Abinash Dash Choudhury

Cuttack first came to me as a palimpsest of stories in which the personal, the historical, and the mythological mingled without clear distinction.

From my father, I learnt that it was the city where my paternal grandfather spent his final days in penury, shuttling between his workplace in the Old Secretariat and the Cuttack Medical Hospital, attending to the contingencies of my great-grandfather’s failing health. It was also the place where my father’s great-granduncle, Kasinath Das Choudhuri—five generations before me—co-convened, in 1889, the first meeting of the Utkal Samaj— an organisation that would go on to take up the Oriya nationalist cause and culminate in the creation of a separate province in 1936 (Nayak 2003). The stories of my grandfather making a stop at the Chandi Maa of Cuttack were not lost on me as a child, especially the mesmerising tale of her emergence from beneath the ground after she appeared in a priest’s dream, instructing him to dig the soil.

The images that came alive through the words of my father, I painted with hues of my own. The Cuttack I constructed was one of old colonial buildings with arched entrances and clock-towers, where the bazaars were packed with people haggling to get a good deal and the river-bank crowded with families seeing off their young men to conduct business in far off places; of students bustling around their college before the dim of silence in classrooms; where the brush of air carried the smell of sweat as babus gently, patiently, climbed down from cycle-rickshaws to go to their offices, and where little children were prodded by their parents to fold hands and bow down in front of the fierce image of Cuttack Chandi….

https://www.theindiaforum.in/culture/seeing-cuttack

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