Transcript
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The museum in Mumbai where I started.
Gondwana
How it got its name
Notes by Craig Robertson
March, 2008
I was told as a geology student in the 1960s, about 45 years ago, that Gondwana
meant land of the Gonds, and that they were a tribal people living somewhere in India.
The idea of going there one day stayed in my mind over all the years and many
travels. It was this that I set out to find in early 2007. I started with my Times atlas,
searches in library catalogues and on the web, and discovered my destination lay in
the state of Madya Pradesh.
Gondwana: the word
Gondwana: "landof the Gonds". The origin of the word is hazy, but Indian historians
seem to agree it was first used by Afghan traders who came into Gond territory in
central India around the 11th or 12th centuries. But the Telugan people of Andra
Pradesh also may well have coined the word or used it. The Telugu-English Dictonary
tells us konda is hill or mountain; kondajaati, a hilltribe,goondu the name of ahilltribe, and wana a wood, forest or grove. "Gond" (also spelt "Goond") is also
possibly a corruption of "Khond" or "Kond", the name of one of the tribal groups
comprising the "Gonds".
Gondwana: the place
It refers to an area covering the north Godavari and Namarda River valleys, occupying
most of Madya Pradesh, meaning Central Province, a state of India created from a
group of old states after independence. However Gond people are spread over a wide
area of central, and central eastern India covering seven states.
Key locations
Seoni: one of the main towns, theforests around it were the setting for
Rudyard Kipling'sJungle Book.
It now lies about half way between Pench TigerReserve andKanha National Park. Kipling stayed
for a few days in a jungle camp at Pench.
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Sal forest in Kanha National Park.
In 1831 there had been a report by one WilliamHenry Sleeman of a feral boy found with a pack of
jungle dogs or wolves in the forest near Seoni.
I cannot find any hint of it in the Jungle Book, butthe logic of the situation strongly suggests Mowgli
was a Gond boy. (There is a statue in Seoni of a boyriding a wolf.)
Wild boar running in the forest, Pench Tiger
Reserve
Pench Tiger Reserve, on the southern edge of the
Satpura Range: apart from it's Kiplingesque history,
and its tigers, it is an important birding location.
Tigers in the forest, Pench Tiger Reserve
Wild peafowl displaying in Kanha.
My guide on an afternoon drive was Probir Patil
who told me he had found the first Forest Owlet
seen in 125 years. He was using a pair of binoculars
given him by a British birder, Michael Beaman, ingratitude for being shown the owl. The teak and sal
forests were in Kipling's day continous from Pench
to Kanha, a major national park in Gondwana
territory between Seoni and Mandla. The Palashtree (Fire of the Forest) is also common across the
central Indian landscape.Listen to thebirds in Kanha(1' 02"; 612 Kb mp3).
Narmada River: the major river flowing through Gondwana. Also the only major
Indian river that flows east-west, to the Arabian Sea; to the north all join the Ganges
flowing east to the Bay of Bengal; to the south the Godivari and others also floweast. Amarkantakis the source of the Narmada River, on the eastern spurs of the
Maikal Hills, part of the Satpura Range; it is sacred and an annual festival is held
there. (The peak is a thick Deccan Trap; see below about the geology.)
http://www.thestudy.net.au/sounds/Kanha-birds-CR.mp3http://www.thestudy.net.au/sounds/Kanha-birds-CR.mp3http://www.thestudy.net.au/sounds/Kanha-birds-CR.mp3http://www.thestudy.net.au/sounds/Kanha-birds-CR.mp37/27/2019 Gondwana Naming
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Mandla: on the Narmada River, upstream from Jabalpur; siteof the Rani Durgavati kingdom (see below), one of the main
Rajput Gond feudal states.
Jabalpur: the main city in the Gond area, it holds the Rani
Durgavati Museum; nearby features are the Marble Rocks, anearly 11th century Gond fort at Madan Mahal, and the
locality of Lameta, one of the first Gondwana geological type
localities.
(Left) Madan Mahal, a medieval Gond fort near Jabalpur, Madya
Pradesh
Satpura Range: a composite feature created by British mapping; includes the
Mahadeo Hills. Maikal Hills and others spread across the Gond heartland.
Mahadeo Hills, Satpura Range, near Pachmarhi, Madya Pradesh
(the temple of Chauragarh is on a distant peak)
Palash trees - Fire of the Forest
near Pachmarhi, Madya Pradesh
Pachmarhi, in the Mahadeo Hills: site of Captain Forsyth's
hill station (see below). Near here is Tamia, on the way to
Chhindwara, another Gond feudal city state. A GondwanaCentre was set up in Tamia during the 1980s by an institute
from Mumbai, to study and interact with Gond people and
culture. Indian ethnographer Behram Mehta worked at thecentre (see below; there is no sign of the centre now).
