# Chhattisgarh Plains (छत्तीसगढ़ मैदान)

> The rice bowl of central India, where the previous day's rice is a drink and a farmer's soil vocabulary is older and more precise than any survey.

Chhattisgarh's plain is one of the great rice landscapes of the world and one of the least famous. Its river, the Mahanadi, rises inside it, so there is no snowmelt and no upstream mountain to depend on — which is why the tank, not the canal, is the oldest technology here, and why the plain kept an extraordinary number of rice landraces, each bred for a soil class and a rainfall the farmers named themselves. Around that sit a summer foodway built on overnight-fermented rice water, a Kalachuri and Somavamshi temple record in brick and stone that most visitors have never heard of, an epic narration tradition in which a single tambura plays every prop, a devotional dance that ends only when it can go no faster, and a silk reared on wild moths in the forest and woven at Champa.

- Source: https://bharatsangraha.com/regions/chhattisgarh-plains
- Language: en
- Tier 1 macro cultural realm: Central Highlands & Forest Belt
- Tier 2 cultural region: Chhattisgarh Plains
- Indigenous scope: A shallow saucer of black and yellow soil between the Maikal scarp on the west and the Chota Nagpur and Odisha hill country on the east, drained entirely by one river system that rises inside it. Every workable acre of the floor is bunded into paddy fields, and every village sits beside a tank it dug itself. Its edges are where the speech changes: north, at the Sarguja rise, Chhattisgarhi gives way to Sadri and to Kurukh and Korwa; west, up the Maikal, to Gondi and Baigani; south, where the plain drops over the Keskal ghat onto the plateau, to Halbi and Gondi; east, in the Mahanadi's gorge, to Sambalpuri and Odia. What makes it one region is that the whole surface does a single thing — it grows rice, in more named varieties than any comparable area of India, and it organises its year, its water, its vocabulary and its breakfast around that fact.
- Overlapping administrative units: Chhattisgarh
- Tier 3 micro-regions: Raipur–Bilaspur Rice Belt (Level alluvial and black-soil plain, 250–330 m); Mahanadi Basin (River terraces, sandbanks and confluence sites); Northern Sarguja Fringe (Plateau rise, sal forest and the Hasdeo and Ib headwaters)
- Languages: Chhattisgarhi, Hindi, Sadri, Kurukh, Odia on the eastern margin

## Terrain and eco-zones

Tropical wet-and-dry, with 1,200–1,400 mm falling almost entirely between the third week of June and late September. Because there is no snowmelt in the system, the whole year's water arrives in about ninety days and then has to be held. April and May reach 44–47 °C in the Raipur and Janjgir belt, and that heat is the direct reason the region drinks its rice rather than eating it hot.

**Landforms:** A level to gently undulating plain between roughly 250 and 330 m, floored with Chhattisgarh basin sediments and Deccan trap outliers, Kanhar, matasi, dorsa and bhata — the farmers' own soil classes, from heavy black clay to gravelly upland, each carrying a different set of rice varieties, Bunded paddy on every workable surface, and a village tank or bandha beside almost every settlement, The Maikal scarp on the western rim, rising to the Achanakmar forests, Laterite and sal forest on the northern rise into Sarguja, The Mahanadi gorge on the eastern side, where the plain drains out towards Odisha

**Rivers and waters:** Mahanadi — rises at Sihawa in Dhamtari, inside the region, and is the reason the plain has water at all, Shivnath (Seonath) — the longest tributary, draining the western and central plain, Kharun — the Raipur river, Pairi and Sondur — meeting the Mahanadi at Rajim, Hasdeo and Mand — the northern drainage from the Sarguja rise, Arpa at Bilaspur, Maniyari at Tala, Kelo at Raigarh, Jonk to the south-east

- **Summer and the basi season** (March–mid June, 25–47 °C): Fields empty, wells low, and the household meal reduced to rice held under water overnight with an onion and a chilli. Mahua and tendu collection on the forest fringes, and the tikhur drink in the towns.
- **Monsoon** (Mid June–September, 24–34 °C): Transplanting, and the year's densest festival run — Hareli at Sawan Amavasya, Pola at Bhadrapada Amavasya, Bhojli and Teeja in Bhadon, Navakhani when the new grain is first eaten.
- **Harvest and the fair season** (October–December, 14–30 °C): Dev Uthni Ekadashi brings the Raut Nacha processions and the cattle back into the village; Diwali brings Gaura-Gaura and the Suwa dance; the madai fairs begin.
- **Winter** (January–February, 10–29 °C): Chherchhera at Pausha Purnima, the Rajim mela from Magh Purnima, the Giroudpuri gathering, and the only comfortable weather for the temple circuit.

**Best time to visit:** October to February for the temples, the forests and the festival calendar — Rajim in Magh and Giroudpuri at Magh Purnima are the two largest gatherings. Come in Kartik if the point is Raut Nacha. Avoid April and May unless you want to understand why basi exists.

## History

## Foodways

Rice is not one ingredient here, it is a grammar. A household distinguishes grain by variety, by soil class, by cooking time and by treatment, and eats a coarse fast landrace on a working day, a scented one at a feast, and yesterday's rice as a drink at dawn. Around that the kitchen is deliberately plain: very little fat, no garam masala tradition, no onion-and-tomato base in the older cooking, and a vegetable repertoire made mostly of foraged greens with fortnight-long seasons. What it does have is fermentation and steaming, and it uses both on rice.

**Primary cooking medium:** Mustard oil in the northern belt, Til (sesame) oil, the older everyday fat, Groundnut oil, which has largely displaced both, Ghee at ritual feasts, on sohari and in the temple kitchen, and almost nowhere else

**Dominant sour agents:** The lactic sourness that basi generates in its own water overnight — the region's most-used acid, and the only one that costs nothing, Tamarind, Amchur, dried from wild mango, Khatta bhaji, the sour leaf, and ambadi, Curd, and lemon in the towns, Tomato, which is recent and still absent from most feast cooking

**Spice register:** Very restrained by plains standards. Salt, green or dried red chilli, raw pounded garlic, turmeric, a little coriander, and mustard or cumin in the tempering. Against Odisha to the east there is no panch phutana habit; against Bastar to the south there is almost none of the wild herb and none of the ant; against the Wainganga side of Vidarbha to the west there is nothing like saoji heat. The distinguishing flavour of the region is sour and mild, not hot, which surprises people who expect central India to be fierce.

