Gond Storytelling: The Living Oral Traditions of Central India's Largest Adivasi Community

Stories as Cosmology: The World the Gond Carry in Their Narratives

There is a story the Gond people of central India tell about the origin of the world. In the beginning, there was only water. From the water rose Lingo Pen, the supreme deity, who created the earth, the forests, and human beings. The story is not simply mythology. It is also an instruction manual — about how to live in relationship with the forest, how to honour the land, and what it means to be human.

The Gond are among the largest Adivasi communities in India, with a population the 2011 Census placed at over twelve million, distributed primarily across Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh. They speak multiple Gondi dialects, classified within the Dravidian language family, though many Gond communities have shifted to Hindi, Marathi, or Telugu in daily life.

Across this vast and linguistically varied community runs a shared oral tradition of extraordinary richness — one that has only partially been documented by scholars and that remains, for many Gond communities, a living daily practice.

This article is the first in Spin A Yarn India's series on the storytelling traditions of India's Adivasi communities. The Gond offer a starting point not because they are more important than other communities, but because their storytelling tradition is well enough documented to write about responsibly — and because what has been documented reveals something important about how stories function as knowledge systems.

Gond oral tradition does not separate entertainment from teaching. A story about a tiger in the forest is also a story about ecological relationship. A story about a royal marriage is also a story about community governance. A story about the creation of iron tools is also a story about the origins of specific clans.

This integration of knowledge and narrative is characteristic of many Adivasi oral traditions, and scholars working on Gond literature have documented how the community's stories encode a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, social organisation, and spiritual life.

The Gond world is populated by a complex cosmology of deities, spirits, and ancestors. Bara Deo, the great god, and Dulha Deo, the bridegroom deity, are central figures in many narratives. The forest is not merely a backdrop but an active participant in the story — rivers speak, trees witness, animals carry messages.

Scholars working at Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya in Bhopal have documented aspects of Gond oral tradition, though a fully systematic documentation remains incomplete. What is available suggests that Gond oral literature includes: Pak narratives — creation and origin stories explaining how the world and specific communities came into being; Deval narratives — stories centred on deities and their relationship with humans; historical narratives — oral histories of migration, conflict, and community formation; agricultural stories — narratives tied to seasonal cycles, farming practices, and forest use; and stories of resistance, including narratives connected to the Gond kingdom of Garha-Mandla and its queen, Rani Durgavati.

Rani Durgavati: When History Becomes Oral Tradition

Rani Durgavati is one of the most significant figures in Gond historical memory. A sixteenth-century queen of the Garha-Mandla kingdom in what is now Madhya Pradesh, she led her forces against the Mughal empire under Akbar in 1564 and died in battle rather than surrender. Her story has been documented in historical sources, but what is significant for storytelling is that she also lives in Gond oral tradition — retold in songs, in spoken narratives, and in community memory in ways that go beyond what written history records.

This is the double life that historical figures often acquire in oral cultures. In the written historical record, Rani Durgavati is a significant but bounded figure. In Gond oral tradition, she becomes something larger — a symbol of resistance, of female agency, of the relationship between a ruler and the land. The oral story does not merely repeat the historical facts. It carries the emotional and political meaning of those facts across generations.

The Government of India has recognised Rani Durgavati as a national figure, and the Madhya Pradesh government declared 24 June as Rani Durgavati Balidan Diwas. But the oral tradition that kept her memory alive through four centuries of changing political contexts belongs to the Gond community — and that oral tradition deserves to be understood as a form of historical knowledge in its own right.

Gond Art and the Visual Language of Story

Any serious account of Gond storytelling must include its visual dimension. Gond art — particularly the tradition associated with Patangarh in Mandla district, Madhya Pradesh — is not merely decorative. It is a visual storytelling system in which patterns carry specific meanings, where the arrangement of dots and lines encodes cosmological knowledge, and where the natural world is depicted in a way that makes ecological relationships legible.

Artists such as Jangarh Singh Shyam, widely credited with bringing Gond art to wider attention through his work at Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya in Bhopal in the 1980s, demonstrated that Gond visual art could carry its traditional knowledge systems into contemporary forms. Shyam's paintings depicted the Gond world — its forests, its deities, its spirits — using a visual language rooted in traditional Gond artistic conventions.

It would be inaccurate to say that Gond art was a single coherent tradition before it entered contemporary art markets. As scholars have noted, the Patangarh Gond art form that became internationally recognised was in part shaped by the context of its documentation and promotion. This complexity should be acknowledged rather than smoothed over: oral and visual traditions are not static, and their relationship with documentation, marketisation, and external recognition involves real tensions and changes.

What can be said is that for many Gond artists, the act of painting continues to be connected to storytelling — to making the Gond cosmological world visible, and to preserving and transmitting a way of understanding the natural and spiritual world.

Language, Loss, and What Is Being Preserved

Gondi, the language spoken by many (though not all) Gond communities, is classified by UNESCO as a vulnerable language. The 2011 Census recorded approximately 2.7 million speakers of Gondi, a significant decline from earlier estimates. Many Gond children now grow up speaking Hindi, Marathi, or Telugu as their primary language, and the oral traditions that were carried in Gondi are subject to the same pressures that affect all oral traditions when a language contracts.

This does not mean that Gond oral tradition is simply disappearing. Some communities actively maintain it. Some younger Gond activists and scholars are engaged in documentation and revitalisation. The relationship between language shift and cultural knowledge is complex: some communities find ways to carry their knowledge into a new language medium, while other knowledge proves tied to the original language in ways that cannot fully survive translation.

What is clear is that systematic documentation of Gond oral tradition — carried out with community participation, in genuine partnership with Gond communities rather than merely about them — is both important and incomplete.

What Gond Storytelling Teaches About the Function of Stories

The Gond oral tradition is a useful case study in why oral storytelling traditions matter beyond their cultural or aesthetic value.

First, they are knowledge systems. The stories carry ecological knowledge, governance knowledge, and social knowledge that has accumulated across generations of living in specific landscapes.

Second, they are identity systems. For communities whose relationship with land, forest, and ecological resources has been contested and disrupted by colonial and post-colonial governance, stories provide a form of continuity and belonging that cannot easily be dismantled.

Third, they are pedagogical systems. Children learn through stories how to relate to the natural world, what their community values, and how to understand their place in the cosmos.

Fourth, they are political documents. The narrative of Rani Durgavati is not merely historical. It is an assertion of Gond political history and Gond dignity that has been maintained against significant historical pressures.

The Gond oral tradition is one thread in India's extraordinary storytelling tapestry. If you work with schools, libraries, or communities in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, or Telangana and want to bring documented Adivasi storytelling into the classroom, Spin A Yarn India would like to hear from you.