Damodar Sekhar

According to the legend, Raja Jagat Deo was the King of the kingdom of Dhar in present day Madhya Pradesh. He was going to Puri along with his wife on pilgrimage. On their way to Puri, his wife gave birth to a son at their camp in Jhalda. But, the king thought the newborn child as dead and left him there. After they left the region, the child was found by the seven local tribal chiefs and they named the child as Damodar Sekhar. Damodar Sekhar later established the Panchakot Royal dynasty in 80 A.D.[9][8][7]

In Orissa many are pradhans or village headmen holding service lands a small proportion make a livelihood as landless day labourers while at the other end of the scale the few who have risen to be considerable zamindars have managed to transform themselves into Rajputs and cannot now be recognized as Kurmis Two instances of this have come to notice The Zamindar of Khelar in Nayabasan paragana of the Midnapur District is said to have been a Kurmi who attempted to reform his brethren by urging them to abandon the custom of widow marriage and to give up yoking cows to the plough His efforts however were unsuccessful and the Khelar family now call themselves Kshsatriyas,and strenuously disown all connexion with the Kurmis Another case is that of the well known house of Pachet in Estern Manbhum. The Pachet Raja claims to be a Go bansi Rajput and traces back his ancestry fifty two generations to a child discovered in the woods by the Kurmis being suckled by a cow. The Kurmis of those part says they have been there just the same number of generations.[10][11][12][13] The family (The Pachat Raja) by the eighteenth century had been Hinduided and provided with a genealogy linking the first Raja with the twelfth Maharaja of Ujjain.[14]