**Staple grains and carbs:** Rice, in the varieties the region is actually known by — Dubraj, Vishnubhog, Jeeraphool, Safri, Badshah Bhog, Luchai, Samundchini, Nagkesar, Kali Kamod, Gurmatia, Kodo and kutki on the western and northern fringes, Urad and chana, grown chiefly to be dried into badi and steamed into bafauri, Wheat, mostly bought rather than grown, and reserved for ritual bread

**Preservation:** Badi and bijori, sun-dried through the hot months, Rakhia badi from ash gourd, the household's summer project, Amchur and tamarind blocks, Usna — parboiled rice, stored in mud kothi bins built into the house wall, Dried fish from the village tanks, salted and roof-dried, Basi itself, which is preservation performed daily rather than seasonally

### Basi and borey — rice held under water
Cooked rice is covered with water in an earthen or steel pot and left overnight. Wild lactic fermentation turns the water faintly sour and slightly effervescent and softens the grain. At dawn it is salted and eaten with raw onion, green chilli and a pickle or a dried fish, and the water is drunk as much as the rice is eaten. Borey is the same thing made with fresh water and eaten at once; basi is the overnight one. It solves three problems together — it keeps cooked rice safe in forty-five-degree heat without fuel, it rehydrates and salts a body about to go into the sun, and it wastes nothing.
Also found in: Utkal, Bengal Delta, Brahmaputra Valley, Bastar, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands

### Leaf-baked breads
Rice-flour dough is patted flat, wrapped in a sal or palash leaf and baked directly in embers — anga is the ember, and angakar roti takes its name from it. The leaf supplies steam so the bread does not dry, scents it, and makes any fat unnecessary. No griddle, no oil, no pan to wash.
Also found in: Bastar, Mahakoshal & Gondwana

### Steaming rice dough
The plain's default treatment of rice dough is steam, not fry. Fara is rolled into short fingers and steamed, then tempered with mustard and curry leaf; muthia is squeezed in the fist — muthi — so it keeps the maker's finger marks, and steamed the same way. It produces a filling dish out of flour, water and almost no fuel.
Also found in: Utkal, Bastar

### Sun-dried badi and bijori
Ground urad, or grated ash gourd worked into a paste, is dropped in small mounds onto cloth on a roof and dried hard through April and May. Fried and simmered months later it becomes the protein of the monsoon, when nothing green is safe to buy and the fields take all the labour. It is a summer job done for a wet-season problem.
Also found in: Bundelkhand, Bagelkhand, Utkal

### Foraged greens as a calendar
Several dozen named bhaji are eaten in strict sequence — charota with the first rains, koliyari from the bauhinia, then chench, bohar, munga, amari, lakhdi. Each has a season of a fortnight or so, and a household knows which is coming next. The kitchen's vocabulary for greens is far larger than its vocabulary for spices, which is the clearest single statement of what this food is about.
Also found in: Bastar, Mahakoshal & Gondwana, Chota Nagpur Plateau

### Fermented rice batter for sweets
Soaked rice is ground and the batter left to sour for a day before being shaped, deep-fried and soaked in jaggery syrup. In dehrori the sourness of the batter is what keeps the finished sweet from being merely sugary — the same fermentation that makes basi work, put to the opposite purpose.
Also found in: Bastar

## Dishes

A rice kitchen with two registers. The everyday one is boiled, steamed, soured and barely oiled. The feast one appears only at weddings, Diwali and Hareli and does the opposite — it fries in ghee, uses wheat instead of rice, and serves on a sal-leaf plate. Sohari, the ghee-fried wheat bread, signals a feast precisely because wheat is the grain nobody here grows.

### Borey basi (बोरे बासी)
Yesterday's rice under its own soured water, salted, with raw onion, green chilli and a pickle or a dried-fish side. Eaten at dawn before the fields, cool and slightly fizzy. It is the single most widely eaten thing in the region and it is a genuine daily practice, not a revival.

### Chila
A rice-flour pancake, plain or with urad in the batter, cooked on a griddle with a smear of oil and eaten with green chutney. The everyday breakfast when it is not basi season.

### Fara
Rice dough rolled into short fingers, steamed, then tossed in a mustard and curry-leaf tempering. Sometimes made sweet with jaggery inside, in which case it becomes a festival dish rather than a meal.

### Angakar roti
Thick rice-flour bread wrapped in a sal or palash leaf and baked in embers. It comes out with the leaf's veins printed on it and a faint smoke in the crumb, and it is made without a drop of oil.

### Muthia
Rice dough squeezed in the fist and steamed, so every piece keeps the finger grooves of whoever made it. Eaten with chutney or dropped into a thin curry.

### Bafauri
Soaked chana dal ground coarse with garlic and chilli, shaped and steamed rather than fried. It is the plain's answer to the pakoda, and it exists because oil was expensive and a steamer was not.

### Dubki kadhi
Raw urad dumplings dropped straight into a simmering curd-and-besan kadhi, where they cook and swell. Nothing is fried at any stage, which is what separates it from the kadhi of every neighbouring region.

### Aamat
A thin, hot, sour stew of mixed vegetables and often bamboo shoot, soured with amchur or tamarind and built on garlic rather than onion. Strongest towards the southern approach, where the plain meets the Bastar plateau, and thinner as you move north.

### Badi and bijori ki sabzi
Sun-dried urad or ash-gourd dumplings fried and simmered in a light gravy. The monsoon staple, made possible entirely by work done three months earlier on a roof.

### Bhaji
The plate of the fortnight's green — charota, koliyari, chench, bohar, munga, amari, lakhdi — boiled, squeezed and finished with garlic. Most are foraged rather than grown, and each has a season a household can name to the week.

### Chousela
A deep-fried rice-flour puri made for feasts and commonly eaten with meat. Rice flour fries into something crisper and more brittle than wheat, and the dish is built around that difference.

