Chapter 8 — ଉତ୍କଳ ସମ୍ମିଳନୀର ଗଠନ

To understand why the Utkal Sammilani was founded, a student must first picture the map of the Odia-speaking people in the year 1900. There was no Odisha on the administrative map of British India. The coastal districts of Cuttack, Puri and Balasore, conquered from the Marathas in 1803, formed the Orissa Division of the Bengal Presidency, governed from Calcutta through a Commissioner at Cuttack. Attached to the Division were the Tributary Mahals, the feudatory states of the Garhjat, ruled by their own chiefs under a British Superintendent. To the south, the district of Ganjam and the agency tracts of Vizagapatam, which contained lakhs of Odia speakers, belonged to the Madras Presidency and were governed from far-off Madras. To the west, Sambalpur and the neighbouring states of Patna, Kalahandi, Sonepur, Bamra and Rairakhol belonged to the Central Provinces and were governed from Nagpur. To the north, the Odia parganas of Midnapore and the state of Singhbhum lay under the Bengal and Chota Nagpur administrations.

In each of these provinces the Odias were a minority. The language of the courts, the offices and the schools was Bengali on the coast, Telugu in Ganjam and Hindi in Sambalpur. In 1895 the Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces had actually abolished Odia as the official language of Sambalpur district, and the Odias of Sambalpur had to fight for eight years to get it restored. On the coast, some Bengali scholars had argued in the 1870s that Odia was not a language at all but a dialect of Bengali, and had proposed that Bengali replace it in the schools. Odia clerks and teachers found the posts in their own home taken by men from the ruling language of each province. The great famine of 1866, the Na Anka Durbhikshya, had killed nearly a third of the population of the coastal districts and had shown how little a distant government knew or cared about Odisha.

Yet by 1900 there were also signs of new life. English education had produced a small class of graduates, lawyers, teachers and government servants at Cuttack, Balasore and Puri. The printing press had given Odisha newspapers such as the Utkal Dipika, founded by Gourishankar Ray in 1866, and a literature of its own through Fakir Mohan Senapati, Radhanath Ray and Madhusudan Rao. Local associations such as the Utkal Sabha of Cuttack had learnt the art of petitions and public meetings. What was missing was a single organisation that could speak for all the Odias, in all the provinces, with one voice. The Utkal Sammilani was the answer to that need.

The Utkal Sammilani did not spring up suddenly in 1903. It was the last and largest of a chain of associations that had been growing since the 1860s. The earliest were literary and social bodies. The Cuttack Debating Society and the Utkal Bhasha Unnati Bidhayini Sabha (the Society for the Improvement of the Odia Language) were formed in the 1860s and 1870s to defend Odia against the charge that it was not a language. In 1882 the educated men of Cuttack founded the Utkal Sabha, which, though it began as a local body, took up questions of wider concern such as the representation of Odisha in the Bengal Legislative Council, the appointment of Odias to government posts and the extension of railways and roads. In the same decade the Utkal Ullasini Sabha and the Orissa Association also appeared, and in 1888 the National Congress movement reached Cuttack when a Congress session was reported in the Odia press and a few Odias attended the Allahabad session.

These bodies had two weaknesses. First, they were confined to the coastal districts of Bengal's Orissa Division and had no connection with the Odias of Ganjam or Sambalpur. Second, they were societies of the English-educated few and did not reach the peasants, the artisans or the rulers of the feudatory states. The idea of a union of all the Odia tracts, which alone could solve the problem of minority status in three provinces, was first stated plainly in the 1890s. Madhusudan Das, who had returned from Calcutta in 1881 as the first Odia graduate and the first Odia lawyer of the Calcutta High Court, made the Utkal Sabha a platform for this demand. He argued that the Odias would never be treated with justice as long as they were the tail-end of three separate governments; they must be brought together under one administration, and to achieve that they must first become one people in feeling.

