The Archaeology of Forgotten Urbanism: Understanding the Iron Age City Beneath Bhubaneswar

Approximately four kilometres southeast of Bhubaneswar railway station, where the expanding residential fabric of the city moves into the neighbourhood now called Sisupalgarh, there survives the outline of one of eastern India’s most important early urban settlements. To an unprepared visitor, the site can appear deceptively ordinary: earthen banks, broken laterite remains, scattered pillars, vegetation, new houses, roads, and a sense of archaeological incompleteness. Yet beneath this surface lies the memory of a fortified city whose ramparts, gateways, streets, habitation areas, craft evidence, and long-distance trade material together point to an urban tradition far older and more complex than the temple-centred imagination through which Odisha’s past is often popularly remembered.

Sisupalgarh is a city in plain sight. It is known to archaeologists, partially absorbed by modern Bhubaneswar, and yet largely absent from public heritage consciousness. The uploaded draft frames this central problem clearly: the site is not lost because it is invisible; it is forgotten because we have not yet learned how to read it.

The First Excavations and the Return of Archaeology

Sisupalgarh was first excavated by B. B. Lal of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1948. His report, Sisupalgarh 1948: An Early Historical Fort in Eastern India, published in Ancient India in 1949, remains one of the foundational references for the site. Lal’s work established Sisupalgarh as an early historic fortified settlement and brought attention to its rampart system, habitation levels, pottery, and material remains.

The site then entered a long period of limited public and institutional attention. It was not forgotten by scholars, but it did not receive the sustained archaeological, interpretive, and conservation attention that a site of this scale required. Later work by Rabindra Kumar Mohanty and Monica L. Smith expanded the understanding of Sisupalgarh through excavation, surface survey, and geophysical investigation. Their research showed that Sisupalgarh was not merely a fortified settlement but an extensive early historic urban centre with formal planning, monumental gateways, habitation activity, and infrastructure that spoke of a complex civic order.

Beyond the Temple-Centred Narrative

The importance of Sisupalgarh lies in the way it changes the question we ask about Odisha’s past. The popular historical narrative often moves from the Kalinga War of 261 BCE to Ashoka’s remorse at Dhauli, then leaps forward to the medieval temple-building phases of Bhubaneswar, Puri, and Konark. This produces a civilisational story dominated by conquest, religious transformation, and temple architecture.

Sisupalgarh opens another corridor. It asks us to look at urban life, civic order, neighbourhood planning, labour organisation, material circulation, and the administrative imagination of Kalinga between these celebrated historical markers. It places Odisha within a wider history of early Indian urbanism and reminds us that the region’s past cannot be reduced to sacred architecture alone.

Reading a City, Not Visiting a Monument

A city is a different kind of archive from a temple. A temple speaks through image, ritual, inscription, iconography, patronage, and architectural grammar. A city speaks through alignment, movement, drainage, fortification, habitation density, craft residue, repair, reuse, and spatial discipline.

At Sisupalgarh, the archaeological record indicates a planned urban environment enclosed by ramparts and organised through gateways and streets. The rampart was more than a defensive boundary. It was a statement of civic enclosure. The gateways were more than entry points. They controlled movement, marked authority, and gave form to the city’s relationship with its surrounding territory. The internal layout was more than an arrangement of paths. It reflected a decision to organise habitation in a structured manner.

In this sense, Sisupalgarh allows us to see urban planning as a cultural act. It was a way of translating power into space, labour into permanence, and collective life into a readable physical system.

The Kalinga Urban Imagination

Sisupalgarh is especially valuable for thinking about the political imagination of ancient Kalinga. The city’s ramparts, gateways, and planned layout suggest a society capable of mobilising labour, organising space, and maintaining civic infrastructure. Such planning requires more than construction skill. It requires administrative capacity, shared norms of settlement, and a political understanding of the city as an instrument of order.

This does not mean Sisupalgarh should be romanticised as a perfectly planned city in the modern sense. Archaeological cities are layered, repaired, altered, and reused. Their built forms carry evidence of both central authority and everyday negotiation. What makes Sisupalgarh important is precisely this layered character. It was not a static monument. It was an inhabited system.

Trade, Craft, and Everyday Life

The archaeological record also suggests that Sisupalgarh was sustained by networks of skill and exchange. The recovered material includes pottery, terracotta objects, rings, bangle fragments, ornaments, iron implements, copper objects, stone beads, and other items that indicate both local production and wider circulation. Evidence of materials not locally available suggests that the city participated in regional trade networks, possibly connected through the Mahanadi system and the wider Kalinga coastline.

This makes Sisupalgarh more than a political site. It was also an economic and social landscape. People lived, worked, exchanged, repaired, manufactured, stored, cooked, moved, and negotiated life within and around its ramparts. The city was not only a seat of authority; it was a world of households, artisans, traders, labourers, guards, planners, and residents.

The Problem of Visibility

The neglect of Sisupalgarh is not only a conservation issue. It is also a problem of visibility. Unlike the temples of the Ekamra Kshetra, which present themselves as finished, legible, aesthetically powerful objects, Sisupalgarh requires interpretation. The ramparts need to be understood as civic boundaries. The gateways need to be reconstructed imaginatively. The buried street grid must be explained. The fragmentary remains must be translated into urban experience.

Without interpretation, the site appears silent. With interpretation, it becomes one of the most powerful lessons in Odisha’s early urban history.

