# Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands (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.

- Source: https://bharatsangraha.com/regions/kbk-uplands
- Language: en
- Tier 1 macro cultural realm: Central Highlands & Forest Belt
- Tier 2 cultural region: Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands
- Indigenous scope: The block of the Eastern Ghats where the range stops being a scarp and becomes a plateau — a tilted upland between roughly 600 and 1,000 metres, topped by Deomali at 1,672 m, cut by the Machkund, the Kolab, the Indravati and the headwaters of the Nagavali and the Tel, and draining in three directions at once: west to the Godavari, north to the Mahanadi, east down the scarp to the Bay. Its edges are audible before they are visible. Eastward the plateau breaks and Desia gives way to coastal Odia at the foot of the ghat; northward it falls into the Tel and Ang lowland where Kosli begins; westward the sal forest continues unbroken into Halbi and Gondi country; southward the same plateau runs on under Telugu administration around Araku while the villages on it keep speaking Kui and Desia. What defines the interior is not one language but the arrangement of several — Dravidian and Munda tongues spoken in adjacent valleys with an Indo-Aryan contact speech, Desia, used between them in the weekly market.
- Overlapping administrative units: Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh
- Tier 3 micro-regions: Koraput Plateau (Eastern Ghats tableland, 600–1,200 m, moist deciduous and sal); Niyamgiri Range (Flat-topped Eastern Ghats ridge, perennial streams, 1,000–1,500 m); Bolangir Lowland (Tel and Ang basin, dry deciduous, 150–400 m)
- Languages: Desia, Kui, Kuvi, Odia, Sora, Gutob, Remo, Parji, Kosli

## Terrain and eco-zones

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:** Deomali, 1,672 m, the highest point of the Eastern Ghats in this stretch, on the Chandragiri–Pottangi ridge, The Niyamgiri range — a long flat-topped ridge holding perennial springs well into the dry season, Bonda hills above the Balimela reservoir, a steep isolated massif reached on foot from Mudulipada, Karlapat and Ampani hills in the Kalahandi highland, The Sunabeda plateau, a high grassland-and-sal tableland at the western edge, Laterite and khondalite scarps where the plateau drops to the Tel and Ang lowland

**Rivers and waters:** Machkund — falls 175 m at Duduma and is dammed at Jalaput and Balimela, its water shared by two administrations, Kolab — dammed above Koraput, becomes the Sabari and joins the Godavari, Indravati — rises at Thuamul Rampur and flows west into Bastar, the only major river here running away from the sea, Nagavali and Vamsadhara — rise on the eastern slope and cut down the scarp to the coast, Tel — the Kalahandi and Bolangir lowland river, and the Mahanadi's largest tributary, Jonk and Sunder in the western lowland

- **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 visit:** October 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.

## History

## Foodways

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:** Niger seed oil (alsi) pressed at the village ghani, Mustard oil, bought in the market towns and used sparingly, Mahua kernel fat (tola), rendered in the hills and used where ghee would be used elsewhere, Ghee only at weddings and at the lowland temples

**Dominant sour agents:** Tamarind — the default sour, kept as salted pulp balls through the year, Torani, the sour water from fermented cooked rice, Ambula, sun-dried mango slices, Red weaver ants and their eggs, whose formic acid is used as a souring agent in its own right, Fermented bamboo shoot liquor, Roselle leaf (khata saga) in the monsoon months

**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:** Ragi or mandia (finger millet) — the actual staple above roughly 700 m, Suan (little millet) and kangu (foxtail millet), Upland rice landraces, most of them red-pericarp and rainfed, Kalajeera, the short aromatic black-cumin rice of the Koraput plateau, grown for ritual and for kheer, Maize on the lower slopes and homestead plots, Kandul (pigeon pea) and jhudunga (rice bean) grown interplanted rather than as a separate crop

**Preservation:** Mahua flowers dried on swept ground in March and April and stored for the year as sweetener and ferment base, Ambula — mango sliced and sun-dried on the roof at the start of summer, Wild mushrooms strung and dried above the hearth so the smoke keeps the weevils out, Bamboo shoot shaved and packed under water in a sealed earthen pot, Sukhua — small river and reservoir fish salted and sun-dried, Grain stored in the kothi, a mud-plastered bamboo bin raised off the floor of the house

### Torani fermentation
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

### Mandia jau
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

### Bamboo shoot souring
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

### Ember and leaf-parcel cooking
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

### Hearth-smoke drying
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

### Ranu-cake brewing and salap tapping
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

## Dishes

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.

