Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
The small things
- Two peoples, one name, two language familiesBoth 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 tractSurvey 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 riceAbove 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 insectKai 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 allKotpad 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 somethingA 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 languageSorang 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-lifeSalap 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 ghatThe 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 skyRanipur-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 personWhen 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 erasedA 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.
Small local details of Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)