### Sohari
Ghee-fried wheat bread served on a sal-leaf plate at weddings and ritual meals. Wheat is not grown here, so serving it is the announcement — the bread signals the occasion by being the wrong grain.

### Jeeraphool bhaat
Plain boiled rice of the short-grained, intensely aromatic Jeeraphool landrace of the northern districts, which holds a geographical indication. Served with almost nothing, because the point of a scented landrace is that it does not need anything.

### Pidiya
Rice flour and jaggery steamed in a leaf parcel at Hareli. Made in quantity, distributed, and not sold in shops.

### Dehrori
Fermented ground-rice batter shaped, deep-fried and soaked in jaggery or sugar syrup. The souring of the batter is deliberate and is what keeps it from cloying; it is the region's signature sweet and travels badly.

### Thethri and khurmi
The Diwali and Hareli pair — khurmi is a hard wheat-and-jaggery biscuit fried and sometimes rolled in sesame; thethri is its savoury opposite, a twisted gram-flour crisp. Made at home in large batches and exchanged between households.

**Staples:** Rice, in a dozen named varieties per district, Basi, Urad and chana, mostly as badi and bafauri, Foraged bhaji, Village-tank fish

**Sweets:** Dehrori, Khurmi, Thethri, Pidiya, Papchi, Gulgula bhajiya

**Street food:** Chila and bafauri at every morning stall, Gupchup, which is what the region calls the puri filled with sour water, Chana dal bhajia, Fara, sold hot by the piece, Dehrori in Raipur and Bilaspur sweet shops

**Drinks:** The soured water off basi, drunk as the meal's liquid, Tikhur sharbat in summer, Mahua, on the forest fringes, Landa, a rice beer of the northern districts, Chhind ras, the seasonal date-palm sap

## Dress and textiles

A plain with no court and therefore no court dress. What it has instead is a working sari worn in a way that assumes standing in water, a silver vocabulary that was a household's savings account, and one genuinely famous cloth — kosa, a silk reared on wild moths in the forest and woven at Champa. The most striking dress in the region is also the plainest: the white dhoti and bead necklace of the Panthi dancers, where the absence of ornament is the statement.

### Lugra
A coarse cotton sari worn kachhora style — the pleats drawn between the legs and tucked at the back — so it clears the water in a transplanted field. The drape is a working design, not a regional flourish, and it loosens into an ordinary wrap for town.
Worn by: Women
Worn for: Everyday

### Polkha
The short blouse worn with the lugra, cut higher and looser than the fitted choli of the north.
Worn by: Women
Worn for: Everyday

### Dhoti, bandi and gamchha
A dhoti wrapped short, a sleeveless jacket, and a checked gamchha that serves as towel, headpad, sling and shade in the course of one day.
Worn by: Men
Worn for: Everyday

### Panthi dress
Bare torso, white dhoti, a kanthi bead necklace and nothing else. The company dances around a jaitkhamb, the white pillar and flag that is the Satnam emblem, and the deliberate plainness of the dress is part of the doctrine being danced.
Worn by: Satnami men
Worn for: Panthi performance

### Raut Nacha costume
A peacock-feather crown, ankle bells, a mirrored jacket, and a stick and small shield carried in the hands. It is worn once a year, for a procession through the village, and the household it stops at is expected to receive it.
Worn by: Yadav and Raut cattle-herders
Worn for: Dev Uthni Ekadashi

### Kosa silk sari
Undyed tussar in its natural gold-fawn, matte rather than lustrous, often with a temple-motif border woven at Champa or Raigarh. The region's one garment with a national reputation.
Worn by: Women
Worn for: Weddings and festivals

### Champa silk saree and fabrics (GI tag)
Kosa, a tussar silk from the wild moth Antheraea mylitta reared outdoors on saja, sal and arjun. It is registered as a geographical indication. The yarn is uneven by nature, which is why kosa cloth has a slub and a matte surface where mulberry silk is smooth and bright.

### Raigarh kosa
The second weaving centre, working the same wild silk with its own border vocabulary. Raigarh's silk and its Kathak gharana grew under the same twentieth-century court patronage.

### Cotton handloom of the rice belt
Plain and checked cotton in narrow widths on pit looms, made for local wear. Much of the surviving capacity has been turned over to kosa, where the margins are.

**Jewellery:** Sutiya and hansuli — the silver neck pieces, Pahunchi and bahunta on the arm, Karadhan, the waist chain, Paijan and bichhiya, Phuli and khinwa on the face, Godna — tattooing worn as permanent ornament, and the only jewellery that cannot be pawned

## Arts and artisanal heritage

### Panthi — ritual
A men's dance around the jaitkhamb, danced bare-chested in white dhotis to a mandar drum. It begins slow and accelerates continuously, the dancers building human pyramids and dropping out of them without breaking the beat, and it ends when the tempo can go no higher — the ending is a physical limit, not a choreographic one. The songs are nirgun verses on Guru Ghasidas's Satnam teaching, so the dance is doctrine performed at speed.

### Raut Nacha — folk
The herders move through the village in peacock crowns and ankle bells to the gadwa baja ensemble, stopping at each house to recite dohas — couplets that are half blessing and half needling, aimed at the household in front of them, which is obliged to take them. It is danced on the day the cattle come back into the village, and it is the herders' annual claim on a place that otherwise belongs to the cultivators.

### Suwa — folk
Women circle a basket holding a clay parrot, clapping a two-beat pattern and singing to the bird. The songs are addressed to the suwa because it can carry a message, and they are among the frankest accounts of marriage in the region's repertoire — sung publicly, in front of everyone, precisely because they are addressed to a parrot.

### Karma — ritual
The karma branch planted in a courtyard and danced around all night in a linked line. It arrives here from the Maikal and the Chota Nagpur side and thins out towards the middle of the plain.

### Saila and Danda Nacha — folk
A stick dance in a rotating circle, each dancer striking his neighbour's stick on the beat so that a mistake is instantly audible. Danced by touring bands that go village to village through the dry months.

### Gaura-Gaura — ritual
Clay images of Shiva and Parvati are married in a night-long ceremony and immersed at dawn, with possession and drumming through the middle of it. Gond and Chhattisgarhi households keep the rite together, which is unusual enough to be worth noticing.

