Place · goddess temple · India
Danteshwari Temple, Dantewada
The 14th-century Bastar royal goddess temple at Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, 400 kilometres from Raipur — the tutelary goddess (kuladevi) of the Bastar royal house of the Kakatiya-descended Bhanj dynasty from 1324 until its 1949 accession to India. The Danteshwari temple sits at the confluence of the Dankini and Shankhini rivers; the goddess Danteshwari (said to hold Sati's tooth in the 51 Shakti Pithas tradition) is identified with the Durga-Mahishasuramardini form. The annual 75-day Bastar Dussehra festival (the longest Dussehra in India) involves the royal family carrying the goddess's chariot through the forest villages, uniting the Bastar tribal communities under the royal cult. The 2000s Maoist (Naxalite) insurgency centred on the Dantewada forests; the April 2010 Chintalnar attack killed 76 CRPF personnel in the district.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Central Indian and Bastar traditions
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.900, 81.350
Connections (2)
- Patronage networkBastar Dussehrā
The whole seventy-five-day Bastar Dussehra is held for Danteshwari, the Bastar rajas' tutelary goddess, and the Dantewada temple is where the authority for it sits. The Muria darbar at the end of the sequence was, and to an extent still is, the occasion on which Adivasi representatives put grievances to the state — a festival that is also a constitutional procedure.
- Life routeKomaram Bheem
Komaram Bheem's 1928-1940 Gond rebellion operated across the Adilabad-Dantewada tribal belt of modern Telangana and Chhattisgarh. His 'Jal Jangal Jameen' campaign for ancestral tribal land rights paralleled the Danteshwari-devoted Bastar Gond tradition of the Dantewada region, where tribal armed struggle continued through the 1946-1951 Telangana Armed Struggle and the subsequent Naxalite movement.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Danteshwari Temple”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
Open Danteshwari Temple, Dantewada in the repository →