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True Valor
The images at Puri were not destroyed, and the reason is that they left before the army arrived.
1568 was a bad year on both sides of India. Akbar was at Chittor. And while he was there, Sulaiman Karrani of Bengal came into Odisha.
And the Gajapati state ended. It had held the eastern coast as an independent power for centuries.
The Gajapatis of Odisha were not a minor kingdom. At their height under Kapilendra Deva in the fifteenth century, they had held territory from the Ganga down to the Kaveri.
They fought the Bahmanis and Vijayanagara on equal terms. And they ruled from Cuttack, with the Jagannath temple at Puri as the spiritual centre of the state. The king of Odisha ruled formally as the deputy of Jagannath.
The deity was the sovereign, and the king served him. It is a constitutional arrangement you do not find elsewhere.
By 1568 that state had weakened. Mukunda Deva, the last independent Gajapati, held a diminished kingdom with a contested nobility.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.