The Sambalpur language agitation of 1895 to 1903 gave the idea its first practical test. When the Central Provinces government replaced Odia with Hindi, the people of Sambalpur, led by Dharanidhar Mishra, Balabhadra Suparkar, Brajamohan Pattnaik and others, sent memorials, held meetings and finally sent a deputation to the Viceroy Lord Curzon at Simla in 1901. Madhusudan Das, though he was a man of Cuttack, took up the cause of Sambalpur. The Sambalpur people discovered that they had brothers on the coast, and the coast discovered that it had brothers in the west. Odia was restored in Sambalpur on 1 January 1903. It was clear that a permanent organisation was now needed to carry the same lesson to Ganjam and to press for the union of all the tracts.

The southern Odias of Ganjam, under the Madras Presidency, were the first outside the coastal division to organise for the Odia cause. Ganjam had a strong tradition of Odia zamindar families, the Rajas of Parlakhemundi, Khallikote, Athagada, Surangi and Dharakote, whose courts had patronised Odia poetry for centuries. It also had an educated Odia middle class at Berhampur, Chatrapur and Parlakhemundi. In 1902 these men formed the Ganjam Jatiya Samiti, the Ganjam National Society, with the object of protecting the interests of the Odias of the Madras Presidency and working for the union of the Odia-speaking areas. Its leading figures were Harihar Mardaraj Deo, the Raja of Khallikote, and Sasibhusan Rath, later famous as the editor of the daily Asha at Berhampur, along with Baikuntha Nath De, Rama Chandra Mardaraj Deo of Khallikote and others.

In April 1903 the Ganjam Jatiya Samiti held a large conference at Rambha, on the southern shore of Chilika lake, in the estate of the Raja of Khallikote. The Rambha meeting is important for two reasons. First, it was the first conference in which Odias from more than one province sat together: Madhusudan Das and other leaders from Cuttack came to Rambha, and men from Sambalpur also attended. Second, it passed a resolution demanding that all the Odia-speaking tracts be united under one administration, and it decided that a conference of all Odias should be held at Cuttack at the end of the year to give the demand a permanent organisation. The Rambha meeting was thus the direct parent of the Utkal Sammilani.

The men of Ganjam had a special urgency. Their district was six hundred miles from Madras, its language was not understood by its rulers, and its schools taught in Telugu. When the Government of India in 1903 proposed to transfer Sambalpur to Orissa but was silent about Ganjam, the Ganjam leaders felt that their case would be forgotten unless the whole Odia people spoke for them. At Rambha they secured the promise of the Cuttack leaders that the union of Ganjam with Orissa would be the first demand of the new conference. This promise was kept for thirty-three years, until Ganjam finally came into the new province of Orissa on 1 April 1936. The Rambha meeting also set the pattern that the Sammilani followed, of holding the conference under the presidency of a ruling chief or zamindar, so that the movement could not be dismissed by the government as the work of a handful of agitating lawyers.

The man who turned the scattered efforts of the associations into a single movement was Madhusudan Das (1848-1934), remembered by the Odias as Utkal Gaurab, the Pride of Utkal. Born at Satyabhamapur near Cuttack, he studied at the Cuttack Zilla School and then in Calcutta, where he took his BA in 1870, his MA in 1873 and his BL in 1878, becoming the first Odia graduate, the first Odia MA and the first Odia lawyer of the Calcutta High Court. He returned to Cuttack in 1881 and built up a large practice, but his real work was public. He was a member of the Bengal Legislative Council from 1896 and of the Imperial Legislative Council from 1897, and he used both to raise the grievances of Odisha.

Madhusudan Das believed that three things were needed. The Odias must be brought under one government; they must be made economically self-reliant through industry; and they must be given self-respect through education and the love of their language. His famous saying, that a nation that does not respect its own language and its own workmanship will be respected by no one, summed up his creed. He was practical rather than fiery. He preferred a memorial to a demonstration, a deputation to a strike, and he sought to carry the rajas and the government with him rather than to confront them.

