Journey
Chhattisgarh & Bastar
Central India's northern plateau and the forested Bastar plateau below it: an early medieval city with Buddhist, Shaiva and Vaishnava remains in one excavated landscape, two long-lived regional capitals, temples deep inside the forest, and a kingdom whose seventy-five-day festival for its own goddess is the longest in the country.
Stops (9)
- Sirpur · 6th–8th century
Sirpur on the Mahanadi, the Panduvamshi capital, with the brick Lakshmana temple, a group of Buddhist viharas and Shaiva and Vaishnava shrines in one excavated landscape. Xuanzang's account of a kingdom called Kosala with a hundred monasteries is generally taken to refer to this place. Xuanzang's account of a kingdom called Kosala with a hundred monasteries is generally taken to refer to this place.
- Ratanpur · 9th–18th century
Ratanpur, the Kalachuri capital of Dakshina Kosala, with its Mahamaya temple, a ruined fort and a set of tanks. It was the regional capital for eight hundred years and then a Maratha and a British district town, and it is where the name Chhattisgarh, the thirty-six forts, comes from. The name Chhattisgarh, the thirty-six forts, is generally traced to this kingdom's territory.
- Bhoramdeo · 11th century
Bhoramdeo, a Nagara temple in the Maikal hills carved with figure sculpture dense enough to earn it the name Khajuraho of Chhattisgarh. It was built by the Phanindra dynasty of the Nagvanshis and stands at the northern edge of the forest plateau rather than in the plains. It stands at the northern edge of the forest plateau rather than out in the plains.
- Barsur · 10th–11th century
Barsur, deep in Bastar, with the Mama-Bhanja temple, a large Ganesha pair and a battaisa temple of thirty-two pillars, all built by the Chhindaka Naga rulers. It shows that the forested Deccan edge had monumental stone building of its own and was not a periphery to be filled in later.
- Bastar · to 1948
The Bastar plateau, its own kingdom under the Chhindaka and then the Bastar rajas until accession, and now the densest concentration of Adivasi craft in India: bell metal, wrought iron, wood carving, terracotta and cotton weaving, much of it practised by particular communities for the court. A court that survived until 1948 kept its craft communities attached to it, which is why the concentration is here.
- Danteshwari Temple, Dantewada · Dantewada
The Danteshwari temple, the Bastar rajas' tutelary goddess and the deity the whole Dussehra sequence is held for. She also appears in Shakta-pitha enumerations, which is the usual pattern: a regional goddess acquires a place in a pan-Indian list without losing the local ritual history. A regional goddess acquires a place in a pan-Indian list without losing the local ritual history.
- Bastar Dussehrā · seventy-five days
The Bastar Dussehra at Jagdalpur, the longest festival in India, with Danteshwari and not Rama as its subject. Villages holding hereditary rights supply the timber, Adivasi carpenters build the rath, and one stage of the sequence is a symbolic abduction of the raja's chariot to press grievances. A Dussehra with no Ramlila in it anywhere, and with the goddess rather than Rama as its subject.
- Ḍhokrā · the eastern belt
Dhokra lost-wax casting, practised in Bastar and across Odisha, Jharkhand and Bengal, in which the wax model is built as coiled thread so the finished bronze carries the winding on its surface. It is one of the oldest continuous metal techniques in India and now sells mostly as decorative work.
- Kotumsar caves · surveyed 1951
The Kotumsar cave in the Kanger valley, nearly a kilometre and a half of limestone cut by an underground stream, with stalactite chambers and pools deep in the dark zone. Its pools hold a blind cave fish whose eyes are reduced and whose daily rhythm has been studied precisely because it lives without light. The cave floods every monsoon and is shut for months.