Around Pachmarhi there is Mesolithic rock art and a view ofChauragarh, topped by a temple.
Mesolithic rock art near Pachmarhi,
Madya Pradesh
Bhopal, Bhimbetka and Raisen: one of the world's most important rock art precints;
the approximate northern limit of Gond territory. Bhimbetka: Acheulian (Lower
Palaeolithic or earliest stone age), Middle and Upper Palaeolithic; then Mesolithic.
Rock paintings in three phases from Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and later historic
periods.
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Gondwana: the people
The Gonds are a large heterogeneous group of tribal people, numbering in the
millions. They are regarded as the aboriginal people of the Gondwana area (although
another people called the Baiga are also aboriginal in certain areas of central-easternMadya Pradesh). They are given an official status as such under an administrative
scheme called the Scheduled Tribes of India, which was set up around the 1950s after
independence.
By heterogeneous we mean the groups vary a great deal in social and cultural aspects,
and in their history. There is a Gond language - Gondi - one of the central-southern
Dravidian family of languages, which includes Tamil and Telugu. However only a
limited number of Gond groups speak Gondi. What makes someone a Gond seems to
be a loose assortment of cultural factors - religious beliefs for example. There is a
Gond myth of the creation of the world and the origin of the Gonds, involving adivine hero called Lingo, sometimes called the Moses of the Gonds.
The Gonds are generally people who favour a
habitat of forested hills and plateaus. Some
were naked hunter-gatherers of the forest.Ptolemy, perhaps a thousand years before we
hear of "Gondwana", refers to the "leaf-clad
Gondali".
Until quite recent times some still thought the
only proper place for men was out in the bush,that they should sleep out there, and also thatthe bush was the only appropriate place for
sex.
(Left) A small Gond settlement on the edge of Kanha
National Park, Madya Pradesh
Gonds like to sit around the fire and sing at night. They have been noted for excessive
drinking, making them uncompetitive with the Hindus, drinking spirit distilled from
flowers of the mahua tree, and in the south, fermented date-palm juice. Historically,some Gonds were also urban dwellers of fortified feudal city states. Some practiced
human sacrifice, to the goddess Kali. This lasted until 1853 in the city of Nagpur, but
in the mid-nineteenth century they made a point of giving it up because of public
opinion.
Rajput Gonds
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During the European Middle Ages, Rajput Hindu people pushed down from the north
into Gond territory. It was under their influence that a number of Gond groups
developed feudal kingdoms, for example at Mandla, Betul and Chhindwara.
Feudalism contributed to the process of detribalization.
Rani Durgavati
Famously, in the 1560s, there was a Gond queen at Mandla, who was of Rajput stock.
Her name was Rani Durgavati and she was and still is a popular figure amongst the
Gonds. By this time the Mughals had invaded northern India and were also pushing
south into Gond territory. The Rajputs and Gonds formed alliances against the
Mughals. Rani was a famous beauty and the wicked Asaf Khan, the Imperial Viceroy
in Delhi, lusted after her and her kingdom at Mandla. She was recorded as having
1400 elephants. In 1564 Asaf laid siege to Mandla. When Rani realised she could not
win the fight she committed suicide by stabbing herself. Her son, inheriting her
crown, was forced to move his seat of power further south to Golkonda. Various other
defeats of the Gond states followed, the last Gond king dying in 1790.
The Narmada River at Mandla,
where Rani made her last stand.Statue of the Gond queen Rani Durgavati in Mandla.
Arrival of the British
That brings us to the eve of the arrival of the British. "British" then meant the East
India Company (EIC), which had been given sole rights to trade in India by Queen
Elizabeth I in about 1600. They had been spreading slowly across India ever since, the
major growth of the areas under their influence being in the 18th century. By the early
19th century the Hindu rulers of the northeast of India were in their final strugglesagainst the British, who then had effective control over most of India. But their
movement into Gondwana was quite slow at first.
In 1795 a Captain Blunt undertook an expedition from Varanesi (formerly Benares) to
the north of Gondwana, right down through it to Rajamundry in the south. With the
probable exception of Ptolemy, his observations of the nudity of the Gonds appear to
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have kicked off the ethnographic record. Generally their reputation in these times was
as naked savages living on roots and fruits and hunting strangers for sacrifice, and
fiercely independent. In 1820 a Lieutenant Prendergast noted that the Gonds were
cannibals that ate their own relatives. There was an expedition into Central India led
by a Sir John Malcom in the 1830s, which seems to have been the first to report on the
geology and archaeology of the area. We will return to that shortly.