### Pandwani
Solo narration of the Mahabharata in Chhattisgarhi, told from the Pandavas' side and drawing on Sabal Singh Chauhan's Hindi retelling rather than the Sanskrit text. Two schools: Vedamati, seated and sober, and Kapalik, standing and acted out. In the Kapalik style the singer's tambura becomes every prop in the story in turn — Bhima's mace, a chariot, a bow, a river — so a single instrument does the work of an entire stage. Teejan Bai is its best-known exponent.

### Bharthari gayan
The epic of King Bharthari, who leaves his throne to become a jogi, sung through the night to the sarangi by singers of the Nath and jogi communities. It is a renunciation story performed by renouncers, which is why it is sung at wakes as readily as at fairs.

### Chandaini
The Lorik and Chanda epic, sung over many nights in the villages. Ram Chandra Deshmukh's Chandaini Gonda in 1971 took it onto a proscenium stage with a company of village performers and changed how the region's own folk forms were staged thereafter.

### Dadaria
The two-line improvised couplet thrown back and forth between men and women at work, at a fair or on a walk. It is the shortest and most common form in the region, and almost none of it is written down.

### Jas geet
Devi songs sung all night through Navratri to manjira and dhol, in a call-and-response that lets a whole village take turns leading.

### Nacha
Night-long open-air folk theatre with the audience on all four sides and a single lamp in the middle. A company of men plays every role, including the female ones, and the plot is interrupted by gammat — comic skits that are the real reason people stay. There is no stage, no wings and no fourth wall, because a four-sided audience does not permit one.

### Naya Theatre and the Nacha actors
Habib Tanvir built his company around Nacha performers, kept them acting in Chhattisgarhi, and let their timing rather than a script shape the production. Charandas Chor in 1975 was the result, and it is the point at which this region's village theatre entered the modern Indian repertoire without being translated first.

### Champa kosa silk (GI registered)
The region's one internationally known cloth, and the only registered geographical indication in this cultural region. The reeling and weaving are concentrated in a few Janjgir and Raigarh towns while the rearing happens across the forest fringe.
Material: Tussar cocoons of Antheraea mylitta
Technique: Cocoons reared outdoors on forest trees, boiled or degummed, reeled by hand — often after the moth has emerged, which breaks the filament and gives the yarn its slub — and woven on pit and frame looms.

### Bell metal and dhokra at Ektaal (GI-worthy)
Cast by Jhara households in and around Ektaal. The registered dhokra of Chhattisgarh is Bastar's, made at Kondagaon in a different cultural region; the Raigarh tradition is separate, older in this plain, and unregistered.
Material: Brass and bell metal over a clay core
Technique: Lost-wax casting — a clay core wound with wax threads, invested in clay, the wax melted out and metal poured in. Every piece destroys its own mould, so no two are identical.

### Village ironwork
Agricultural tools, shrine lamps, tridents and votive figures made by village lohars. The famous central Indian wrought-iron craft with a geographical indication is Bastar's, from Kondagaon, and belongs to a different region; what the plain has is a working smithy tradition rather than a sculptural one.
Material: Wrought iron
Technique: Forged at the anvil from bar stock or, on the Maikal fringe, from locally smelted bloom.

### Godna work
Tattooing carried by the Ramnami and Devar communities among others. The Ramnami Samaj's practice of marking the body with the name of Ram, from around the end of the nineteenth century, is the most distinctive form of it, and its annual Bhajan Mela at Magh Purnima is when it is most visible.
Material: Ink on skin; now also pigment on paper and cloth
Technique: Fine dotted and linear patterns pricked into the skin, and the same pattern vocabulary transferred to paper as line drawing.

### Bamboo and sabai grass work
The craft of the northern rise, where forest replaces field. Sabai rope in particular is a cash product of the Sarguja fringe rather than a village-use item.
Material: Bamboo and sabai grass
Technique: Split and coiled baskets, mats, fans and rope.

### Votive terracotta
Left at village and clan shrines and then left to weather. The figures accumulate at a shrine over decades and are never repaired, so the shrine is a dated record of its own use.
Material: River clay, open-pit fired
Technique: Coil-built horses, elephants and riders, unglazed.

## Folk songs

### Dadaria (Chhattisgarhi)
A single improvised couplet, thrown by one side and answered by the other, usually between men and women. Love, teasing, complaint and local incident. It is the region's most common song and the least recorded, because it is composed and discarded in the same minute.
Sung at: Work, walks and fairs

### Sua geet (Chhattisgarhi)
Women sing to a clay parrot in a basket about husbands, in-laws and marriage. The parrot is the addressee, and that framing is what allows the songs to say publicly what could not otherwise be said.
Sung at: Diwali to Dev Uthni Ekadashi

### Karma geet (Chhattisgarhi and Sadri)
The rains, the tree and the young. Short cycles built to repeat for a whole night.
Sung at: Bhadon, around the karma branch

### Bhojli (Chhattisgarhi)
Sung to sprouted wheat or barley seedlings raised in baskets in a dark room for nine days and then carried in procession to water. The songs address the sprouts as a young girl being sent away.
Sung at: Bhadon

### Panthi geet (Chhattisgarhi)
Nirgun verse on the formless divine and on Guru Ghasidas's Satnam teaching, sung to an accelerating drum while the dance is danced to it.
Sung at: Guru Ghasidas Jayanti and Magh Purnima

### Pandwani (Chhattisgarhi)
The Mahabharata told from the Pandavas' side, with Bhima as the hero rather than Arjuna — a shift that tells you a great deal about who the audience is.
Sung at: Village nights, fairs and now concert stages

### Jas geet (Chhattisgarhi)
Praise of the Devi, sung all night in call and response so that no single singer has to carry it.
Sung at: Navratri

### Arpa Pairi ke Dhar (Chhattisgarhi)
The rivers of the plain, named in order. Written by Narendra Dev Verma, it is now the official state song and one of the few modern Chhattisgarhi compositions that everyone can sing.
Sung at: Public occasions

## Dialect and oral traditions

Chhattisgarhi is not a dialect of standard Hindi. It belongs to the Eastern Hindi group, with Awadhi and Bagheli, while standard Hindi descends from Western Hindi — so it is a cousin of the standard, not a deviation from it. It carries the Eastern Hindi third-person past in -is, so a verb behaves as it does in Awadhi and Bhojpuri rather than as it does in Delhi. Around 16.2 million people returned it in the 2011 Census, and it was made an official language of the state alongside Hindi in 2007. Its written literature is recent and datable: Pandit Sundarlal Sharma's Chhattisgarhi Danleela of 1898 is conventionally taken as the first modern literary work in the language, which means everything before it — Pandwani, Chandaini, Bharthari, the whole Nacha repertoire — existed only as performance. The northern fringe is where it gets interesting: on the Sarguja rise, Sadri works as a lingua franca, Kurukh is Dravidian, and Korwa is Austroasiatic, so three language families meet within a couple of districts.

