Karmaveer Gourishankar Ray

On the occasion of this Historic milestone for Odisha .... Odia getting the status of Classical Language last Thursday, the sixth Indian language after Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit and Tamil and the first among the Indo-Aryan linguistic group to get the tag .... 

Koti Koti Pranam to Karmaveer Gourishankar Ray the Savior of Odia Language and Literature .... who led the SAVE ODIA movement and worked for the protection and preservantation of odia language.... "ODIA EKTA BHASA NOY" - An anti-Odia movement then rocked the province to replace it by Bengali in the costal, Hindi in western and Telegu in the southern Orissa was thwarted by his relentless efforts and Odia was given its due place.

1838 - 1917

Gourishankar Ray was one of the brightest son of Orissa (Odisha), an icon of patriotism, a great reformer who dedicated his entire life for noble causes like widow marriage, prohibition of dowry, child marriage and co-dying or Sati, abolition of untouchability and casteism, He was the father of the co-operative movements as well as printing & publishing crafts in Orissa. He founded the Cuttack Printing Company and was the Editor of Utkal Deepika. He was the heralder of National Congress in Orissa as the secretary of Utkal Sabha. He worked for the expansions of craft education including horticulture etc. He proposed to link Cuttack with Sambalpur, to link Khurda and Bolangir by Railways and to extend the railway line to Jaipur town. He worked for introduction of a universal and popular Oriya (Odia) language for different parts of Orissa with the common and colloquial Oriya language in literature, different pauses, uniform alphabet & a popular prose style in Oriya writing and printing, besides introduction of one lipi i.e. Devanagari for the whole country in order to bring about national integration. He was in favour of inter caste, inter region and inter state marriages for national integration.