Open Contemporary Version (Chhattisgarhi)

The Biblica Open Chhattisgarhi Contemporary Version is the open edition of the contemporary translation that Biblica, the organization behind the NIV, maintains in Chhattisgarhi. Its copyright lists the years 2012, 2016, 2021, 2024, a sign of a text that went through more than one round of work before reaching this edition. Chhattisgarhi is the language of the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, related to Hindi and written in Devanagari. The local title calls the work सुतंतर, “free.”

Biblica's contemporary versions translate for meaning: the priority is that each sentence sounds natural in Chhattisgarhi and is understood on first reading, even when that moves away from the word order of the Hebrew and Greek. It is a text meant to be read aloud, in church and at home.

The gain here is real: many Chhattisgarhi speakers read the Bible in Hindi at church, and this edition brings the text back to the language of home. The honest limit comes from the method itself: by choosing one interpretation to make the text clear, the translation sometimes closes doors the original leaves open. For close study of a word or a construction, compare it with a more literal version.

Biblica has released several of its translations as Biblica Open, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0), with the original available at biblica.com and open.bible. Anyone may read, quote and redistribute the text freely, with credit and under the same license, and that is what makes it possible to offer it here.