Written accounts of Gonds remained rare. Eventually missionaries and scientists
followed the spread of empire and were often the first ethnographers. For Gondwana
the first serious ethnography was undertaken by a missionary, the Rev. Stephen
Hislop, probably in the 1850s. He was the first to record the legend of Lingo but he
didn't publish during his lifetime.
Some journal articles about the Gonds began to be published: The Journal of the
Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 1853 includes an item about "the
Gondwana highlands and jungles [comprising] a large tract of unexplored country". It
states: "Captain Blunt's interesting journeys in 1795 give almost all the information
we possess...such a description would scarcely be applicable anywhere out of Central
Africa". By the 1850s Gondwana was still one of those dark mysterious blanks in the
map of the empire.
Siege of Lucknow, 1857
There is little documented interaction with the Gonds until
after the key event of mid-nineteenth century Indian history,
the Indian Uprising of 1857 (also known as the Indian Mutinyand the first war of liberation depending which side you were
on). The famous siege of Lucknow ended in defeat for the
Indians. However it was also the end of a significant role forthe EIC. India was placed thereafter under the direct rule of
Queen Victoria.(Left) Old place at Lucknow still standing with holes in the walls from
cannonfire.
The British penetration of Gond lands then stepped up. This resulted in more about
the Gonds being published. In 1860 there was an article in the EIC Gazetteerdescribing "Gondwana, the land of the Gond race", and Hislop's findings were
published post-mortem inPapers on the Aboriginal Tribes of the Central
Provinces 1866. The significant activity in the history of Gondwana is that it was
during these years that the British geologists first came into the area. They were
primarily looking for coal, which had already been found by the EIC at Hoshangabad
on the edge of the Gond lands near the Narmada River, where they opened the first
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coalfield in 1852.
Captain James Forsyth
During the 1860s, as the geologists were
exploring the area, the ethnography
expanded. The most notable contributionwas by the young Captain James Forsyth
of the Bengal Staff Corps. He established
a post at Pachmarhi in the MahadeoHills, where he built Bison Lodge in1862, today a little museum.
He returned to London and his account ofthe Gonds was published - In Memoriam
- in 1871, shortly after he died at the age
of thirty-three.
His book is calledHighlands of Central
India: Notes on Their Forests and WildTribes, Natural History, and Sports. On
page seven he refers to "the country
called by the name Gondwana, from thetribe of Gonds who chiefly inhabit it". He
uses the word elsewhere in the book,
referring for example to the "hills of
Gondwana".
(Left) Highlands Of Central India by Capt. James
Forsyth: title page; probably the first book
describing Gondwana.
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Ethnography continued
Ethnographic work continued into the twentieth
century. Probably the most intriguing was by
Verrier Elwin who publishedLeaves from the
Jungle: Life in a Gond Village 1936.
He worked at Karanjia near Mandla, RaniDurgavati's old territory, and seems to have been
one of those English eccentrics worth a study
himself.
(Right) Verrier Elwin with a Gond friend at Karanjia, Madya
Pradesh.
Some other major publications include:
R. V. Russell and R.B. Hira Lal Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces ofIndia 1916;
the 1930s were especially productive: W. V. Grigson The Maria Gonds ofBastar1938 and 1949;
Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, who worked in Gond country 1939-1949 andpublished The Gonds of Andhra Pradesh (1979)
Some Indian authors have also published, e.g. Behram H. Mehta: Gonds of theCentral Indian Highlands 1984
Gondwana: geology
Charles Lyell, in the first edition of Principles of Geology in the early 1830s, refers to
a recent expedition into Central India by one Sir John Malcolm. From the information
in Lyell's book, this would have been into the area below the Mahadeo Hills and
downstream from Hoshangabad. A member of the expedition, the well-named Captain
Dangerfield, reported on the geology of the Narmada (Nerbuddah) River channel, and
some archaeological finds regarding cities buried by volcanic activity in the area. ButLyell does not mention Gondwana (orGlossopteris; see below); the final edition of
the Principles was the 12th of 1875, still without mention of Gondwana.
The history of the geology of Gondwana does take off in a sort of logical progression
from the ethnographic history. The Geological Survey of India (GSI), an arm of the
British administration, is the organization that mattered. One of the main things
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exercising their minds was the search for coal resources, already found and mined by
the EIC. They knew aboutGlossopteris, which is the main plant fossil found in the
Permian coal deposits that came to be recognized as a major feature of Gondwanan
remnant landmasses (the taxon was established by 1830).
