Tier 2 · Cultural region · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
महाकोशल
A single cultural region that no state contains — which is the point, and the reason it is usually described as four state peripheries instead of one centre.
Gondwana is the largest cultural region in India that has never been an administrative unit. The Gond homeland runs across the Satpura and Maikal from the Narmada to the Godavari watershed, and every modern boundary cuts it: it is the far south of one state, the far north of another, the far west of a third and the far north of a fourth. Inside it sits a Dravidian language surrounded on all sides by Indo-Aryan ones, a bardic caste that kept the clan deities alive with a three-stringed fiddle, four Gond kingdoms whose forts still stand, and a household economy that runs on mahua flower, tendu leaf, sal seed and millet. In 1885 a geologist borrowed its name for the southern supercontinent. In 1981 a survey team found a Pardhan Gond bard painting mud walls in a Dindori village, and a bardic tradition turned into a school of contemporary painting inside twenty years.
Gondwana is the largest cultural region in India that has never been anybody’s administrative unit, and that is not an accident of drafting. Boundaries in the interior were drawn along rivers and across watersheds, and the Gond country sits astride every one of them. The result is that a single region with one language, one clan religion and one forest calendar is taught as the southern edge of one state, the northern edge of another, the western edge of a third and the northern edge of a fourth — four peripheries and no centre.
What the region actually has at its centre is a language that should not be here. Gondi is Dravidian, with its nearest relatives several hundred kilometres south, and it survived in the Satpura and Maikal because uplands were not worth the trouble of taking. The same isolation that preserved it now works against it: no script anyone uses, no standard across the spread, no school medium, and a census that offers Hindi instead. Around three million people returned Gondi in 2011. The Gond population is several times that.
The second thing at the centre is a job description. The Pardhan bard exists so that a Gond clan can worship its Persa Pen, because the deity is held to live in the bard’s fiddle. That made a hereditary musician structurally necessary rather than merely welcome — and when the bardic economy weakened in the twentieth century, the households that had kept it turned out to be carrying a complete visual language as well, painted on walls that were washed off every year. In 1981 a survey team from Bharat Bhavan walked into Patangarh and found Jangarh Singh Shyam. Twenty years later Pardhan Gond painting had a name of its own, a second generation and buyers on three continents. It is the only tradition in India that has made that particular crossing.
Everything else follows the forest. The sugar comes off the ground under a mahua tree in April, the cash comes off a tendu bush in May, the fat comes out of a mahua seed in July, and the vegetable is whatever is up that fortnight. The kitchen has more names for wild greens than it has for spices, and the calendar is named for what falls rather than for what the almanac says.
Tropical wet-and-dry, with a monsoon that arrives in the third week of June and drops 1,200–1,600 mm on the Maikal crest against 1,000–1,200 mm in the Narmada trough. The range is severe for a forested upland: 44–46 °C at Jabalpur in May, 4–7 °C on a December night at Amarkantak and Pachmarhi. Altitude does the work that latitude does elsewhere — the plateau is habitable in summer, the trough is not.
Landforms
Rivers and waters
Through the year
| Season | Months | Typical | What it is like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winter | November–February | 5–27 °C | Park season, madai fair season and the marriage months. Mahua trees drop their leaves and begin to bud in late February, which is what the whole household calendar is waiting for. |
| Mahua and tendu summer | March–June | 25–46 °C | Mahua corollas fall at night through March and April and are swept up before sunrise; tendu leaf is plucked through May. These are the two weeks of the year that carry a forest household's cash and its stored sugar. |
| Monsoon | Late June–September | 22–33 °C | Kodo and kutki go in, Karma is danced, and rugda and boda mushrooms come up under the sal within days of the first heavy rain. Kanha and Pench close their core zones from 1 July to 15 October. |
| Post-monsoon | October | 18–31 °C | Dashera, the start of the madai circuit, and the clearest air of the year on the Maikal. |
Best time to visitNovember to March for the forests, the gorge and the fort sites. Late February to early April if the point is to see the mahua economy working. Amarkantak is best in October and November, when the plateau is green and the source pools are full.
A region that has never been an administrative unit cannot take its periodisation from a state, and this one does not. Its ancient period belongs to the Narmada trough and to Tripuri, at Tewar near Jabalpur, where the Kalachuris ruled for five centuries and left the inscriptions and temples that are the region's only continuous written record. Its medieval period is the Gond one, attributed by tradition to the fourteenth century and firmly documented from Sangram Shah in the early sixteenth, running to 1781. And its modern period begins with the Maratha conquests — Deogarh and Chanda by 1751, Garha in 1781 — not with the British, who arrived in 1818 to administer a country already twice reorganised. The most important thing to say about all three is that the four Gond kingdoms held the valleys and the fort sites and very little else. Authority in the uplands between them was distributed and held in offices rather than houses — the village headman, the clan priest who serves the clan deity, and the hereditary Pardhan bard who keeps a clan's genealogy and its deity songs. That contrast between a documented dynastic fringe and an undocumented upland interior is the region's central fact, and it is why a Dravidian language survives in the middle of an Indo-Aryan continent.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
Everything datable in this period happens in the trough. Tripuri, on the Narmada near modern Jabalpur, was a town of consequence for centuries before it became the capital of the Kalachuris, who ruled from it from the seventh century to the thirteenth and who at their height under Gangeyadeva and his son Karna claimed sovereignty over a large part of northern India. They left temples, land grants and copper plates, which is why the valley half of the region has a dated history at all. The uplands to the south and east left almost nothing of the kind. They were forest on poor sandstone and basalt, of no revenue interest to any dynasty, and were not conquered because they were not worth conquering — which is precisely why a Dravidian language and a religion of clan deities survived there, surrounded on every side by Indo-Aryan speech.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 3rd century BCE – 3rd century CE | Tripuri, at Tewar near modern Jabalpur, is an established town on the upper Narmada, on the route between the northern plains and the Deccan. |
