Tier 2 · Cultural region · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
କୋରାପୁଟ–କଳାହାଣ୍ଡି
Millet above, rice below, and two language families farming adjacent valleys.
This is the highest, wettest and most linguistically crowded part of the Eastern Ghats. Above about 700 metres the staple is not rice but ragi and little millet, eaten as a cold gruel before the day's work; rice returns as the lowland begins. The same upland holds Dravidian languages (Kui, Kuvi, Parji, Ollari) and Munda languages (Sora, Gutob, Remo, Gorum) in valleys within sight of one another, with Desia — an Odia contact variety with a stripped-down grammar — doing the work of a market language between them. Its agriculture carried a rice landrace pool large enough for the Food and Agriculture Organization to designate Koraput a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2012. Its craft is what a household makes for itself and then sells at the weekly haat — an aal-root dye in Kotpad, a shawl a girl embroiders in Niyamgiri, a wall painting a diviner commissions in Sora country.
The quickest way to misread this region is to arrive expecting eastern India’s rice culture and find it only in the lowland. Above the scarp the calorie base is finger millet, drunk cold and slightly sour before dawn; rice is there, but as a landrace collection of extraordinary depth rather than as a monoculture, and a good deal of it is grown for scent and for ritual rather than for yield. The agriculture and the altitude explain each other.
The second thing worth holding onto is the linguistic arrangement. Dravidian and Munda languages are spoken in valleys within sight of one another here, with an Indo-Aryan contact speech doing the connecting work in the weekly market — an arrangement found in very few places on the subcontinent and nowhere else at this density. Two communities carrying the same name speak languages from different families. Any account of this upland that treats its people as one culture with local variations has already got the basic fact wrong.
What follows from both is a craft and ritual life that is domestic before it is commercial. The shawl is embroidered to be given, the wall painting is made to be replastered, the palm sap cannot be sold beyond walking distance, and the market day is the calendar. The things that did become commodities — the Kotpad dye, the Habaspuri weave, the millet now sold as tiffin in a district town — are the exceptions, and each of them survives on a very small number of households still willing to do the slow part.
Tropical monsoon modified by altitude. The plateau takes 1,400–1,600 mm from the south-west monsoon between mid-June and September and is genuinely cold in December and January — 4–8 °C at night around Semiliguda and Pottangi, with ground frost in hollows — while the Bolangir lowland below the ghat regularly touches 45 °C in May. The altitude difference of about a kilometre inside a single region is the reason its two halves eat different grains.
Landforms
Rivers and waters
Through the year
| Season | Months | Typical | What it is like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winter | November–February | 4–28 °C | Harvest, marriage and mela season. Frost settles in the Semiliguda hollows, the haats are at their fullest, and mahua trees are bare before flowering. |
| Summer | March–May | 20–45 °C | Mahua flowers drop in the pre-dawn hours through late March and April and are collected before the deer get them. Chaita Parab falls here, red ants are at their most numerous, and the whole region moves onto pakhala. |
| Monsoon | June–September | 20–32 °C | Sowing on the slopes, and the wild mushroom season — the first flush comes days after the first heavy rain and is the one forest food that reliably earns cash. |
| Post-monsoon | October | 18–30 °C | The millet harvest, Dussehra at Jeypore, and the clearest month for the plateau's long views. |
Best time to visitOctober to February. Time a visit around a market day rather than a monument — the weekly haat is where this region is most itself. March and April are hot but are the mahua and Chaita Parab months.
These uplands have no dynastic history of their own, and that is the finding rather than a gap in the record. Outside powers named the tract before they governed it — Mahakantara, the great forest — and for most of two thousand years authority above about seven hundred metres was held by village and clan office: the mutha and its head, the gauntia in the settled valleys, the jani or beju in ritual matters. Kingship belongs to the margins. The Nalas at Pushkari, the Nagas of Kalahandi, the Chauhans at Patnagarh and the Nandapur–Jeypore line all sat where the plateau falls away, drew tribute and forest produce from the highland, and did not administer it. So the region's medieval period begins in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when those lowland lines formed, and its modern period is split: 1803 for the lowland estates and the princely states, but the highland was not administered in any continuous way until the agency arrangements of the mid-nineteenth century, and Koraput became a district only in 1936.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
The upland has a long occupation record and a short written one. Rock shelters in the Kalahandi hills carry painting; a fortified early historic settlement at Asurgarh in the Tel basin shows a town with ramparts, a moat and long-distance trade goods well before any dynasty is named here. The first written notice of the tract is from outside it, in an imperial inscription that lists it among the forest countries campaigned through on the way south. When a dynasty finally appears — the Nalas, in the fifth and sixth centuries — it rules from the plateau's western edge and is known mainly from coins, a ruined temple site and the claims of its enemies.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| prehistory | Rock shelters at Gudahandi and Yogimatha in the Kalahandi hills carry painted panels, the oldest human record in the region. |
| c. 1st millennium BCE – early centuries CE | Asurgarh, near Narla in the Tel basin, is occupied as a fortified settlement with rampart, moat and evidence of trade — the only early urban site so far excavated in the uplands. |
| mid-4th century CE | A king named Vyaghraraja of Mahakantara appears in the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta among the rulers of the forest country of the south. Mahakantara is generally located in this upland, though not to a precise seat. |
| 5th–6th century | The Nala dynasty rules from Pushkari, with remains at Podagarh in the Nabarangpur country. Its rulers Arthapati, Bhavadatta-varman and Skandavarman are known from inscriptions and coins. |