### Mandia jau (ମାଣ୍ଡିଆ ଜାଉ)
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.

### Pakhala (ପଖାଳ)
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.

### Suan bhata
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.

### Kai chutney (କାଇ ଚଟଣି)
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.

### Chhatu tarkari
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.

### Karadi (bamboo shoot) curry
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.

### Desia mangsa
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.

### Chuna machha bhaja
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.

### Kandula dali with ambula
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.

### Saga bhaja
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.

### Ambila
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.

### Kalajeera anna and kheeri
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.

### Mandia pitha
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.

### Pita kanda and forest tubers
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.

### Mahua ladu
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.

### Ghuguni and chop
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:** Mandia jau, Pakhala and torani, Suan and kangu cooked as rice, Upland red rice, Kandula dali

**Sweets:** Kalajeera kheeri, Mahua ladu, Arisa and kakara pitha in the lowland, Jaggery from date and sago palm

**Street food:** Ghuguni with aloo and baigana chop, Roasted maize on the ghat roads, Chuda and mahua sold together by the measure at the haat, Bara and mudhi at bus stands

**Drinks:** Salap — fishtail palm sap, drunk within hours of tapping, Landa — rice or millet beer brewed with a ranu starter cake, Mahuli — distilled mahua flower spirit, Torani, Black tea, heavily sweetened, at every market stall

## Dress and textiles

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.

### Kapdaganda
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 by: Dongria Kondh women and men
Worn for: Everyday and courtship

### Ringa
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 by: Bonda women
Worn for: Everyday

### Kerang cloth
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 by: Gadaba women
Worn for: Everyday, now largely ceremonial

### Dhoti and gamucha with tangi
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 by: Kondh and Paraja men
Worn for: Everyday

### Sambalpuri-style cotton sari
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 by: Women of the lowland
Worn for: Everyday and festival

### Kotpad handloom (GI tag)
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.

### Habaspuri (GI tag)
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.

### Kapdaganda embroidery
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:** Aluminium and brass neck rings worn in stacks by Bonda women, Bead ropes in many strands covering the chest, wound rather than clasped, Three nose rings — one in each nostril and one in the septum — worn by Dongria Kondh women, Bunches of hairpins and metal combs worn in the hair knot by both sexes among the Dongria, Heavy silver anklets and armlets in the lowland, bought by weight and worn as savings, Grass and bead headbands (turuba) among Bonda women, who keep their heads shaved

## Arts and artisanal heritage

### Dhemsa — tribal
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.

### Ghumura — folk
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.

### Dhap — folk
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.

### Karma — folk
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.

### Dalkhai — folk
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.

### The dhemsa ensemble
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.

### Kui and Kuvi marriage song
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 ensemble
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.

### Sora ritual recitation
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.

### Bhagabata tungi
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.

### Ramleela and Jatra troupes
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.

### Kotpad natural-dye weaving (GI registered)
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.

### Habaspuri weaving (GI registered)
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.

### Kapdaganda embroidery (GI-worthy)
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.

### Idital — Sora wall painting (GI-worthy)
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.

### Dokra and bell-metal casting
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.

### Terracotta votive figures
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.

### Siali and sal leaf work, bamboo basketry
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.

## Folk songs

### Dhemsa geet (Desia)
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

### Kui marriage songs (Kui and Kuvi)
Praise, refusal and the settling of terms between two households, sung in formal alternation.
Sung at: Marriage negotiation and the wedding itself

### Guar songs (Sora)
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

### Dalkhai (Kosli)
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

### Karma geet (Kosli and Desia)
The karam branch, the brother's welfare and the coming harvest, sung all night around the planted branch.
Sung at: Karma Puja, in Bhadraba

### Rela (Desia and Parji)
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

### Ghumura song (Odia and Kosli)
Invocation of Manikeswari and of the drum itself, sung between rounds of drumming rather than over it.
Sung at: Dussehra and the Kalahandi jatras

## Dialect and oral traditions

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.

