इतिहास
A region that has never been an administrative unit cannot take its periodisation from a state, and this one does not. Its ancient period belongs to the Narmada trough and to Tripuri, at Tewar near Jabalpur, where the Kalachuris ruled for five centuries and left the inscriptions and temples that are the region's only continuous written record. Its medieval period is the Gond one, attributed by tradition to the fourteenth century and firmly documented from Sangram Shah in the early sixteenth, running to 1781. And its modern period begins with the Maratha conquests — Deogarh and Chanda by 1751, Garha in 1781 — not with the British, who arrived in 1818 to administer a country already twice reorganised. The most important thing to say about all three is that the four Gond kingdoms held the valleys and the fort sites and very little else. Authority in the uplands between them was distributed and held in offices rather than houses — the village headman, the clan priest who serves the clan deity, and the hereditary Pardhan bard who keeps a clan's genealogy and its deity songs. That contrast between a documented dynastic fringe and an undocumented upland interior is the region's central fact, and it is why a Dravidian language survives in the middle of an Indo-Aryan continent.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
प्राचीनc. 300 BCE – c. 1300 CE
Everything datable in this period happens in the trough. Tripuri, on the Narmada near modern Jabalpur, was a town of consequence for centuries before it became the capital of the Kalachuris, who ruled from it from the seventh century to the thirteenth and who at their height under Gangeyadeva and his son Karna claimed sovereignty over a large part of northern India. They left temples, land grants and copper plates, which is why the valley half of the region has a dated history at all. The uplands to the south and east left almost nothing of the kind. They were forest on poor sandstone and basalt, of no revenue interest to any dynasty, and were not conquered because they were not worth conquering — which is precisely why a Dravidian language and a religion of clan deities survived there, surrounded on every side by Indo-Aryan speech.
मध्यकालीनc. 1300 – 1781
This is the Gond period, and it produced four kingdoms rather than one — Garha-Mandla on the upper Narmada, Deogarh on the Kanhan, Chanda-Sirpur on the Wainganga, and Kherla in the Satpura. They were never a single state and never fought as one. Garha is the best documented. Tradition puts its founding in the fourteenth century, but the record becomes firm with Sangram Shah, who is credited with holding fifty-two garhs, and with the regency of Rani Durgavati, whose defeat by a Mughal force in 1564 is the hinge of the whole period. The kingdom was restored as a tributary and lasted another two centuries, moving its capital from Garha to Singhorgarh to Chauragarh to Ramnagar as the military situation demanded. What ended Gond rule was not the Mughals but the Marathas, in two stages, and by 1781 none of the four kingdoms was left.
आधुनिक1781 – 1947
The British inherited the region from the Marathas rather than taking it from the Gonds, and what they added was not a conquest but a settlement — a land revenue system that turned cultivators into tenants of intermediaries, and a forest administration that turned sal, teak and bamboo into state property. Almost every recorded grievance in these districts from the 1860s onward runs back to one or other of those two decisions, and both fell hardest on the upland communities that had never been taxed before. The 1857 rising here was a different matter, and belonged to the displaced Gond lineage rather than to the forest. By the twentieth century the Hindi-speaking Narmada towns had become part of national politics, and Jabalpur was substantial enough that the Congress met beside it in 1939, while the forest districts to the south ran a movement of their own that Congress leaders followed rather than led.
शासक और सेनापति
Sangram Shah Raja शासक 1513–1543
The ruler under whom Garha reached its widest extent, credited with holding fifty-two garhs across the Satpura and Maikal. The figure is the kingdom's own reckoning and later accounts show the number shrinking steadily after him.
राजवंश: Garha. राजधानी: Garha
Dalpat Shah Raja शासक 1543–1550
His marriage in 1542 to Durgavati, a Chandela princess, joined the Gond kingdom to a Rajput house of the Vindhyan north; his death in 1550 left a minor heir and produced the regency the region is remembered for.
राजवंश: Garha. राजधानी: Garha
Rani Durgavati Rani संरक्षक 1550–1564
Governed Garha for fourteen years as regent for her son Bir Narayan and is credited in the kingdom's record with extending its cultivation and revenue. She met Asaf Khan's Mughal force at Narrai in 1564, was wounded by arrows and died on the field on 24 June, refusing to withdraw.
राजवंश: Garha. राजधानी: Singhorgarh, later Chauragarh
Hriday Shah Raja शासक 1634–1668
Moved the capital to Ramnagar on the Narmada above Mandla and built there. His is the last long and settled reign the kingdom had.
राजवंश: Garha. राजधानी: Ramnagar
Bakht Buland Shah Raja संस्थापक c. 1686–1706
Secured the Deogarh throne in 1686 after a succession dispute, with Mughal backing, and in 1702 founded Nagpur out of twelve existing hamlets. His administration founded villages across the Kanhan and Wainganga country and is the direct foundation the Bhonsle Marathas later built on.
राजवंश: Deogarh. राजधानी: Deogarh, later Nagpur
Narhar Shah Raja शासक 1776–1781
The last ruler of Garha. His overthrow by the Sagar Marathas in 1781 ended four and a half centuries of Gond rule on the upper Narmada, and the region has had no capital of its own since.
राजवंश: Garha. राजधानी: Ramnagar
Raghoji Bhonsle Senasahibsubah सेनापति campaigns of 1743–1751
Brought Deogarh, Chanda and Chhattisgarh under Maratha control between 1743 and 1751, using the city Bakht Buland Shah had founded as his own capital. Two of the four Gond kingdoms ended in these campaigns.
राजवंश: Bhonsle of Nagpur. राजधानी: Nagpur
The Pardhan Hereditary office, not a dynasty प्रशासक attested in the ethnographic record from the 19th century
Outside the four kingdoms, authority in this region was held in offices rather than houses. The Pardhan is the hereditary bard attached to a Gond clan, who keeps its genealogy and the songs of its clan deities and plays the three-stringed bana at the clan's rituals. The continuity of a clan was carried by that office rather than by any throne, which is why the region has an unbroken religious record and almost no dynastic one — and why, when a survey team met a Pardhan bard painting mud walls in a Dindori village in 1981, what they had found was an old office doing something new.
राजधानी: The Gond clan villages of the Satpura and Maikal