| 6th century | The Nalas are broken by their neighbours; an Aihole inscription credits the Chalukya king Kirtivarman I with their destruction, and the Panduvamshis take the western ground. |
Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries a ring of small dynasties formed around the plateau's rim — the Nagas at Kalahandi from about 1005, the Chhindaka Nagas at Chakrakota to the west, the Chauhans at Patnagarh from 1360, and the Nandapur line that became the Jeypore state. Each of them lived off the same arrangement: tribute and forest produce collected through hill intermediaries, and a fort at the ghat head to hold the pack route. None of them tried to settle the highland, and the highland kept its own arrangements. From the later sixteenth century the whole ring became tributary in turn to the Gajapatis, to Golconda, and to whichever power held the Circars.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1005 | The Naga dynasty establishes itself at Kalahandi, the longest continuous ruling line in the region. |
| 1023–1324 | The Chhindaka Nagas hold Chakrakota mandala from Barsur and Chakrakota, a territory that took in the western Koraput and Kalahandi uplands as well as Bastar. |
| 1360 | Ramai Deva founds the Chauhan line at Patnagarh in the Tel and Ang lowland, displacing an arrangement of eight independent gauntia chiefships. The account comes from later chronicles and carries a founding legend about a tiger hunt, which is tradition rather than record. |
| 1443–1476 | Vinayak Dev rules at Nandapur on the Koraput plateau; the line that becomes the Jeypore state is established, at times as a feudatory of the Gajapatis. |
| 16th century | Vishwanath Dev Gajapati extends the Nandapur state south and east and builds temples on the Nagavali; the capital later moves to Rayagada. |
| mid-17th century | Veer Vikram Dev moves the capital from Nandapur down to Jeypore, where it remained; the state's centre shifts off the high plateau to the plateau's edge. |
| 1775 | A British force attacks Jeypore and destroys the fort after Vikram Dev I resists the extension of Company authority into the hills. |
In the nineteenth century the region was divided by an accident of administration that still shapes it: the Jeypore estate and the Koraput plateau were dealt with from Madras, while Kalahandi, Patna and Bolangir were feudatory states under a separate agency. Neither administration reached the hill villages for decades. What did reach them, from the 1840s, were the agency officers sent into the Kondh country and, later, forest rules, contractors and moneylenders following the new roads. Famine in 1866 and again at the turn of the century fell hardest on precisely the tracts with the thinnest administration. National politics arrived very late — there was effectively no Congress organisation on the plateau before about 1929 — and when it came it was built among cultivators rather than in towns, which is why the largest events of 1942 happened at police stations in villages.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1803 | The Jeypore estate is settled under British arrangements at a fixed tribute and administered through the Madras Presidency; Kalahandi and Patna continue as feudatory states. |
| 1840s–1850s | Agency operations against the meriah rite extend from Ghumsur into the Kalahandi hills. Resistance under Chakra Bisoi crosses the Ghumsur, Kandhamal and Kalahandi borders through this decade. |
| 1866 and 1899–1900 | Famine strikes the uplands twice within a generation; the highland tracts, furthest from road and rail, recorded the heaviest mortality and the largest permanent out-migration. |
| 1929 | Congress enrolment begins on the Koraput plateau, largely through Radhakrushna Biswasray, who had resigned government service. |
| 1936–1938 | Koraput becomes a district of the new province of Orissa in 1936; a training camp for tribal and scheduled caste workers is held at Nuaput near Jeypore in December 1937, and by October 1938 the district had enrolled more than fifty thousand Congress members. |
| August 1942 | Quit India reaches the plateau. Laxman Nayak led a march to the police station at Mathili on 21 August; police fired on the crowd, with heavy loss of life. A firing at Papadahandi in the Nabarangpur country later the same month killed a large number of demonstrators. |
| 1 January 1948 | Kalahandi, Patna and the neighbouring highland states acceded to the Indian Union. |
Rulers and commanders
Known from a single line in Samudragupta's Allahabad pillar inscription, which lists him among the rulers of the forest country. No seat, no coin and no inscription of his own survives; he is the first named authority in the uplands and almost nothing else about him is recoverable.
The best-attested of the Nala kings, known from inscriptions and from a coin hoard. The dynasty pushed north-west into Vidarbha and was broken in the reaction that followed.
Dynasty: Nala. Seat: Pushkari
The strongest ruler of the Chakrakota line, whose inscriptions claim campaigns in every direction. He was defeated by the Kalachuri king Jajalladeva I in 1114, after which the line held only the core of the plateau.
Dynasty: Chhindaka Naga. Seat: Chakrakota and Barsur
Founded the Chauhan line in the Tel and Ang lowland, replacing an arrangement in which eight gauntia chiefships held the country between them. The change from gauntia oligarchy to a single raja is the clearest instance in the region of dynastic rule displacing distributed authority.
Dynasty: Chauhan of Patna. Seat: Patnagarh
Established the line that became the Jeypore state, holding the Koraput plateau from a seat high on it. It is the only long-lived kingdom to have had its capital on the highland itself rather than below it.
Dynasty: Nandapur (later Jeypore) line. Seat: Nandapur
Extended the state down the Nagavali and built the temples that mark its southern reach. Under his successors the capital moved to Rayagada and then, in the seventeenth century, off the plateau to Jeypore.
Dynasty: Nandapur line. Seat: Nandapur, later Rayagada
Resisted the extension of Company authority into the hills; a British force attacked Jeypore and destroyed the fort in 1775. His successor reversed the policy and the estate survived by accommodation instead.
Dynasty: Jeypore. Seat: Jeypore
The offices that actually held authority above the ghat. A group of villages formed a mutha under its head; a gauntia held the settled valley village and its revenue; the jani or beju held the ritual charge of land and season. Kings dealt with these offices for tribute and forest produce and did not replace them, which is why the plateau kept several languages and several agricultural systems side by side under a succession of dynasties.
