5 - The central Indian forest from Mughal suzerainty to British control

Summary

PART I – THE BHIL COUNTRY

Introduction,

We have so far looked the peoples dwelling in the peninsula; now our focus shifts to its northern boundaries. These are marked by the two great west-flowing rivers, the Narmada and Tapti, and by the parallel ranges that separate their valleys from each other and the Dakhan plateau. In the nineteenth century the forest people who dominated the hill forest in the western half of this region were termed Bhils – a name also found in the rugged country of north-east Gujarat and the adjoining regions of Rajasthan. The ethnonym itself does not (to my knowledge) appear until the early medieval period and is not mentioned in the great classical lexicon Amarakosha, nor could I trace it in an exhaustive index to the Valmiki Ramayana. However, by 1240 CE when a Sanskrit work on dance was written in north Karnataka, the Bhils evidently possessed a distinct identity and costume, which the performers of a particular dance were supposed to don (bhillaveshamupeyushim). The dance was also performed in Maharashtra, but (the treatise continues) it was known there as the Gondli dance since that was the term for Bhilla in Maharashtra at the time. So the name was unfamiliar in thirteenth-century Maharashtra, but the life-style had a local equivalent permitting translation. The name Bhilla (and not necessarily the population) thus originated in the Dravidian-speaking south, and then travelled north to its later lodgement in the central Indian forests.