ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 investigates the history of state and social formation in Khurda kingdom in the early modern period. An integrative process took place in which the state and local society, the coast and the interior and human society and the natural world began to be be increasingly connected. Instead of seeing this increasing connectivity as a result of the penetration of modernising forces from outside, permeating the forest and expanding agriculture, this chapter looks at history from the inside out, and explores how the frontier was opened from within the forest. Forest-dwellers responded to new opportunities and availed their environmental knowledge and martial capabilities to become warriors, peasants and herdsmen, thus enabling state and social formation from below. In the course of this, social and ecological spaces opened at the interface of the coastal plain and the interior forest, accompanied by the twin processes of Hinduisation and tribalisation, allowing the diversification of resource utilisation and lifeways. Inner transformative dynamics arose from the engagement between and the management of these diversities.