A kitchen organised around what a slope produces and what a forest gives up in a particular fortnight, not around a spice box. The base is millet, the fat is mostly seed oil pressed locally, the sourness comes from tamarind and from fermentation rather than from citrus, and the aromatics are garlic, dried chilli and fresh turmeric pounded on a stone. Coastal Odisha's pancha phutana tempering thins out as the ghat rises and is largely absent in the hill villages; what replaces it is smoke, ferment and the specific gathered ingredient of the week — mushroom, bamboo shoot, red ant, mahua flower, tuber, wild greens. Almost nothing is fried in depth, because oil is expensive and the hearth is a three-stone fire.
Primary cooking medium
Dominant sour agents
Spice register
Hot and plain rather than aromatic. Dried red chilli and garlic roasted on the hearthstone and crushed with salt is the standard seasoning; turmeric goes in fresh and green from the slope, not as powder. Whole-spice work — cinnamon, clove, bay — belongs to the lowland market kitchens and to wedding cooking, not to the hill hearth. Against coastal Odisha this food is less mustard-driven and much less sweet; against Bastar across the western forest it is nearly identical, which is the truer comparison.
Staple grains and carbs
Preservation methods
Signature techniques
Cooked rice is covered with water in an earthen pot and left overnight; lactic fermentation sours the water and the grain both. The water — torani — is drunk separately and is also the standard souring agent for the next day's cooking. It is a technique that turns yesterday's cooked rice into today's electrolyte drink, and it is why the pot is never washed out between days.
Also found in: Utkal, Chhattisgarh Plains, Bastar
Ragi is ground, slaked into cold water so it does not clot, boiled to a thin porridge and then left to stand. It is thinned with the previous day's torani and drunk cold before the walk to the fields. Cooking it hot and eating it cold is the whole point — a fermented, cool, high-calcium drink for a day that starts at five.
Also found in: Bastar, Chhattisgarh Plains, Rayalaseema
Young shoots are shaved fine, packed into an earthen pot under water and sealed for a week or more. The resulting shoot and its liquor are used the way tamarind is used elsewhere — as an acid and a savoury depth at once — and the same pot is topped up rather than emptied.
Also found in: Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau, Naga Hills
Fish, ant chutney, meat or tubers are wrapped in sal or siali leaf, tied with bark fibre and buried under the ashes of the hearth. It needs no pot, no oil and no water, which is why it is the field and forest method rather than a household one.
Also found in: Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau, Mahakoshal & Gondwana
The rack above the three-stone fire is permanent storage. Mushrooms, maize cobs, seed grain, fish and meat all sit there for weeks; the point is as much the constant smoke as the heat, since it keeps insects out of seed stock that must survive until sowing.
Also found in: Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau
Rice or millet is fermented with ranu — a dried cake of pounded rice and a set of forest roots and barks kept as a household recipe — to make landa. Salap needs no ferment at all: the inflorescence of the fishtail palm is cut and the sap drips into a pot slung under it overnight, arriving sweet at dawn and turning sharp within hours, which is why it is drunk at the tree or at the nearest market and almost never travels.
Also found in: Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau, Mahakoshal & Gondwana
Two kitchens again, but divided by altitude rather than by community. The hill kitchen is millet, gathered forest food and very little oil; the lowland kitchen of Kalahandi and Bolangir is rice, dal, ambila and the festival pitha, and reads much closer to western Odisha. Market towns like Jeypore and Bhawanipatna hold a third, later layer — the tea shop, the ghuguni pot and the mutton hotel.
Ragi porridge, boiled thin and drunk cold, usually soured with torani and taken with nothing more than salt and a raw onion or a green chilli. It is the highland's calorie base and the reason the region's diet is far higher in calcium and iron than a rice-eating plain.
Cooked rice left overnight under water and eaten the next day with its sour liquor, badi, a fried green and whatever the day offers. In the uplands it is a summer necessity rather than the ritual observance it is on the coast.
Little millet cooked and served exactly as rice would be, with dal or a green. It cooks faster than rice, keeps badly once cooled, and is grown on plots too dry and too steep for paddy.
Red weaver ants and their eggs, taken from leaf nests in the canopy with a long pole in the hot months, cleaned, and ground on stone with garlic, salt and dried chilli. It is intensely sour and faintly metallic; the sourness is formic acid, not tamarind. Eaten as a chutney and taken as a remedy for fever and cough.
Where to try: Weekly haats through the Koraput and Rayagada uplands in the hot months.
Wild mushroom curry. A dozen or more named kinds appear in sequence after the first rains — sal-forest, termite-mound and bamboo-clump types among them — each with its own price and its own short window. The first flush is the one cash crop a household can gather without owning land.
Where to try: Roadside sellers on the Koraput–Jeypore and Rayagada–Muniguda roads in June and July.
Fermented bamboo shoot cooked with dried fish or with pumpkin and potato. The ferment carries the dish; the spicing is only garlic, chilli and turmeric.
Goat cooked slowly in an earthen pot with pounded garlic, dried chilli and fresh turmeric, and nothing else — no onion paste, no whole garam masala, no thickener. The gravy is thin and stains red from the chilli rather than from tomato.
Where to try: The mutton hotels behind Jeypore's main market, and any wedding.
Very small reservoir and stream fish fried whole and crushed with salt and chilli, or dried and stored. The Balimela and Kolab reservoirs made a fishery where there had been only stream catch.
Pigeon pea cooked with sun-dried mango slices for sourness and finished with garlic burnt in niger oil. The pigeon pea is not a field crop here but a hedge and bund plant, harvested from between other crops.
Fried greens, but the list is long and mostly wild — koshala, madaranga, poi, drumstick leaf, tamarind shoot, kalama from the tank edges. Households name and use thirty or more leafy plants, most of which have no market and no English name.