### Khaltahi (central Chhattisgarhi) — Indo-Aryan, Eastern Hindi
The Raipur, Durg and Bemetara register, treated as the standard because it is what broadcasting and publishing use.

### Bilaspuri — Indo-Aryan, Eastern Hindi
The northern-plain variety around Bilaspur, Janjgir and Ratanpur; the register in which most Panthi and Bharthari repertoire is sung.

### Laria — Indo-Aryan, Eastern Hindi
The eastern variety towards Raigarh and the Mahanadi gorge, shading into Sambalpuri and Odia. Speakers here are routinely bilingual and the vocabulary moves in both directions.

### Surgujia — Indo-Aryan, Eastern Hindi
The northern fringe variety, in contact with Sadri and with the Chota Nagpur languages, and noticeably different from the plain's speech in intonation.

### Sadri — Indo-Aryan
Not a Chhattisgarhi variety but the trade and inter-community lingua franca of the Sarguja and Jashpur belt, shared with Jharkhand — the language people use when their first languages belong to different families.

### Kurukh — Dravidian, North Dravidian
Spoken by Oraon households in Jashpur and the northern districts. A second Dravidian island in central India, unrelated to Chhattisgarhi and related distantly to Gondi far to the west.

### Korwa — Austroasiatic, Munda
Spoken in pockets of the Sarguja and Jashpur hills, with relatives on the Chota Nagpur plateau. Its presence is why the northern fringe of a rice plain holds three language families at once.

#### Indigenous terminology

- **Basi** (बासी): Cooked rice kept overnight under water, and by extension the meal built around it.
- **Borey** (बोरे): The same dish made with fresh water and eaten immediately, without the overnight souring.
- **Kanhar, matasi, dorsa, bhata** (कन्हार, मटासी, दोरसा, भाटा): The farmers' soil classes, from heavy black clay through yellow loam and mixed soil to gravelly upland. Each takes a different set of rice varieties and a different sowing method, and the words are far older than any soil survey.
- **Bhaji** (भाजी): Any leafy green, of which the region names several dozen, each with a fortnight of season. The word is doing the work that a vegetable market does elsewhere.
- **Badi and bijori** (बड़ी, बिजौरी): Sun-dried lentil and ash-gourd dumplings, made in summer for the monsoon.
- **Bandha** (बंधा): The village tank. In a plain whose river rises inside it, the bandha is the oldest and most important piece of infrastructure, and most villages are named in relation to one.
- **Gedi** (गेड़ी): Bamboo stilts walked by children from Hareli through the monsoon — nominally to keep out of the mud, in practice a season-long competition.
- **Jaitkhamb** (जैतखंभ): The white pillar with a white flag that marks a Satnami settlement and stands at the centre of the Panthi dance.
- **Gadwa baja** (गड़वा बाजा): The drum-and-shawm ensemble that plays for Raut Nacha — nishan, timki, mohri and dafda — with a fixed instrumentation the dance cannot be performed without.
- **Gammat** (गम्मत): The comic interlude inside a Nacha performance, improvised and usually topical.
- **Sohari** (सोहारी): The ghee-fried wheat bread of ritual meals, and by extension the feast itself.
- **Nawakhai** (नवाखाई): The first eating of the new rice, offered to the household and village deities before anyone in the house may eat it.
- **Chherchhera** (छेरछेरा): The Pausha Purnima custom of going door to door for grain from the harvested crop, and the name of the day itself.
- **Johar** (जोहार): The greeting, shared across the central Indian forest belt into Jharkhand and Odisha. It marks a cultural zone more accurately than any boundary does.

#### Sayings

- "Chher chhera, koti ke dhan la her tera" — literally: Chherchhera — take out from the store the grain that is yours — The chant children sing at doorways at Pausha Purnima, when households give away paddy from the fresh harvest. The wording varies from village to village, but the transaction does not: the grain is given because it has just been received.
- "Bhojli" — literally: The sprouted seedling — Two girls who exchange bhojli leaves at the Bhadon immersion address each other as bhojli afterwards rather than by name. A ritual friendship formed in one afternoon and, by custom, not dissolved.
- "The doha at the door" — A Raut Nacha dancer stops at a house and recites a couplet that praises and needles the household in the same breath. The household is expected to hear it out and reward it. Once a year, the herders get to say to the cultivators what they cannot say the rest of the time.

## Places

### Sirpur, Mahasamund
The Lakshmana temple, built of brick in the seventh century by Vasata, mother of the Somavamshi king Mahashivagupta Balarjuna, and still standing with its moulded and carved brick surface largely intact. Excavation around it has exposed Buddhist viharas, a market street and Jain remains on the same site, so a single Mahanadi-bank town held Shaiva, Buddhist and Jain establishments together. Brick was used in a region with plenty of stone, which is the interesting part.
Best time: November–February

### Rajim, Gariaband
A temple town on the sandbanks where the Mahanadi, Pairi and Sondur meet. The Rajivlochan Vishnu temple and the Kuleshwar Mahadev shrine out on the riverbed are the oldest parts; the Rajim Maghi Punni Mela runs from Magh Purnima to Mahashivratri and turns the dry riverbed into a temporary town.
Best time: Magh, February–March

### Ratanpur, Bilaspur
The Kalachuri capital of this plain from the eleventh century, with a fort, a set of tanks and the Mahamaya temple. It governed the region for centuries and is now a small town, which is roughly the story of every capital in the interior.

