritual of understanding.

This reading aligns him with a broader Indic tradition where the body is not the enemy of the spirit but its instrument. In this synthesis, Bhanja anticipates later bhakti poets like Jayadeva, but with an added complexity: his is not surrender to God, but surrender to beauty as truth.

Between Ornament and Ontology: The Aesthetic Philosophy

To call Bhanja an ornamental poet (alankarik) is to mistake ornament for excess. In his framework, ornamentation is ontology — the way being manifests itself through beauty. His deployment of yamaka (repetition), anuprāsa (alliteration), and layered metaphor were not decorative tricks but acts of embodiment. Each rhetorical flourish reaffirms that form is inseparable from meaning.

This philosophical alignment echoes the Rīti school of Sanskrit poetics, yet Bhanja reconfigures it within an Odia consciousness. His aesthetics are not cosmopolitan imitations but regional universalisms — articulating the universality of desire through the language of the local.

As Dr. Prafulla Mohanty noted in Rīti Yugara Kabi Upendra Bhanja (1987), his formalism is a mode of thought, not escape. The poet’s obsession with linguistic symmetry mirrors a deeper cultural order — one that sees harmony as moral and rhythm as metaphysical.

Reframing the Erotic Canon: Interpretation and Resistance

Recent scholarship, such as “Refiguring Baidehīśa Bilāsa: Reading the Queer and the Erotic in Upendra Bhanja’s Ramayana” (ResearchGate, 2023), has reopened the poet’s texts to critical theory. By recasting Sita’s voice and the conjugal dialogue between Rama and Sita as spaces of intimacy and agency, Bhanja unsettles the patriarchal rigidity of epic tradition.

In this lens, his writing becomes a form of resistance literature — not overtly political, but aesthetically insurgent. His verses expose the fragility of moral binaries, purity and desire, divinity and corporeality, proposing instead a continuum where sensual and spiritual merge.

This interpretive pliability is why Bhanja remains perennially relevant. His texts welcome psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer readings not by accident but by design. The deliberate ambiguity of his metaphors functions as cultural encryption: inviting every generation to decode itself through his words.

The Afterlife of a Poetic Consciousness

Centuries after his death, Bhanja survives not merely in manuscripts but in memory systems: in the songs of Odissi, in Bharata Lila performances, in the performative syntax of Odia speech itself. His poetry remains central to the pedagogy of Odissi abhinaya, as noted in Paripex International Journal (2024) — a testament to how text migrates into gesture.

For ParibhaAsha, he represents more than a literary ancestor.

He is a method of thinking — a reminder that heritage is not to be archived but interpreted. His language of feeling aligns with ParibhaAsha’s philosophy of activating culture as infrastructure — not by worshipping the past but by making it functional in the present.

To engage with Bhanja today is to recognise that language can be both the record of civilisation and its resistance — that in the shimmer of his words lies a timeless negotiation between the body, the word, and the world.

References

• Mohanty, P. (1987). Rīti Yugara Kabi Upendra Bhanja. Cuttack: Friends Publishers.

• “Nayaka Nayika in Upendra Bhanja’s Literature: Exploring Love, Longing and Devotion.” ResearchGate, 2024.

• “Refiguring Baidehīśa Bilāsa: Reading the Queer and the Erotic in Upendra Bhanja’s Ramayana.” ResearchGate, 2023.

• “Abhinaya in Upendra Bhanja’s Literature.” Paripex International Research Journal, 2024.

• Odisha Review, Vol. LXV, April 2008.

• Bhanja, Upendra. Labanyabati & Baidehisha Bilasa (Critical Editions, Odia Sahitya Akademi).