Showing Friends Around Odisha
When someone from outside sees your home for the first time, you see it differently too.
Founder, Majhi Group & Majhi OS
Three years ago, I brought two friends from outside India to Odisha for a week. One was from the UK, one from Singapore. Neither had any prior knowledge of the state beyond a vague awareness that it existed. I had spent a decade away from home by that point and had developed the typical emigrant's selective memory, the things I missed had grown cleaner in recollection, the things I had been glad to leave had faded.
The experience of showing your home to people seeing it for the first time is a specific kind of re-education. You see it through their eyes and your own simultaneously. The combination is disorienting and illuminating.
When someone from outside sees your home for the first time, you see it through their eyes and your own simultaneously. The combination is disorienting and illuminating.
What they noticed first
They noticed the temples.
I had grown up around the Lingaraj temple in Bhubaneswar, the 11th-century Shiva temple that is one of the finest examples of Kalinga architecture, and had developed the characteristic local blindness to it. It was just there, a massive, beautiful, slightly inconvenient presence in the middle of the city. My friends stood in front of it and were visibly moved by the scale and the antiquity and the fact that it was still functioning, that actual religious practice continued in a structure built nearly a thousand years ago.
Then they noticed Konark.
The Sun Temple at Konark, built in the 13th century, is one of the great monuments of world architecture. It was designed as a giant chariot of the sun god Surya, 24 stone wheels, several meters in diameter, horses pulling the chariot, the entire composition an act of architectural audacity at a scale that is hard to comprehend even standing in front of it. My friends were quiet for a long time. Eventually one of them said: why is nobody here?
The question stayed with me.
The tourism paradox
Konark is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It should, by any reasonable assessment, be receiving international tourist volumes comparable to Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu. The scale of the monument, its preservation, its art historical significance, all of these are comparable to destinations that receive millions of visitors per year.
It does not receive those numbers. The reasons are partly infrastructure, the roads and accommodation that would support high tourist volumes are not what they should be, and partly visibility, Odisha has not been effectively marketed internationally as a cultural tourism destination in the way that Rajasthan or Kerala have been. But there is something deeper too: the lack of investment in the visitor experience around Konark, the absence of the interpretive infrastructure that helps international visitors understand what they are looking at, has kept the monument from becoming a destination rather than a detour.
This is not inevitable. It is a policy and investment choice that could be made differently.
What I understand differently now
After that trip, I started seeing Odisha through the lens of what it could be for people who have not been conditioned to take it for granted.
The Chilika Lake, the largest brackish water lagoon in Asia, a migratory bird destination of global significance, is an ecological and tourism asset that most of the world does not know exists. The tribal art traditions of the western districts, Pattachitra, Dhokra casting, the Saura tribal art of southern Odisha, are among the most distinctive craft traditions in India, with an international market that remains almost entirely untapped.
The state is sitting on a tourism endowment that is genuinely extraordinary. What it lacks is the investment in infrastructure and the marketing effort to convert that endowment into the kind of visitor experience that produces word-of-mouth, return visits, and the economic development that sustainable tourism can generate.
My friends left Odisha having seen things they did not expect to see and wanting to come back. That response, genuine, unsolicited, from people who had no prior investment in finding the state impressive, is the seed of something.
The question is who tends it.
See also: Odisha Tourism: The Most Underused Asset, A Love Letter to Odisha, The Odyssey of Odisha
Sources
UNESCO: Konark Sun Temple: Outstanding Universal Value
Ministry of Tourism, Government of India: Annual Report on Tourism Statistics
World Travel and Tourism Council: India 2024 Economic Impact Research
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do first-time visitors to Odisha consistently react with 'why haven't I heard of this?'
Because Odisha's tourism endowment, the Konark Sun Temple (UNESCO World Heritage), the Lingaraj and Mukteshwar temples representing a distinct school of Kalinga architecture, the Jagannath Rath Yatra at Puri, Chilika Lake as Asia's largest coastal lagoon, the tribal art traditions of the western districts, has not been matched by the marketing investment, interpretive infrastructure, and visitor experience investment of destinations like Rajasthan or Kerala. The assets are extraordinary. The systems that convert extraordinary assets into extraordinary visitor experiences have not been built. Visitors who find their way to Odisha discover something genuinely significant. The people who would love it most simply don't know to go.
What is the Konark paradox and what would closing it actually require?
Konark Sun Temple is a UNESCO World Heritage Site comparable in architectural ambition and historical significance to Angkor Wat, designed as a giant chariot of the sun god, 24 stone wheels several metres in diameter, horses, the entire composition an act of architectural audacity at a 13th-century scale. It should receive international tourist volumes comparable to destinations that draw millions per year. It does not. The paradox is not the monument, the monument is extraordinary. It is the visitor experience around the monument: the interpretive infrastructure that helps international visitors understand what they are looking at, the accommodation and connectivity that supports multi-night stays, the marketing that places Konark in the mental map of culturally motivated international travellers. These are policy and investment choices. None of them require changing the monument.
What specific tourism assets does Odisha have beyond the most commonly known?
The tribal culture and craft traditions of the western districts are among the most intact in India, weekly tribal markets (haats), Dongria Kondh and Bonda weaving, the Saura tribal art of southern Odisha, representing cultural heritage that international cultural tourism markets actively seek and that remains almost entirely untapped. Chilika Lake's ecology: Asia's largest brackish water lagoon, hosting one of India's largest migratory bird populations in winter and the rare Irrawaddy dolphin as a resident species. Bhitarkanika mangrove ecosystem and saltwater crocodile sanctuary. Pattachitra paintings, Sambalpuri textiles, Dhokra metal casting, palm leaf manuscripts, silver filigree, craft traditions with established international markets that Odia artisans are barely represented in. The tourism endowment is not one asset, it is a concentrated portfolio, each element of which would anchor tourism promotion in a smaller state.
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