### Bhoramdeo, Kabirdham
An eleventh-century Nagvanshi stone temple at the foot of the Maikal, densely carved with figurative panels, with the Madwa Mahal and Chherki Mahal shrines nearby. The comparison people reach for is Khajuraho; the more useful point is that it marks the exact line where the plain meets the hills.
Best time: October–March

### Tala (Devrani–Jethani temples), Bilaspur
Two ruined temples on the Maniyari, and between them the Rudra Shiva figure — a standing image roughly two and a half metres high in which every part of the body is composed of another creature: snakes for limbs, faces at the knees and belly, a lizard, a crab, peacocks. There is nothing else like it in Indian sculpture, and it is usually dated to the fifth or sixth century.

### Malhar, Bilaspur
A site occupied continuously from around the second century BCE, with the Pataleshwar Kedareshwar temple, an inscribed Chaturbhuj Vishnu image and a long excavated sequence. It is where the plain's archaeology is deepest rather than most spectacular.

### Ramgarh hill and Sitabenga cave, Sarguja
A rock-cut chamber with tiered stone seating, a Brahmi inscription and an acoustic that carries a voice to the back row. It is usually dated to around the third century BCE and frequently described as one of the oldest surviving theatre spaces in India; local tradition also attaches Kalidasa's Meghaduta to the hill, which is a claim rather than a fact.

### Girodpuri, Baloda Bazar
The birthplace of Guru Ghasidas, founder of the Satnam panth, and the site of its tallest jaitkhamb. The Magh Purnima gathering here is one of the two largest in the region.
Best time: Magh Purnima, February

### Damakheda, Baloda Bazar
The seat of the Dharamdasi lineage of the Kabir panth, and the centre of a very large rural following that sings Kabir's nirgun verse in Chhattisgarhi. Its Magh gathering is a working religious assembly rather than a tourist occasion.

### Achanakmar Tiger Reserve, Mungeli and Bilaspur
Sal forest on the Maikal scarp, part of the Achanakmar–Amarkantak Biosphere Reserve. It is the plain's western wall and the catchment that keeps the Maniyari and the Arpa running.
Best time: November–March

### Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary, Baloda Bazar
Dry deciduous sal and teak on the Mahanadi's northern side, with a set of forest tanks that concentrate animals in the late dry season. Easily reached from Raipur, which is the main reason to know about it.
Best time: February–May

### Khairagarh, Khairagarh-Chhuikhadan-Gandai
Indira Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya, founded in 1956 and the first university in Asia devoted entirely to music and the fine arts, established in a small town by the ruling family who gave their palace to it.

### Champa and Raigarh, Janjgir-Champa and Raigarh
The kosa silk towns. Champa reels and weaves the registered cloth; Raigarh weaves its own and also carries the Kathak gharana built there under Raja Chakradhar Singh, commemorated every year in the Chakradhar Samaroh.

### Raipur, Raipur
The plain's largest city and its transport hub, with the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum — a nineteenth-century collection of the region's sculpture and ethnography, and the best single introduction to everything else on this list.

## Festivals

- **Hareli** (Sawan Amavasya, July–August): The first festival of the Chhattisgarhi year. Ploughs, yokes and tools are washed, marked and worshipped; neem branches go up at the door; cattle are given a medicinal preparation; and children take to bamboo gedi stilts for the rest of the monsoon.
- **Pola** (Bhadrapada Amavasya, August–September): The bullocks' day off. Working animals are bathed, painted and paraded, and children are given clay bulls and a small clay grinding toy — a festival that gives the animals a holiday and the children a scale model of the adult economy.
- **Bhojli** (Bhadon, August): Wheat or barley is sprouted in baskets in a dark room for nine days, carried in procession with singing and immersed. Girls exchange the leaves and become ritual friends, addressing each other as bhojli thereafter instead of by name.
- **Navakhani** (Bhadrapada, August–September): The new rice is offered to the household and village deities before anyone eats it. In a region with this many varieties, it also fixes the date on which each one is deemed to have arrived.
- **Teeja** (Bhadrapada Tritiya, August–September): Married women return to their parents' village to keep a day-long waterless fast, eating the karu bhat meal the night before. The return journey is as much the point as the fast, and the roads fill with it.
- **Dev Uthni Ekadashi** (Kartik Shukla Ekadashi, October–November): The gods wake, the tulsi is married, and the Raut Nacha processions go through the villages with the gadwa baja. It is the pivot of the region's festival year.
- **Gaura-Gaura** (Diwali night): Clay images of Shiva and Parvati are married through the night and immersed at dawn, with drumming and possession in the middle of it. Kept jointly by Gond and Chhattisgarhi households.
- **Chherchhera** (Pausha Purnima, January): Children and young people go door to door asking for grain from the harvest just brought in, and every household gives. It redistributes a share of the crop through the village in a single day.
- **Rajim Maghi Punni Mela** (Magh Purnima to Mahashivratri, February–March): Several weeks of fair on the dry riverbed at the confluence, with bathing, temple visits and a full market. The riverbed is the venue precisely because it is empty at that time of year.
- **Giroudpuri Mela** (Magh Purnima, February): The Satnami gathering at Guru Ghasidas's birthplace, with Panthi companies performing continuously and the jaitkhamb at the centre of it.
- **Champaran Mela** (Magh, January–February): Held at Champajhar near Rajim, at the birthplace of Vallabhacharya, and drawing Pushtimarg pilgrims from well outside the region.
- **Madai** (November–February): Village fairs held in rotation through the dry months, with the neighbouring villages' deities carried in to visit. Strongest towards the southern and western margins.

