Bagheli

Baghelis are the Eastern Hindi-speaking people of Baghelkhand, the wooded Vindhya country of Rewa and Chitrakuta. Their speech, Bagheli, stands close to neighbouring Awadhi and shares the literary world of the eastern Hindi lands.

The region takes its name from the Baghel Rajputs, a Vaghela branch of the Solanki clan, whose chief Vyaghra Dev founded the kingdom of Bandhogarh around 1140 and ruled from the hill fort of Bandhavgarh. His successors kept an independent court amid the rise of the Delhi sultans and Mughals: the boy Akbar found refuge in Rewa when Humayun fled India, and in the mid-sixteenth century Raja Ramachandra Singh sent the musicians Tansen and, later, Birbal to the emperor's court.

In 1580 Akbar folded Bandhogarh into his new Subah of Ilahabad, and in 1617 Maharaja Vikramaditya Singh moved the capital to Rewa, from which the Baghel rajas ruled until accepting British protection in 1812.