The immediate occasion of the Sammilani was the visit of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, and the discussion in the Government of India about redrawing provincial boundaries. Curzon was considering the reduction of the enormous Bengal Presidency, and in this connection the question of Orissa naturally arose. In 1902 and 1903 Madhusudan Das and the Utkal Sabha prepared a detailed memorial setting out the case for the union of all the Odia-speaking tracts. The memorial argued from language, from history, from the injustice of minority status and from the convenience of administration. It showed that the Odias in the Madras and Central Provinces were cut off from their kinsmen, that their children could not be educated in their own tongue and that no Odia could rise in the service of a province whose language was not his own. Madhusudan also met Curzon personally when the Viceroy passed through Cuttack, and it is said that Curzon was impressed by the case. The Government of India took up the first part of the demand in the Risley Circular of 3 December 1903. It was to press the rest that the Utkal Sammilani was formed within the same month.

On 3 December 1903 the Home Secretary of the Government of India, H. H. Risley, issued a circular letter to the governments of Bengal, Madras and the Central Provinces. It is known as the Risley Circular. Its main subject was the reduction of the overgrown Bengal Presidency, which then contained seventy-eight million people. The circular proposed to transfer the Chittagong Division, Dacca and Mymensingh from Bengal to Assam, and, in the west, to transfer Sambalpur district and the feudatory states attached to it from the Central Provinces to the Orissa Division of Bengal. The reason given was that Sambalpur was Odia in language and in feeling and had already shown, by the language agitation of 1895 to 1903, that it did not wish to belong to a Hindi-speaking province.

For the Odias the Risley Circular was both a victory and a disappointment. It was a victory because for the first time the Government of India had admitted the principle for which they had been fighting: that people of one language should be under one administration. If the principle was good for Sambalpur, it was good for Ganjam too. It was a disappointment because the circular said nothing about Ganjam, the agency tracts, Midnapore or Singhbhum. The Madras government, when consulted, refused to part with Ganjam, saying that the district was well administered and that its transfer would break the unity of the Presidency. The Odias saw that if they did not organise at once, the boundary question would be settled without them and Ganjam would remain in Madras for another generation.

The circular thus acted as a spark. It was published in the last weeks of 1903, when the leaders of the Utkal Sabha, the Ganjam Jatiya Samiti and the Sambalpur associations were already preparing the Cuttack conference decided upon at Rambha. The conference now had an immediate object: to welcome the transfer of Sambalpur and to demand that the same principle be applied to Ganjam and the other Odia tracts. The Utkal Sammilani was therefore born in the very month of the Risley Circular, and its first resolutions were a direct reply to it.

The transfer of Sambalpur took effect on 16 October 1905, the same day as the Partition of Bengal. Sambalpur district and the five feudatory states of Patna, Kalahandi, Sonepur, Bamra and Rairakhol joined the Orissa Division. The Odias had gained a large western district and five states, but the eastern Bengali-speaking part of the old Sambalpur district was left in the Central Provinces, and Ganjam remained in Madras. Half the demand had been met; the other half was to take thirty-one years more.

The first session of the Utkal Sammilani, called in English the Utkal Union Conference, was held at Cuttack on 30 and 31 December 1903. The meeting took place in a great pandal on the Idgah ground near the Cuttack Printing Company, the press of Madhusudan Das, and it drew delegates from every part of the Odia-speaking country: from the coastal districts, from Ganjam, from Sambalpur, from the Odia parganas of Midnapore, from Singhbhum and from the feudatory states. Contemporary accounts speak of more than a thousand delegates and many thousands of visitors. Nothing like it had been seen in Odisha before.