| 675–1212 | The Kalachuris rule from Tripuri, the longest continuous dynastic record the region has. |
| 850–890 | Kokkalla I, the first powerful ruler of the line, establishes the Kalachuris as a major central Indian power. |
| 1015–1073 | Gangeyadeva takes the titles of a sovereign emperor, and his son Lakshmikarna, called Karna, takes the title chakravartin and campaigns as far as the Ganga plain. |
| 10th–11th century | The Chausath Yogini temple is built above the marble gorge at Bhedaghat, on the Kalachuri heartland's most striking piece of ground. |
| 1073–1123 | Yashahkarna loses the northern territories, including Varanasi, to the Gahadavalas, and the dynasty's decline begins. |
| by 1212 | The line ends with Trailokyamalla, and the territory is divided among the Paramaras, the Chandelas and the Delhi Sultanate. |
This is the Gond period, and it produced four kingdoms rather than one — Garha-Mandla on the upper Narmada, Deogarh on the Kanhan, Chanda-Sirpur on the Wainganga, and Kherla in the Satpura. They were never a single state and never fought as one. Garha is the best documented. Tradition puts its founding in the fourteenth century, but the record becomes firm with Sangram Shah, who is credited with holding fifty-two garhs, and with the regency of Rani Durgavati, whose defeat by a Mughal force in 1564 is the hinge of the whole period. The kingdom was restored as a tributary and lasted another two centuries, moving its capital from Garha to Singhorgarh to Chauragarh to Ramnagar as the military situation demanded. What ended Gond rule was not the Mughals but the Marathas, in two stages, and by 1781 none of the four kingdoms was left.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 14th century | Tradition attributes the founding of the Garha kingdom to a ruler remembered as Jadurai. The documentary record begins about two centuries later. |
| c. 1398 | Narsingh Rai of Kherla is said to have held the hills of Gondwana; he was overthrown and killed by Hoshang Shah of Malwa. |
| 1513–1543 | Sangram Shah rules Garha and is credited with fifty-two garhs, the widest extent the kingdom reached. |
| 1542 | Dalpat Shah of Garha marries Durgavati, daughter of the Chandela ruler Shalbahan, born at Kalinjar in 1524. |
| 24 June 1564 | Rani Durgavati, regent since 1550 for her son Bir Narayan, is defeated by Asaf Khan's Mughal force at Narrai near Jabalpur and dies on the field. |
| 1566–1668 | Garha is restored as a tributary kingdom under Chandra Shah, and the capital is later moved to Ramnagar under Hriday Shah. |
| 1686–1706 | Bakht Buland Shah rules Deogarh, and in 1702 founds Nagpur by joining twelve existing hamlets. |
| 1743–1751 | Raghoji Bhonsle brings Deogarh, Chanda and Chhattisgarh under Maratha control. |
| 1781 | The Sagar Marathas overthrow Narhar Shah, the last ruler of Garha, ending Gond rule on the upper Narmada. |
The British inherited the region from the Marathas rather than taking it from the Gonds, and what they added was not a conquest but a settlement — a land revenue system that turned cultivators into tenants of intermediaries, and a forest administration that turned sal, teak and bamboo into state property. Almost every recorded grievance in these districts from the 1860s onward runs back to one or other of those two decisions, and both fell hardest on the upland communities that had never been taxed before. The 1857 rising here was a different matter, and belonged to the displaced Gond lineage rather than to the forest. By the twentieth century the Hindi-speaking Narmada towns had become part of national politics, and Jabalpur was substantial enough that the Congress met beside it in 1939, while the forest districts to the south ran a movement of their own that Congress leaders followed rather than led.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1818 | The upper Narmada country passes to the British after the Third Anglo-Maratha War, as the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories. |
| 18 September 1857 | Shankar Shah, titular head of the Garha line and a British pensioner, and his son Raghunath Shah are executed at Jabalpur by being fired from a cannon; thirteen others are executed the following day. The 52nd Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry at Jabalpur mutinied afterwards. |
| 20 March 1858 | Rani Avantibai of Ramgarh, who had defeated a British force near Mandla, dies at Sukhi-Talaiya between Balapur and Ramgarh. |
| 1861 | The Central Provinces are formed by merging the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories with Nagpur Province, and the region is administratively divided for the first time along lines it has never recovered from. |
| 1885 | The name Gondwana is borrowed by geologists for the southern supercontinent, on the strength of the rock sequence first described in these hills. |
| 1923 | The flag satyagraha, begun at Jabalpur and centred on Nagpur, draws volunteers from across India. |
| 1930 | The jungle satyagraha in Betul and the neighbouring Satpura districts, in which Gond and Korku cultivators cut trees and grass in forest under malguzari control. |
| March 1939 | The Congress meets at Tripuri, beside Jabalpur. Subhas Chandra Bose, elected president over Pattabhi Sitaramayya, resigns shortly afterwards. |
Rulers and commanders
The ruler under whom Garha reached its widest extent, credited with holding fifty-two garhs across the Satpura and Maikal. The figure is the kingdom's own reckoning and later accounts show the number shrinking steadily after him.
Dynasty: Garha. Seat: Garha
His marriage in 1542 to Durgavati, a Chandela princess, joined the Gond kingdom to a Rajput house of the Vindhyan north; his death in 1550 left a minor heir and produced the regency the region is remembered for.
Dynasty: Garha. Seat: Garha
Governed Garha for fourteen years as regent for her son Bir Narayan and is credited in the kingdom's record with extending its cultivation and revenue. She met Asaf Khan's Mughal force at Narrai in 1564, was wounded by arrows and died on the field on 24 June, refusing to withdraw.
Dynasty: Garha. Seat: Singhorgarh, later Chauragarh
Moved the capital to Ramnagar on the Narmada above Mandla and built there. His is the last long and settled reign the kingdom had.
Dynasty: Garha. Seat: Ramnagar
Secured the Deogarh throne in 1686 after a succession dispute, with Mughal backing, and in 1702 founded Nagpur out of twelve existing hamlets. His administration founded villages across the Kanhan and Wainganga country and is the direct foundation the Bhonsle Marathas later built on.
Dynasty: Deogarh. Seat: Deogarh, later Nagpur
The last ruler of Garha. His overthrow by the Sagar Marathas in 1781 ended four and a half centuries of Gond rule on the upper Narmada, and the region has had no capital of its own since.
Dynasty: Garha. Seat: Ramnagar
Brought Deogarh, Chanda and Chhattisgarh under Maratha control between 1743 and 1751, using the city Bakht Buland Shah had founded as his own capital. Two of the four Gond kingdoms ended in these campaigns.
