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Mahakoshal & Gondwana · Central Highlands & Forest Belt

छोटी-छोटी बातें

A supercontinent named after a peopleThe Permian rock sequence first described in this country was called the Gondwana series after the Gond homeland it outcrops in. In 1885 Eduard Suess borrowed the name for the southern supercontinent, and every geological reconstruction of the ancient southern hemisphere since has carried the name of an Adivasi people of central India. Almost nobody using the word knows it is a place, or whose.
Two rivers, one hilltop, two oceansThe Narmada and the Son rise within a few kilometres of one another on the Amarkantak plateau and then run in opposite directions — the Narmada west down a rift valley to the Arabian Sea, the Son east and north to the Ganga and the Bay of Bengal. Amarkantak is a watershed you can walk across in an afternoon, and it is why the place is a pilgrimage site rather than merely a source.
The type locality of an entire dinosaur groupTitanosaurus indicus was described by Richard Lydekker in 1877 from vertebrae collected in the Lameta beds on Bara Simla hill at Jabalpur. The whole titanosaur group — the last and largest of the sauropods, found on every continent — takes its name from a genus whose type specimen came out of a cantonment hillside here.
The deity lives in the fiddleA Gond clan's Persa Pen is understood to reside in the bana, the three-stringed fiddle of the Pardhan bard attached to that clan. The clan therefore cannot worship properly without its Pardhan, and the Pardhan cannot eat without the clan, which is paid out in grain. It is a religious system with a hereditary musician built into its machinery rather than added to it for atmosphere.
From a mud wall to an auction house in twenty yearsJangarh Singh Shyam was painting digna on village walls at Patangarh when a Bharat Bhavan survey found him in 1981. By the mid-1990s Pardhan Gond painting had a name, a market, a second generation and international exhibitions. It is the only case in India of a bardic caste converting substantially into a school of contemporary painters — and it happened because the visual language was already there, on surfaces that were washed off every year.
Three language families inside one regionGondi is Dravidian. Korku is Austroasiatic, with its nearest relatives hundreds of kilometres east in Chota Nagpur. Bagheli, Bundeli, Powari and Marathi are Indo-Aryan. Very few regions of this size anywhere in India hold three families at once, and here they sit in villages within sight of each other.
A script found on palm leaves in 2006Gondi had no traditional script until manuscripts in an unknown alphabet turned up at Gunjala in the Adilabad uplands in 2006. A separate script, Masaram Gondi, had been invented for the language in 1918. Both were encoded in Unicode in 2017 and 2018 — a language with no script for most of its history now has two, and neither is in general use.
One forest, two tiger reservesPench is a single teak forest along a single river, administered as two separate tiger reserves with two managements, two sets of gates and two sets of rules, because a state boundary crosses it. It is the region's whole condition in one place.
Twelve deer that became a subspeciesThe hard-ground barasingha of Kanha's meadows fell to a few dozen animals around 1970 and exists nowhere else on earth. It survived because the maidans it needs are the sites of villages that were moved out, so the grassland is an artefact of settlement history rather than of nature.
The sugar that falls at nightMahua corollas drop in darkness and have to be swept up before sunrise, before heat and ants take them. Dried, they hold about half their weight in sugar and keep a year. A household's entire annual sweetener can come off the ground under a few trees in three weeks, which is why individual mahua trees are inherited and partitioned like fields.
Nagpur was founded by a Gond kingBakht Buland Shah of Deogarh moved his seat down from the Satpura around the turn of the eighteenth century, and the city that grew from it is now read as the centre of Marathi Vidarbha. The Gond kingdoms of Deogarh, Kherla, Chanda and Garha-Mandla all straddle what are now different states, which is the reason no state teaches them as its own history.
What is not hereBandhavgarh, with its fort and its white-tiger record, lies over the Son divide in Bagelkhand. Bhimbetka, the painted rock shelters near Bhopal, belongs to the Malwa side of the Vindhya; the in-region equivalent is Adamgarh and the shelters of the Pachmarhi hills. Chitrakote falls, the ghotul and the registered dhokra and iron crafts belong to Bastar, south-east over the watershed. This region is defined by what its own terrain and speech hold, not by the famous things nearest to it.

Mahakoshal & Gondwana की छोटी-छोटी स्थानीय बातें — रीति-रिवाज़, अनोखी आदतें और वे चीज़ें जो किसी गाइडबुक में नहीं मिलतीं। (12)