The president of the session was Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo of Mayurbhanj, the most enlightened of the Garhjat rulers, who had built schools, a hospital and the first stretch of the Mayurbhanj light railway in his state. His choice as president was deliberate. It showed the government that the movement was not an agitation of discontented lawyers but a national gathering supported by the princes. The Raja of Kanika, Rajendra Narayan Bhanja Deo, the Raja of Khallikote, Harihar Mardaraj Deo, the Raja of Parlakhemundi, Goura Chandra Gajapati Narayan Deo, and other chiefs and zamindars attended and gave money. Madhusudan Das was the chief organiser and the moving spirit; Gopabandhu Das, then a young student at Puri, attended as a delegate; Fakir Mohan Senapati, Radhanath Ray and Madhusudan Rao, the three great writers of the age, were present, and Fakir Mohan later became a president of the Sammilani.

The session passed a set of resolutions that set the programme of the Odia movement for thirty years. It thanked the Government of India for the proposed transfer of Sambalpur and prayed that Ganjam and the agency tracts, the Odia parganas of Midnapore and Singhbhum be united with the Orissa Division under one administration. It demanded the encouragement of Odia in schools and courts, the appointment of Odias to public service in their own land, the expansion of education and the development of the industries of Odisha. It also resolved that the conference would meet every year and would be a permanent body with a constitution and a standing committee. In his presidential address the Maharaja of Mayurbhanj stressed that the conference was loyal to the Crown and sought the improvement of the Odias by constitutional means. Madhusudan Das, in a memorable speech, told the delegates that the Odia had been made to feel ashamed of his own name and that the first work of the Sammilani was to give him back his self-respect. The session ended with a decision that the next conference would be held at Cuttack in 1904.

The Utkal Sammilani gave itself a written constitution at its early sessions, and its objects were stated in clear terms. Its first and chief aim was the union of all the Odia-speaking tracts under one administration. This was called the Utkal Sammilan, the union of Utkal, from which the conference took its name. Its second aim was the development of the Odia language and literature: Odia was to be the language of the schools, the courts and the offices in every Odia tract, and the conference was to encourage the writing of books and the founding of schools. Its third aim was the economic improvement of the Odias through the revival of old industries and the introduction of new ones, so that the Odia should not depend on the clerkship alone. Its fourth aim was social reform, the removal of untouchability, the spread of temperance, the education of girls and the uplift of the backward classes. Its fifth aim was to promote a feeling of unity among all classes of Odias, the raja and the peasant, the coast and the hill, the Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian.

The Sammilani was expressly a non-political body in its first phase. Its constitution declared loyalty to the British Crown and stated that the conference would not discuss questions of general Indian politics that were the concern of the Indian National Congress. This rule had two purposes. It kept the rajas, the zamindars and the government servants, who could not join a political agitation, inside the movement. And it kept the government friendly, so that the demand for union could be granted as an administrative measure. Madhusudan Das defended the rule by saying that the Odias had first to become one people before they could take their place in the larger politics of India.

The organisation was simple. An annual session was held in December in a different town each year, presided over by a chief, a zamindar or a distinguished citizen elected for the occasion. Between sessions a standing committee with a secretary at Cuttack carried on the work of memorials, deputations and correspondence. Local branches, the Sammilani Sabhas, were formed in the districts and the states. Delegates were elected by public meetings in their areas and paid a small fee. The proceedings were conducted in Odia, a deliberate choice, for the conference existed to prove that Odia was fit for public affairs. English was used only for the memorials to government. The Sammilani also had a flag and, from the 1920s, an anthem, and its sessions were accompanied by exhibitions of Odia industry and art, a feature that Madhusudan Das insisted on.

After the founding session of 1903 the Utkal Sammilani met every year for the next two decades, and the very fact of its moving from town to town spread the idea of Odia unity across the region. The second session was held at Cuttack in 1904, and thereafter the conference travelled. It met at Balasore in 1905, where it welcomed the transfer of Sambalpur that had just taken effect and renewed its demand for Ganjam; at Cuttack in 1906; at Puri in 1907, the sacred city, where the presence of pilgrims from every part of Odisha gave the session a special meaning; at Sambalpur in 1908, the first session in the newly united western district, which showed that the Sammilani belonged to the west as much as to the coast; and at Berhampur in 1909, the first session held on Madras soil, in the heart of the Ganjam whose union the Sammilani was demanding. Later sessions were held at Cuttack, Puri, Balasore, Parlakhemundi, Bhadrak and Chakradharpur in Singhbhum, and even outside the Odia tracts at Calcutta, so that the Odias in the city of the Bengal government could hear the demand.

