Mahakoshal & Gondwana · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
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
The history of Mahakoshal & Gondwana from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (8)