Chhattisgarh Plains · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
The small things
- A plain with no upstreamThe 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 ricesWorking 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 surveyKanhar, 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 dawnBasi 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 onesSirpur'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 creaturesThe 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 rockThe 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 limitPanthi 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 propIn 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 afternoonGirls 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 outdoorsKosa 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 townIndira 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 hereChitrakote 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.
Small local details of Chhattisgarh Plains — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (13)