The presidents of the sessions were chosen to represent the whole Odia people. The rulers of the feudatory states presided in the first years: Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo of Mayurbhanj in 1903, the Raja of Kanika, the Raja of Khallikote, the Maharaja of Parlakhemundi and the Raja of Bamra in later years. The men of letters were also honoured: Fakir Mohan Senapati, the father of modern Odia prose, presided over a session, as did Madhusudan Das himself. From the second decade the new generation of nationalist leaders took the chair: Gopabandhu Das presided at the Puri session of 1919 and turned the direction of the movement, and later presidents included Nilakantha Das, Jagabandhu Singh and Godabarish Mishra.

Each session had a fixed pattern. The town formed a reception committee headed by a local notable, who delivered a welcome address. The president was escorted in procession to the pandal, sometimes on an elephant lent by a raja. The presidential address, always in Odia, reviewed the progress of the year and restated the demand for union. Resolutions were moved and seconded by delegates from different tracts, so that a man of Sambalpur would second a resolution on Ganjam and a man of Ganjam one on Singhbhum. An exhibition of industries and a cultural evening of Odia music and poetry accompanied the session. The resolutions were then printed, sent to the newspapers and forwarded as a memorial to the Government of India, to the provincial governments and, on occasion, to the Secretary of State in London. Between sessions the standing committee at Cuttack kept up the correspondence. In this way the Sammilani became, as the Odias called it, the parliament of the Odia nation.

Once Sambalpur had come to the Orissa Division in 1905, the union of Ganjam with Orissa became the central demand of the Utkal Sammilani, and it remained so for thirty years. Ganjam was the largest of the outlying Odia tracts. Its northern taluks of Berhampur, Chatrapur, Aska, Ghumsur, Surada, Purushottampur and the Parlakhemundi estate, together with the agency tracts of the Ganjam and Vizagapatam hills, were overwhelmingly Odia. The southern taluks around Ichhapur and Chicacole were Telugu. The Madras government treated the whole district as Telugu, used Telugu in the courts and schools, and filled its offices with Telugu clerks.

The Sammilani attacked this in every session. It collected census figures to prove that the Odias of Ganjam and the agencies numbered more than a million. It gathered evidence that Odia children were failing in schools because they were taught in Telugu, that Odia litigants could not follow their own cases, and that Odia petitions were rejected because the clerks could not read them. It sent memorials to the Madras government and the Government of India, and in 1909 it deliberately held its session at Berhampur to show that Ganjam was part of the Odia nation. The Ganjam Jatiya Samiti and the local branches of the Sammilani at Berhampur, Parlakhemundi and Chatrapur kept the agitation alive between sessions.

The Madras government resisted every proposal. It argued that Ganjam was a well-run district, that the transfer of its northern half would leave the southern half a fragment, and that the Odias of Ganjam were prosperous and content. Behind this lay an unwillingness to lose revenue and territory. The Government of India, for its part, was reluctant to force Madras. When Bengal was partitioned in 1905 and reunited in 1911, and when the new province of Bihar and Orissa was created in 1912, Ganjam was left in Madras on each occasion. The Sammilani protested each time and each time the government replied that the question would be examined later.

