History

History of Chhattisgarh

The foundation of Chhattisgarh dates back to thousands of years. Recently, anthropologists have found evidences of some of the initial human habitations in the rocks and caves of this fabulous land. Chhattisgarh has also been mentioned in the tradition of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In these legends, the region was recognized as Dakshina Kosala, a place where Lord Rama spent some time of his banish period. The history of Chhattisgarh stretches back to the 4th century AD. The kingdoms, like that of the Sarabhpurias, Panduvanshi, Somvanshi, Kalchuri, and Nagvanshi, reined the land during the 6th-12th centuries. Earlier it was named as South Kosala. In the medieval period, Chhattisgarh came to be known as Gondwana. Later it became part of the realm of the Kalchuris, who dominated the region until the late-18th century AD.

The Muslim narrators of the 14th century AD, have explained in detail about the dynasties, which ruled over the county. During 16th century, Chhattisgarh was influenced by the Mughals and then, by the Marathas. By the year 1758, the whole region came under the province of the Marathas, who cruelly ransacked its natural resources. In the beginning of 19th century, the British came and included most of the region into the Central Province. Past 1854, the British managed the region like a deputy commissionership with its control center at Raipur. Chhattisgarh took active part in the rebellion of 1857, when Vir Narayan Singh (a landlord of Sonakhan) stood up to challenge the biasness of the British rule. In 1904, the British restructured the region, wherein the estates of Surguja were added while Sambalpur was transferred to Orissa. In 1924, there was a demand to make a separate state by the Raipur Congress Unit at the meeting of the Raipur District Congress. Without any result of the protest, Chhattisgarh got independence from the British like the entire country, but it remained as the part of Madhya Pradesh. It was realized that this region was culturally and historically dissimilar from M.P. After independence, in 1955, the demand for a separate state reappeared in the Nagpur Assembly though it didn’t executed. At last, on 1st November 2000, Chhattisgarh was constituted as the 26th state of India.