इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Vidarbha · Deccan Inland Plateau
छोटी-छोटी बातें
- A supercontinent named after a districtThe coal-bearing rock sequence around Chandrapur and Ballarshah was described by nineteenth-century geologists as the Gondwana system, after Gondwana, the country of the Gonds. When Eduard Suess later proposed a southern supercontinent he named it after the same rocks. Every geology textbook on Earth carries a Vidarbha place-name, and almost nobody using it knows that.
- An afternoon that changed a census categoryOn 14 October 1956 Ambedkar took the Buddhist refuges at Nagpur and then administered them, together with twenty-two additional vows of his own composition, to a gathering generally put at around four lakh people. He died seven weeks later. Maharashtra's Buddhist population, effectively nil before that afternoon, is now several million and is concentrated in Vidarbha and Marathwada.
- Oranges flowered on commandThe Nagpur mandarin is worked on bahar treatment. Irrigation is deliberately withheld until the tree is stressed enough to drop its leaves, then restored, and the tree flushes into flower on cue. Withhold in one window and you get the ambia crop; withhold in another and you get the mrig. Two harvests a year out of one orchard, entirely by controlling when the water stops.
- The war that built the railwayWhen the American Civil War cut Lancashire off from American cotton between 1861 and 1865, Berar's black-soil cotton became suddenly valuable, and a branch railway was pushed to the Khamgaon market to move it. The mills and the ginning towns of the cotton plain are laid out around that decade.
- Two regions, two dates, one languageBerar was assigned to British administration by the Nizam in 1853 and attached to the Central Provinces in 1903. Marathwada stayed inside Hyderabad State until 1948. Two Marathi-speaking regions on either side of the Painganga spent ninety-five years under different governments, which is why one says patwari and the other says talathi, and why one's Marathi carries Hindi habits and the other's carries Urdu ones.
- Theatre that runs from ten at night until dawnOnce the paddy is in, the Zadipatti circuit of Bhandara, Gondia, Chandrapur and Gadchiroli stages ticketed plays on village platforms through the night, with professional troupes, contracted stars and hundreds of shows a season, in Zadi Boli. It is a self-financing commercial theatre economy operating almost entirely outside the notice of Marathi theatre criticism.
- A procession for taking disease out of the cityOn the day after Pola, Nagpur carries the Kali and Pivli Marbat effigies through the old city and burns them, calling the year's illness and misfortune to leave with them. The Kali Marbat procession is said to have been running since the 1880s. It is the only festival of its kind in Maharashtra.
- Tanks built by a tenure that no longer existsSeveral thousand earthen tanks across the eastern districts were built and maintained by malguzars, the revenue landholders of the Central Provinces. The tenure was abolished in the 1950s and with it the obligation to desilt. The tanks stayed, the maintenance did not, and restoring them has been a state programme since the 2000s.
- A rice variety that came out of one man's fieldDadaji Khobragade, a smallholder in Chandrapur district, spotted an off-type plant in his paddy in the 1980s and selected from it over several seasons until it bred true. The result, HMT, spread across central India. He held no rights over it and gained nothing from it, and the case is cited constantly in arguments about farmers' rights to their own selections.
- A village that won its own bambooMendha-Lekha in Gadchiroli became the first village in India to obtain community forest rights under the Forest Rights Act in 2009, and then the right to harvest and sell bamboo from its own forest. Its gram sabha takes decisions by consensus, and it has been doing so since long before the law recognised the practice.
- A crater used as a stand-in for MarsLonar is one of very few known hypervelocity impact craters formed in basalt, which makes its shocked and melted rock a close terrestrial analogue for the basaltic surfaces of Mars and the Moon. Planetary geologists come here to calibrate instruments. It sits in Buldhana district, in Vidarbha, and is regularly and wrongly assigned to Marathwada.
- A legislature that moves here for one monthNagpur was the capital of the Central Provinces and Berar and lost that status in the reorganisations of 1956 and 1960. The Nagpur Pact of 1953 provided for a session of the state legislature to be held here, which is why Maharashtra's winter session sits in Nagpur and not in Mumbai.
Vidarbha की छोटी-छोटी स्थानीय बातें — रीति-रिवाज़, अनोखी आदतें और वे चीज़ें जो किसी गाइडबुक में नहीं मिलतीं। (12)