## People

- **Guru Ghasidas** (1756–1850) — Religious teacher: Born at Girodpuri; founded the Satnam panth on a nirgun teaching of one formless name, with the white jaitkhamb as its emblem. The Panthi dance, its songs and a large part of the plain's social geography descend directly from his teaching.
- **Teejan Bai** (Born 1956) — Pandwani: From Ganiyari near Durg; took up the standing, acted-out Kapalik style of Pandwani at a time when women performed the seated style if they performed at all, and made it the form's public face. Awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2019.
- **Habib Tanvir** (1923–2009) — Theatre: Born in Raipur; founded Naya Theatre and built it around Nacha performers acting in Chhattisgarhi rather than around trained urban actors. Charandas Chor (1975) is the result and remains the clearest case of an Indian village form entering the modern repertoire on its own terms.
- **Pandit Sundarlal Sharma** (1881–1940) — Poet and social reformer: Wrote Chhattisgarhi Danleela in 1898, conventionally taken as the first modern literary work in the language, and so the point at which Chhattisgarhi acquired a written literature distinct from its performed one.
- **Devdas Banjare** (1949–2001) — Panthi dance: The dancer and choreographer who took Panthi from Satnami village performance onto national and international stages without stripping out its doctrinal content. Awarded the Padma Shri.
- **Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh** (1917–1964) — Poet: Taught at Digvijay College in Rajnandgaon for the last years of his life and wrote his major long poems there, including Andhere Mein. A central figure of modern Hindi poetry, working from a small town in this plain.
- **Padumlal Punnalal Bakshi** (1894–1971) — Essayist and editor: From Khairagarh; edited the journal Saraswati and effectively established the modern Hindi essay as a form. His prose is the reason this region has a place in Hindi literary history at all.
- **Raja Chakradhar Singh** (1905–1947) — Ruler and musicologist: Ruler of Raigarh and a serious percussionist and writer on dance; his patronage produced the Raigarh Kathak gharana and treatises including Nartan Sarvaswa. The Chakradhar Samaroh at Raigarh continues in his name.
- **R. H. Richharia** (1909–1996) — Rice science: Directed rice research at Raipur and, through systematic village-by-village collection, documented on the order of nineteen thousand rice landraces from this plain — the reason its genetic diversity is a recorded fact rather than an impression.
- **Surujbai Khande** — Bharthari singing: The best-known singer of the Bharthari epic in Chhattisgarhi, who kept the night-long sarangi-accompanied form in live performance when it had almost no other exponents.
- **Narendra Dev Verma** — Poet: Wrote Arpa Pairi ke Dhar, the song that names the plain's rivers in order and is now the official state song — the one modern Chhattisgarhi composition most people can sing from memory.

## Freedom fighters

## Shops and premises

- **Shabari Emporium**, Raipur: Kosa silk, bell metal, godna-derived work, bamboo and terracotta The state handicraft board's outlet, and the most reliable place to see the region's crafts side by side before deciding what to buy where.
- **Sanjeevani outlets**, Raipur, Bilaspur and district towns: Mahua, chironji, tikhur, forest honey and herbal preparations Run by the state minor-forest-produce federation, which buys from collector groups. The straightforward way to buy tikhur and mahua without a middleman chain.
- **The weaver cooperative showrooms at Champa**, Champa, Janjgir-Champa: Kosa silk bought where it is reeled and woven A cluster of society showrooms rather than one shop. Ask whether the yarn is reeled kosa or spun waste silk; the price difference is large and the difference in hand is obvious once pointed out.
- **The Ektaal bell-metal workshops**, Ektaal, Raigarh district: Lost-wax cast figures, lamps and measures Cast by Jhara households in the village itself; this is a workshop cluster, not a retail street.
- **Tribes India (TRIFED)**, Raipur: Kosa, bell metal, bamboo and forest produce from artisan groups Prices sit between a village purchase and a gallery, which is usually the honest number.
- **The sweet shops of Gol Bazar**, Raipur: Dehrori, khurmi, thethri and papchi Dehrori is best eaten the day it is fried; it is one of the few Indian sweets that genuinely does not survive a journey.

## How to reach

**By air:** Swami Vivekananda Airport, Raipur (RPR); Bilaspur Airport (PAB); Jharsuguda Airport (JRG)

**By rail:** Raipur Junction (R); Bilaspur Junction (BSP); Durg (DURG); Champa (CPH); Raigarh (RIG); Ambikapur (ABKP)

**By road:** NH 53 — the east–west corridor from Nagpur through Durg and Raipur towards Sambalpur, and the spine of the plain, NH 30 — Raipur northwards to Bilaspur and Ambikapur, and southwards out of the plain towards Bastar, NH 130 — Bilaspur to the Sarguja districts, The Raipur–Rajim–Sihawa road, which follows the Mahanadi up to its source, The Bilaspur–Kawardha road to Bhoramdeo and the Maikal foot

**By water:** Seasonal boat crossings on the Mahanadi at the Rajim confluence during the mela, Otherwise almost none: this plain's water culture is the tank and the bund, not the boat, because the river is empty for half the year

**Getting around:** Buses and shared vehicles connect every district town, and the plain is flat enough that distances are honest — Raipur to Sirpur about 80 km, to Rajim about 45 km, to Bilaspur about 120 km, to Ambikapur about 340 km. Bhoramdeo, Tala and Malhar realistically need a hired car for the last stretch.

## The small things

### A plain with no upstream
The Mahanadi rises at Sihawa, inside this region. There is no snowmelt in the system and no mountain catchment beyond the border to fall back on, so the entire year's water arrives in about ninety monsoon days and then has to be held on the spot. That single fact explains the tank beside every village, the bunded field, and why a bad monsoon here is felt within weeks rather than seasons.

### Nineteen thousand rices
Working out of Raipur, R. H. Richharia documented on the order of nineteen thousand rice landraces collected village by village across this plain. Farmers were maintaining varieties bred for a specific soil class, a specific depth of standing water and a specific harvest date, and naming each one. It is among the densest concentrations of cultivated rice diversity ever recorded anywhere.

### A soil vocabulary older than any survey
Kanhar, matasi, dorsa and bhata are not descriptive adjectives, they are working classes: heavy black clay, yellow loam, mixed soil and gravelly upland. Each carries its own set of rice varieties and its own sowing method, and a farmer will place a field in one before mentioning its size. Soil taxonomy here is a folk science with a functioning nomenclature.

### Yesterday's rice, drunk at dawn
Basi is cooked rice left overnight under water, where wild lactic fermentation sours it slightly and makes it faintly fizzy. It is eaten cold at dawn with onion and chilli, and the water is drunk. It keeps cooked rice edible in forty-five-degree heat without fuel, rehydrates and salts a body about to go into the sun, and wastes nothing — three problems solved by leaving something alone.

