ABSTRACT
Jagdalpur, the former capital of the Princely State of Bastar, is popularly known as the ‘city of crossroads.’ This image, says a recent political commentator, best represents the political disconnect between the state and the people in the Bastar region today (Mahaprashasta 2010). The idea of the crossroads also best represents the deep history of economy and culture in Chhattisgarh as a whole. The uniqueness of Chhattisgarh as a region in India is defined by its position at the crossroads of a north/south division of India into Indo-Aryan and Dravidian-speaking linguistic regions and an east/west division into wet-rice and dry-grain producing farming regions. These oppositions, in turn, have been modified by the deep and shallow history of Chhattisgarh. The arrows on the maps drawn by archaeologists (Bellwood 2005) of the movements of Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and Munda speakers into India meet in Chhattisgarh; the sons and daughters of the Chhattisgarh soil speak dialects born of this clash. Meanwhile, the agrarian frontier has moved slowly westward as rice has asserted its dominance over millet and with it, in the mythical allegories of the oral epics of farmers, the dominance of Lakshmi (as goddess of rice) over her elder sister Alakshmi (as goddess of millet) as the main co-wife of Narayan. Rice’s victory was complete on the lower, well-watered Raipur plain, but is a never-ending conflict on the higher, marginal farmlands of the Bastar plateau. The history of Chhattisgarh is a long one of migration into the area, but one that has intensified over the past 75 years as DDT has transformed the region from an endemic malarial area to an epidemic one, and as high-yielding varieties of rice have ushered in the green revolution. The arrival of steel, and the human sacrifices this new god demands (Parry 2008b), has pushed the region in new directions: a relatively peaceful melting pot of people from different castes, classes, and regions here (Parry 2008a), a red revolution there as forests are cleared and the mountains raided for their mineral treasures. The new state of Chhattisgarh is at a new crossroad. The old debate between ‘tribe’ and ‘caste,’ previously restricted in the main to academic journals, is now fought out at all levels in the political arena as politicians, Naxalites, Hindu nationalists, unions, and villagers try to define the key terms in a new debate about Chhattisgarhi identity: adivasi (original-dweller), vanvasi (forest-dweller), dharati putr (son of the soil)? This has wrought changes that contemporary ethnographers strive to document. The following account locates these studies in their geographical and historical context.