Dynasty: Bhonsle of Nagpur. Seat: Nagpur
Outside the four kingdoms, authority in this region was held in offices rather than houses. The Pardhan is the hereditary bard attached to a Gond clan, who keeps its genealogy and the songs of its clan deities and plays the three-stringed bana at the clan's rituals. The continuity of a clan was carried by that office rather than by any throne, which is why the region has an unbroken religious record and almost no dynastic one — and why, when a survey team met a Pardhan bard painting mud walls in a Dindori village in 1981, what they had found was an old office doing something new.
Seat: The Gond clan villages of the Satpura and Maikal
This is a low-fat, low-spice, high-forest kitchen, and it is the opposite of everything north of the Vindhya. The staple is millet rather than wheat. The fat is mahua seed oil, used sparingly, with ghee reserved for ritual. The default treatments are boiling, ember-roasting and pounding, not frying. Most of a year's calories come from three sources a field cannot supply — mahua flower as sugar, forest tuber and green as vegetable, and whatever the tanks and streams give. The seasoning is salt, chilli and pounded garlic, and the aroma is expected to come from the ingredient.
Primary cooking medium
Dominant sour agents
Spice register
Deliberately thin. Salt, dried or green chilli and raw pounded garlic do most of the work, with a little coriander and turmeric behind them. The older village kitchen has no onion-and-tomato base of the north Indian kind, no garam masala and no asafoetida. Against Malwa to the west there is a fraction of the ghee and none of the sweet-sour habit; against Bastar to the south-east there is much less wild herb; against the Wainganga side of Vidarbha there is nothing like the black-masala heat of saoji cooking, which stops at the state line more sharply than any dish should.
Staple grains and carbs
Preservation methods
Signature techniques
The mahua corolla drops overnight and has to be swept up before sunrise, because heat and ants take it within hours. Dried in the sun it turns raisin-dark and holds roughly half its weight in sugar, keeps a year, and becomes the household's sweetener, its grain-extender and its brewing base. Months later the same tree drops a seed, and the kernel is pressed for tora oil. One tree therefore yields the year's sugar in April and the year's cooking fat in July, which is why a mahua tree is inherited, partitioned and quarrelled over like land.
Also found in: Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands, Chhattisgarh Plains
Kodo or kutki boiled thin, left in its own water and drunk cold through the working day rather than reheated. It is the same logic as basi to the east: cooked grain held under water neither spoils in the heat nor needs fuel a second time, and the sour liquid does the work of a drink.
Also found in: Chhattisgarh Plains, Bastar, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands
Young shoots are sliced, salted and packed into an earthen pot for several weeks until they sour and turn pungent. The result works as a pickle and as an acid, and one pot carries a household through the months when no fresh sour fruit is available.
Also found in: Bastar, Chota Nagpur Plateau, Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills
Weaver-ant nests are cut down from sal and mango canopy, and the ants and larvae pounded raw with garlic, green chilli and salt. Nothing is cooked, because heat destroys the formic acid that is the whole point. It will not keep a day, so it is made and eaten within an hour of the nest coming down.
Also found in: Bastar, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands
Batter or coarse dough is wrapped in sal or palash leaf and buried in embers rather than cooked on a griddle. The leaf supplies steam so the bread does not dry, scents it, and removes the need for any fat at all — a technique that exists because oil is expensive and leaves are not.
Also found in: Chhattisgarh Plains, Bastar
Tubers, small fish, dried fish and wild greens are dry-roasted on embers or a hot stone and then pounded in a wooden mortar with salt and chilli into a thick chutney rather than being cooked into a gravy. It is the region's default way of turning anything into a side dish, and it uses no water, no oil and no pot.
Also found in: Chota Nagpur Plateau, Bastar
Two kitchens again, but the split is by altitude rather than by community. On the Satpura and Maikal the meal is millet, a wild green, a pounded chutney and whatever the forest is giving that fortnight. In the Narmada towns it is rice, wheat, dal and a recognisably north Indian vegetable — and a sweet tradition, in Jabalpur, that has nothing to do with the uplands at all.
Millet cooked exactly as rice is cooked, drained, and eaten with a thin dal or a green. Kodo holds its shape and eats coarse; kutki cooks in half the time and eats soft, which is why kutki goes to children and the sick.
Millet or rice gruel drunk cold from a pot carried to the field. The name covers a range from a thin drink to a thick porridge depending on how much of the day is left.
Dried mahua flowers boiled with rice or kodo until the sugar in the flowers glazes the grain. It is sweet, faintly smoky and eaten as a meal, not a dessert — the clearest example of a forest product standing in for something a field would otherwise have to grow.
Dried mahua pounded with til or chironji kernels and pressed into a ball. No added sugar and no cooking; the flower is sweet enough by itself.
Red weaver ants and their eggs pounded raw with garlic, chilli and salt into a sharp, citrus-sour paste. Eaten in the southern and eastern forest belt; the Bastar version of the same dish, over the watershed, is the one that has been formally registered.
Bamboo shoot, either fresh in a thin curry through the monsoon or salted and soured in a pot for the rest of the year. The fermented version is used a spoonful at a time, as an acid rather than a vegetable.
The plate of wild greens, each with a fortnight of season — charota with the first rains, koliyari from the bauhinia, chench, amari, munga, bohar. Boiled, drained and finished with garlic and salt. The kitchen has far more names for greens than it has for spices.
Wild mushrooms that fruit under sal within days of the first heavy rain and are dug rather than picked. They cannot be cultivated, appear for perhaps three weeks, and sell in Jabalpur and Mandla markets at prices no cultivated vegetable in the region approaches.
Starch washed out of the rhizome of Curcuma angustifolia, dug from the forest floor and settled in water over several changes. Set with jaggery it becomes a cool, translucent slab; stirred into water it is the region's summer drink.
Sun-dried urad dumplings fried and simmered — the stored protein of the wet months, and the northern and eastern edge of the region's food rather than its centre.
Maize roasted whole on embers, or ground coarse and baked into a thick roti on the Satpura slopes.
Small fish from the Narmada, the Banjar and the tanks, wrapped in leaf and put in the ashes, then pounded with salt and chilli. Larger river fish are smoke-dried on the hearth rack for the monsoon.