A sour stew of mixed vegetables — pumpkin, brinjal, drumstick, colocasia — soured with tamarind or dried mango and thickened with a little rice flour. The lowland's everyday dish and a marker of Kosli cooking.
The plateau's short black aromatic rice, cooked plain for offerings or simmered with milk and jaggery. It yields poorly and is grown for its scent, which is why it survived as a ceremonial grain when the higher yielding varieties took the good land.
Ragi flour worked with a little jaggery or dried mahua, pressed flat on a leaf and cooked on the hearthstone or steamed. The commonest way of eating millet as something other than gruel.
Wild yams and tubers dug in the lean months, some of them requiring repeated boiling and a change of water before they are safe to eat — knowledge held by particular households and taught rather than assumed.
Dried mahua flowers pounded with millet or rice flour and pressed into cakes. Mahua flower is a sugar source before it is anything else, and this is what that means at the hearth.
Dried peas boiled down with spices and served with an onion-and-lime scatter, alongside deep-fried potato and brinjal chops. The market-town food of Jeypore, Bhawanipatna and Balangir, and the thing the whole region eats on a bus journey.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
Cloth here is small, narrow and made to a body rather than to a fashion. Handlooms in this upland weave short widths — a shawl, a waistcloth, a towel — because the loom is a domestic one and the wearer is the buyer. Two kinds of garment carry information: the embroidered shawl a Dongria girl makes and gives away, and the beaded and metal ornament that says which community and which stage of life a woman is in. The market-town wardrobe below the ghat is ordinary coastal Odia dress.
What is worn
A coarse off-white cotton shawl embroidered in green, red and yellow thread with dense geometric lines and triangles, worked freehand without a drawn design. Unmarried girls embroider them and give them to brothers and to suitors, so the piece functions as a statement about a relationship as much as a garment. Older pieces used cloth woven by Dom weavers in exchange for hill produce.
Worn for: Everyday and courtship
A narrow handwoven waistcloth, roughly a foot deep, wrapped and tucked. It is woven at home on a simple loin loom, historically from fibre stripped and processed from local plants and now often from bought cotton yarn.
Worn for: Everyday
A stiff, coarse striped cloth traditionally woven from processed plant fibre rather than cotton, giving a textile closer to matting than to a sari. Mill cotton has replaced it in daily use and the technique now survives with only a few weavers.
Worn for: Everyday, now largely ceremonial
A short dhoti, a cotton towel over the shoulder, and — in the Niyamgiri villages — a small axe carried on the shoulder as a matter of routine rather than of display, along with hairpins worn in a bunch at the knot of the hair.
Worn for: Everyday
Below the ghat, in Balangir, Titlagarh and the Kalahandi plains, the dress is the tie-dyed bandha cotton of the Kosli belt, worn with the pallu over the left shoulder.
Worn for: Everyday and festival
Weaves and textiles
Cotton dyed with the root bark of aal (Morinda) by Mirgan weavers, giving a maroon-to-deep-brown range and, with an iron modifier, black. The yarn is pre-treated for weeks in castor oil, ash and cow dung before it will take the dye at all, and the colour deepens rather than fades with washing. No synthetic dye is used. Motifs are small and drawn from the surrounding villages — fish, crab, temple, axe, conch. Registered as a geographical indication.
A cotton sari woven in the Kalahandi lowland with Kondh-derived motifs — temple spire, fish, flower — set in a narrow contrasting border. Nearly extinct in the mid-twentieth century and revived from a handful of surviving weavers. Registered as a geographical indication.
Not a woven textile but a surface one — hand embroidery on plain cloth, counted by eye. Its motifs are read locally as hills, streams, paths and fields, though the reading is a description of the country rather than a fixed code.
Jewellery
Dance
A line of women linked arm-to-arm behind the back, moving in a slow serpentine to a fixed step pattern that speeds up over a long sequence. The drum ensemble — dhol, tamak, and the mahuri reed — sets the tempo, and the line simply lengthens as more women join. It is the region's default social dance and belongs to no single community.
Performed by: Paraja, Gadaba, Durua and Kondh women, with male drummers. Occasion: Chaita Parab, weddings, and any village gathering
Danced with the ghumura — an earthen or wooden pitcher-shaped drum slung from the neck and struck with both hands — in fast crouching formations that read as martial. It is Kalahandi's signature form and the one it sends out to national parades.
Performed by: Men of Kalahandi. Occasion: Dussehra, Chhatar Jatra, Nuakhai
A courtship dance in two facing lines to the flat dhap drum, with sung exchanges between the sides. The song is improvised and the exchange is the substance of it.
Performed by: Young men and women of the Kondh and Binjhal villages. Occasion: Courtship gatherings and marriages
Danced in a ring around a branch of the karam tree planted in the courtyard, through the night, with sisters fasting for brothers. Shared with the Chota Nagpur plateau and with the Chhattisgarh plains.
Performed by: Villagers of the lowland and forest fringe. Occasion: Karma Puja, in Bhadraba
A song-and-dance form named for the refrain "dalkhai bo" that closes every line, danced by women with men playing dhol, nisan and tasa. It belongs to the western Odia belt and reaches this region through Balangir and Titlagarh.
Performed by: Women of the Kosli-speaking lowland. Occasion: Bhaijiuntia in Aswina
Music
Dhol, tamak, the double-reed mahuri and a bamboo flute, with the tudbudi pressure drum used for accents. The ensemble is hereditary work, usually of Dom or Ghasi households, who play for villages that are not their own — a service relationship that is also how music travels between valleys.
Sung antiphonally between the two parties across a negotiation that can run for days, with formal exchanges of praise and refusal. The songs carry the descent lines and the terms; the singing is the record.
