Place · limestone cave system · India
Kotumsar caves
Also known as Kotumsar, Kotamsar, Gopansar, Kanger Valley
A limestone cave nearly a kilometre and a half long in the Kanger valley of Bastar, cut by an underground stream through Kanger limestone, with stalactite and stalagmite chambers and pools deep in the dark zone. It is among the longest natural caves in India and one of very few with a described cave-adapted fauna.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.872, 81.928
Worth knowing
Its pools hold a blind cave fish, Nemacheilus evezardi, 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, and the local Bhatri name means simply the cave of Kotumsar — it was known to the surrounding villages long before it was surveyed in 1951.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyBarsur
The Kotumsar cave and the Barsur temples are both in Bastar, forty kilometres apart, and together they are the two things the plateau is usually denied: a described cave fauna with a blind fish found nowhere else, and eleventh-century monumental stone temples built by the Chhindaka Nagas. Neither fits a reading of the forest as a periphery waiting to be filled in.
- Site adjacencyBastar Dussehrā
Kanger valley and Jagdalpur are thirty kilometres apart, so the cave and the seventy-five-day Dussehra belong to one small district. Both are reasons Bastar is unlike the rest of central India: a limestone system with its own endemic fauna, and a festival in which Adivasi villages hold hereditary rights over the building of the raja's chariot.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kutumsar Caves”. Kanger Valley National Park records, Chhattisgarh Forest Department; studies of Nemacheilus evezardi circadian rhythms by Ramesh and Biswas.
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