GSI geologists worked along the Narmada River and up into the Satpura Range. Early
workers in the field were:
J.G.M. Medlicott, who first identified the Lameta formation in 1860; W.T. Blanford of the Geological Survey of India, who delivered a report on the
Chhindwara District in 1866;
H. B. Medlicott, who explored the Satpura Range, and began publishing in theearly 1870s.
Narmada River at Lameta near Jabalpur;
Gondwana rocks on the riverbank.
These geologists discovered within the pre-Cambrianterrain around Jabalpur, a faulted trough filled with
about 80 metres of Upper Mesozoic sediments, theJabalpur-Lameta sequence (named for these type
localities), which is capped to the south by Deccan
volcanic intrusions. These sediments were generallyregarded as fluvio-lacustrine. That is, they were
freshwater sediments, although there was much debate
for decades about whether some of them were marine, or
at least mixed.
It was soon revealed that there were a number of geological basins throughout thewhole area of central India with the same sequence. The crucial early example was
those having formed in the Satpura Basin and later pushed up to form the Satpura
Range. H.B. Medlicott mapped these (although the Satpura name wasn't given until
1893 by his colleague R. D. Oldham).
Presumably the two Medlicotts were related, and the two Blanfords (probably
brothers); they would have been part of a small colonial community. The Blanfords
published works on geology, mammals and birds, molluscs and meteorology, from at
least 1858. It doesn't take too much imagination to think they all would have read the
sort of journal articles described above, and most likely would have stayed at JamesForsyth's Lodge when they were in the area, and later read his book. The name
Gondwana, one way or another, would have been well known to these geologists of
the 1860s and early 1870s.
Adoption of the name
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The important point here is that H.B. - Henry Benedict - Medlicott is credited with
first naming this sequence the Gondwana series. He did this in unpublished reports for
the GSI in 1872. The name was then adopted by other workers. The first credited with
using it in print was Ottokar Feistmantel in 1876 (in spite of the name he was British,
or at least worked for the GSI), in a paper in theRecords of the GSI: Notes on the age
of some fossils of India. In his preamble Feistmantel says: "...almost the only
fossiliferous, rock series in the peninsular area of India, is that usually spoken of
collectively as the plant-bearing series. This is an awkward designation; I will at once
adopt instead the name GONDWANA series or system, to be understood in the same
wide sense as when we speak of the Jurassic or Silurian series or system. The name
was proposed some years ago by Mr. Medlicott, and has since been more or less
current on the survey; it has been once used in print by Mr. H.F. Blanford in his little
work on the Physical Geology of India".
Geological Survey of India 1876:
title page of issue with Ottokar
Feistmantel's historic paper.
Ottokar Feistmantel's historic 1876 paper publishing the name Gondwana
for the first time in the geological literature.
The latter work has either sunk without a trace, or Feistmantel has almost certainly
confused it with a work listed in the British Library catalogue: H. F. (Henry Francis)
Blanford The Rudiments of Physical Geography for the use of Indian Schools 1873(1874 and 1878). The Oxford Dictionary in fact names this as its first published use of
the word, quite ignoring Forsyth's 1871 book and the other earlier sources. But for
geology at least Feistmantel gets first naming honors. (This paper also
discusses Glossopteris. He later continued this work, and published, in Australia.)
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Medlicott & Blanford's Manual of the Geology of Indiaand Burma: page describing Gondwana.
In 1879 H.B Medlicott and W.T. BlanfordpublishedA Manual of the Geology of India
and Burma (Oldham edited the secondedition, 1893, and named the Satpura
Range). It descibes the "Gondwana system"
as starting at the Middle and UpperCarboniferous boundary, a major break in
Indian stratigraphy, ushering in the "great
Gondwana era" which started with a glacialevent and followed with a long period of
river sedimentation, into the Cretaceous. The
Lower Gondwana has the
"characteristicGlossopteris flora".
The volcanics of the Deccan Traps at the
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary overlaid much
of the sequence, at least along its southernmargins, and helped preserve it through the
subsequent long geological periods.