Ghumura drums with nisan, tal and the mahuri, in a form that supports both a competitive display and a processional accompaniment for the Kalahandi jatras.
The kuranmaran or shaman speaks in the voice of the dead during divination, in a chanted register distinct from ordinary speech. It is not performance and is not staged.
Theatre
The village shed housing a manuscript of Jagannatha Das's Odia Bhagabata, where evening reading and explication happen. In the lowland villages it is still the building where public matters get discussed, which is what makes it more than a devotional habit.
Touring Odia jatra companies work the market towns in the dry months with a portable stage, a generator and a night-long programme, and Ramleela is staged locally around Dussehra at Jeypore.
Crafts
The region's one craft with a national market, sustained by a handful of Mirgan weaver families. The process is slow because the mordanting is slow, and the price a piece fetches is mostly a price for time.
Material: Cotton yarn, aal root bark, castor oil, cow dung, iron water. Technique: Weeks of oil-and-ash pre-treatment, then repeated dye baths in aal root; iron modifiers shift the maroon to black. Woven on pit looms in short widths.
A weave that had fallen to a few working looms and was rebuilt around a cooperative in the Kalahandi lowland.
Material: Cotton. Technique: Extra-weft patterning of Kondh-derived motifs on a fine cotton ground.
Made by unmarried Dongria Kondh women for their own use and for gifting rather than for sale, which is why pieces reaching the market are usually made to order and are not the same object.
Material: Coarse cotton cloth, cotton thread in three colours. Technique: Freehand counted embroidery worked without a marked design.
The picture is commissioned, not decorative. A diviner establishes which spirit is causing an illness or a loss, and the painting is made as a dwelling and a settlement for it. When the reason passes, the wall is replastered — which is why almost nothing old survives.
Material: White rice paste on a red-earth wall. Technique: Painted with a chewed bamboo twig directly onto the house wall, building stick figures, horses, houses, ladders and grids inside a bordered rectangle.
Household-scale casting of lamps, measures, ritual figures and jewellery. Odisha's best-known dokra villages — Kuliana in Mayurbhanj and Sadeibareni in Dhenkanal — lie well outside this region; what survives here is the smaller, older, unbranded end of the same technique, and its closest kin is at Kondagaon across the forest in Bastar.
Material: Beeswax, clay, brass and bell metal. Technique: Lost-wax casting using drawn wax thread wound over a clay core.
Made to be given, not kept — the figures are placed at a shrine on the fulfilment of a vow and left to weather. A shrine's accumulated horses are a record of the promises a village has made.
Material: Local clay, open-fired. Technique: Hand-built and coil-built horses, elephants and riders, fired in a field kiln.
The packaging and containers of the whole regional economy — plates, cups, grain bins, fish traps, carrying baskets — made at home and sold by the dozen at the haat.
Material: Siali and sal leaf, bamboo, broom grass, siali bark fibre. Technique: Leaf plates stitched with slivers of bamboo; split-bamboo coiling and twill weaving.
Short repeated verses on courtship, the season and the village, sung by the dancing line and answered by the drummers, extended as long as the dance lasts.
Sung at: Chaita Parab, weddings and village gatherings.
Praise, refusal and the settling of terms between two households, sung in formal alternation.
Sung at: Marriage negotiation and the wedding itself.
Addressed to the dead person directly, as one side of a conversation. The rite ends with a stone set upright in a field or a village row, and the song is what makes the stone that person's.
Sung at: The planting of a memorial stone for the dead.
Love, separation and mockery, every line closing on the refrain "dalkhai bo". Sung by women in the lowland with drums answering.
Sung at: Bhaijiuntia, in Aswina.
The karam branch, the brother's welfare and the coming harvest, sung all night around the planted branch.
Sung at: Karma Puja, in Bhadraba.
A refrain form built on the repeated word "rela", carried across the forest belt into Bastar, where the same device organises whole song cycles.
Sung at: Dancing nights.
Invocation of Manikeswari and of the drum itself, sung between rounds of drumming rather than over it.
Sung at: Dussehra and the Kalahandi jatras.
The defining linguistic fact of this upland is not any one language but the coexistence of two entire families inside a day's walk. Dravidian languages — Kui, Kuvi, Parji, Ollari — and Munda languages — Sora, Gutob, Remo, Gorum — are spoken in adjacent valleys, and neither family is an intrusion into the other's territory; both have been here long enough that the boundaries are village-by-village rather than block-by-block. Over that sits Desia, an Odia contact variety with simplified verb morphology and heavy borrowing from both families, which almost nobody claims as a mother tongue and almost everybody uses in the market. The state's multilingual education programme teaches early primary classes in several of these languages, which is one of the few places their orthographies are settled at all.
Speech varieties
Also called Koraputia. A trade and inter-community speech with a reduced verb system, Odia core vocabulary and Dravidian and Munda loans. Being nobody's first language is precisely what makes it usable.
Speakers: Used as a second language across the highland; rarely returned as a mother tongue
The language of the largest Adivasi population in this belt. Written in the Odia script where written at all, and closely related to Kuvi and to Gondi further west.
Speakers: Several lakh, concentrated in the Kondh uplands
Spoken by the Kondh of the Koraput and Rayagada hills, including the Dongria of Niyamgiri. Mutually partially intelligible with Kui, and treated locally as the same speech with a different accent.
Speakers: Well over a lakh
The Paraja language, spoken across the plateau and continuing into Bastar. Many people identified as Paraja now speak Desia as their first language, so the community and the language no longer map onto each other.
Two communities both called Gadaba speak languages from two different families — Gutob is Munda, Ollari is Dravidian. It is the single clearest illustration that community names in this region were assigned from outside and do not track descent or speech.
