In the shattered glass of Cuttack’s calm, a glimpse of Odisha’s swift collapse

Cuttack is my hometown. For most of my life, it stood apart from the contagion that swept across India – a city devout yet not doctrinaire, religious not rigid, where the sacred did not demand purity or exclusion as its price.

Nowhere is that spirit more visible than in Buxi Bazar, where the Amareswar temple shares a wall with a dargah, and both overlook Royal Biryani, one of the city’s most famous eateries. On festival nights, incense, attar and mutton smoke mingle in the same air. Amid these ordinary miracles of coexistence, Cuttack learned to live with itself.

In June 2024, the city elected Sofia Firdous, a young Muslim woman, as its legislator – a decision so natural that few even called it historic. Cuttack’s pluralism was routine, built into our mental architecture as much as the 1,000-year-old Barabati Fort. It was as quintessentially Cuttacki as the timeless pleasures of a good dahibara aludum.

Muslim artisans fashion the silver medhas that rise each autumn behind the goddess’s face. Their needles, threading gold and silver, turn labour into liturgy. For them, Durga is a civic icon to be adorned, a goddess who belongs to the whole city. The shimmer of their craft is Cuttack’s oldest theology: faith shared...

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