RAIPUR, CAPITAL CITY OF CHATTISGARH, sits near the centre of a wide plain once known as the Rice Bowl of India. Thousands of varieties of rice are grown in the region, supplying over 600 mills in the state and in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh.

Northwest of Raipur rise the sal-forested Maikal Hills, running northeast to include Amarkantak, source of the holy Narmada (Click for Note) and the Son, a tributary of Ganga. The Maikal Range is home to the Baiga people and to Kanha National Park, perhaps the finest Tiger Reserve of all.

Northwards the land rises to the broad Chota Nagpur Plateau which extends northeast across Jharkhand State, recently carved from southeastern Bihar.

The Chattisgarh Plain is drained to the east by the Mahanadi ('Great River') which rises close to Kanker and Bastar and runs through Orissa into the Bay of Bengal.

To the south, the plain runs out in the small former princely state of Kanker, beyond which Keshkal Ghat climbs to the Bastar Plateau. Bastar, once a princely state and before 1998 India's largest single district, is the forest home of the Muria, Bison-Horn Maria and other Gond tribes. Three hundred kms south of Raipur the Indravati River, rising in Orissa, bisects the mineral-rich Bastar region before running west and south into the east-flowing Godaveri in Andhra Pradesh.

North of the Indravati on Bastar's Maharashtra border, the wild hills of Abhujmar are still the forest home of the shy Hill Maria, most remote of all Secret India's Gond tribes.

Gondwana itself no longer features as a name on the map of India. The country of the Gonds, a variety of aboriginal tribes who speak dialects of the Dravidian Gondi language, is a vast area of Central India roughly bordered by the Vindhya Hills to the north, the Godaveri River to the south and the Eastern Ghats of Andhra and Orissa.

In tectonics the name Gondwana appears again. Gondwanaland is the hypothetical southern super continent that once linked South America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica and peninsular India. Evidence of this is found in the rock strata known as the Karroo System in Southern Africa, the Santa Catharina System in South America and the Gondwana System in Central India.

The Gondwana System is centred around Central India's west-flowing Narmada River, considered by many to be more sacred than Ganga (Ganges) and probably older by a hundred and fifty million years...

ALTITUDE

The elevation of Secret India's central highlands varies from 600 to about 900 metres (2-3000 ft.) ASL.

Amarkantak, source of the Narmada and Son rivers, sits at 1057m. In the south, the Bastar Plateau at about 600m (2000 ft.) is nearly 500m above the Chattisgarh Plain, rising in the west to peaks of over 1000m in the Abhujmar Hills. South of Bastar, on the railway line that runs across the Eastern Ghats to Visakhapatnam, sits the highest broad gauge station in India (998m), at Shimiliguda in Andhra Pradesh.   

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