The Bonda language. Remo means simply "man" and is what its speakers call themselves; Bonda is the name used from below the hill.
Speakers: A few thousand, in the Bonda hills
Spoken in the eastern uplands towards Gunupur and Puttasingi. It has its own script, Sorang Sompeng, devised in the 1930s for the language rather than adapted from an existing one — a rare thing among Indian languages of this size.
The speech of the Bolangir and Kalahandi lowland, also called Sambalpuri, with its own literature, its own festival calendar and a long-running claim to separate language status.
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Desia ଦେଶିଆ | "Of the country" — both the contact language and the way highland people of many communities describe themselves collectively when speaking to outsiders. |
| Dongar ଡଙ୍ଗର | The hill slope, and by extension the sloping plot cultivated on it. Dongar chasa is slope cultivation, sown as a mixture of a dozen or more crops in one plot so that something survives whatever the year does. |
| Mandia ମାଣ୍ଡିଆ | Finger millet — the grain, the flour and, by shorthand, the meal itself. |
| Torani ତୋରାଣି | The soured water of fermented cooked rice, drunk on its own and used as the household's sour agent. |
| Kai | The red weaver ant, and the chutney made from it with its eggs. |
| Salap | The fishtail palm and the sap tapped from its cut inflorescence — sweet at dawn, sour by noon, alcoholic by evening, the same liquid at three stages. |
| Ranu | The dried starter cake of pounded rice and forest roots used to ferment landa. Each household keeps its own combination of plants and it is not written down. |
| Disari | The village astrologer-diviner who fixes the dates for sowing, harvest, marriage and travel. The agricultural calendar of a village is his reading, not an almanac's. |
| Jani | The Kondh village priest, who makes the offerings at the earth shrine on behalf of the whole village. |
| Bejuni | A woman medium among the Kondh, consulted in illness and misfortune; she speaks in the voice of the agency identified as the cause. |
| Idital | The Sora wall painting, made to house a spirit after a divination. The word names the picture and the act together. |
| Kapdaganda | The embroidered Dongria Kondh shawl, and by extension the embroidery itself. |
| Haat ହାଟ | The weekly market, held on a fixed day at a fixed crossroads. It is the region's calendar, bank, news service and marriage market as much as its shop. |
Sayings
| Saying | Literally | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Jete guda debu, sete mitha | The more jaggery you put in, the sweeter it will be | A common Odia saying used for effort and result, and for what a bargain is worth. |
| Nuakhai juhar | New-rice greeting | Not a proverb but the formula of the lowland's principal festival — juhar is a greeting made with joined hands, and on Nuakhai day it is offered to every elder in turn before anyone eats. |
| Bara masare tera parba | Thirteen festivals in twelve months | Used across Odisha, half in complaint and half in pride, about a calendar with more observances than months to hold them. |
At 1,672 m the highest point in this stretch of the Eastern Ghats, reached by a motorable road to a bare grassy top with coffee and pepper on the lower slopes. Winter dawns here are below freezing at ground level while the plain a thousand metres below is warm.
Best time: November–February, at dawn.
The Machkund drops about 175 m in a single fall at the point where the plateau ends. The river is dammed upstream at Jalaput for a hydro scheme jointly operated by two administrations, so the fall's volume depends on releases as much as on rain.
Best time: August–December.
A large reservoir on the Sileru with forested islands and long arms, and the crossing point for the Bonda hills above it. The reservoir created a fishery where the country had only stream catch, and the launch is the practical road for villages on its far side.
The steep massif where Remo-speaking Bonda villages sit above 900 m, reached on foot. Visits are best made at the Ankadeli market below rather than in the villages, which are not a display and are approached only with local arrangement.
A limestone cave shrine above the Kolab, approached by a long stair through sal forest, with a Shiva lingam inside and substantial resident bat colonies in the deeper chambers. Busiest in Sravana.
A long flat-topped ridge whose porous cap holds water and releases it as perennial streams down every flank — which is why its slopes carry orchard crops rather than field crops. Approached from Bissamcuttack and Muniguda; the hill is a deity to the Dongria Kondh who live on it, and access is a matter of asking, not of ticketing.
The plateau's market town and the seat of the old Jeypore chiefs, whose Dussehra is still the region's largest court festival. The town is the base for Kotpad, Deomali and the surrounding haats.
A hilltop Jagannath temple built in the early 1970s and open to visitors of any faith and any origin, unlike the parent temple at Puri. Its name claims the Sabara forest origin of the deity directly.
Kalahandi's town and the seat of the Manikeswari temple, whose Chhatar Jatra at Dussehra is the district's largest gathering. The base for Karlapat and the Ampani hills.
A weaving village on the Jeypore–Jagdalpur road where the aal-root dye process can be seen from vat to loom. The dyeing yard, not the loom, is the thing worth watching.
Moist deciduous hill forest with sambar, gaur, leopard and a good elephant presence, and the Phurlijharan fall on its edge.
Best time: November–March.
A high tableland of grassland, sal and waterfalls at the western edge of the region, the source of the Jonk, and one of the few Odisha landscapes with open grassland at altitude.
A laterite outcrop carrying a circular roofless temple of sixty-four yoginis — one of only a handful of such hypaethral temples anywhere — alongside a brick Someswar Siva temple and scattered shrines. The plan is open to the sky by design, not by ruin.
A stream-bed shrine at the foot of the Gandhamardan range, where the water runs over bare rock in a series of slides. The range carries a dense medicinal flora and a long association with herbal knowledge.
