thing of a challenge to the elite and orthodox literary culture ofIndia's classical language, Sanskrit. Only the so-called heterodoxreligious groups, the Buddhists and Jains, accepted and encouragedwriting in a vernacular language. Both Buddhists and Jains used earlyvernaculars, called Middle Indie, for religious texts and secular com-positions. For all others in early and medieval India, Sanskrit was con-sidered to be the only proper language for the educated and the onlylanguage in which to write serious literature or discuss philosophy. TheNew Indie vernacular literatures, ancestors of today's languages, madetheir appearance at different times on the subcontinent. Oriya literatureis said to have begun in the fifteenth century C.E. with an Oriya versionof the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, by Sarala Das. For the nextthree hundred years, writing in Oriya was with few exceptions in verseand its subject matter was predominantly religious. In the sixteenth cen-tury, the translation of the Mahahharata was followed by a translationinto Oriya of the other major Sanskrit epic, the Rarnayana, by Balarama Dasa.