Two figures deserve mention in this long struggle. The Maharaja of Parlakhemundi, first Goura Chandra Gajapati Narayan Deo and after him his son Krushna Chandra Gajapati Narayan Deo, gave the Ganjam cause the weight of the oldest royal house of Odisha; the younger Gajapati later carried the demand to the Round Table Conference in London. And Sasibhusan Rath, with his newspaper Asha, kept the question before the public of Ganjam every day. The Ganjam demand was finally conceded only in 1936, when the greater part of the district and the agency tracts became part of the new province of Orissa, with Berhampur and Parlakhemundi included. The Sammilani's thirty-year insistence on Ganjam is the best example of its patience and its purpose.

The Utkal Sammilani was more than a body that passed resolutions about boundaries. From the beginning Madhusudan Das insisted that a people who could not stand on their own feet economically and culturally did not deserve a province, and the Sammilani therefore took up a large programme of constructive work.

In the field of language the Sammilani secured, session by session, the recognition of Odia in the schools and courts of the Odia tracts. It pressed for Odia textbooks, for Odia teachers and for Odia as the medium of examination. It encouraged the writing of grammars, dictionaries and school books. Gopal Chandra Praharaj, one of its active members, later compiled the great Purnachandra Odia Bhashakosha, the Odia lexicon in seven volumes. The Sammilani also patronised the poets and prose writers of the age, and its sessions were occasions for readings of Odia verse. In this way it turned the defence of the language from a scholarly argument into a mass sentiment.

In education the Sammilani demanded a college for Odisha and more high schools, and its members founded schools in their own towns. Ravenshaw College at Cuttack, the only college of Odisha, was raised in status and the Sammilani pressed for a separate university. The demand for technical education led to the founding of the Orissa School of Engineering at Cuttack in 1923. Gopabandhu Das founded his open-air school at Satyabadi near Sakhigopal in 1909 to train a new generation of Odias in national ideals, and its teachers, Nilakantha Das, Godabarish Mishra, Kripasindhu Mishra and Acharya Harihar Das, became leaders of the Sammilani and later of the Congress in Odisha.

In industry Madhusudan Das set the example personally. In 1897 he started the Orissa Art Wares at Cuttack to revive the filigree and horn work of the Odia craftsmen and to sell it in India and abroad. In 1905 he founded the Utkal Tannery at Cuttack to make leather goods with modern methods, and he spent the whole of his private fortune on it. He preached that the Odia youth should not be ashamed of manual work and that a nation of clerks could never be free. The Sammilani's industrial exhibitions, held with every session, gave the weavers and craftsmen of Sambalpur, Berhampur, Cuttack and Pipili a market and a pride. The Sammilani also took up the question of the salt industry, ruined by the government monopoly of 1804, and the demand for railways, roads and irrigation to open up the neglected districts. Its social reform resolutions on untouchability, temperance and the education of girls, though less successful, prepared the ground for the Gandhian programme of the 1920s.

The strength of the Utkal Sammilani lay in the alliance of three groups that in most parts of India stood apart from one another: the ruling chiefs, the English-educated middle class and the vernacular press.

The rajas and zamindars gave the Sammilani money, prestige and protection. The feudatory chiefs of the Garhjat states, such as the Maharaja of Mayurbhanj, the Raja of Kanika, the Maharaja of Parlakhemundi, the Raja of Khallikote and the Raja of Bamra, were Odias by language and Odisha's old aristocracy by tradition. They presided at sessions, hosted the delegates and lent the movement respectability in the eyes of the government. Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo of Mayurbhanj not only presided at the founding session but financed Odia education in his state. The Raja of Kanika, Rajendra Narayan Bhanja Deo, was for many years a pillar of the Sammilani and a member of the legislative councils. The Gajapati of Parlakhemundi carried the Ganjam cause. Because the chiefs were with it, the Sammilani could never be treated by the government as a seditious body.

The middle class, the lawyers, teachers, doctors and government servants of Cuttack, Balasore, Puri, Berhampur and Sambalpur, provided the organisers, the draftsmen and the speakers. Madhusudan Das, Gopabandhu Das, Biswanath Kar, Gopal Chandra Praharaj, Nilakantha Das, Brajasundar Das, Harihar Das, Sasibhusan Rath, Dharanidhar Mishra and Balabhadra Suparkar were all men of this class. They wrote the memorials, edited the newspapers, ran the local branches and represented Odisha in the councils. Their weakness was their small number and their dependence on government employment; their strength was their command of English and of the methods of constitutional agitation.