### Desia — Indo-Aryan, Odia
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.

### Kui — Dravidian, South-Central
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.

### Kuvi — Dravidian, South-Central
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.

### Parji — Dravidian, Central
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.

### Gutob and Ollari — Munda (Gutob) and Dravidian (Ollari)
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.

### Remo — Munda
The Bonda language. Remo means simply "man" and is what its speakers call themselves; Bonda is the name used from below the hill.

### Sora — Munda
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.

### Kosli — Indo-Aryan, Odia
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

- **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

- "Jete guda debu, sete mitha" — literally: 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" — literally: 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" — literally: 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.

## Places

### Deomali, Koraput
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

### Duduma falls, Koraput
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

### Chitrakonda and the Balimela reservoir, Malkangiri
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.

### Bonda ghati and Mudulipada, Malkangiri
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.

### Gupteswar cave, Koraput
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.

### Niyamgiri range, Rayagada and Kalahandi
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.

### Jeypore, Koraput
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.

### Sabar Srikhetra, Koraput, Koraput
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.

### Bhawanipatna, Kalahandi
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.

### Kotpad, Koraput
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.

### Karlapat Wildlife Sanctuary, Kalahandi
Moist deciduous hill forest with sambar, gaur, leopard and a good elephant presence, and the Phurlijharan fall on its edge.
Best time: November–March

### Sunabeda plateau and sanctuary, Nuapada
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.

### Ranipur-Jharial, Balangir
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.

### Harishankar and the Gandhamardan hills, Balangir
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.

### Kolab reservoir and gardens, Koraput
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.

## Festivals

- **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.

## People

- **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.

## Freedom fighters

## Shops and premises

- **Ankadeli haat**, Onukudelli, Malkangiri district: 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.
- **Chatikona haat**, Chatikona, Rayagada district: 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.
- **Kunduli haat**, Kunduli, Koraput district: 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.
- **Kotpad weavers' cluster**, Kotpad, Koraput district: 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.
- **Boyanika**, Bhubaneswar, Jeypore and district towns: Odisha handloom, including Kotpad and Habaspuri The state weavers' cooperative outlet — the reliable place to find these weaves outside their villages.
- **Utkalika**, Bhubaneswar and district centres: Odisha handicrafts, including dokra, terracotta and tribal jewellery The state handicrafts emporium; useful mainly for comparison before buying in the villages.
- **Tribes India outlet, Koraput**, Koraput: Millet, forest produce, dokra and craft bought through tribal cooperatives
- **Millet Shakti outlets**, Koraput, Bhawanipatna and other district towns: 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.

## How to reach

**By air:** Visakhapatnam (VTZ); Biju Patnaik International Airport, Bhubaneswar (BBI); Raipur (RPR); Jeypore airstrip

**By rail:** Koraput (KRPU); Jeypore (JYP); Rayagada (RGDA); Kesinga (KSNG); Titlagarh (TIG); Balangir (BLGR)

**By road:** The ghat road from Visakhapatnam through Araku and Sunki to Koraput and Jeypore, Jeypore to Jagdalpur, the direct link into Bastar, passing Kotpad, Rayagada to Bhawanipatna via Kesinga, along the foot of the Niyamgiri range, Bhawanipatna to Balangir via Junagarh and Titlagarh, Raipur to Nuapada and Khariar for the western approach

**By water:** Launch services across the Balimela reservoir from Chitrakonda to Janbai and the villages on its far arms, Boating on the Kolab reservoir above Koraput

**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.

## The small things

### Two peoples, one name, two language families
Both communities called Gadaba here speak entirely unrelated languages — Gutob is Munda, Ollari is Dravidian. The shared name came from outside. It is the clearest single demonstration that the tribal labels used administratively in this region are categories of convenience, not of descent.

