Three and a half years — that’s how long it took the founding director of the KIIT School of Architecture and Planning, Odisha, Dr Soumyendu Shankar Ray and his research team to conclude their work on Odisha: An Architectural Odyssey. But when the time came to get it published, Dr Soumyendu, who has 30 years of architectural experience, turned to Google just like the rest of us.
The 55-year-old laughs as he admits this. With the aim of depicting the architectural wonders of the state, also known as the Soul of India, he along with Dr Kajri Misra compiled the 201-page visually-arresting book published by Bloomsbury, for which they even travelled to Maoist and Naxal-hit areas.
Take, for example, the Jagannath Rath Yatra, one of the oldest festivals observed in Puri, Odisha where the deities of Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra are taken out in a procession in three richly decorated chariots.
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Home to the largest number of tribes, a whopping 62, each tribe in Odisha has its own distinct architecture. The Gadaba tribe, which is 67,000 people strong, alone has three kinds of houses. A distressing fact is that these beautiful houses, which they build and paint themselves, are being abandoned for modern concrete and brick structures. “If you travel to Odisha even five years from now, all of this will be gone,” he says.