Whole grain or gram boiled and lightly salted, made at Pola and Nag Panchami and distributed rather than served. A ritual dish defined by being shared out, not by being cooked well.
The kernel of Buchanania lanzan, cracked one at a time from a hard stone. It goes into sweets across north India and is collected almost entirely in forests like these, which is why it costs what it does.
Jabalpur's own sweet — jalebi made from a khoya batter rather than a fermented flour one, so it comes out dense, dark and fudge-like instead of crisp. Sold by weight, warm, and not really found outside the city.
Where to try: The sweet shops around Fuhara Chowk in Jabalpur.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
There is no court dress here, because the Gond kingdoms dressed like the Rajput courts they married into and their subjects did not dress like them at all. What the region has instead is a working wardrobe of two or three unstitched cotton pieces, a very large silver vocabulary that functioned as a household's savings, and a body-marking tradition among the Baiga that is the closest thing in central India to a textile worn permanently. The region also rears the raw silk that other regions weave — the tussar cocoon comes off sal and saja here and is reeled and woven at Champa, Raigarh and Bhagalpur, which is why no famous cloth carries the name of any town in it.
What is worn
A coarse cotton sari, about six to eight cubits, wrapped short and tucked between the legs for forest and field work. Traditionally worn without a blouse; the polka blouse is a twentieth-century addition that is now universal.
Worn for: Everyday
A short dhoti wrapped high for walking in undergrowth, with a sleeveless jacket and a gamchha.
Worn for: Everyday
A white dhoti with a tightly wound turban, worn on the Betul and Melghat slopes where Korku villages sit next to Gond ones and the dress distinguishes them at a distance.
Worn for: Festival
A towering peacock-feather crown over a deerskin or blanket wrap, with body ash and bells. It is worn only by the dancers who take the Gussadi role, and putting it on carries obligations that last the length of the festival.
Worn for: Dandari, at Diwali
Undyed tussar, gold-fawn and matte. It is the feast garment of the eastern edge, made from cocoons reared here and woven elsewhere.
Worn for: Weddings
Weaves and textiles
Antheraea mylitta reared outdoors on sal, saja and arjun rather than indoors on mulberry. The region is one of India's main cocoon sources and almost none of its weaving; the value is added downstream.
Plain unbleached cotton in narrow widths on pit looms, made for local wear rather than sale, and now largely displaced by mill cloth.
Jewellery
Dance
A branch of the karma tree is cut, planted in the courtyard and danced around all night in a shoulder-linked line that gathers and releases to the mandar drum. The dance ends at dawn with the branch taken to water. It is the region's central monsoon rite and it runs east into Chhattisgarh and Chota Nagpur with different theology attached at each stop.
Performed by: Gond, Baiga and Oraon households. Occasion: Karma Ekadashi in Bhadon, and through the monsoon
Rela is the men's line dance to dhol and timki, taken at a running tempo; Rina is the women's counterpart, slower, sung in call and response. Both are named after their song form rather than their steps.
Performed by: Gond men and women. Occasion: Weddings and village fairs
A stick dance in which each dancer strikes his neighbour's stick on a fixed beat while the circle rotates, so a mistake is audible instantly. Shared with the Chhattisgarh plains and the Sarguja fringe.
Performed by: Young men. Occasion: After the harvest, Dashera to Magh
A troupe travels from village to village for several days performing narrative sequences, led by Gussadi dancers in peacock-feather crowns and body ash who are treated as embodying the deity rather than representing him. Strongest in the Adilabad uplands.
Performed by: Raj Gonds of the southern uplands. Occasion: Diwali
Danced in two facing lines with a dipping, wave-like step, to a drum and a bamboo flute. The Baiga repertoire is separate from the Gond one despite the villages often being a kilometre apart.
Performed by: Baiga men and women. Occasion: Dashera and the winter fairs
Music
A three-stringed spike fiddle with a carved horse-head or peacock finial, played by the Pardhan bards attached to Gond patron clans. The clan deity is understood to reside in the instrument, so the Pardhan is not an accompanist but part of the ritual apparatus — a clan cannot properly worship its Persa Pen without its bard, and the bard is paid in grain by the households whose history he keeps.
The Gond origin epic, sung over several nights: Pahandi Pari Kupar Lingo brings the gods out of the cave and founds the clan order that still governs who may marry whom. It is the charter document of Gond society and it exists only as sung performance.
Short cyclical songs built for hours of repetition, led by one voice and answered by the line, with the mandar, timki and tudbudi carrying an accelerating pulse.
The Bundeli and Bagheli repertoire reaches into the Narmada belt at Holi and through the monsoon, and the Jabalpur countryside sings both without treating them as foreign.
Theatre
The Gussadi troupes perform episodes of Gond myth in the round with masks and mime over several nights of Diwali, moving between villages rather than drawing an audience to one place.
The Chhattisgarhi night theatre with its gammat comic interludes crosses the Maikal into Balaghat and Dindori, played in the open with the audience on all four sides and a single lamp in the middle.
Crafts
A forty-year-old school of contemporary painting descended directly from a bardic caste. It has a founder, a named style, three generations of practitioners and an international market, and no geographical indication.
Material: Poster and acrylic colour on paper and canvas. Technique: A flat outlined form filled edge to edge with one repeated mark — dot, dash, comma, fish-scale, seed. Each artist owns a signature fill, and other painters do not use it, which functions as a signature more reliably than the name in the corner.
The wall and floor painting done by Gond and Baiga women. Every visual habit of the studio painting that made the region famous — the outline, the repeated fill, the flattened animal — is here first, on a surface designed to be washed off.
Material: White clay, geru, cow dung and rice paste on mud wall and floor. Technique: Painted freehand with fingers and a rag at festivals and before weddings, and renewed each year because the surface it is painted on is renewed each year.
A body-marking system with its own named patterns, now rapidly declining, and increasingly reproduced as a drawing idiom on paper and cloth rather than on people.
Material: Soot and pigment under the skin. Technique: Applied by itinerant Badni tattooists with a needle bundle, in a fixed sequence keyed to age — forehead in girlhood, then chest, arms, legs, and the great back pattern after marriage.
