Madhavi Pattanayak

Madhavi Pattanayak (or Madhavi Dasi, 16th-century CE) is considered the first woman poet in the Oriya language. She was a contemporary of the famous Pancha Sakha poets in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. She was born in Bentapura village of Puri district in a Karana family and was the sister of Raya Ramananda Pattanayak. Her chosen path was that of devotion to the god Jagannath. She wrote religious poetry in the mid-16th century.