Bundeli

The Bundeli are the Indo-Aryan people of Bundelkhand, the dry hill country between the Yamuna River and the Vindhya Range, whose main settlements in 1337 included Khajuraho. Their language, Bundeli or Bundelkhandi, descends from Sauraseni Apabhramsha and belongs to the Western Hindi group, closely related to Braj Bhasha.

The region, once called Jejakabhukti, was the heartland of the Chandela dynasty, builders of the Khajuraho temples, until the twelfth century; it then passed to the Khangars and from the fourteenth century to the Bundela Rajputs, who gave Bundelkhand its present name. Bundeli bardic verse goes back to the Alha-Khand epic about twelfth-century heroes, while formal written literature developed under Mughal-era patronage, including works at the court of Chhatrasal of Panna.

The Bundela states submitted to the Mughals, although Chhatrasal of Panna rebelled against Aurangzeb and ruled from 1675 to 1731, and in the early nineteenth century they entered British paramountcy as tributary princely states.