For nearly a thousand years, a sacred text lay largely unread outside a small circle of scholars in eastern India, an eleventh century Purana that dared to make an extraordinary claim: that a stretch of coastline most of the world has never heard of holds a concentration of sanctity greater than even the legendary lake of Pushkara.
That text is the Kapila Purana. This is its story, told in full for an English-speaking audience for the first time.
Walk with the sage Kapila as he tells a gathering of astonished ascetics why the land of Utkala, the ancient name for what is now Odisha, deserves to stand among India's holiest ground. Follow the desperate, years-long search of a king who abandoned the comforts of his own throne to find a vanished god, and meet the divine carpenter who left that god's wooden image deliberately unfinished at Puri. Stand before the self-manifest linga that gave Bhubaneswar its name as the City of a Thousand Lingas, and the audacious thirteenth century Sun Temple built at Konark in the shape of a colossal stone chariot. Meet the goddess at Jajpur whose navel is said to mark the very center of the earth, guardian of some of the oldest tantric practice anywhere in eastern India.
Along the way, discover the hidden hill sanctuaries, forgotten river valleys, and sacred waters that bind this entire landscape into one, the same rivers a soul is still said to cross after death. And arrive, finally, at the Purana's own closing revelation, a teaching that dissolves the boundary between Vishnu and Shiva and quietly reframes everything that came before it.
Written as a work of accessible scholarship rather than a dry academic translation, this book combines the narrative pull of a great journey with the rigor of real historical, architectural, and textual research. Drawing on the critical Sanskrit edition of the Kapila Purana, decades of archaeological and art historical scholarship on Odisha's temples, and the author's own extensive travel through the region, it finally offers English-language readers something that has never existed before: a single, complete, and genuinely engaging account of one of India's most remarkable and least-known sacred landscapes.
Whether you come to this book as a student of Hindu philosophy, a lover of India's temple architecture, a pilgrim planning your own journey through Odisha, or simply a reader drawn to stories of lost texts and rediscovered wonders, this is a journey through sacred geography unlike any other: honest about what history can prove, generous about what devotion has always known, and written throughout in clear, unhurried prose for anyone curious enough to follow it.
The land the sage Kapila once called holier than Pushkara itself is waiting to be walked again.
