Journey

Forests, Adivasi worlds & craft

Stops (16)

1. Toda Munds, Nilgiris · the Nilgiri munds

   The barrel-vaulted thatched houses of the Toda pastoralists, set in stone-walled hamlets called munds above the Nilgiri grasslands with their dairy temples beside them. Toda buffalo pastoralism and the shola-grassland mosaic it maintains are now recognised as a conservation system rather than an obstacle to one. Toda dairy temples are built in the same barrel-vaulted form as the houses, at a larger scale.

2. Baiga sacred grove, Dindori · Baiga devgudi

   The community sacred forests of the Baiga in Dindori, where the grove is the shrine and there is no building. Baiga bewar shifting cultivation was banned in the nineteenth century on forestry grounds, and the groves are what survives of a land-use system the Forest Department spent a century trying to end.

3. Kani groves, Agasthyamalai · Kani groves

   The Kani community's sacred forest patches in the Agasthyamalai hills. These are also where the arogyapacha plant came from, and the 1990s benefit-sharing agreement over it between the Kani and a research institute is one of the earliest cases anywhere of a community being paid for its own botanical knowledge.

4. Bastar · Bastar

   The forested plateau of southern Chhattisgarh, its own kingdom under the Kakatiya-descended Chhindaka and then Bastar rajas until 1948, and now the densest concentration of Adivasi craft traditions in India: bell metal, wrought iron, wood carving, terracotta and cotton weaving, several of them practised by named caste groups for the court.

5. Bastar Dussehrā · seventy-five days

   The Bastar Dussehra at Jagdalpur, the longest festival in India, in which Danteshwari and not Rama is the subject and the Adivasi communities hold formal roles. Villages with 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.

6. Danteshwari Temple, Dantewada · Dantewada

   The Danteshwari temple, the Bastar rajas' tutelary goddess and the deity the whole Dussehra sequence is held for. It also appears in Shakta-pitha lists, which is the usual pattern: a regional goddess with a local ritual history acquires a place in a pan-Indian enumeration without losing the local one. The temple's authority over the Dussehra sequence has outlasted the kingdom by seventy-five years.

7. Ḍhokrā · the eastern belt

   Dhokra lost-wax casting, practised by Ghadwa and related smiths from Bastar through Odisha to Bengal and Jharkhand, in which the wax model is built up as coiled thread so the finished bronze carries the winding as its surface. It is one of the oldest continuous metal techniques in India and now sells largely as decorative work.

8. Warli painting, Palghar · Palghar

   The Warli ritual wall painting of coastal Maharashtra, white rice paste on cow-dung-washed mud, built from triangles, circles and lines. It was made by women for the marriage chauk until Jivya Soma Mashe began painting outside ritual occasions in the 1970s, which is how it became a style with a market and a signature.

9. Saurā icon painting (idital) · southern Odisha

   The Saura idital, drawn in white on red-ochre walls to fulfil a vow, with the figures enclosed in a bounded field entered by a drawn ladder. It resembles Warli work at a distance but is drawn outline-first and names the spirit it is made for, and it is commissioned through a ritual specialist.

10. Pardhān Gond painting and Jangarh Singh Shyam · from the 1980s

    Pardhan Gond painting, which did not exist before Jangarh Singh Shyam was brought from Patangarh to Bhopal by J. Swaminathan in 1981 and given paper and acrylic. Within a decade a hereditary bardic community of Gond musicians had become a school of painters, and it is the clearest case in India of a named individual originating a tradition.

11. Sohrai and Khovar, Hazaribagh · Hazaribagh

    Khovar, the marriage painting scraped through white slip to the dark earth beneath, and Sohrai, the harvest painting in coloured earths, made on house walls in the Hazaribagh valleys. The motifs match those in the rock shelters a few kilometres away, which is an unbroken visual line rather than an archaeological one.

12. Isko & Hazaribagh rock art · the shelters above

    The painted rock shelters at Isko and around Hazaribagh, whose animal and geometric motifs recur in the Khovar and Sohrai paintings in the villages below. This is the one place in India where prehistoric rock art and a living wall-painting practice can be compared in the same valley. Bulu Imam's surveys from the 1990s recorded the shelters and the house walls together.

13. Moirang · Moirang

    A Meitei cultural centre associated with the Lai Haraoba festival and the Khamba-Thoibi cycle, and in modern history the place where the INA flag was first raised on Indian soil in April 1944. Ritual theatre and the eastern front of the Second World War in the same small town. The INA memorial and the Lai Haraoba ground are a few hundred metres apart.

14. Andro · Andro

    A Meitei village where the older pre-Vaishnava ritual practice, pottery and the community sacred grove remain unusually legible, with a maintained fire that the village treats as continuous. It is the clearest surviving instance of Manipuri religious life before the eighteenth-century Vaishnava reform. Manipur's eighteenth-century Vaishnava reform under Garib Niwaz went as far as burning older texts, and Andro is where what it did not reach can still be seen.

15. Kangla Fort, Imphal · Kangla

    The Meitei kings' seat at Imphal, with its own script, Vaishnava court theology and martial arts. The Anglo-Manipur War of 1891 ended Manipur's independence; the fort was occupied by the Assam Rifles until 2004, when it was returned to the state and reopened as a heritage site. Sanamahi worship, the pre-Vaishnava Meitei practice, is still maintained inside the fort enclosure.

16. Gir National Park · closed to shooting c. 1900

    The dry teak forest south of Junagadh, the only place on earth where the Asiatic lion survives in the wild, with Maldhari pastoralists still grazing buffalo inside the sanctuary. The Nawab of Junagadh closed it to shooting when perhaps a dozen animals were left; the 2025 census counted about eight hundred and ninety, and a princely hunting ban is why the animal on the national emblem still exists.