The Odia press carried the message to the people. The Utkal Dipika of Gourishankar Ray, founded at Cuttack in 1866, was the first and most influential of the Odia weeklies, and it reported every session of the Sammilani. The Sambalpur Hitaisini, published from Bamra state, spoke for the west and led the language agitation of the 1890s. The Asha of Sasibhusan Rath at Berhampur spoke for Ganjam. Gopabandhu Das founded the Satyabadi monthly and, in 1919, the weekly Samaja, which became a daily and the most powerful newspaper of Odisha. Biswanath Kar's literary monthly Utkal Sahitya, founded in 1897, gave the writers of the renaissance a home. These papers turned the resolutions of the Sammilani into the daily talk of the towns and, through the village reader, of the countryside as well.

The Partition of Bengal of 1905 had raised a storm in Bengal, and in December 1911, at the Delhi Durbar of King George V, the government announced that the partition would be annulled and Bengal reunited. At the same time it announced that Bihar and Orissa would be separated from Bengal and made a new province, and that Assam would again be a Chief Commissioner's province. The Province of Bihar and Orissa came into being on 1 April 1912, with its capital at Patna and a Lieutenant-Governor at its head; the first was Sir Charles Bayley.

The Utkal Sammilani had a mixed reaction. On one side, the Odias were freed from Bengal, whose language had threatened their own and whose capital was distant. The Orissa Division, now containing Cuttack, Puri, Balasore, Sambalpur and the feudatory states, became a distinct unit inside the new province, with its own Commissioner and, from 1912, a few Odia members in the Bihar and Orissa Legislative Council, among them Madhusudan Das and the Raja of Kanika. On the other side, the new arrangement was not the separate Odisha that the Sammilani had demanded. The Odias were once more a minority, this time in a Hindi-speaking province of thirty-four million people in which they numbered about five million. Patna was as far as Calcutta. Ganjam remained with Madras, Singhbhum and the Midnapore parganas remained with Bihar's Chota Nagpur and with Bengal. The Sammilani's memorial of 1911, which had prayed for a Chief Commissioner's province of all the Odia tracts, had been passed over.

The Sammilani therefore continued its work in the new province. It used the Bihar and Orissa Legislative Council as a platform. When Montagu, the Secretary of State, came to India in 1917 to gather opinion for constitutional reforms, the Sammilani sent a deputation led by Madhusudan Das that placed before him a memorial for the amalgamation of the Odia-speaking tracts. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1918 admitted that the Odias had a strong case and that provinces based on language would be a rational goal, but it left the question for the future. Under the Government of India Act of 1919 Bihar and Orissa became a Governor's province with dyarchy, and in 1921 Madhusudan Das became a Minister in charge of Local Self-Government and Public Health, the first Odia to hold such office. He resigned in 1923 when the Council refused to vote his salary, a protest that showed the weakness of Odisha's position in a Bihar-dominated legislature. The lesson of 1912 was that a half-measure would not satisfy the Odias, and the Sammilani's demand for a full province was renewed with greater force.

By the end of the First World War a new generation had grown up inside the Utkal Sammilani that was no longer content with loyal memorials. Its leader was Gopabandhu Das (1877-1928), a lawyer of Puri, the founder of the Satyabadi school and of the Samaja, and a member of the Bihar and Orissa Legislative Council. Gopabandhu had attended the first session of the Sammilani as a student in 1903 and had served it for sixteen years. But he had come to believe that the union of the Odia tracts would never be granted by a foreign government as a favour; it would come only when India as a whole won the right to govern itself, and the Odias must therefore join the national movement under Gandhi.