### Seventeen hundred rices from one tract
Survey work in the Jeypore tract in the 1950s collected on the order of 1,700 distinct rice landraces from an area smaller than a modern district — varieties selected for particular slopes, particular water regimes, scent, or storage life. The Food and Agriculture Organization designated Koraput's traditional agriculture a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2012, one of a small number of Indian sites so recognised.

### The staple is not rice
Above roughly 700 m, ragi and little millet feed the household and rice is the festival and market grain. This inverts the popular image of eastern India entirely, and it is a function of slope and rainfall reliability — millet ripens on a thin soil in a short window that paddy cannot use.

### Sourness from an insect
Kai chutney is red weaver ants and their eggs ground with garlic and chilli. Its sharpness is formic acid, not tamarind or citrus, which makes it one of the few Indian preparations that gets its sourness from an animal source. Nests are cut from the canopy with a pole in the hottest months, when the colonies are largest.

### A dye that takes six weeks before it takes at all
Kotpad yarn is treated repeatedly with castor oil, ash and cow dung over weeks before it will accept aal-root dye. The maroon that results deepens with washing rather than fading, and an iron modifier turns it black. The price of the cloth is essentially the price of that pre-treatment time.

### A shawl that says something
A kapdaganda is embroidered by an unmarried Dongria Kondh girl and given to a brother or a suitor. It is made freehand, without a marked pattern, and its lines are described as hills, streams and paths. Pieces sold in shops are made to order, which makes them a different object with the same stitches.

### A script made for one language
Sorang Sompeng was devised in the 1930s specifically for Sora, rather than adapting the Odia or Devanagari script to it. Very few Indian languages of comparable size have a purpose-built writing system, and its existence is why Sora appears in print at all.

### Sap with a half-life
Salap is sweet when the pot comes down at dawn, sour by mid-morning and alcoholic by evening. It cannot be transported without becoming something else, so it is sold within a few kilometres of the tree and is effectively invisible outside the region.

### The railway that climbs the ghat
The Kottavalasa–Kirandul line, built for iron ore, climbs the Eastern Ghats through dozens of tunnels and a spiral, and Shimiliguda on it was for years the highest broad-gauge station in India at just under 1,000 m. The passenger service on it is one of the cheapest ways to see the escarpment.

### Sixty-four yoginis, open to the sky
Ranipur-Jharial in the Bolangir lowland has a circular yogini temple with no roof — one of a very small number of hypaethral yogini shrines anywhere. The absence of a roof is original to the plan and not a result of ruin.

### The calendar is a person
When a village sows, harvests, marries and travels is fixed by the disari, its astrologer-diviner, reading against the season rather than against a printed almanac. Two villages an hour apart can therefore run different agricultural calendars, and often do.

### A wall painting made to be erased
A Sora idital is commissioned after a divination to give a spirit somewhere to live. Once the trouble it addresses has passed, the wall is replastered — which is why the tradition is old and almost none of its objects are.

## Cross-border corridors

### Eastern Ghats Highland Corridor
Spans: Odisha, Andhra Pradesh

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.

Divergence: 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.

### Bastar–Koraput Forest Corridor
Spans: Odisha, Chhattisgarh

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.

Divergence: 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.

### Godavari Drainage Corridor
Spans: Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana

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.

Divergence: 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.

### Kosli Lowland Corridor
Spans: Odisha

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.

Divergence: 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.

### Sabara–Jagannath Corridor
Spans: Odisha

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.

Divergence: 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.

## Sources

- [FAO — Koraput Traditional Agriculture, GIAHS designated site](https://www.fao.org/giahs/giahsaroundtheworld/designated-sites/asia-and-the-pacific/koraput-traditional-agriculture/en/)
- [Odisha Tourism — official portal](https://odishatourism.gov.in/)
- [SCSTRTI, Bhubaneswar — tribal community and language documentation](https://www.scstrti.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/)
- [M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation — Jeypore rice landrace work](https://www.mssrf.org/)
- [Sangeet Natak Akademi — folk and tribal performing arts documentation](https://sangeetnatak.gov.in/)

_Last reviewed 2026-08-30._