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Raghunath Parichha was born in 1802 at the village of Lahuri near Parlakhemundi. His ancestors had received the title to Parichha for their service to Lord Gopinath of Lahuri. Not much is known about the life of Raghunath Parichha, and what is known is mainly hearsay. It is said that Raghunath attained‘siddhi’(exceptional power) by the blessings of a saint and, as a result, his poetic talent blossomed. He became famous when he demonstrated his scholarship before an assembly of pandits at Puri, and he came to be known as Kavichandra. He was a poet, a scholar, a devotee and a musician.

Raghunath was proficient in Sanskrit, Oriya, Telugu, Bengali and Hindi. Only three of his published works are available to us. They are Gopinath ballav natak kabya, Lakshana chandrodaya and Raghunathvilas kabya. From these three works it appears that Raghunath was a follower of the Gaudiya Vaishnava School, and his writings mainly centred around the story of Radha Krishna.

In order to popularise Vaishnavism, he made use of music and lilas. But instead of following the lyricism of Vaishnava poets like Dinakrushna, he imitated the rhetor-ic of poets like Upendra Bhanja. Besides, he also applied the ‘gana’ principle of the Sanskrit metres to Oriya songs. His style is one found irt Sanskrit and may be regarded as part of a later development of the medieval literary tradition.

Gopinath ballav is regarded by some critics as the first Oriya drama. The romance of Radha-Krishna is the central theme of the play. A portion of the Rasa-lila is presented in the form of a dance-drama. The abundance of Oriya songs and shlokas in Sanskrit metres and the highly rhetorical prose dialogues show this as a developed lila, a type of dance-drama on the pattern of south Orissan opera. It almost appears like a‘champu drama’, an admixture of prose and poetry.

Apart from the three published texts, Raghunath has also a number of unpublished manuscripts to his
credit. They are Sangita Rama-lila, Sangita Krishna-lila, Niti shataka, Sangita-ratnakar, Vasudeva nataka, Krishnachandra nataka, Mukta-natika, etc.His bibliographys are Gourikumar Brahma, Chinta o chetana; Natabar Samantaray, Odia sahityara itihas (1964); Raghunath Parichha, Gopinath ballav natak (Orissa Sahitya Academy, Bhubaneswar).

Mukta-Natika
Krishnachandra Nataka,
Vasudeva Nataka
Sangita-Ratnakar
Niti Shataka
Sangita-Ratnakar