Gondi people

The Gondi (Gōṇḍī) or Gond people, who refer to themselves as "Koitur" (Kōī, Kōītōr), are an ethnolinguistic group in India. Their native language, Gondi, belongs to the Dravidian family. They are spread over the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha. They are listed as a Scheduled Tribe for the purpose of India's system of reservation. The Gond have formed many kingdoms of historical significance. Gondwana was the ruling kingdom in the Gondwana region of India. This includes the eastern part of the Vidarbha of Maharashtra. The Garha Kingdom includes the parts of Madhya Pradesh immediately to the north of it and parts of western Chhattisgarh. The wider region extends beyond these, also including parts of northern Telangana, western Odisha, and southern Uttar Pradesh. Gondi is claimed to be related to the Telugu language. The 2011 Census of India recorded about 2.4 million speakers of Gondi as a macrolanguage and 2.91 million speakers of languages within the Gondi subgroup, including languages such as Maria (also known as Maadiya Gond). Many Gonds also speak regionally dominant languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu. According to the 1971 census, the Gondi population was 5.01 million. By the 1991 census, this had increased to 9.3 million and by 2001, the figure was nearly 11 million. For the past few decades, the group has been witness to the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency, in India. Gondi people, at the behest of the Chhattisgarh government, formed the Salwa Judum, an armed militant group, to fight the Naxalite insurgency. This was disbanded by order of the Supreme Court of India on 5 July 2011, however. The origin of the name Gond, used by outsiders, is still uncertain. Some believe the word to derive from the Dravidian kond, meaning hill, similar to the Khonds of Odisha. Another theory, according to Vol. 3 of the Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life, is that the name was given to them by the Mughal dynasty of the 16th–18th centuries.

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Related concepts (39)

Gondi people

Gondi language

Gondi (), natively known as Koitur (Kōī, Kōītōr), is a South-Central Dravidian language, spoken by about three million Gondi people, chiefly in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and by small minorities in neighbouring states. Although it is the language of the Gond people, it is highly endangered, with only one fifth of Gonds speaking the language. Gondi has a rich folk literature, examples of which are wedding songs and narrations.

Marathi people

The Marathi people (मराठी लोक) or Marathis (मराठी) are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who are indigenous to Maharashtra in western India. They natively speak Marathi, an Indo-Aryan language. Maharashtra was formed as a Marathi-speaking state of India in 1960, as part of a nationwide linguistic reorganization of the Indian states. The term "Maratha" is generally used by historians to refer to all Marathi-speaking peoples, irrespective of their caste; however, now it may refer to a Maharashtrian caste known as the Maratha.