International Journal of Multidisciplinary Horizon
ISSN: 3049 – 2017
Impact Factor (RJIF): 7.8
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Article Abstract
2025
Beyond the Canon: Peripheral Aesthetics and Vernacular Expression in the Sculpture of Bolangir
Author(s): Alakananda Gahir
Abstract
The "great tradition" of Bhubaneswar, Puri, and Konark has long served as the foundation for Odisha's art-historical imagination. This trio has come to represent the entirety of Kalinga sculptural achievement in both colonial-era surveys and subsequent nationalist studies. The stone-carving customs of the state's western uplands, and of Bolangir district in particular, have been driven to the periphery of research as a result of this centring, where they are primarily preserved as brief asides in temple-architecture surveys, gazetteer entries, and tourist comments.This paper argues that the sculptural remains of Bolangir — most prominently the hypaethral Chausath Yogini shrine at Ranipur-Jharial, the Vishnu-avatara reliefs of Nrusinghanath on the Gandhamardan hills, and the dispersed temple fragments of the Tel valley around Patnagarh, Harishankar, and Saintala — constitute not a provincial derivative of the eastern Kalinga idiom but a distinct, historically legible vernacular formation. Drawing on the historiographic critique of the “canon” developed in Indian art history and on the regional temple surveys of various scholars, the paper develops the concept of “peripheral aesthetics” as an analytical frame for reading sculpture that is materially coarser, iconographically hybrid, and institutionally under-documented, yet aesthetically and historically coherent on its own terms. The paper is a literature-based, it consolidates published epigraphic, archaeological, and art-historical sources on Bolangir into a single interpretive argument and identifies directions for the field documentation that the corpus still requires. It concludes that recentring peripheral sites such as Bolangir is necessary not to displace the eastern Odishan canon but to reveal the plural, regionally negotiated character of what is retrospectively homogenised as “Odishan” or “Kalingan” art.