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22 Translating Medieval OrissaWith these texts, Oriya emerged as one of the dominant languagesand it became a key constituent in the Oriya national identityformation.During the following fifty years, various literary genresincluding prose literature were articulated in this language. Themajor prose texts of the period were Rudra Sudhanidhi by NarayanaAbadhuta Swami, Brahma Gita, Ganesha Bibhuti and GyanaChudamani by Balaram Das and Tula Bhina by Jagannath Das. Thatprose texts with such sophisticated conceptual thinking could bearticulated in the Oriya language of that time is proof of thedemocratization of the episteme. This kind of democratization ofdiscourse was possible because of the pressures of the Muslimpresence. In order to protect their spheres of influence the Hinduruling elite consisting of the Kshyatriya and the Brahmin castes triedto democratize some religious tenets and accommodate thesubalterns in their fold. This resulted in the Bhakti cult, which inturn generated some religious diffusion and the translational process.The restrictions to the domain of knowledge and power (Dash andPattanaik 2002) were automatically diluted and people belonging tovarious castes and religions participated in the production,consumption, transmission and diffusion of knowledge. The sphereof influence, and the extent of acceptance of the Oriya language wassuch that, even when the political formation that enabled this kind ofemergence of language-based national identity collapsed after abouthundred years, the language continued to unite people culturally.The resilience and accomodative capacities of Oriya enabled it tobecome one of the ideological formations that controlled theapparatuses of the states where the language was used.Dash and Pattanaik (2002) discusses how the Oriyalanguage had a rather dormant existence for around four hundredyears after its emergence from Purva Magadhi. Though it was usedwidely in colloquial transactions and stray rock-edicts, there werenot many written texts. Only after Sarala Das’stranslations/transcriptions (the word ‘translation’ has been used here