Inside Koraput and Rayagada: The Tribal Villages of Southern Odisha That Time Has Not Erased

The last stretch into Koraput comes through hills that fold into each other like something breathing. There are no billboards. The trees are sal and teak, and the light through them is the particular green that exists only in places where the canopy has not been interrupted in decades. By the time you reach the town, you have already understood that the usual vocabulary of Indian tourism, heritage, experience, getaway, does not quite fit what this place is.

Koraput district sits in the far south of Odisha, bordering Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Rayagada lies to its north, and between the two districts, the Eastern Ghats run in ridges that have historically kept the interior communities at a remove from the plains. That remove is not accidental. The Kondh, the Dongria Kondh, the Bonda, the Gadaba, the Paroja, these are among the tribal communities who have lived across this region for centuries, and their presence here is not a relic. It is a fact of the present tense.

Every Thursday and Sunday, the weekly haat at Chatikona in Rayagada fills before sunrise. Women from Dongria Kondh villages walk down from the hills carrying turmeric they have grown, tamarind they have collected, and sometimes live chickens trussed in leaf rope. They wear the distinctive nose rings and beaded jewellery that mark Dongria identity, not for the visitors, who are few, but because that is how they have always dressed for the market.

The haat is loud and specific. Bargaining happens in Kui and Gondi and fragments of Odia. The vegetables are not the vegetables of a city market: there are roots whose names exist only in the local tongue, greens that have no standardised trade, forest mushrooms that appear only in certain seasons. To walk through it is to understand that the indigenous food economy of this region is not a survival mode. It is a sophisticated system that the mainstream agricultural market has simply not absorbed.

At Jeypore, the larger town in Koraput, there is a different kind of haat, more mixed, more accessible. But even there, the tribal communities who come to sell are not performing their culture. They are running their week.

The Bonda highlands near Mudulipada are among the most discussed and the most misrepresented communities in this part of India. The Bonda, also called Remo, which is their name for themselves, number only a few thousand. They speak a language from the Munda family that linguists classify as significantly distinct from its neighbours. The women wear distinctive brass rings and minimal clothing that has generated decades of anthropological attention, much of it extractive.

What that attention often misses is the internal coherence of Bonda society: the clan structures, the oral literature, the agricultural calendar that governs when to plant and when to let the land rest. The Bonda practice shifting cultivation on the slopes, and their knowledge of which forest plants are medicinal, which are seasonal, and which are to be left alone is not documented in any government archive. It lives in the community.

The Kondh villages spread across both Koraput and Rayagada, and the Dongria Kondh specifically inhabit the Niyamgiri hills, a range that became internationally known after a prolonged legal and community-led resistance against a bauxite mining project. In 2013, the gram sabhas of twelve Dongria Kondh villages voted unanimously against the mine. The Niyamgiri hills, which the Dongria Kondh regard as the body of their deity Niyam Raja, remained. The forest remained. The communities remained. That outcome is not a small thing in the history of indigenous land rights in India.

Arriving in Koraput or Rayagada as a visitor requires a particular kind of honesty about what you are doing. These are not communities that have set up a tourism infrastructure for your comfort. There are government-run tribal museums in Koraput town, and the Tribal Research Institute in Bhubaneswar has documentation, but the actual villages are not open in the way a heritage site is open. Entry to many areas requires permissions, and some communities have actively chosen not to be accessible to outsiders.

The visitors who find this region most rewarding tend to be those who arrive with patience rather than an itinerary. The landscape itself is enough to justify the journey: the Saberi river, the Deomali peak which is the highest point in Odisha, the Duduma waterfall where the Machkund river drops into a gorge. The culture is not a backdrop to these places. It is the reason the places are what they are, the Deomali forests are intact partly because the communities around them have treated them as sacred rather than as resource.

The phrase used most often about these communities, that they have "changed very little", is both true and incomplete. The Dongria Kondh have mobile phones now. Some Bonda children attend residential schools. Koraput town has a university. The change is real.

What has not changed is the underlying grammar of how these communities organise their lives: the relationship to the land as something inhabited rather than owned, the authority of clan elders in dispute resolution, the ritual calendar that still governs agriculture and marriage and death. These are not traditions maintained out of nostalgia. They are functional systems that the communities have chosen to keep because they work, because they carry meaning, and because the alternatives on offer have not always served them well.

A traveller who arrives expecting to find people frozen in the past will be confused. A traveller who arrives expecting to find people exactly like themselves will also be confused. The communities of Koraput and Rayagada are neither museum pieces nor mirrors. They are sovereign, specific, and entirely themselves.

What the journey through southern Odisha actually teaches is something about the relationship between place and culture that the rest of India has largely severed. The forest is not scenery here. The haat is not quaint. The villages are not remote, they are simply located at the centre of their own world, which happens not to be yours.