Thus Gondwana was established in the
geological literature.On the road to Gondwana - Deccan Traps:
volcanic beds covering much of southern and central
India
Eduard Suess adds the "-land"
An important example was Eduard Suess, Professor of Geology in the University of
Vienna, who published a landmark book:Das Antlitz der Erde 1885. This book
collated the then known geology of the earth, and referred to Medlicott and Blanford's
book for the geology of India. It was translated into English in the early 1900s as The
Face of the Earth. It seems - at least according to the Oxford Dictionary - that it was
Suess who started using the term "Gondwanaland", and that W.T. Blanford (1896)
was the first to do so in English, and he specifically refers to Suess as his source. It
looks like they tacked the '-land' on to distinguish the supercontinent from the originalGondwana territory, which possibly gives it a certain validity inspite of the tautology.
Alfred Wegener and continental drift
The similarities of the southern continents, the Permian non-marine sediments,
the Glossopteris flora and so forth, had made the idea of a supercontinent of
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"Gondwanaland" well-known by the time Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of
continental drift in 1912; he refers to works as early as 1857 amongst the vast
literature that he had read.
Wegener was an interesting character, an intellectual rebel who looked outside the
box. He was not a geologist, but a trained astronomer who mainly worked as a
meteorologist until his untimely death on an expedition on 1930. He published the
first edition of his bookThe Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1915. (Suess was just
one of numerous references, and he wrote from a standpoint of the continuous
contraction of the earth, a theory Wegener was seeking to refute.)
In fact explaining Gondwana was a significant part of the intellectual challenge to
come up with an acceptable theory of the earth's geological history. There was a lot of
talk about land bridges and sunken continents which created more problems than they
solved. Speculation on the 'fit' between South America and Africa goes back to
Francis Bacon in 1620.
The debate on drift theory raged for decades. While growing numbers of geologists
and biogeographers tended to support it, it was a theory with a serious lack of
explanation; the geophysicists were the last to accept it. Harking back to my years at
Melbourne University in the 1960s, debate was still going. Some time in the mid-
1960s Owen Singleton gave a lecture putting forward the stratigraphic objections,
focusing on the South America - West Africa match up which was supposedly one of
the strong arguments in support. From a geophysical point of view, we were taught
that continental drift was akin to having a ship of butter ploughing through a sea of
concrete; it just didn't make sense. Eventually palaeomagnetism proved it must have
happened and plate tectonics solved the mechanical problem.
The debate was won by the continental drift proponents but arguments have continued
about various anomalies ever since with people like Sam Carey of "expanding earth"
fame, Mac Dickins, a former ANU geologist and an uncle of mine, and Neil
Archbold, a recent president of The Royal Society of Victoria, amongst those raising
various questions.
These debates were aired at a series of nine international Gondwana symposia held
from 1967 to 1994, started by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS)
and taken up by various host organizations every few years, in Buenos Aires, Cape
Town, Canberra (ANU 1973), Calcutta, Wellington, Ohio, Sao Paulo, Hobart and
Hyderabad. The proceedings from each of these symposia are available in various
libraries. According to Mary White (in her bookThe Greening of Gondwana 1986)
the fifth of them, held in Wellington, New Zealand officially dropped the "-land" from
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the name, as it is a tautology. I can't find any confirmation of this in the proceedings
for that fifth symposium, but it was absent in the proceedings of the sixth symposium.
There have been many symposia since the 1960s. There was a conference on the flora
of Gondwana in the 1960s, and a web search will bring up further conferences in
recent years.
Gondwana and popular culture
In the meantime Gondwana or Gondwanaland has passed into popular culture. It
seems to have acquired some particularly Australian cultural associations, with
aborigines and Australiana. It has become a land of the imagination, an imagined
space. There have been various books, some in popular science:
Mary E. White: The Greening of Gondwana: the 400 million year story ofAustralia's plants 1986. Reed Books Pty Ltd, Sydney.
Patricia Vickers-Rich and Thomas Hewitt Rich: Wildlife of Gondwana: the500-million-year history of vertebrate animals from the ancient southern
supercontinent1993. REED, a part of William Heinemann, Sydney.
A more recent publication: V. A. Gostin (Editor) Gondwana to Greenhouse:
ustralian Environmental Geoscience2001. Geological Society of Australia Special
Publication 21. See The StudyInterview with Vic & Olga Gostin.
There have been bands and other music groups: Gondwanaland, a choirGondwana
Voices, and some totally over the top books like Craig Robertson'sSong ofGondwana.
Back to home page
Note: These notes and accompanying images are from a talk presented to
theVictorian Ornithological Research Group (VORG), March, 2008.
Images from publications by Forsyth, Elwin, Geological Survey of India (Feistmantel), Medlicott
& Blanford are all out of copyright. Otherwise photographs, recording and text Copyright
Craig Robertson, 2008.
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