The dam above Koraput, with a terraced garden below it and boating on the reservoir — the standard local outing, and a useful orientation to how the plateau's rivers were re-plumbed in the twentieth century.
| Festival | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Chaita Parab | Chaitra, March–April | The Desia year's largest festival — a spring observance across the highland communities combining a communal hunt, the first eating of new mahua and mango, offerings at the village earth shrine, and days of dhemsa. Village work stops; the disari fixes the date. |
| Dussehra at Jeypore | Aswina, September–October | The old Jeypore court's ten-day Durga observance centred on the Kanaka Durga temple, with processions, night markets and a fair that draws the whole plateau into the town. It is a court festival in form and a market festival in practice. |
| Chhatar Jatra, Bhawanipatna | Aswina, at Dussehra | The chhatar — the ceremonial umbrella standing for Manikeswari — is carried at night from the temple to the Jena Khal grounds and back, with ghumura drumming the whole way and the town awake for it. |
| Nuakhai | Bhadraba Sukla Panchami, August–September | The new-rice festival of the Kosli-speaking western belt, whose day is fixed each year by the almanac. It is principally a Sambalpur and Bolangir observance and reaches this region through the Bolangir lowland and the Kalahandi plains — not the highland villages, where the first grain of the year is millet and the year turns at Chaita Parab instead. |
| Push Punei | Pausa Purnima, December–January | The winter harvest festival of the highland — new grain cooked at home, offerings at the village shrine, and the year's fullest markets, held when granaries are at their highest and work at its lowest. |
| Karma Puja | Bhadraba Sukla Ekadasi, August–September | A branch of the karam tree is cut, carried in and planted in the courtyard; sisters fast, the night is spent dancing round it, and the branch is floated away at dawn. Shared with Chota Nagpur and the Chhattisgarh plains. |
| Bihan puja and the sowing rites | Baisakha to Asadha, April–July | Seed is brought out, offered at the earth shrine and sown only after the village priest has sown first. The sequence — which crop, which field, which day — is set by the disari and differs between villages within a few kilometres of one another. |
| Parab, Koraput | Early November | A district-organised festival of the highland's dance, craft and food, held over several days at Koraput. It is a modern platform rather than an old rite, and it is the one occasion where forms from across the plateau are performed side by side. |
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laxman Naik | 1899–1943 | Freedom movement | A Bhumia leader from Tentuliguma in the Koraput hills who organised the region's Adivasi villages during the 1942 movement and was tried and hanged at Berhampur in 1943. He remains the highland's own historical figure rather than a borrowed one, and every district town here has his statue. |
| Bhima Bhoi | c. 1850–1895 | Poet and religious teacher | A blind poet of Kondh origin, the principal voice of the Mahima Dharma movement, whose Odia verse — Stuti Chintamani above all — reached villages that had no access to Sanskrit learning. His seat at Khaliapali lies just beyond the Bolangir lowland, and the movement's reach through this belt is his. |
| Mangei Gomango | Active in the 1930s | Script | Devised Sorang Sompeng, a script created specifically for the Sora language rather than adapted from Odia or Devanagari — one of very few Indian languages of its size with a purpose-made writing system. |
| Verrier Elwin | 1902–1964 | Anthropology | Lived and worked among the Bonda and the Sora and wrote Bondo Highlander and The Religion of an Indian Tribe. His books remain the fullest published record of Sora funerary ritual and Bonda social organisation, and they are the reason much of that material is documented at all. |
| M. S. Swaminathan | 1925–2023 | Agricultural science | His foundation's centre at Jeypore worked with cultivator families on the plateau's rice landraces and a community seed bank, and that documentation underpinned the recognition of Koraput's traditional agriculture by the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2012. |
| Gobardhan Panika | b. 1948 | Weaving | A Kotpad weaver who kept the full aal-root dye process working when synthetic dye was cheaper and faster in every respect, and was awarded the Padma Shri in 2018. The craft's survival is a small number of such households, not an industry. |
This is adivasi-majority country and its resistance history reflects that rather than the national timetable. The nineteenth-century risings here were about administration arriving in hills that had never been administered, and they were led by hereditary hill officers, not by politicians. National politics reached the plateau extremely late: there was effectively no Congress organisation in Koraput before about 1929, and it was built in the following decade among Bhumia, Paraja, Gadaba and Kondh cultivators rather than in the market towns. That base is why the events of August 1942 here were village flag-hoistings and the firings that answered them, and why the region's best-known figure was a village Congress president rather than a lawyer. Below the ghat, in the feudatory states, the demand was directed at the ruler as much as at the British and took the form of praja mandal agitation.
Risings and revolts
The special agency established to end the meriah rite pushed into the Kondh tracts of Kalahandi from Ghumsur. Its officers were the first administration many of these villages had encountered, and the demands for labour, tribute and access that came with them met sustained resistance led from 1846 by Chakra Bisoi, moving across the Ghumsur, Kandhamal and Kalahandi borders.
Outcome: The hills were brought under permanent agency supervision. Chakra Bisoi was never captured and disappears from the record about 1855.
The first organised national political action in Koraput. Volunteers recruited after the enrolment drive of 1929, under Radhakrushna Biswasray, joined the civil disobedience movement and courted arrest.
Outcome: Arrests and short sentences, and a district Congress organisation that grew from almost nothing to more than fifty thousand enrolled members by October 1938.
On 21 August 1942 Laxman Nayak led villagers to hoist the Congress flag at the police station at Mathili; police fired on the crowd and many were killed and injured. Later the same month a firing at Papadahandi in the Nabarangpur country killed a large number of demonstrators. Similar actions were recorded at Umerkote, Raighar, Padwa, Nandapur, Jeypore and Malkangiri.
Outcome: Mass arrests across the district. Laxman Nayak was charged with murder, sentenced on 13 November 1942 and hanged at Berhampur jail on 29 March 1943.
