Scant evidence suggests that during the early medieval period clans of the Nag lineage (Nagvansh, claiming descent from serpent gods) ruled over the area known as Chattisgarh. On the northern banks of the Narmada, just west of modern Jabalpur, the Kalchuri dynasty ruled from the already ancient city of Tripuri (now a village called Tewar). Farther north, the turn of the first millennium of the Common Era saw the rise of the Chandelas, builders of the Khajuraho Temples. From Tripuri, a new branch of the Kalchuri is thought to have migrated south, possibly intermingling with existing local Nagvansh rulers to establish a capital at Tuman, then Ratanpur just north of modern Bilaspur. This so-called Haihaiya lineage established a dynasty that dominated the Chattisgarh plain until the coming of the Marathas in the first half of the eighteenth century CE. The last Raja of Ratanpur, Ragunath Singh, who had fought in vain the Maratha onslaught, expired in 1781.

The name 'Chattisgarh' is itself a source of controversy. Conventional wisdom translates it as the "36 Forts" of the Haihaiya dynasty, split in about 1420 into two branches of 18 forts each, one based at Ratanpur, the other at Raipur, founded by the ruler's brother Rai Brahma Deo.

Energetic researchers have pieced together possible locations for the 36 Forts, but their efforts might be equally rewarded with 84 or 108 possible sites. Another more recent tradition evolves from the Satnami ("True Name") sect of North Indian Hindu reform which flourished in Chattisgarh under Guru Ghasidas (1756-1850). This hypothesis proposes 36 Dalit 'Families' (from a different Hindi spelling of 'garh') who originally migrated from Bihar. Given the strong presence of the Satnami sect in Chattisgarh to this day, together with dalit followers of the 15th century reformer Kabir, the 'Family' hypothesis still attracts many adherents. Yet another theory holds the name to be a corruption of 'Chedi', a major early medieval empire of eastern India centred in Orissa.

Haphazard Maratha rule, based in far-off Nagpur, gave way in 1818 to advancing British authority which in turn provoked Chattisgarh's first and most renowned martyr. In 1795 a son was born to a small zamindar of Sonakhan village, Ram Rai, who by 1819 was himself already resisting British attempts at 'pacification'.

Having set out to eliminate the 'Pindaris', marauding ex-mercenaries who had made Central India a volatile and unsafe region in the chaotic years of Maratha rule, the British began to impose new taxation and administrative measures that nationalists like Ram Rai found intolerable. His son. Veer (or Vir) Narayan Singh grew up to challenge the injustices of British rule, culminating in 1857, at the time of the Great Sepoy Uprising, with resistance to food distribution inequities that led to his arrest and execution tied to the mouth of a cannon which was then fired. A number of fellow 'mutineers' were later hanged.

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Crest of the Gond Kings (Image courtesy of Palace Kawardha)

The most famous martyr in the brief known history of Gondwana was not a Gond at all. Rani Durgavati was the Chandela Rajput widow of the Gond Raja of Garha-Mandla when in 1564 she perished after valiantly failing to prevent the advance of Akbar's armies into Central India.

The Garha-Mandla line ruled for another two centuries before being annexed by the Maratha Pandits of Saugor in 1780 and finally 'awarded' to the Nagpur Bhonsles in 1791. The last ruler of the line met his end in the resistance of 1857, 'blown from the mouth' of a British cannon beside his son and heir at Jabalpur.

The collection of fiefdoms and small kingdoms that constituted historical Gondwana was a mixture of lineages both tribal Gond and Rajput. Titles like 'Thakur' were more common than 'Raja' and with the spread of Mughal administration, 'Zamindars' (landowners and substantial farmers) were increasingly granted local rights to rule.

Apart from Garha-Mandla covering the area around Jabalpur and south of the Narmada to Mandla itself, two other historic Gond centres are notable: Deogarh, whose Gond Raja Bakht Buland founded Nagpur at the dawn of the 18th century, and, farther south in Maharashtra towards the borders of Bastar, Chandrapur (Chanda).

