The Gondi (Gōṇḍī, ) or Gond people, who refer to themselves as "Kōītōr" (Kōī, Kōītōr, ), are an ethnolinguistic group in India. Their native language, Gondi, belongs to the Dravidian family. They are spread over the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha. They are classified as a Scheduled Tribe for the purpose of India's system of reservation.
The Gond have formed many kingdoms of historical significance. Gondwana was the ruling kingdom in the Gondwana region of India. This includes the eastern part of the Vidarbha of Maharashtra. The Garha Kingdom includes the parts of Madhya Pradesh immediately to the north of it and parts of western Chhattisgarh. The wider region extends beyond these, also including parts of northern Telangana, western Odisha, and southern Uttar Pradesh.
Gondi is claimed to be related to the Telugu language. The 2011 Census of India recorded about 2.4 million speakers of Gondi as a macrolanguage and 2.91 million speakers of languages within the Gondi subgroup, including languages such as Maria (also known as Maadiya Gond). Many Gonds also speak regionally dominant languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu.
According to the 1971 census, the Gondi population was 5,653,422. By 1991, this had increased to 7,300,998, and by 2001, the figure was 8,501,549. For the past few decades, the group has been witness to the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency. Gondi people, at the behest of the Chhattisgarh government, formed the Salwa Judum, an armed militant group, to fight the Naxalite insurgency. This was disbanded by order of the Supreme Court of India on 5 July 2011, however.
Etymology The origin of the name Gond, used by outsiders, is still uncertain. Some believe the word to derive from the Dravidian kond, meaning hill, similar to the Khonds of Odisha or Konda-Doras of Andhra. The word gonda/gunda/gundar is used throughout South Asia to mean a thug and is said to be derived from this word.
Another theory, according to Vol. 3 of the Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life, is that the name was given to them by the Mughal dynasty of the 16th–18th centuries. It was the Mughals who first used the term "Gond", meaning "hill people", to refer to the group.Gonds – Document – Gale in Context: World History Gale, part of Cengage Group.
The Gonds call themselves Koitur (Kōītōr) or Koi (Kōī), which also has no definitive origin but is perhaps related to kō, meaning "mountain", other ethnonyms like Kui, Kuvi, Koya and Kubi (Konda endonym) are also said to be from it.
History
The origins of the Gonds is unclear. Some researchers have claimed that the Gonds were a collection of disparate tribes that adopted a proto-Gondi language as a mother tongue from a class of rulers, originally speaking various pre-Dravidian languages. While there is an affinity between Gonds and Munda peoples, researchers point to a more complex event involving language shift through a Dravidian linguistic expansion, rather than a recent event of Gondi replacing a North Munda language, hence supporting distinct origins for these two groups. "By considering the case of language shift we modelled the scenario considering Gond originally as an Austroasiatic population, which has recently changed its language to Dravidian. In this case, we should expect a largely similar amount of chunks donated by an outlier distant Austroasiatic population (Bonda) to Gonds and their present Austroasiatic (both North and South Munda) neighbours. However, this was not the case in our analysis, and we observed significantly higher Bonda chunks among North and South Munda neighbours than any Gond group. Hence, this weakens the case for any recent language shift of Gond from Austroasiatic speakers and suggests a distinct genetic identity of the Gonds."
R. V. Russell believed the Gonds came into Gondwana from the south: up the Godavari into Vidarbha, from there up the Indravati into Bastar, and up the Wardha and Wainganga into the Satpura Range.
The first historical reference to the Gonds appears in Muslim writings from the 14th century. Scholars believe the Gonds ruled Gondwana, a region extending from present-day eastern Madhya Pradesh to western Odisha, and from northern Telangana to the southeastern corner of Uttar Pradesh, between the 13th and 19th centuries CE.
The first kingdom of the Gonds was that of Chanda, founded in 1200, although some genealogies trace its founders to the 9th century CE. The Gonds of Chanda originated from Sirpur in what is now northern Telangana and were said to have overthrown the previous rulers of the country, called the Mana dynasty. Another theory states that after the downfall of the Kakatiyas in 1318, the Gonds of Sirpur had the opportunity to throw off outside domination and built their own kingdom. The kingdom of Chanda developed extensive irrigation and the first defined revenue system of the Gond kingdoms. It also began to build forts, which later became highly sophisticated. Khandakhya Ballal Shah founded the town of Chandrapur and shifted the capital there from Sirpur. The Ain-i-Akbari records the kingdom as being fully independent, and it even conquered some territory from nearby sultanates. However, during Akbar's rule, Babji Shah began paying tribute after the Mughals incorporated territory to their south into the Berar Subah.