### A brick temple that outlasted the stone ones
Sirpur's Lakshmana temple was built entirely of brick in the seventh century, in a region with stone available, and its moulded and carved brick surface has survived thirteen centuries of monsoon. The town around it held Shaiva temples, Buddhist viharas and Jain remains at the same time.

### A god assembled from other creatures
The Rudra Shiva at Tala is a standing figure in which every limb and feature is made of another animal — snakes for legs, faces on the knees and abdomen, a lizard on the head, crabs and peacocks worked into the body. Nothing else in Indian sculpture is built this way, and nobody has satisfactorily explained it.

### A theatre cut into rock
The Sitabenga chamber on Ramgarh hill has tiered stone seating cut into the rock and an acoustic that carries an unamplified voice to the back. With a Brahmi inscription usually placed around the third century BCE, it is regularly described as the oldest surviving theatre space in India.

### The dance that stops at a physical limit
Panthi starts slow and accelerates continuously, the dancers building and dismantling human pyramids without breaking the beat. It ends when the drum cannot go faster and the bodies cannot keep up. The ending is not choreographed; it is the point at which the form runs out of human capacity, and everybody watching knows it is coming.

### One tambura, every prop
In the Kapalik style of Pandwani the singer stands and acts, and the tambura in her hand becomes Bhima's mace, a chariot, a bow and a river in the course of a single episode. An instrument doubles as an entire stage set, which is why the form needs no stage.

### A friendship formed in an afternoon
Girls who exchange bhojli leaves at the Bhadon immersion address each other as bhojli from then on instead of by name. It is a formalised kinship created between people who are not related, in one ceremony, and custom does not provide a way to end it.

### Silk from a moth that lives outdoors
Kosa is tussar, reared from Antheraea mylitta on saja, sal and arjun trees in open forest rather than on mulberry indoors. The cocoon is frequently reeled after the moth has emerged, which breaks the filament into short lengths — the reason kosa cloth has a slub and a matte finish where mulberry silk is even and bright. The defect is the identity.

### A music university in a small town
Indira Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya was founded at Khairagarh in 1956, in a palace given over for the purpose, and was the first university in Asia devoted entirely to music and the fine arts. It is still there, in a town most of the country could not place on a map.

### What is not here
Chitrakote falls, Bastar Dussehra, the ghotul, the Kondagaon dhokra and iron crafts and their geographical indications all belong to Bastar, south over the Keskal ghat, which is a separate cultural region with a different language and a different calendar. The plain ends where the plateau begins, and the two are routinely confused because they share a state.

## Cross-border corridors

### The Fermented Rice Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam, Bangladesh

Cooked rice held overnight under water and eaten cold at dawn — basi here, pakhala in Odisha, panta bhat in Bengal, poita bhat in Assam. The same technique, the same reason, the same hour of the day, across fifteen hundred kilometres.

Divergence: Odisha pairs it with badi chura and fried fish and has given it a calendar day of its own; Bengal takes it with mustard oil and green chilli and it anchors the Poila Boishakh meal in Bangladesh. Here the liquid counts as much as the grain and is drunk rather than left, which is the distinguishing habit.

### The Mahanadi Corridor
Spans: Chhattisgarh, Odisha

The river, the Somavamshi and Kalachuri temple record running from Sirpur down towards Sambalpur, and the Laria speech belt where Chhattisgarhi and Odia shade into each other.

Divergence: Downstream the temple tradition became the Odishan rekha deul in stone and the language became Sambalpuri and then Odia; upstream the brick tradition stopped and the language stayed Chhattisgarhi. The dynasties are shared, the descendants of their architecture are not.

### The Tussar Silk Corridor
Spans: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal

Antheraea mylitta reared outdoors on sal, saja and arjun, and the cocoon trade that moves between the rearing districts and the weaving towns.

Divergence: Champa reels and weaves its own cocoons, which is unusual. Jharkhand's and Odisha's cocoons are largely sold on to Bhagalpur to be woven, so across most of the corridor the region that rears the silk and the region that gets the name for it are different places.

### The Karma and Sadri Corridor
Spans: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh

The karma branch, the monsoon night dance around it, and Sadri as the shared working language of the northern fringe.

Divergence: In Chota Nagpur it is Karam parab, tied to the sarna grove and to a brother-sister vow with a fast attached; here it is a village night dance with neither. Sadri does the same job on both sides — a language nobody claims as a mother tongue holding together districts where several families meet.

### The Nacha and Proscenium Corridor
Spans: Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi

Nacha's gammat structure, its performers and its Chhattisgarhi, carried into modern Indian theatre by Habib Tanvir's Naya Theatre from the 1970s.

Divergence: On stage the form acquired a script, a director, a lighting plot and a proscenium it was never designed for; in the village it keeps its four-sided audience, its single lamp and its improvised topical interludes. Both survive, and they are no longer the same thing.

### The Kabir Panth Corridor
Spans: Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar

Kabir's nirgun verse, sung in a Chhattisgarhi register, and the Dharamdasi guru lineage seated at Damakheda.

Divergence: The Banaras branch is textual, urban and centred on a math; the Chhattisgarh branch is a village-based hereditary guru lineage with an enormous rural following, and its repertoire is sung rather than read.

## Sources

- [Chhattisgarh Tourism Board — official portal](https://www.chhattisgarhtourism.co.in/)
- [Geographical Indications Registry, India — registered GI list](https://ipindia.gov.in/registered-gls.htm)
- [Census of India 2011 — language tables](https://censusindia.gov.in/)
- [Archaeological Survey of India — Raipur Circle](https://asi.nic.in/)
- [Indira Gandhi Krishi Vishwavidyalaya, Raipur — rice germplasm work](https://igkv.ac.in/)
- [Chhattisgarh Forest Department](https://forest.cg.gov.in/)
- [Sangeet Natak Akademi — Pandwani, Panthi and Nacha documentation](https://sangeetnatak.gov.in/)
- [Indira Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya, Khairagarh](https://iksvv.ac.in/)

_Last reviewed 2026-08-30._