Gopabandhu presided over the Puri session of the Sammilani in 1919. In his presidential address he argued that the Sammilani's refusal to touch general politics had become a weakness, that the demand for a province was itself a political demand, and that the Odias should throw in their lot with the Indian National Congress, whose Nagpur session of December 1920 would accept the principle of linguistic provinces. The session accepted his lead. The Chakradharpur session of 1920, held in Singhbhum, went further and resolved that the Sammilani should support the Congress programme of non-cooperation and that the two movements should work together.

The Congress on its side recognised the Odia case. At its Nagpur session in December 1920 the Congress reorganised its provincial committees on a linguistic basis, and a separate Utkal Pradesh Congress Committee was formed for all the Odia-speaking tracts, in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, Madras and the Central Provinces alike. Gopabandhu Das became its first president. In this way the Congress itself became an organisation that treated Odisha as one unit, thirty years before the government did so, and the demand for a united Odisha became part of the national demand for Swaraj. Gandhi visited Odisha in March 1921 and was welcomed at Cuttack, Bhadrak, Puri and Berhampur.

The turn had its cost. The rajas and the loyalist members, who could not follow the Sammilani into non-cooperation, withdrew from it, and Madhusudan Das, who remained a constitutionalist, drew apart from the younger men, though he never gave up the demand for union. For some years the Sammilani was overshadowed by the Congress and met irregularly. Yet the turn was decisive. The Odia movement was now carried by two streams, the constitutional stream of Madhusudan Das and the rajas, who dealt with the government and the committees, and the national stream of Gopabandhu and the Congress, who mobilised the people. Both were needed, and both contributed to the province of 1936.

Historians regard the formation of the Utkal Sammilani as the turning point in the making of modern Odisha, and the reasons are worth stating carefully.

First, the Sammilani created the Odia nation as a political fact. Before 1903 the Odias were three minorities in three provinces who hardly knew one another. By bringing delegates from Ganjam, Sambalpur, Singhbhum, Midnapore, the coast and the states into one hall every December, the Sammilani made them one people with one demand. The song Bande Utkala Janani, the flag, the exhibitions and the Odia speeches gave this new identity its symbols.

Second, the Sammilani won the first concessions. The transfer of Sambalpur and five states in 1905, the recognition of Odia in schools and courts, the appointment of Odias to the councils, the Orissa School of Engineering and the raising of Ravenshaw College all came from its pressure. Above all it kept the demand for a separate province alive through the disappointments of 1905, 1912 and 1919 until the government yielded in 1936.

Third, the Sammilani trained the leaders of Odisha. Every important public man of Odisha between 1903 and 1936 served his apprenticeship in it: Madhusudan Das, Gopabandhu Das, Nilakantha Das, Godabarish Mishra, Krushna Chandra Gajapati Narayan Deo, Biswanath Das, Harekrushna Mahatab. It taught them the art of organisation, of public speaking in Odia and of dealing with government. When Odisha became a province, its first ministers and legislators were Sammilani men.

Fourth, the Sammilani gave Odisha a model of unity across classes. Its alliance of rajas, middle class and press was unusual in India, and it showed that a linguistic movement could be constitutional, constructive and inclusive at once. Its programme of language, education and industry was a programme of nation-building before there was a nation.

Fifth, the Sammilani's example influenced the rest of India. The Congress's decision of 1920 to organise on linguistic lines, the Nehru Committee's recommendation of 1928 that provinces be redrawn by language, and the States Reorganisation of 1956 all followed the principle that the Odias had been the first to state and the first to win, when Orissa became the first linguistic province of India on 1 April 1936.

The Sammilani had its limits. It was a movement of the towns and the educated; it reached the peasant late and through the Congress; its loyalty to the Crown and its dependence on the rajas made it cautious; and it could not prevent the loss of Singhbhum, of the Midnapore parganas and of southern Ganjam in 1936. But its central achievement stands. The province of Orissa was, in the words of its founders, the child of the Utkal Sammilani.