Tradition · Dussehra festival · India
Bastar Dussehrā
Also known as Bastar Dussehra, Bastar Dasara, Muria darbar, Jagdalpur
A seventy-five-day festival at Jagdalpur, the longest in India, in which the goddess Danteshwari rather than Rama is the subject and the Adivasi communities of Bastar hold formal roles. It includes the building and hauling of a massive wooden rath by Adivasi carpenters and the rituals of the Muria darbar.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 19.076, 82.029
Worth knowing
The rath is rebuilt every year from timber brought by particular villages who hold the hereditary right to supply it, and the ritual sequence includes a stage at which the Adivasi participants symbolically abduct the raja's chariot to press their grievances. A Dussehra with no Ramlila in it.
Connections (3)
- Patronage networkDanteshwari Temple, Dantewada
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.
- Patronage networkBastar
The Dussehra sequence is the Bastar state's constitutional procedure as much as its festival: the raja's authority is renewed by Adivasi participation, the rath cannot be built without the villages that hold the timber right, and the Muria darbar at the end is the occasion for putting grievances. The kingdom acceded in 1948 and the festival has outlasted it by seventy-five years.
- Site adjacencyKotumsar caves
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, “Bastar Dussehra”. Verrier Elwin, The Muria and their Ghotul (1947), on Bastar ritual; Chhattisgarh state culture department documentation of the festival sequence.
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