Mukunda Deva came to power in 1559 through the blunt expedient of removing his predecessor. Of Chalukya descent, he ousted Raghuram Raya Chotaraya, the Bhoi dynasty ruler, and claimed the throne of Odisha. His reign coincided with a period of upheaval across northern India. The Mughal emperor Humayun had defeated Sikandar Shah Suri at the Battle of Sirhind, re-establishing Mughal authority after the interregnum of Sher Shah Suri's dynasty. When Humayun died shortly after, his son Akbar ascended the throne. Into this volatile landscape came a fugitive: Ibrahim, a member of the defeated Suri dynasty, who fled to Odisha seeking protection. Mukunda Deva granted him refuge and land, an act of generosity that would cost him everything. Sulaiman Khan Karrani, ruler of the Bengal Sultanate, demanded Ibrahim's surrender. Mukunda Deva refused. The refusal transformed a border dispute into a war of annihilation.

Mukunda Deva was not a passive defender. By 1565, he had received an embassy from Akbar himself and sworn allegiance to the Mughal emperor, promising to deploy Ibrahim against Bengal should Sulaiman Karrani revolt. This triangular diplomacy gave Mukunda Deva confidence, perhaps too much of it. In January 1567, he invaded Bengal. The campaign was initially successful - his forces defeated the Bengal army and amassed significant wealth. Encamped along the Ganges, Mukunda Deva conducted military exercises and boat maneuvers on the river, displaying the power of an Odishan state that still believed itself capable of projecting force northward. But the campaign's success was its own undoing. It confirmed for Sulaiman Karrani that Odisha under Mukunda Deva was not merely a nuisance but a genuine threat, one that needed to be eliminated entirely rather than merely contained.

The Bengal counterattack came with overwhelming force. Bayezid, the Karrani general, was accompanied by Sikandar Uzbak, a former Mughal commander whose experience added professional military weight to the campaign. Ibrahim Sur was forced to surrender and killed, removing the refugee whose presence had triggered the conflict. But the conquest's lasting damage came not from the armies but from one man: Kalapahar, the commander of the Karrani dynasty's forces. As the Bengal armies swept through Odisha, Kalapahar oversaw the systematic destruction of temples and religious images across the region. The devastation is recorded in Odishan histories as one of the most significant cultural tragedies in the region's heritage - not the incidental damage of a military campaign but a deliberate program of iconoclasm that left the great temple traditions of Odisha scarred for centuries. The scale of what was lost can be measured in the fragments that remain: headless sculptures, shattered carvings, temples whose interiors were gutted while their structures survived.

In 1568, Odisha's medieval independence ended. The kingdom that had built the temples of Bhubaneswar, the great Jagannatha temple at Puri, and the Sun Temple at Konark became a province administered by governors answerable to Bengal. Local kings continued to exist, but stripped of real authority - their titles hollow, their armies disbanded, their courts reduced to ceremonial functions. Odisha would remain under external rule for centuries: first the Bengal Sultanate, then the Mughal Empire after its annexation of Bengal's territories in 1592, then the Marathas, and finally the British. The loss of sovereignty meant the loss of patronage. No more grand temple construction, no more royal sponsorship of sculpture and architecture. What the Karrani conquest destroyed, no subsequent ruler rebuilt. The temples that survived Kalapahar survived because stone is durable, not because anyone protected them. It took until 1936 for Odisha to regain even administrative identity as a separate province, and until 1947 for it to join independent India as a state. The conquest of 1568 cast a shadow that measured four centuries long.