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56 Translating Medieval OrissaSanskrit text through the filter language of Bengali. In hisBrajalilamrita Samudra he admitted that it was a translation ofRadhakrishna Lila Kadambe, the Bengali rendering of the SanskritBidagdha Madhaba. Dinabandhu, a poet of southern Orissa of late18 th century, translated the Telugu text Dahramanga Purana asPatibhakta Purana. Towards the early 19 th century, Tulsi Das’sRamayana written in a Hindi dialect was translated several timesinto Oriya. Moreover, some major Oriya writers of the period likeBrajanath Badajena also started writing in languages contiguouswith Oriya. Oriya writers like Pindika Srichandana andShymasundar Bhanja demonstrated their mastery over contiguouslanguages by translating some Sanskrit texts like Gita Gobinda intoBengali. In order to gain access to a wider discursive practice, someother writers translated their own Oriya texts into Sanskrit. It wasbelieved that through a Sanskrit translation a text could have a widerreach and gain acceptability in an elite circle. All these traits oftranslation are a sign of identity crisis within a social space fracturedby political instability discussed earlier.However, two trends in translation ran counter to thisidentity crisis. Firstly, the Oriya writers tested the strength andresilience of their language by translating a number of technicalbooks like Kama Sutra, Aswa Sashtra, Jyotisha Sashtra etc.Moreover, for a long time they resisted the translation of thecanonical literary and aesthetic texts in Sanskrit into Oriya, barringsome exceptions like Gita Gobinda. On the one hand, through thetranslation of technical texts, they expected Oriya to graduate from acolloquial language into a more ‘complete’ language, and on theother by resisting translation of the literary texts; they expectedOriya literature to evolve such texts on its own.The appropriation of scientific information and technicalknowledge from other languages and evolving indigenous literaryforms and expressions went hand in hand till the British occupation