From here the Kawardha Raj Gond dynasty traces its antecedents via the Pandaria Raj to the west of Bilaspur in Chattisgarh.

The origins of these Gond rulers and lineages may lie much further back in history than records indicate. Apart from limited local inscriptions, any semblance of objective history only dates from the first Muslim chroniclers of the 14th-15th centuries.

Always protected to a degree by their wild and impenetrable hills and forests, the Gonds nevertheless were touched by the waves of imperial movement that swept up and down peninsular India for many centuries.

 Their Dravidian language itself indicates a southern connection and their tribal religious practices, with strong vestiges of serpent worship and pre-Vedic animism, suggest links to a more ancient and unrecorded past.

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The Market Temple at Barsur, a former capital under Nagvanshi dynasty rule. The temple was probably built in the 11th century CE, following invasion by the southern Chola empire. Open for worship only on market days, the temple is sacred to Shiv for Hindus and considered by local people to be a temple of Sri Danteshwari Mai, state goddess of the later Kakatiya rulers. Photo: courtesy Franco-Indian Research Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai

The Royal Palace at Jagdalpur, last capital of Kakatiya Bastar, where the last ruling Maharaja, Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo, was shot in 1966.

The large former princely state of Bastar offers an instructive example of the combining of elements of Rajput, orthodox ‘high’ Hindu and tribal Gond tradition. Modern scholarship claims a date of 1323 for Annam Deo, founder of the Bastar dynasty, to have fled Warangal in Telengana (Andhra) following the collapse of Kakatiya rule after the invasion of the Tughlaq Delhi sultanate. Oral tradition had suggested that the advent of the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan had precipitated his flight a hundred years later, in about 1425, and there is evidence that small Rajput kingdoms did survive the first Muslim invasions of the south.

Annam Deo is said to have taken the family goddess Sri Danteshwari Mai with him into Bastar, creating a temple for her at Dantewara. As personal goddess of the ruling family, this aspect of ferocious Kali/Durga has long taken centre stage in the affairs of Bastar, which in previous centuries had been ruled by scions of the Nagvansh line.

The new Bastar rajas, with a fully fledged Rajput heritage of the Chandra (Moon) line, ruled a forest population of different religious traditions, who, while generally acknowledging the raja as ruler, did not, and do not worship the 'state' goddess.

To embellish their spiritual status, the Bastar family over the centuries introduced many other purely Hindu and Brahmanical elements, especially from neighbouring Orissa.

The major festival of the Bastar calendar, Dashehra, owes nothing to the northern tradition associated with events of the Ramayan. Here, with giant chariots borrowed from the Jagannath tradition of Puri, and devotion that had more in common with the Durga Puja of Bengal, the festival became a reaffirmation of the ruler's position and the temporal fidelity of his subjects.

The last ruler in direct descent from the Kakatiya line, Prafulla Kumari Devi, passed away in 1936. She had married into the Bhanj Deo house of Mayurbhanj in Orissa and her son and heir, Pravir Chandra, last ruling Maharaja of Bastar, perished in a police firing in the Jagdalpur Palace in 1966, championing to the end the rights of Bastar's tribal peoples to their lands and forests.

THE DETAILED HISTORY of the Princely States of Secret India is yet to be written. Great external power surges, Hindu kingdoms from the south, Muslim empires spreading from the north, the brief Maratha ascendancy from the west and the British expansion from Bengal in the east, all wrought their changes on the landscape. Tributes were paid (or not, in the case of Kanker, north of Bastar, which managed to avoid this ignominy throughout the Maratha period) and titles were distributed, erased or upgraded by these outside authorities. (Kawardha, in early British years, benefited from an increase in royal status at the expense of its original elder branch at Pandaria.) For the most part, the region was too inaccessible, too difficult to deal with, to feel the fullest effects of imperial ambition.

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