ABSTRACT
The name ‘Chhattisgarh’ refers to a specific region organised around 36 forts or administrative headquarters. The first mention to this is found in a manuscript of the 14th century. It principally included the region of the Mahanadi and the Seonath basins, and neither Koriya and Surguja districts which belong to the eastern part of Vindhyanchal Baghelkand (Singh 1995), nor the districts of Kanker, Bastar and Dantewara were included in Dandakaranya region. The anthropological survey led by Ajit Danda in 1977 included the districts of Shadol, Mandla and Balaghat but not the Bastar region (Danda 1977). This was based on the mother tongue of the inhabitants, since Chhattisgarhi is recognised as a specific dialect of Sanskrit origin. The distinct character of Chhattisgarh’s culture was first raised as a political issue in the beginning of the 20th century by a few politicians such as Khubchand Baghel (1900–69) and Thakur Pyare Lal Singh (1891–1954) in the 1940s and 1950s, and then again in 1967, when Baghel formed the Chhattisgarh Bhratra Sangathan for a separate state. 1 The predominant feeling among the politicians in Chhattisgarh was that the elite from Indore and Bhopal were foreign to them and their interest. But it did not take the shape of either an articulated or a mass movement. By the late 1970s, the trade union movement led by Shankar Guha Neogi, namely, the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM) also put forth Chhattisgarh’s identity both on a social and environmental basis for special focus is typically given to regional claims in the literature of the leftist trade union movement (CMM 1998). The movement indeed gained some sympathy among the intellectuals and generated a social workers network at the grass-root level, but it did not evolve into a broad regional movement nor demanded statehood.