The kingdom of Garha was founded in the 14th century by Jadurai, who deposed the previous Kalachuri rulers. Garha-Mandla is known for queen Rani Durgavati, who fought against Mughal emperor Akbar (d. 1564). Mandla was then ruled by her son Bir Narayan, who similarly fought until he died. Afterward, his kingdom was offered to Chanda Shah by the victorious Mughals. During Shah Jahan's reign, his successor Hirde Shah was attacked by the Bundelas and shifted the capital to Mandla. His successors fought against themselves and invited the aid of Aurangzeb and the Marathas to their cause.
Deogarh was founded in the early 13th century. It is said that its founder, Jatba, slew the previous Gauli rulers during a temple festival. In the Ain-i-Akbari, Deogarh was said to have 2,000 cavalry, 50,000 footmen, and 100 elephants and was ruled by a monarch named Jatba. Jatba built outposts in the Berar plains, including a fort near modern Nagpur. It was his grandson Bakr Shah who, in order to enlist Aurangzeb's help, converted to Islam and became Bakht Buland Shah. Shah founded the city of Nagpur and brought a revival of the fortunes of the Deogarh kingdom. During his reign, the kingdom covered the southeastern Satpura range from Betul to Rajnandgaon in the east, and parts of the northern Berar plains. Under his son Chand Sultan, Nagpur gained even more importance.
These kingdoms were briefly conquered by the Mughals, but eventually, the Gond rajas were restored and were simply under Mughal suzerainty. In the 1740s, the Marathas began to attack the Gond rajas, causing both rajas and subjects to flee from the plains to the forests and hills. Raghoji Bhonsle forced the Gond rajas of Garha-Mandla to pay tribute to him. Marathi caste groups quickly replaced the displaced original population. Maratha occupation of the Gond rajas' territory continued until the Third Anglo-Maratha War, when the British took control over the remaining Gond zamindaris and took over revenue collection. The British, who regarded the Gonds as "plunderers" and "thieves" before their takeover, began to view the Gonds as "timid" and "meek" by the mid-19th century. The remaining Gond zamindaris were absorbed into the Indian union upon independence.
During colonial rule, the Gonds were marginalised by colonial forest management practices. The Bastar rebellion of 1910, better known in the tribal belt as the bhumkal, was a partly successful armed struggle against colonial forest policy that denied the Madia and Muria Gonds of Bastar, along with other tribes in the region, access to the forest for their livelihoods. In the early 1920s, Komaram Bheem, a Gond leader from Adilabad in Hyderabad state, rebelled against the Nizam and sought a separate Gond raj. It was he who coined the well-known slogan jal, jangal, jameen ("water, forest, land") that has symbolised Adivasi movements since independence.
In 1916, Gondi intellectuals from various parts of Gondwana formed the Gond Mahasabha to protect Gondi culture from increasing outside influence. The organisation held meetings in 1931 and 1934 to discuss ways to preserve Gond culture from manipulation by outsiders, social norms the Gonds should have, and solidarity between the Gonds of different parts of Gondwana. Starting in the 1940s, various Gond leaders agitated for a separate state that would encompass the erstwhile territory of Gondwana, especially tribal areas of eastern Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Vidharbha, and Adilabad. The demand reached its peak in the early 1950s, when Heera Singh founded the Bharatiya Gondwana Sangh to agitate for statehood. Singh held many meetings throughout Gondwana and could mobilise 100,000 people between 1962 and 1963, but his movement had died down by the late 1960s and was never taken seriously by the Indian authorities. Other methods of agitation, including petitions and demands by various Gond organisations, were ignored by the state. In the 1990s, Heera Singh Markam and Kausalya Porte founded the Gondwana Ganatantra Party to fight for statehood.
The Gond rajas used Singh or Shah as titles, influenced by the Rajputs and Mughals. The Gond are also known as the Raj Gond. The term was widely used in the 1950s but has now become almost obsolete, probably because of the political eclipse of the Gond rajas.
Society
Gond society is divided into several exogamous patrilineal units known as sagas. The number depends on the region, with Gonds in the hills of Madhya Pradesh and the northern Nagpur plain having only two and those in the southern Nagpur plain and Adilabad having four. In Adilabad, these Sagas are called Yerwen, Sarwen, Siwen, and Nalwen, and their names refer to the number of ancestors for that saga. In Adilabad, there is a fifth saga, Sarpe saga, which for marriage purposes is linked with Sarwen, although their origin myths are different. According to Gond mythology, all sagas once lived in a single village but soon moved out and established individual villages. The names of these ancestral villages are preserved in culture and sometimes identified with present-day locations. The number of ancestors for each saga is its symbol, and on many ceremonial and ritual occasions, the number of involved animals, people, actions, or objects corresponds to that saga's number.
The saga exists mostly in the sphere of ritual and has no real political or organizational significance. The most visible sign of saga consciousness is in the worship of Persa Pen, although this occurs mainly at the clan level. All worshippers of the same Persa pen see themselves as agnatically related, and so any intermarriage or sexual relations between them is forbidden. Gonds use the term soira to refer to sagas whose members they can marry.