Halbi

The Halbi are the Halba people of the Bastar hills in southern Chhattisgarh, centred on Jagdalpur, with kin in Odisha. Their Halbi tongue is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language between Odia and Marathi, mixed with Chhattisgarhi, in Odia and Devanagari scripts and used as a trade language across the central Indian forests.

Linguistic evidence marks them as an aboriginal people who adopted Hinduism and Indo-European speech; traditionally cultivators, they served as militia and palace guards for the kings of Bastar and Gond rajas of Chanda.

The Bastar kingdom was founded around 1324 by Annamaraja, brother of the last Kakatiya king, and its rulers built the temple of goddess Danteshwari at Dantewada in the fourteenth century. When it split into Bastar and Kanker in the fifteenth century, the Halbas formed their military class; their later eighteenth-century revolt against the Bastar throne was put down with Maratha and British support.