This is where Odisha’s public heritage vocabulary needs expansion. We have inherited a strong visual and emotional vocabulary for temples, rituals, kings, saints, and sacred geography. We have a weaker public vocabulary for cities, craft production, trade networks, settlement archaeology, and pre-medieval civic planning. This imbalance has consequences. When a site does not fit the existing visual grammar of pride, it becomes easier to overlook, easier to encroach upon, and easier to exclude from public education.

Encroachment, Protection, and Public Memory

The present condition of Sisupalgarh reveals how archaeological importance and administrative protection can drift apart. The site has repeatedly faced concerns around encroachment, incomplete protection, and inadequate public interpretation. The irony is severe: a site of major significance for early Indian urbanism survives within a modern capital city, but without the level of civic recognition and interpretive infrastructure it deserves.

For Bhubaneswar, this should matter profoundly. The city is often presented as a modern planned capital shaped by post-Independence urban design, with Old Town functioning as its sacred-historical core. Sisupalgarh complicates this self-image. It reminds us that the Bhubaneswar region knew planned urban life long before the modern capital city. The contemporary city has expanded over an older urban intelligence that it has yet to fully acknowledge.

Sisupalgarh and the Future of Heritage Interpretation

A Paricharchā reading of Sisupalgarh must therefore place the site within a longer argument about cultural infrastructure. Heritage is not only what survives; it is what a society makes intelligible. A temple survives through ritual, pilgrimage, patronage, and iconographic familiarity. An archaeological city survives through mapping, signage, guides, school visits, conservation law, public writing, and repeated acts of explanation.

Sisupalgarh needs precisely this second form of cultural infrastructure. It needs interpretation panels that explain the rampart, gateway, street grid, habitation zones, and material finds. It needs a site museum or interpretation centre. It needs trained local interpreters who can turn an apparently quiet landscape into a readable city. It needs integration into Bhubaneswar’s public heritage circuits, alongside Dhauli, Khandagiri-Udayagiri, Old Town, and the museums.

Walking the Ancient City

A walk through Sisupalgarh, if properly curated, would be unlike a conventional heritage walk. It would not be a monument visit; it would be an exercise in archaeological imagination. The visitor would begin with the landscape as it appears today, then gradually learn to see the city beneath the ground. The rampart would become a civic wall. The gateway would become a controlled threshold. The street grid would become a trace of movement. The habitation evidence would become evidence of everyday life. The broken and buried would become readable.

In such an experience, heritage would move from spectacle to literacy.

This is especially important for younger audiences. Children and students are often introduced to history through kings, wars, temples, and dates. Sisupalgarh can introduce them to another set of historical questions: How do cities begin? What makes a settlement urban? How do people organise water, waste, entry, trade, housing, defence, and public space? What does archaeology reveal that texts do not?

Such questions are essential if Odisha’s past is to be understood as a living field of inquiry rather than a decorative inheritance.

Reclaiming Odisha’s Urban Past

There is also a larger Indian significance. Early historic urbanism in India is usually taught through sites associated with the Gangetic plains, the Indus tradition, or major imperial centres. Sisupalgarh reminds us that eastern India had its own urban experiments, its own political geographies, and its own regional forms of civic life.

Its location near Dhauli and Udayagiri-Khandagiri allows it to be read in relation to Ashokan Kalinga, the Mahameghavahana political world, trade routes, religious transformations, and later shifts toward the ritual centre of Old Town Bhubaneswar. The site is not peripheral to Odisha’s history. It is central to understanding how Kalinga reorganised itself across the centuries.

The City That Waits to Be Read

The final lesson of Sisupalgarh is sobering. A civilisation may leave behind temples that are worshipped, inscriptions that are studied, and cities that are forgotten. Forgetting, however, is not always caused by absence. Sometimes it is caused by a lack of public vocabulary.

Sisupalgarh has been excavated, published, cited, photographed, debated, and legally discussed. The knowledge exists. What remains insufficient is translation: from specialist archaeology to public memory, from protected-site status to lived civic responsibility, from academic recognition to heritage education.

The ramparts of Sisupalgarh have waited through empires, dynasties, urban expansion, administrative neglect, and the slow violence of forgetfulness. They do not ask to be romanticised. They ask to be read. In their earthwork, gateways, pillars, buried streets, and scattered artefacts, they hold one of Odisha’s most important civilisational arguments: that Kalinga was not only a land of conquest and temples, but also a land of planned cities, civic systems, skilled labour, regional exchange, and urban imagination.

To recover Sisupalgarh is to recover an older intelligence of place. To teach it well is to give Bhubaneswar a longer memory of itself.

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References

1. Lal, B. B. “Sisupalgarh 1948: An Early Historical Fort in Eastern India.” Ancient India, No. 5, Archaeological Survey of India, 1949.

2. Mohanty, Rabindra Kumar, and Monica L. Smith. Excavations at Sisupalgarh, Orissa. Indian Archaeological Society, 2008.

3. Smith, Monica L. “Urban Infrastructure as Materialized Consensus.” 2016.

4. Mohanty, Rabindra Kumar, and Monica L. Smith. “The Excavations at Sisupalgarh, Odisha: An Early Historic Urban Centre in Eastern India.” Related archaeological publications and field reports on Sisupalgarh.

5. Odisha Review. “Cities and Towns in Early Odisha: A Historical Appraisal.” Odisha Review, April 2021.

6. The New Indian Express. “Government hasn’t demarcated Sisupalgarh as protected area yet: ASI to Orissa HC.” 30 September 2021.