Gondwana

How it got its name

Notes by Craig Robertson
March, 2008
The museum in Mumbai where I started.

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: "land of 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 a hilltribe, 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, the forests around it were the setting for Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. It now lies about half way between Pench Tiger Reserve andKanha National Park. Kipling stayed for a few days in a jungle camp at Pench.

In 1831 there had been a report by one William Henry 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, but the logic of the situation strongly suggests Mowgli was a Gond boy. (There is a statue in Seoni of a boy riding a wolf.) 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.

Sal forest in Kanha National Park.

Wild boar running in the forest, Pench Tiger Reserve

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, in gratitude 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 Palash tree (Fire of the Forest) is also common across the central Indian landscape.
Listen to the birds 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 flow east. Amarkantak is 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.)

Mandla: on the Narmada River, upstream from Jabalpur; site of 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, an early 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 Gondwana Centre 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 the centre (see below; there is no sign of the centre now). Around Pachmarhi there is Mesolithic rock art and a view of Chauragarh, 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.

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-eastern Madya 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 a divine 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 that the 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

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 struggles against 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

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 Mutiny and 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 for the 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 Gazetteer describing "Gondwana, the land of the Gond race", and Hislop's findings were published post-mortem in Papers 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

coalfield in 1852. Captain James Forsyth

During the 1860s, as the geologists were exploring the area, the ethnography expanded. The most notable contribution was by the young Captain James Forsyth of the Bengal Staff Corps. He established a post at Pachmarhi in the Mahadeo Hills, where he built Bison Lodge in 1862, today a little museum. He returned to London and his account of the Gonds was published - In Memoriam - in 1871, shortly after he died at the age of thirty-three. His book is called Highlands of Central India: Notes on Their Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History, and Sports. On page seven he refers to "the country called by the name Gondwana, from the tribe 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.

Ethnography continued
Ethnographic work continued into the twentieth century. Probably the most intriguing was by Verrier Elwin who published Leaves from the Jungle: Life in a Gond Village 1936. He worked at Karanjia near Mandla, Rani Durgavati'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 of India 1916; the 1930s were especially productive: W. V. Grigson The Maria Gonds of Bastar 1938 and 1949; Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, who worked in Gond country 1939-1949 and published The Gonds of Andhra Pradesh (1979) Some Indian authors have also published, e.g. Behram H. Mehta: Gonds of the Central 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. But Lyell does not mention Gondwana (or Glossopteris; 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

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 the early 1870s.
These geologists discovered within the pre-Cambrian terrain around Jabalpur, a faulted trough filled with about 80 metres of Upper Mesozoic sediments, the Jabalpur-Lameta sequence (named for these type localities), which is capped to the south by Deccan volcanic intrusions. These sediments were generally regarded 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.

Narmada River at Lameta near Jabalpur; Gondwana rocks on the riverbank.

It was soon revealed that there were a number of geological basins throughout the whole 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 James Forsyth'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

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 the Records 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".

Ottokar Feistmantel's historic 1876 paper publishing the name Gondwana for the first time in the geological literature. Geological Survey of India 1876: title page of issue with Ottokar Feistmantel's historic paper.

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.)

In 1879 H.B Medlicott and W.T. Blanford published A Manual of the Geology of India and Burma (Oldham edited the second edition, 1893, and named the Satpura Range). It descibes the "Gondwana system" as starting at the Middle and Upper Carboniferous boundary, a major break in Indian stratigraphy, ushering in the "great Gondwana era" which started with a glacial event 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 southern margins, and helped preserve it through the subsequent long geological periods.

Medlicott & Blanford's Manual of the Geology of India and Burma: page describing Gondwana.

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 original Gondwana 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

"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 book The 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 mid1960s 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 book The Greening of Gondwana 1986) the fifth of them, held in Wellington, New Zealand officially dropped the "-land" from

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 of Australia's plants 1986. Reed Books Pty Ltd, Sydney. Patricia Vickers-Rich and Thomas Hewitt Rich: Wildlife of Gondwana: the 500-million-year history of vertebrate animals from the ancient southern supercontinent 1993. REED, a part of William Heinemann, Sydney.

A more recent publication: V. A. Gostin (Editor) Gondwana to Greenhouse: Australian Environmental Geoscience2001. Geological Society of Australia Special Publication 21. See The Study Interview with Vic & Olga Gostin. There have been bands and other music groups: Gondwanaland, a choir Gondwana Voices, and some totally over the top books like Craig Robertson's Song of Gondwana. Back to home page Note: These notes and accompanying images are from a talk presented to the Victorian 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. Information on this page may be accessed and read for personal use. The material may not be copied or communicated to other parties without permission.