Chhattisgarh Plains · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
The plain's periods are set by who was collecting from the rice and from where. Its ancient period runs unusually late, because Sripura on the Mahanadi was a working capital and a Buddhist teaching centre into the seventh century, long after the classical order had broken up further north. Its medieval period is the Kalachuri centuries at Tummana, Ratanpur and Raipur, from about 1000 to 1741 — and the region's own name belongs to that arrangement, a country described by its garhs and their circles of villages rather than by a capital. Its modern period begins in 1741 with the Maratha conquest, not with the British, because it was Maratha revenue-farming that first treated the plain as a single fiscal unit; the British superintendence of 1818 and the annexation of 1854 changed who received the money rather than how it was raised. Everything the plain is known for — the tank, the landrace, the soil-class vocabulary — belongs to the village, and outlived all of them.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
The plain has one of the oldest inscribed sites in central India on its northern rim and one of the most complete early medieval capitals in India at its centre. Between the fifth and the seventh centuries the Sarabhapuriyas and then the Panduvamshis ruled Dakshina Kosala from the Mahanadi, and under Maha-Shivagupta Balarjuna, Sripura carried Shaiva temples, a Vaishnava brick temple and a cluster of Buddhist monasteries at the same time. That layering — royal patronage running in several directions at once — is the plain's oldest recorded habit. What supported all of it was the same thing that supports the region now: a level basin whose river rises inside it, bunded into paddy and backed by village tanks.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 3rd century BCE | The Jogimara cave on Ramgarh hill in Sarguja carries a short Brahmi inscription and painted panels; the adjoining Sitabenga rock-cut chamber is often described as an early performance space, though that identification is an interpretation rather than a record. |
| 5th–6th century | The Sarabhapuriya rulers issue copper-plate grants from Sarabhapura and later from Sripura, the earliest continuous administrative record from the plain. |
| from 595 CE | Maha-Shivagupta Balarjuna of the Panduvamshi line rules from Sripura, an inscription of his fifty-seventh regnal year survives, and the Buddhist monasteries at the site are built under his patronage. |
| c. 7th century | The brick Lakshmana temple is raised at Sirpur; its inscription records the endowment of the queen Vasata, mother of Balarjuna, in memory of her husband Harshagupta. |
| 7th–8th century | The Rajivalochana temple is built at Rajim, at the meeting of the Mahanadi and the Pairi — the plain's other great stone site and still its principal pilgrimage point. |
About the year 1000 Kalinga-raja established a Kalachuri line at Tummana near present Bilaspur, and his successors moved the seat to Ratnapura — Ratanpur — which remained the plain's capital for seven hundred years. The Kalachuris ruled by garh: a fort with a defined circle of villages under it, answerable for revenue and for men. Later records describe the country as thirty-six such forts, eighteen under Ratanpur and eighteen under the Raipur branch, and that description is where the name Chhattisgarh comes from; the arithmetic is traditional rather than documented. The arrangement was loose enough that the plain absorbed rulers without absorbing much else, and durable enough that it lasted until an outside army arrived.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1000 | Kalinga-raja establishes the Kalachuri line at Tummana, near present Bilaspur. |
| c. 1045–1065 | Ratna-deva I moves the seat to Ratnapura, modern Ratanpur, which remains the plain's capital until the eighteenth century. |
| 1090–1120 | Jajalla-deva I, the first strong ruler of the line, fights the Chhindaka Nagas of Chakrakota to the south and defeats Somesvara in 1114. |
| 1120–1135 | Ratna-deva II asserts independence from the parent Kalachuri house at Tripuri. |
| c. 1200–1225 | Pratapa-malla is the last securely attested ruler of the main Ratanpur line; a branch continues at Raipur, and the two divisions give the region its later description as a country of thirty-six forts. |
| 1741 | A Maratha army from Nagpur invades the plain; the Kalachuri house is reduced to a dependency. |