The smelting tradition of the Agaria, documented by Verrier Elwin in 1942 and now surviving mainly as blacksmithing rather than smelting. The famous central Indian wrought-iron craft with a geographical indication is Bastar's, over the watershed, and is a different tradition.
Material: Local iron ore and charcoal. Technique: Small clay furnaces worked with hand or foot bellows, producing a bloom that is then forged into tools and ritual objects at the anvil.
Grain bins, winnowing fans, fish traps and the flat tokni. The region grows more bamboo than almost anywhere in India and consumes most of it as containers rather than as construction.
Material: Bamboo from the region's own forests. Technique: Split, shaved and coiled or twilled by Basod and Burud households.
A craft that exists because the raw material is lying at the foot of the cliff. Worked at the stalls above the Dhuandhar fall and almost nowhere else.
Material: Dolomitic limestone from the gorge, sold locally as marble. Technique: Hand-cut and filed figures, bowls and lamps, then polished with abrasive stone.
Made to be left at a clan shrine and then left to weather. The figures are not sold as art in the village and are not repaired; the shrine accumulates decades of them.
Material: River clay, fired in an open pit. Technique: Coil-built horses, elephants and riders, unglazed and unpainted.
The karma tree, the rains, and the young men and women dancing around it. Sung in short cycles that repeat for hours, because the song is a metronome for a dance that lasts until dawn.
Sung at: Karma Ekadashi and the monsoon nights.
Courtship, teasing and village incident, improvised over a fixed refrain that the line sings back after every couplet.
Sung at: Weddings and fairs.
The freeing of the Gond gods from the cave and the founding of the saga divisions. Performed by Pardhan bards to the bana; it is a legal text as much as a poem, since it fixes who may marry whom.
Sung at: Clan rites, over several nights.
Harvest, cattle and the return of the young men from wage work, sung to the beat of struck sticks.
Sung at: Post-harvest, Dashera to Magh.
Krishna, colour and open erotic teasing, sung by men in chorus to the nagariya drum in the Narmada belt villages.
Sung at: Phagun, up to Holi.
A two-line improvised couplet thrown between men and women at work or at a fair. It crosses the Maikal into Balaghat and Dindori and is the shortest song form in the region.
Sung at: Any working gathering.
Sung at the collection itself, before dawn under the trees. The songs are about the tree, the sweeping and the sharing of what falls, and they exist because the work is done in the dark and in company.
Sung at: The March and April collection.
The single most important fact about this region is that Gondi is a Dravidian language and everything around it is not. Gondi belongs to the South-Central branch of Dravidian; its nearest relatives are Telugu, Koya, Kui and Konda, all of them spoken to the south. To the north it faces Bundeli and Bagheli, to the east Chhattisgarhi, to the south-west Marathi — all Indo-Aryan. It is there because Indo-Aryan expansion moved up river plains and the Dravidian northern outliers survived where plains agriculture did not go: Gondi in the Satpura and Maikal, Kurukh in the Chota Nagpur hills, Malto on the Rajmahal, Brahui far to the north-west. The uplands were not worth taking, and that is the whole explanation. The language is now under pressure from a different direction. It has no traditional script, no single standard across a 700-kilometre spread, and no school medium, and the census offers its speakers Hindi and Marathi as the return — roughly 2.98 million returned Gondi in 2011, against a Gond population several times that number. Two scripts exist, both unusual: Masaram Gondi, devised in 1918 by Munshi Mangal Singh Masaram, and Gunjala Gondi, found on palm-leaf manuscripts at Gunjala in the Adilabad uplands in 2006 and studied from 2014. Both were added to Unicode in 2017 and 2018.
Speech varieties
Betul, Chhindwara, Seoni, Balaghat and Mandla. Heavily loaded with Hindi vocabulary, largely unwritten, and no longer mutually intelligible with the southern varieties across the full span.
Speakers: Part of the roughly 2.98 million who returned Gondi in the 2011 Census
The southern variety, in long contact with Telugu and Marathi, and the one with a manuscript tradition in the Gunjala script and the Dandari–Gussadi repertoire attached to it.
Betul, Chhindwara, the Khandwa fringe and the Melghat slope. It is the region's second non-Indo-Aryan language and belongs to a third family entirely — its relatives are Mundari and Santali, hundreds of kilometres east, with nothing of the kind in between.
Speakers: Around 7 lakh returned in the 2011 Census
The market, school and court language of Jabalpur, Mandla, Katni and Narsinghpur, transitional between the two and usually returned simply as Hindi.
Spoken by Powar cultivators of Balaghat, Seoni and the Bhandara side. Its vocabulary points west, towards Rajasthani and Gujarati, and it has been surrounded by Hindi, Marathi and Gondi for centuries without merging into any of them — a small island inside a larger one.
The Baiga are a distinct people with their own ritual repertoire, but their speech is an Indo-Aryan variety close to Chhattisgarhi and Bagheli. Community and language do not line up here, and assuming they do is the commonest mistake made about the region.
The Wainganga side, from Gondia and Gadchiroli southwards, shading into the Vidarbha dialect belt.
