The Dead King Problem: On India's Compulsive Return to Its Historical Dead

Paricharchā - Thinking Culture & Rethinking Society (Monsoon 2026)

Paricharchā invites contributions that interrogate, interpret, and reimagine the epistemic, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of culture and society. We welcome works that are theoretically grounded yet accessible — engaging both the public intellectual and the informed reader in conversation around heritage, language, and contemporary experience.

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Sarnath Climbs to UNESCO World Heritage Status

Sarnath had been on the tentative list for twenty-seven long years. The wheels of fortune changed its fate in July.

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jul 256 min read

Power, Protest, Pattern: Analysing the History of Citizens' Movements Against Power in Independent India

A documented and anthropological account of the Republic's confrontations with its own authority, tracing what recurs, what is contested, and what is won or lost.

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jul 2316 min read

Twelve Days for the Devotees: Understanding Ratha Jatra of Shree Jagannatha Temple, Puri

The Ratha Jatra asks little of doctrine and much of participation. What persists across all twelve days is a form of faith that operates independent of institutional definition.

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jul 149 min read

କହଇ ମନ ଆରେ ମୋ ବୋଲ କର: Chautisa and the Question of Who Still Remembers

Discussing a form of composition where the act of learning to read and the act of preparing to die occupy the same verse...

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jul 116 min read

The Ledger and the Legend - On the State's Custody of Sacred Texts

The Odisha DCM announced a Lakshmi Purana Corridor at the birthplace of the 16th century poet Balaram Dasa, at an estimated cost of ₹28 Cr rupees with a promise to distribute 1 Cr Laxmi Purana books.

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jul 57 min read

The Sealed Room at Shree Jagannatha Temple, Puri

Inside the fortnight every year when Jagannatha goes dark, a tribal-descended priesthood, a closed sickroom and the limits of what a billion-rupee pilgrimage economy is willing to show...

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jun 309 min read

The Servant-King of Kalinga: Gajapati Kapilendra Deva and the Making of an Odia Imperial Age

To write of him is to write of the hinge on which medieval Odisha turned from a contracting Ganga inheritance into an imperial formation that reached from the lower Ganga to the waters of the Kaveri!

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jun 2911 min read

The Earth Turns Over: Raja, Womanhood, and the Archive of Indian Women's Minds

This is an attempt at what Raja itself performs: a seasonal reckoning, a time set apart, in which we return to the ground to understand what it has given us.

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jun 1314 min read

Who Are We When We Are Not Performing Online?

On the Fragmentation of the Self Across Platforms, the Erosion of the Back Stage, and the Question of Identity in the Age of Managed Visibility

Soumyaranjan Sahoo

Jun 717 min read

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The Dead King Problem: On India's Compulsive Return to Its Historical Dead

Paricharchā - Thinking Culture & Rethinking Society (Monsoon 2026)

Featured Essays

Sarnath Climbs to UNESCO World Heritage Status

Twelve Days for the Devotees: Understanding Ratha Jatra of Shree Jagannatha Temple, Puri

The Sealed Room at Shree Jagannatha Temple, Puri

The Servant-King of Kalinga: Gajapati Kapilendra Deva and the Making of an Odia Imperial Age