| 1758 | Mohan Singh, the last Kalachuri ruler, dies and the plain passes to direct Maratha administration under Bimbaji Bhonsle, who held Ratanpur until 1787. |
Under the Marathas and then the British the plain was administered as a revenue tract by outsiders, and its politics for two centuries were about the terms on which the countryside paid. The two nineteenth-century risings were both short and both in Raipur's orbit: a zamindar hanged in 1857 for breaking open a grain store in a famine year, and a rising of sepoys in the town weeks later. Between them and the twentieth century sits the plain's largest internal event, which was not political at all — the Satnami movement founded by Guru Ghasidas, which reorganised a large part of the countryside's religious and social life. When Congress politics arrived in 1920 it arrived through two disputes about money rather than through constitutional argument: an irrigation cess refused by one village in Dhamtari tehsil, and a mill strike at Rajnandgaon in the same year. That is the pattern for the rest of the period.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1818 | After the Third Anglo-Maratha War the plain comes under British superintendence and the administrative headquarters shifts from Ratanpur to Raipur. |
| 1830–1854 | The territory is restored to the Bhonsles of Nagpur in 1830, then annexed in 1854 when the Nagpur state lapses; it becomes a division of the Central Provinces in 1861. |
| 10 December 1857 | Narayan Singh, zamindar of Sonakhan, is hanged at Raipur after being taken by a force under Captain Smith; he had been arrested for opening a grain store during the famine of 1856 and had escaped from Raipur jail earlier in 1857. |
| January 1858 | Sepoys of the regiment stationed at Raipur rise under Hanuman Singh; seventeen of those tried were hanged at Raipur on 22 January 1858. |
| 1899–1900 | Famine, remembered in the plain as chhappan kal after its Samvat year, kills and displaces on a scale that the tank system had been built to prevent and could not. |
| 1920 | The village of Kandel in Dhamtari tehsil refuses an irrigation cess in a campaign organised by Sundarlal Sharma; Gandhi visits Raipur in December of the same year. In the same year the mill workers of Rajnandgaon strike for more than thirty-seven days under Thakur Pyarelal Singh. |
| 1930–1934 | Civil disobedience reaches the plain, with forest satyagrahas in the Dhamtari tract asserting grazing and cutting rights in reserved forest alongside the salt campaign; arrests follow across Raipur, Durg and Bilaspur. |
Rulers and commanders
Ruled the longest recorded reign in the plain's history and built or endowed Shaiva temples, the Surang Tila, and the Buddhist monasteries at Sirpur in the same decades. Sripura under him is the most completely excavated early capital in central India.
Dynasty: Panduvamshi of Dakshina Kosala. Seat: Sripura (Sirpur)
Established the Kalachuri line in the plain, initially as a branch of the house at Tripuri. The dynasty he founded held the country for two centuries and left the garh system that gave the region its name.
Dynasty: Kalachuri of Ratnapura. Seat: Tummana
Moved the seat to Ratanpur, which stayed the plain's capital for seven hundred years and remained a temple and tank town long after the administration left it.
Dynasty: Kalachuri of Ratnapura. Seat: Ratnapura (Ratanpur)
The first ruler of the line to campaign beyond the plain, defeating the Chhindaka Naga ruler Somesvara of Chakrakota in 1114 and securing the southern approaches over the Keskal ghat.
Dynasty: Kalachuri of Ratnapura. Seat: Ratanpur
Asserted independence from the parent Kalachuri house at Tripuri, after which the Ratanpur kingdom is a separate state rather than a province of one.
Dynasty: Kalachuri of Ratnapura. Seat: Ratanpur
The last of the line. His death ended seven and a half centuries of local dynastic rule and brought the plain under direct Maratha administration.
Dynasty: Kalachuri of Ratnapura. Seat: Ratanpur
Governed the plain from Ratanpur for nearly thirty years and set up the revenue arrangement — farming the garh circles to contractors — that the British later took over largely unchanged.
Dynasty: Bhonsle of Nagpur. Seat: Ratanpur
Zamindar who opened a grain store during the famine of 1856 and distributed the grain, was arrested, escaped from Raipur jail in 1857 and raised a force of about five hundred men. Taken by a Company force under Captain Smith and hanged at Raipur on 10 December 1857.
Seat: Sonakhan
The history of Chhattisgarh Plains from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (8)