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Koitur कोइतुर | The Gonds' own name for themselves, meaning roughly "the people". "Gond" is an outsiders' word, most likely from a Dravidian root for hill, and it entered the record through neighbours rather than through the community. |
| Persa Pen पेरसा पेन | The great clan deity. Each Gond clan has one, kept in a shrine hut, brought out at fixed points in the year, and inseparable from the Pardhan bard whose instrument the deity is held to occupy. |
| Saga सगा | The phratry. Gond clans are grouped into divisions conventionally counted as four, five, six and seven gods, and marriage is permitted only across divisions. It is an exogamy system carried entirely in sung genealogy. |
| Bana बाना | The Pardhan bard's three-stringed fiddle, and the seat of the clan deity while it is played. |
| Bhumka भुमका | The village priest who deals with the local deities and, in most villages, also the herbalist. The office is hereditary in a household rather than in a caste. |
| Bewar बेवर | The Baiga form of shifting cultivation — ash-fertilised, sown broadcast into a hoed slope, never ploughed. The refusal of the plough is doctrinal, not technical. |
| Digna डिगना | The geometric floor and threshold pattern drawn by women, from which the studio painting took its fill. |
| Godna गोदना | Tattoo, and by extension the whole system of patterns applied in sequence through a woman's life. |
| Tora or dori टोरा | The mahua seed, and the oil pressed from it — the everyday cooking fat of the uplands. |
| Pej पेज | Millet or rice gruel kept in its own water and drunk cold. |
| Chapda चापड़ा | The red weaver ant, its nest, and the raw chutney made from both. |
| Nistar निस्तार | The customary entitlement of a village to take firewood, bamboo, grazing and minor forest produce for its own household use. The word is central to how a forest village describes its own year. |
| Madai मड़ई | The winter fair circuit. Each village holds one in turn between Dashera and Magh, and the deities of neighbouring villages are carried to visit — a calendar of reciprocal hospitality, not a market day. |
Sayings
| Saying | Literally | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| How many gods do you have? | How many gods do you have? | The standard opening question between two Gonds who do not know each other. The answer — four, five, six or seven — names the saga, and settles immediately whether the two families may intermarry. Genealogy is asked for before a name is. |
| The plough tears the breast of the earth | — | The Baiga explanation, recorded by Verrier Elwin in the 1930s, for why they cultivated by axe, fire and hoe rather than by plough. It is a stated principle rather than a technical preference, and it shaped where and how Baiga villages could exist. |
| Mahua ka mahina | The mahua month | March and April, named locally for what falls rather than for the almanac. The forest calendar overrides the printed one in ordinary speech across the uplands. |
A three-kilometre gorge where the Narmada has cut through a band of dolomitic limestone, leaving cliffs about thirty metres high that go from white to pale green to grey along their length. The Dhuandhar fall at the head of the gorge throws enough spray to be named for smoke. Boats run the gorge outside the monsoon, and on full-moon nights in winter they run after dark.
Best time: November–March, and full-moon nights.
A circular open-air shrine of the tenth century on the cliff above the gorge, its perimeter lined with stone yogini figures in individual niches, each named in an inscription. It is one of only a handful of substantially surviving yogini temples in India, and the roofless circular plan is the form itself, not a ruin.
A small Gond fort built onto a granite tor above the city, with rock-cut cisterns and a stable cut into the boulder. It belongs to the Garha line and is the most accessible piece of Gond royal building left.
The Maikal summit plateau at about 1,050 metres, where the Narmada and the Son rise within a few kilometres of each other and then run in opposite directions to two different oceans. The Narmada source tank sits inside a walled temple complex of Kalachuri date; Kapildhara falls and the Son source are a short walk apart from it.
Best time: October–February.
Sal forest broken by maidans — open grassy meadows that are the sites of villages moved out decades ago, and now the reason the park's grazing animals are so visible. Kanha holds the only surviving population of the hard-ground barasingha, which fell to a few dozen animals around 1970.
Best time: November–March; core zones closed 1 July to 15 October.
One teak forest along the Pench river, administered as two separate tiger reserves because a state line runs through it. The animals do not observe it; the paperwork does. It is the clearest illustration in the region of what this cultural boundary costs.
Best time: February–May for sightings.
A horseshoe valley roughly 1,200 to 1,700 feet below its own rim, holding a dozen or so Bharia and Gond villages that were reached only on foot until roads and power arrived in the 1990s. The valley floor keeps its own microclimate and its own herbal pharmacopoeia, and the bhumkas of Patalkot are consulted from well outside it.
Getting there: By road from Tamia, then on foot down the rim path.
The region's only hill station and the core of the Satpura Biosphere Reserve — a sandstone plateau of ravines, waterfalls and painted rock shelters, with the Mahadeo cave and Chauragarh summit above it. In Sawan several lakh pilgrims walk the Nagdwari route through the gorges.
Best time: October–June; the Nagdwari mela is in Sawan.
A three-storey Gond palace on the Narmada built by Raja Hridayshah in the seventeenth century, now substantially ruined and largely unvisited. Together with the Mandla fort a few kilometres away it is what survives of the Garha-Mandla state's later phase.
A Pardhan Gond village whose houses carry painted digna and bhitti work, and the home village of Jangarh Singh Shyam and of a large share of the named artists who followed him. There is no museum; the interest is the walls and the families.
Painted sandstone shelters on a hill above the Narmada with a long Mesolithic sequence beneath them. They are the in-region equivalent of the far better known Bhimbetka shelters, which lie north-west near Bhopal and belong to the Malwa side of the Vindhya rather than to this region.
Fifty-two white Jain temples climbing a wooded gorge on the Satpura crest, with a seasonal waterfall at the head of the steps. A Digambara site of long standing, reached from either side of the range.
A large natural cave in the Dhanegaon hills that Gond tradition identifies as the place where Lingo released the gods. The Magh Purnima gathering here draws Gonds from across the whole span of the region and is the single largest occasion at which it assembles as one.
Best time: Magh Purnima, February.
The shrine of Nagoba, the serpent deity of the Mesram clan, and the site of the Nagoba Jatara at the new moon of Pushya. The Bheting ceremony held there formally admits women married into the clan during the preceding year, which makes the festival a clan register as much as a rite.
Best time: Pushya Amavasya, January.
The mound of the Kalachuri capital west of Jabalpur, excavated in patches and mostly under fields and village. The Kalachuris of Tripuri are why this stretch of the Narmada has tenth- and eleventh-century stone temples at all.
