Gondwana Naming

7/27/2019 Gondwana Naming

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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.mp3


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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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Gondwana Naming

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