CHHATTISGARH, a division of the Central Provinces of India, comprising a British division (21,240 sq. m.) and two small feudatory states, Raigarh (1486 sq. m.) and Sarangarh (540 sq. m.). In 1905 the five Oriya states of Bamra, Rairakhol, Sonpur, Patna and Kalahandi were transferred from the Central Provinces to Bengal. Chhattisgarh, or “the thirty-six forts,” is a low-lying plain, enclosed on every side by hills and forests, while a rocky barrier shuts it off from the Nagpur plain on the west. Two great rivers, the Nerbudda and Sone, take their rise at the side of the Amarkantak hill in the north-west corner of the division, the Nerbudda flowing nearly due west to the Bombay coast, the Sone ultimately falling into the Ganges in Lower Bengal. Protected on both sides by ranges of hills, the district was, until late years, the least known portion of the most obscure division of India, but recently it has been opened up by the Bengal-Nagpur railway, and has developed into a great grain-producing country. Its population is almost pure Hindu, except in the two great tracts of hill and forest, where the aboriginal tribes retired before the Aryan invasion. It remained comparatively unaffected either by the Oriya immigration on the east, or by the later influx of Mahrattas on the west. For though the Mahrattas conquered and governed the country for a period, they did not take possession of the land. In 1901 the population of the two remaining feudatory states was 125,281, Raigarh having 86,543 and Sarangarh 38,738. Much of the soil is still covered with forest, but it includes fertile rice land.
The British division of Chhattisgarh comprises the three districts of Drug (created in 1906), Raipur and Bilaspur. In 1905 the district of Sambalpur, together with the five feudatory states, was transferred to Bengal. In 1901 the population of the reduced area was 2,642,983.
CHHINDWARA, a town and district of British India, in the Nerbudda division of the Central Provinces. The site of the town is 2200 ft. above sea-level, and is surrounded by ranges of low hills. The European station extends for nearly 2 m. and is well wooded. It is considered very healthy, and forms a resort for European visitors from Nagpur and Kampti during the hot weather.
The area of the District of Chhindwara is 4631 sq. m. It has two natural subdivisions—the hill country above the slopes of the Satpura mountains, called the Balaghat, and a tract of low land to the south called the Zerghat. The high tableland of the Balaghat lies for the most part upon the great basaltic formation which stretches across the Satpuras as far east as Jubbulpore. The country consists of a regular succession of hills and fertile valleys, formed by the small ranges which cross its surface east and west. The average height of the uplands is 2500 ft., but there are many points of greater elevation. The appearance of the Zerghat below the hills is generally open and undulating. The country is intersected by several streams, of which the Kanhan is the most considerable. Near the hills and along the streams are strips and patches of jungle; the villages are usually surrounded with picturesque groves of tamarind, mango and other shade-giving trees. In the hill-country the climate is temperate and healthy. In the cold season ice is frequently seen in the small tanks at an elevation of about 2000 ft. Until May the hot wind is little felt, while during the rains the weather is cool and agreeable. The average annual rainfall amounts to 36 in. Pop. (1901) 407,927. There are manufactures of cotton cloth and brassware. Coal in this neighbourhood began to be worked after the opening of a branch of the Bengal-Nagpur railway to Chhindwara and the coalfields to the north in 1905.
Chhindwara formed part of the dominions of the ancient Gond dynasty of Chhindwara and Nagpur, whose seat was at Deogarh until, in the 18th century, it was removed by Chand Sultan, son of Bakht Buland (founder of the short-lived greatness of the dynasty, and of the city of Nagpur) to Nagpur (see [Gondwana] and [Nagpur]).
CHIABRERA, GABRIELLO (1552-1637), Italian poet, sometimes called the Italian Pindar, was of patrician descent, and was born at Savona, a little town in the domain of the Genoese republic, twenty-eight years after the birth of Ronsard, with whom he has far more in common than with the great Greek whose echo he sought to make himself. As he has told in the pleasant fragment of autobiography prefixed to his works, in which, like Caesar, he speaks of himself in the third person, he was a posthumous child; he went to Rome at the age of nine years, under the care of his uncle Giovanni. There he read with a private tutor, suffered severely from two fevers in succession, and was sent at last, for the sake of society, to the Jesuits’ College, where he remained till his twentieth year, studying philosophy, as he says, “più per trattenimento che per apprendere,”—rather for occupation than for learning’s sake. Losing his uncle about this time, Chiabrera returned to Savona, “again to see his own and be seen by them.” In a little while, however, he returned to Rome, and entered the household of a cardinal, where he remained for several years, frequenting the society of Paulus Manutius and of Sperone Speroni, the dramatist and critic of Tasso, and attending the lectures and hearing the conversation of Mureto. His revenge of an insult offered him obliged him to betake himself once more to Savona, where, to amuse himself, he read poetry, and particularly Greek. The poets of his choice were Pindar and Anacreon, and these he studied till it grew to be his ambition to reproduce in his own tongue their rhythms and structures, and so to enrich his country with a new form of verse—in his own words, “like his countryman, Columbus, to find a new world or drown.” His reputation was made at once; but he seldom quitted Savona, though often invited to do so, saving for journeys of pleasure, in which he greatly delighted, and for occasional visits to the courts of princes whither he was often summoned, for his verse’s sake, and in his capacity as a dramatist. At the ripe age of fifty he took to himself a wife, one Lelia Pavese, by whom he had no children. After a simple and blameless life, during which he produced a vast quantity of verse—epic, tragic, pastoral, lyrical and satirical—he died in 1637, at the patriarchal age of eighty-five. An epitaph was written for him in elegant Latin by Urban VIII.; but on his tombstone are graven two quaint Italian hexameters of his own, in which the gazer is warned from the poet’s own example not to prefer Parnassus to Calvary.
A maker of odes in all their elaborate pomp of strophe and antistrophe, a master of new and complex rhythms, a coiner of ambitious words and composite epithets, an employer of audacious transpositions and inversions, and the inventor of a new system of poetic diction,—it is not surprising that Chiabrera should have been compared with Ronsard. Both were destined to suffer eclipse as great and sudden as had been their glory. Ronsard was succeeded by Malherbe and by French literature, properly so-called; Chiabrera was the last of the great Italians, and after him literature languished till the second renaissance under Manzoni. Chiabrera, however, was a man of merit, apart from that of the mere innovator. Setting aside his epics and dramas (one of the latter received the honours of translation at the hands of Nicolas Chrétien, a sort of scenic du Bartas), much of his work remains yet readable and pleasant. His grand Pindarics are dull, it is true, but some of his Canzonette, like the anacreontics of Ronsard, are exceedingly elegant and graceful. His autobiographical sketch is also extremely interesting. The simple old poet, with his adoration of Greek (when a thing pleased him greatly he was wont to talk of it as “Greek Verse”), his delight in journeys and sight-seeing, his dislike for literary talk save with intimates and equals, his vanities and vengeances, his pride in the memory of favours bestowed on him by popes and princes, his “infinita maraviglia” over Virgil’s versification and metaphor, his fondness for masculine rhymes and blank verse, his quiet Christianity, is a figure deserving perhaps of more study than is likely to be bestowed on that “new world” of art which it was his glory to fancy his own, by discovery and by conquest.
The best editions of Chiabrera are those of Rome (1718, 3 vols. 8vo); of Venice (1731, 4 vols. 8vo); of Leghorn (1781, 5 vols. 12mo); and of Milan (1807, 3 vols. 8vo). These only contain his lyric work; all the rest he wrote has been long forgotten.