| Festival | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Karma | Bhadrapada Ekadashi, August–September | The karma branch is cut, planted in the courtyard, worshipped and danced around through the night, then immersed at dawn. Observed by Gond, Baiga and Oraon households and by many caste-Hindu ones alongside them. |
| Nagoba Jatara | Pushya Amavasya, January | The Mesram clan's great gathering at Keslapur, preceded by a long walk to fetch water from the Godavari for the rite. New brides are presented and admitted to the clan in the Bheting ceremony; until then they may not take part in clan worship. |
| Kachargarh Jatra | Magh Purnima, February | Several days at the Kachargarh cave in the Dhanegaon hills, tied to the Lingo narrative. It is the one occasion on which the region's four-state spread is visible in one place. |
| Nagdwari mela, Pachmarhi | Sawan, July–August | A monsoon pilgrimage on foot through the Satpura gorges to a series of cave shrines, open only for about ten days a year. Several lakh people walk it in heavy rain, which is the point of it. |
| Hareli and Pola | Sawan Amavasya and Bhadrapada Amavasya | The two agricultural amavasyas — implements washed and worshipped at Hareli, working bullocks rested, painted and paraded at Pola. Strongest on the eastern and southern margins. |
| Dandari and Gussadi | Diwali, October–November | Several days of village-to-village performance by Raj Gond troupes in the southern uplands, with the Gussadi dancers in peacock crowns treated as carrying the deity for the duration. |
| Narmada Jayanti | Magh Shukla Saptami, January–February | The river's birthday, marked with lamps floated at Amarkantak, Mandla and the Jabalpur ghats, and with the start of many parikrama walks. |
| Madai circuit | Dashera to Magh, October–February | Village fairs held in rotation, with the deities of neighbouring villages carried in to visit. Traders, a wheel, and a wrestling ring arrive with them; the sequence matters more than any single fair. |
| Balidan Diwas | 24 June | The anniversary of Rani Durgavati's death in battle in 1564, observed at Jabalpur and Mandla with processions and readings. |
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rani Durgavati | 1524–1564 | Ruler | A Chandel princess of Mahoba who married Dalpat Shah of Garha-Katanga and, after his death, governed the Gond kingdom as regent for her son. She was killed in June 1564 fighting a Mughal force under Asaf Khan near Jabalpur. The Jabalpur museum, the university and the local June observance all carry her name. |
| Bakht Buland Shah | Ruled around 1700–1709 | Ruler | The Gond raja of Deogarh who shifted his seat down to the plains and is credited with the founding of Nagpur. A city now read as entirely Marathi began as the administrative move of a Gond king. |
| Jangarh Singh Shyam | 1962–2001 | Painter | A Pardhan Gond from Patangarh, found by a Bharat Bhavan survey team in 1981 painting on village walls and brought to Bhopal. Within a decade he had converted a bardic visual vocabulary into a studio practice on paper and canvas, trained the next generation and named it by his own hand. He died in Japan in 2001. The style is called Jangarh Kalam after him — the rare case of an Indian folk school named for a single living founder. |
| J. Swaminathan | 1928–1994 | Painter and curator | Founding director of the Roopankar museum at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, from 1982. He sent survey teams into the districts rather than waiting for artists to arrive, hung Adivasi painting on the same walls as urban modernism, and refused the folk-versus-fine distinction that would have kept Jangarh in a craft emporium. |
| Bhajju Shyam | Born 1971 | Painter | Jangarh's nephew and student; his London Jungle Book (2004) redrew a European city in the Pardhan Gond idiom, using its animal vocabulary as a way of describing an unfamiliar place. Awarded the Padma Shri in 2018. |
| Durgabai Vyam | Born 1974 | Painter and illustrator | Working with Subhash Vyam, she illustrated Bhimayana (2011), a graphic biography, entirely in the Pardhan Gond visual language — proving the style could carry sequential narrative and not only single images. |
| Venkat Raman Singh Shyam | Born 1970 | Painter | Another of the Patangarh line; his illustrated memoir Finding My Way sets out how a Pardhan bardic household became a studio, in the words of someone who made the transition. |
| Verrier Elwin | 1902–1964 | Anthropologist | Settled in the Mandla district in the 1930s and wrote The Baiga (1939) and The Agaria (1942), still the fullest descriptions of bewar cultivation and of central Indian iron smelting. Much of what is knowable about the region's practice in that period exists because he wrote it down. |
| Kanaka Raju | — | Dancer | The best-known exponent and teacher of the Gussadi dance of the Adilabad Raj Gonds, who trained successive village troupes and kept the Dandari cycle in performance. Awarded the Padma Shri in 2021. |
| Bhavani Prasad Mishra | 1913–1985 | Poet | Born in the Narmadapuram district; his Satpura ke Ghane Jangal is the poem through which most Hindi readers first picture this landscape, and it is about the forest's silence rather than its scenery. |
| Harishankar Parsai | 1924–1995 | Writer | Born near Hoshangabad and resident in Jabalpur for most of his life; the writer who made satire a serious prose form in Hindi and did it entirely from a small city in this region. |
| Subhadra Kumari Chauhan | 1904–1948 | Poet | Settled in Jabalpur, where she wrote and where she died. Her ballad on the Rani of Jhansi is among the most widely memorised poems in Hindi. |
Resistance here has three strands and only the last of them is Congress politics. The first is dynastic. The Gond ruling houses had been displaced twice, by a Mughal army in 1564 and by the Marathas in 1781, and what happened at Jabalpur in 1857 was the final act of that displacement rather than the opening of a national one. The second is the forest. From the 1860s the sal, teak and bamboo on which upland households actually lived became state property, and almost every grievance recorded in these districts for the next seventy years runs back to that — which is why the region's largest twentieth-century movement was a forest movement, fought by Gond and Korku cultivators who sometimes had Congress leaders with them and often acted against their instructions. The third strand arrived last and stayed in the Hindi-speaking towns of the Narmada belt, where Jabalpur ran a flag satyagraha in 1923 and the Congress held its 1939 session beside the city.
Risings and revolts
Shankar Shah, the titular head of the Garha line and a pensioner of the British, and his son Raghunath Shah were charged with plotting a rising at Jabalpur and with composing verses said to incite one. They were executed on 18 September 1857 by being fired from a cannon, and thirteen of their followers were executed the next day. The 52nd Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, stationed at Jabalpur, mutinied afterwards.
Outcome: The rising in the Narmada districts was suppressed during 1857 and 1858.
Rani Avantibai of Ramgarh, in what is now Dindori, raised a force of about four thousand and sent bangles with her letters to neighbouring chiefs and landholders as a challenge to join. She defeated the deputy commissioner Waddington at Khairi near Mandla and afterwards fought in the Devharigarh hills.
Outcome: She died at Sukhi-Talaiya between Balapur and Ramgarh on 20 March 1858.
Baburao Shedmake, a Gond zamindar of Chanda on the Wainganga, raised about five hundred men in September 1857 and took the Rajgarh territory in March 1858, other zamindars joining him. His force fought at Nandgaon Ghosari on 13 March, Sagnapur on 19 April, Bamanpeth on 27 April and Ghot on 10 May 1858.