In the states below the ghat the demand was for an end to forced labour and irregular levies and for rights of association and publication. Praja mandals were formed in most of the garjat states after the second All Orissa States People's Conference in 1937, and an All Orissa Garjat Day was observed on 29 October 1938.
Outcome: The states' administrations were opened to scrutiny and, by the end of 1947, almost all of them had agreed to merge with the province.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laxman NayakTentuligumma, in the Malkangiri country of the old Koraput district | 1899–1943 | Quit India | A Bhumia cultivator and village Congress president who organised across the southern plateau in the Gandhian idiom and led the march on the Mathili police station on 21 August 1942.Charged with murder after the firing, sentenced on 13 November 1942 and hanged at Berhampur jail on 29 March 1943. |
| Chakra BisoiThe Kondh hills of Ghumsur, Kandhamal and Kalahandi | active 1846 – c. 1855 | The Kondh risings | Led hill resistance to the agency administration for nearly a decade across three district borders, keeping a force in being without a fort or a treasury.Never captured; he disappears from the record about 1855. |
| Radhakrushna BiswasrayKoraput district | — | Civil disobedience; Quit India | Resigned government service to build the Congress organisation on the plateau from 1929, headed the district committee, and led the 1930 civil disobedience volunteers. He is the reason a district with no political history at all had fifty thousand enrolled members within a decade.Imprisoned during the movements of the 1930s and 1940s. |
| Radhamohan SahuKoraput district | — | Civil disobedience; Quit India | Secretary of the district Congress committee through the years in which the organisation was extended from the towns into the hill villages. |
| Sanu MajhiNabarangpur country | — | Quit India | One of the tribal organisers who carried the movement into the Nabarangpur villages before the firing at Papadahandi. |
| Rabi Singh MajhiNabarangpur country | — | Quit India | Village-level organiser in the Nabarangpur tract during the 1942 movement, recorded in interviews with surviving participants rather than in official files. |
The weekly market below the Bonda hills
Traditionally held on Thursdays. Bonda women walk down from the hill with forest produce and buy salt, yarn and beads. It is a working market, not a spectacle — photography without asking is resented, and rightly.
The Dongria Kondh market at the foot of Niyamgiri
Traditionally a Wednesday market, where hill horticulture — pineapple, jackfruit, banana, turmeric, ginger, orange — comes down and grain, oil and cloth go up.
The plateau's largest weekly market
Millet, mahua, tamarind, mushrooms in season, livestock, iron tools and salap by the pot. Check the market day locally before travelling; the surrounding villages organise their week around it.
Aal-dyed cotton saris, stoles and yardage
Buying at the weaver's own house or through the cooperative puts the price where the months of dyeing happened. Ask to see the dye yard.
Odisha handloom, including Kotpad and Habaspuri
The state weavers' cooperative outlet — the reliable place to find these weaves outside their villages.
Odisha handicrafts, including dokra, terracotta and tribal jewellery
The state handicrafts emporium; useful mainly for comparison before buying in the villages.
Millet, forest produce, dokra and craft bought through tribal cooperatives
Ragi and little millet cooked as tiffin — mandia jau, millet idli, millet pitha
Run under the state millet programme with self-help groups. It is the easiest place for a visitor to eat the region's actual staple rather than its restaurant version.
By air
By rail
By road
By water
Getting around
Buses between district towns, shared jeeps to the haats on market days and very little else — a jeep and a driver who knows the market calendar is the only sensible way to work the plateau. Distances look short and take twice as long as the map suggests, because the roads follow the contour.
Traditions that continue past an administrative line. Written once at the corridor level and referenced from every region it crosses, never duplicated.
The same plateau, the same millet-and-slope agriculture, dhemsa dancing and Kondh and Kondadora communities continue south past Sunki into the Araku and Ananthagiri hills without a break in the terrain.
How it diverges: On the southern side the administrative and school language is Telugu and coffee became the plateau's cash crop with an accompanying tourist economy; on the northern side the market language stayed Desia and the weekly haat, not the resort, remained the institution.
Parji-speaking Paraja villages on both sides of the forest, dokra casting, mahua and sal collection, the fermented bamboo shoot, red ant chutney, and the road through Kotpad that has carried this trade for centuries.
How it diverges: Bastar's Dussehra runs some seventy-five days and is built around Danteswari and the Adivasi villages' participation; Jeypore's is a ten-day court Dussehra in the Durga calendar. The kitchens are nearly identical and the festival calendars are not.
The Kolab becomes the Sabari and the Machkund becomes the Sileru, and both run to the Godavari — so this highland's water, its Koya kin networks and its bamboo and mahua trade have always faced south-west rather than towards the Bay.
How it diverges: Downstream the same communities sit inside a Telugu administrative and educational world; upstream they sit inside an Odia one, and the family names change spelling at the boundary.
Nuakhai, Dalkhai, the ghumura and dhap drums, the ambila kitchen and the bandha tie-dye weave connect the Bolangir and Kalahandi lowland northward to Sambalpur, Bargarh and Subarnapur.
How it diverges: In the lowland the year turns on new rice at Nuakhai; a hundred kilometres up the scarp it turns on Chaita Parab and the first mahua. The same district administration contains both calendars.
The origin narrative of the coastal deity runs uphill into this forest — Nilamadhava worshipped by a Sabara chief, the image made of daru found in the forest, and the Daitapati servitors at Puri who claim Sabara descent. The Koraput temple built in the 1970s is named Sabar Srikhetra for exactly this reason.
How it diverges: On the coast the story is the charter of an enormous institutional temple economy; in the uplands it is a claim of prior right, and the hill temple that states it most plainly is also the one open to everybody.
Last reviewed 2026-08-30