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

There exists, within the devotional literature of Odisha, a form of composition where the act of learning to read and the act of preparing to die occupy the same verse. This is the chautisa, a thirty-four-stanza structure built upon the consonants of the Odia script, each stanza opening with the letter that follows the one before, so that reciting the poem in full means moving, in order, through the entire alphabet. A child taught to read through such a text absorbs, in the same breath, an instruction on mortality, detachment, and the futility of hoarded wealth.

This convergence of pedagogy and philosophy, of script and soul, offers a way of understanding how Odia identity has long been carried not through institutions or monuments but through the very shape of the language spoken in its villages, and it offers, too, a way of asking why that carrying has grown fainter within the state’s cities.

Chautisa: Definition and Descent

The chautisa belongs to a family of alphabet-anchored verse forms that flourished in Odia literature well before print gave the language its modern permanence. Its discipline is exacting: thirty-four stanzas, one for each consonant, the opening syllable of each stanza dictated by the sequence of the script itself. Within that constraint, poets across three centuries found room for courtly ornament, personal devotion, and social protest in turn, proof that a fixed structure need not fix the content it carries.

The form’s most celebrated early flowering belongs to the closing decades of the Riti Yuga, the ornate literary period that produced four poets of lasting stature: Kabisurya Baladev Rath, Brajanath Badajena, Gopalakrushna Pattanaik, and Bhima Bhoi. Baladev Rath worked extensively in champu and chautisa, and his Kishore Chandranana Champu remains a foundational text within Odissi musical repertoire to this day. Alongside him worked Bhaktacharan Das, author of the voluminous Mathura Mangala and, more relevant to this article, of the Manabodha Chautisa, a composition whose opening line, addressed directly to the poet’s own restless mind, has survived independently of the full text as a devotional refrain recited and sung across generations.

A century later, the form travelled into radically different hands. Bhima Bhoi, the blind Kondh poet and chief propagator of Mahima Dharma, took up the same thirty-four-letter architecture in his Chautisa Madhu Chakra, but where Bhaktacharan Das had addressed the individual soul, Bhoi addressed the social order itself, his vernacular, Sambalpuri-inflected Odia carrying critique of caste and idol worship into a form previously associated with courtly refinement. The chautisa, in other words, proved capacious enough to hold both a Riti-era poet’s meditation on personal impermanence and a nineteenth-century subaltern reformer’s demand for social equality, without abandoning the alphabetic discipline that gave the form its name and its memorability.

Manabodha Chautisa: The Grammar of Impermanence

Bhaktacharan Das opens Manabodha Chautisa by turning inward, addressing his own mind as a companion who has strayed and urging it toward remembrance of the divine countenance. What follows across the subsequent thirty-three stanzas is less a narrative than a sustained argument, conducted letter by letter, against the illusions that bind a person to the world. The body appears repeatedly as a temporary and unreliable dwelling, its eventual decay described without flinching, its claim on permanence dismissed stanza after stanza. Wealth, too, comes under the same scrutiny: whatever is gathered through a lifetime of labour passes, upon death, into hands that never laboured for it, and the household that once called a person master will, within hours of that person’s passing, treat the same body as an object to be hastily removed. Kinship fares no better under the poet’s questioning, since companions depart one by one throughout life, and none accompanies the soul on its final journey.

Midway through the sequence, the argument turns from warning to instruction. Time itself becomes the poet’s evidence: youth offers no immunity, and death makes no distinction between the old and the young, taking each in its own hour without notice. Against this unpredictability, the poet offers a single counsel, repeated with variation across the closing stanzas, that the name of the divine, invoked with sincerity, is the only companion able to accompany the soul beyond the body. The chautisa closes as it began, returning to the same fragile, ash-destined body with which it opened, except that the posture has changed from anxious attachment to willing surrender, a circle completed across thirty-four letters.