Outcome: He was taken on 18 September 1858 after being informed on, and hanged at Chanda jail on 21 October 1858.
In Betul and the neighbouring Satpura districts, Gond and Korku cultivators went into forest held under malguzari control and cut trees and grass in defiance of the forest rules, led by Ganjan Singh Korku and Banjari Singh Korku. Congress leaders were sometimes present and were often acting against rather than with the movement's own direction.
Outcome: Suppressed, but it is the largest mass action the region produced and the one that named the grievance the whole modern period turns on.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shankar ShahJabalpur | died 1857 | 1857 | Titular head of the Garha Gond line and a British pensioner, held by local zamindars and cultivators to be the region's rightful ruler. He was charged with plotting a rising and with verses said to incite one.Executed at Jabalpur on 18 September 1857, fired from a cannon. |
| Raghunath ShahJabalpur | died 1857 | 1857 | Son of Shankar Shah and charged with him.Executed with his father at Jabalpur on 18 September 1857. |
| Rani Avantibai LodhiRamgarh, in what is now Dindori | 1831–1858 | 1857 | Ruled Ramgarh as regent for her minor sons, raised a force of about four thousand in 1857, and defeated a British force under the deputy commissioner Waddington at Khairi near Mandla before taking to the Devharigarh hills.Died at Sukhi-Talaiya on 20 March 1858, aged twenty-six. |
| Baburao ShedmakeChanda, on the Wainganga | 1833–1858 | 1857 | Gond zamindar who raised the force he called the Jangom Dal in September 1857 and fought four recorded engagements across the Chanda country in the spring of 1858.Taken on 18 September 1858 and hanged at Chanda jail on 21 October 1858. |
| Ganjan Singh KorkuBetul district | — | Jungle satyagraha, 1930 | One of the two Korku leaders of the 1930 forest movement in the Satpura districts, in which Gond and Korku cultivators cut timber and grass in forest they had been excluded from. |
| Banjari Singh KorkuBetul district | — | Jungle satyagraha, 1930 | Led the 1930 forest movement in Betul alongside Ganjan Singh Korku. |
| Makhanlal ChaturvediMakhan Nagar, in the Narmada belt | 1889–1968 | Congress and nationalist journalism | Hindi poet and editor of the nationalist weeklies Prabha, Pratap and Karmavir, which gave the Narmada towns a nationalist press of their own rather than one imported from Nagpur or Allahabad.Repeatedly imprisoned under British rule. |
Gond painting, bamboo, bell metal and MP handloom under one roof
The state emporium chain. Useful as a reference point for price and quality before buying anywhere else, though much of its stock comes from outside this region.
Mahua products, forest honey, chironji, amla and tikhur
The state's forest-produce brand; the plainest way to buy mahua and chironji without a middleman chain.
Pardhan Gond painting, Baiga godna-derived work, bamboo and metal
Buys from artisan groups directly. Prices are higher than a village purchase and lower than a gallery, which is roughly where the honest number sits.
Carved dolomitic limestone figures, bowls and lamps
A cluster rather than a shop, working stone from the gorge below them.
Khoya jalebi, sold warm by weight
Several old shops in the same few lanes; the jalebi is dense and fudge-like rather than crisp.
By air
By rail
By road
By water
Getting around
Buses and shared jeeps connect the district towns; park gates and Gond villages usually need a hired vehicle and often a last stretch on foot. Distances are deceptive because the roads follow the ranges — Jabalpur to Kanha is about 160 km and takes four hours, Jabalpur to Amarkantak about 230 km and takes five. Forest routes are best done in daylight.
Traditions that continue past an administrative line. Written once at the corridor level and referenced from every region it crosses, never duplicated.
Gondi itself, the Persa Pen clan-deity system, the saga phratry divisions that govern marriage, and the Pardhan bard's obligation to the clan whose genealogy he sings.
How it diverges: The northern varieties are heavily Hindi-influenced, essentially unwritten and losing ground fastest; the Adilabad variety sits in Telugu contact and carries the Gunjala manuscript tradition; Bastar's Muria and Dorla speech is the most conservative. Across the full 700-kilometre span the varieties are no longer mutually intelligible, which is why no single standard has ever taken.
Garha-Mandla, Deogarh, Kherla and Chanda — four Gond states with a shared building idiom of hill forts, stepped tanks and a Persa Pen shrine kept alongside an increasingly Rajputised court.
How it diverges: Chanda and Deogarh were absorbed into the Maratha state and their memory is now carried in Marathi; Garha-Mandla's is carried in Hindi and runs through Jabalpur. The same dynasty history is taught in two languages as two different regional pasts.
Mahua flower and seed, tendu leaf, sal seed, chironji kernel and lac, and an identical annual collection calendar keyed to the same three species across the whole forest belt.
How it diverges: The culinary use shifts along the way: here mahua is primarily a stored sweetener and grain-extender, while further south and east it is used more heavily as a drink. Sal seed is rendered for fat here and largely sold on elsewhere.
The karma branch cut, planted in a courtyard and danced around through a monsoon night, with the same drum pattern and the same dawn immersion.
How it diverges: In Chota Nagpur it is Karam parab, tied to the sarna grove and to a brother-sister vow with a fast attached. Here it is a village night dance with no grove and no vow, and Baiga and Gond households keep separate song repertoires for it.
The circumambulation of the Narmada on foot — down one bank from the source to the sea and back up the other — supported by village dharamshalas and feeding stations along both banks. This region holds the source at Amarkantak and the gorge at Bhedaghat, the two fixed points of the walk.
How it diverges: The upper river is a forest walk through Gond and Baiga country where the parikrama is fed by villages with no temple economy at all; the lower river is a plains and estuary walk with organised ashrams. The discipline is the same throughout — the river is not crossed except at the source and the sea.
Jangarh Kalam — the outlined form with a signature repeated fill — carried from Patangarh to Bhopal and then to Delhi galleries and to exhibitions abroad.
How it diverges: The source village still supplies painters and subject matter, but the market, the materials and the critical vocabulary are urban. Second- and third-generation artists now largely work from Bhopal, and the work made in the village and the work made in the city have begun to look different.
Last reviewed 2026-08-30