The Story
OrganizerEvery February, as night falls over the Dhauli hills near Bhubaneswar, the illuminated white dome of the Shanti Stupa, the Peace Pagoda built where Emperor Ashoka is said to have renounced war after the carnage of the Kalinga battle, becomes the backdrop for one of Odisha's most resonant cultural events. The Dhauli-Kalinga Mahotsav is a festival of dance and music whose very theme is peace over war, staged on the ground that gave that idea its most famous historical expression.
The festival was begun in 2003 by the Orissa Dance Academy, one of Odisha's premier cultural institutions, founded in 1975 by the Padma Shri Odissi guru Gangadhar Pradhan and now led by the Padma Shri dancer and choreographer Aruna Mohanty. It is organised in collaboration with the Department of Tourism, Government of Odisha, and Art Vision, the academy led by the Italian-born Odissi dancer and scholar Ileana Citaristi, and it grew out of, and later merged, two impulses: the Dhauli festival of dance and music, and the Kalinga Mahotsav of martial arts. That fusion remains its defining feature: the Dhauli-Kalinga Mahotsav is a unique combination of classical and martial dance forms presented on the same stage.
Across its three to four evenings, the festival gathers around five hundred artists from across India and abroad, presenting Odissi and other Indian classical dances alongside martial and folk forms, and allied Odishan arts such as Gotipua, Mayurbhanj Chhau, Sambalpuri dance, Danda Nata, Prahallad Natak, Ghoda Nata and puppet theatre. Supported by the Ministries of Tourism and Culture and telecast live on Doordarshan, it aims explicitly to project Odisha's heritage on the national and international stage, to create cultural awareness among the people and youth of Odisha, and to spread, through performance, the gospel of peace that the Dhauli site embodies. The 2026 edition, held from 6 to 9 February, also marked the golden jubilee of the Orissa Dance Academy.
The Dhauli-Kalinga Mahotsav is significant on several levels. As a showcase of Odissi and Odishan performing arts, it is a major platform for the classical dance lineage associated with Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra and carried forward by the Orissa Dance Academy and Art Vision. Its distinctive pairing of classical dance with martial art forms is rare among Indian festivals and expresses a deliberate artistic and philosophical statement about discipline, energy and grace. Above all, its rootedness at the Dhauli Shanti Stupa binds the festival to one of the most powerful stories in Indian history, Ashoka's turn from war to peace, making the celebration of art an annual reaffirmation of that message. Its scale, some five hundred artists, and its national telecast extend Odisha's cultural reach well beyond the state.
In a divided and often violent world, a major festival whose explicit purpose is to spread a message of peace through the concerts of classical, folk and martial dance carries a resonance beyond the aesthetic. The Dhauli-Kalinga Mahotsav matters as a sustained platform for Odissi and Odishan arts, as a rare space where classical and martial traditions share a stage, and as a living link between contemporary performance and the Ashokan ideal of peace. For the Atlas, it is an important node connecting classical dance, heritage sites, martial traditions and cultural tourism in Odisha.