What makes this movement significant for the purposes of this article is not merely its theological content but its method of transmission. Manabodha Chautisa was not preserved through classroom instruction or institutional canon. It survived, and continues to survive, through recitation: grandparents teaching grandchildren their letters through its verses, temple functionaries and household elders carrying its cadence forward by voice rather than by print. The full Odia text, along with its transliteration, remains available through community-maintained archives such as The Smaranika and Odia Wikisource, themselves quiet acts of custodianship performed by individuals outside any institutional mandate. Readers of this article wishing to encounter the verses in their original sequence are encouraged toward those sources directly, since the composition’s rhythm and internal rhyme reward reading in the original Odia far more than any paraphrase can convey.

From Court to Conscience: The Social Turn of Chautisa

If Bhaktacharan Das used the chautisa to instruct the individual soul, Bhima Bhoi used the same form to instruct the collective conscience. Composed in the second half of the nineteenth century, Chautisa Madhu Chakra retained the alphabetic discipline of its predecessors but redirected its address outward, toward a society Bhoi found riddled with caste hierarchy and hollow ritual. Bhoi’s language departed deliberately from the Sanskritized register favoured by earlier court poets, adopting instead the colloquial cadence of the Sambalpuri dialect, a choice that placed the form within reach of listeners who had never been permitted access to Sanskrit learning in the first place. His assertion that he would accept damnation himself if it secured the redemption of the world stands as one of Odia literature’s most quoted lines of moral conviction, and it demonstrates how thoroughly the chautisa form, born in courtly ornament, had been repurposed by Bhoi into an instrument of protest against the very social order that courtly literature had often served.

Read together, Manabodha Chautisa and Chautisa Madhu Chakra reveal the form’s extraordinary range. One addresses the self in the language of renunciation, the other addresses society in the language of reform, and both rely on the identical structural discipline of thirty-four letters to make their case memorable enough to survive without the aid of print. This is the argument this article wishes to advance: that Odia identity, in its philosophical, devotional, and social dimensions alike, has been carried across centuries not primarily through manuscript or monument but through forms deliberately built for the human voice and the human memory, forms that placed spiritual and ethical instruction inside the very tool, the alphabet, through which a child first learns to read the world.

Custodians in the Village, Spectators in the City

The custodianship of this inheritance has never been evenly distributed. In rural Odisha, chautisa recitation persists chiefly through informal transmission, an elder teaching a child letters through verse, a village reciter carrying the cadence forward at a gathering, a household continuing a practice inherited without ever having named it heritage. This custodianship asks nothing of institutions and expects no audience. It survives because it is practised, not because it is preserved.

Urban Odisha’s relationship with the same material has grown, by contrast, increasingly mediated. The verses of Manabodha Chautisa now circulate chiefly as devotional audio tracks, YouTube uploads, or fragments embedded within Jatra theatre, encountered as content rather than absorbed as practice. The alphabet-instruction function that once fused literacy and philosophy into a single childhood act has been ceded entirely to printed primers stripped of any devotional residue, and the chautisa itself has been repositioned from lived pedagogy to nostalgic artefact, something to be listened to rather than something to be taught forward.

This is not a matter of urban Odisha lacking access to the material. The verses are, if anything, more searchable and more widely available now than at any point in their history, preserved by community archives, transcribed on Wikisource, sung by contemporary devotional artists. What has been lost is not access but transmission, the specific act of one generation placing the verse directly into the mouth of the next. Rural Odisha continues to perform this act, largely without recognition, while urban Odisha consumes the same inheritance as a finished product, encountered and closed, rather than as a living practice, received and carried onward.

What Custodianship Would Require

The question this article leaves open, deliberately, is what it would take for urban Odisha to move from spectatorship back toward custodianship, from listening to a chautisa recording toward teaching one, from treating Manabodha Chautisa as archival curiosity toward treating it as the grandmother once did, as the first lesson a child receives in both letters and mortality. No institution can manufacture this shift by decree, since custodianship, by its nature, cannot be delegated; it can only be practised, one household and one recitation at a time. What institutions and publications can do is smaller but not without value: they can keep the verses in circulation, keep their history intact, and keep the question of transmission alive in front of readers who might otherwise never encounter it at all. Paricharchā’s own ongoing documentation of Odisha’s devotional and literary inheritance, essay by essay, stanza by stanza, offers one such modest counter-current against forgetting, a reminder that the alphabet still has something to teach beyond how to read, if only someone is willing to recite it aloud again.