Odia sculpture was influenced by the Gita Govinda. The Dasavatara worship (ten incarnations) flourished in Puri, and spread throughout Odisha and the Prachi valley, creating a corpus of themes for devotees of different ideological thoughts to ponder over. Hence the worship of Gods like Narsimha, Varaha, Vamana, Trivikrama, Buddha, Balarama, Sankarsana and Krishna Gopinath flourished throughout the region. In course of time sculptural representations of different incarnations following various artistic styles were constructed and worshipped accordingly, like the four-handed Madhava-Vishnu-Vasudeva images. Another popular representation came from the Maharasa showcased by Jayadeva. Here, a herd of cows is depicted on a pedestal, with four bearded devotees flanking them, with eight Gopis or Asta Sakhis on both sides of Krishna, with expressions of devotion and absolute surrender to the Almighty.
Eight-hundred years ago, a wandering poet in the eastern parts of India composed a devotional song in Sanskrit about...
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