Toda

ETHNONYMS: O.1, Todava, Ton, Tutavar

Orientation

Identification. The Toda, a small, traditionally pastoral community of the Nilgiri Mountains in south India, call themselves O.l (long rounded vowel, plus voiceless retroflex l ), meaning simply "the men." Their Badaga neighbors call them Todava, while Tamil speakers call them Tutavar. To other Nilgiri neighbors, the Kota, they are Ton. "Toda" is an anglicization of the Badaga form. Today the Toda include traditionalists (the majority) and a small breakaway Community of Christians.

Location. The Nilgiri Mountains of India's Tamil Nadu State rise spectacularly to an elevation of 2,400 meters. The highlands, where the Toda live, enjoy a temperate monsoonal climate, very different from the tropical plains below. The natural vegetation of the highlands is rolling grassland, with patches of temperate forest known as shola. As the Nilgiri slopes are precipitous and the thickly forested foothills were once highly malarial, the Toda and their highland neighbors lived for centuries in considerable isolation from the South Indian mainstream cultures.

Demography. Throughout recorded history the Toda community has been small. In 1603, a Jesuit priest who visited them wrote that the Toda numbered "about a thousand." The first government of India census in 1871 counted 693. In 1952 the parent, non-Christian community reached probably its all-time low of 475, and then it began slowly to increase. In August 1988 the author counted 1,042 Toda traditionalists (all but 35 living in Toda hamlets) and another 4 persons, born traditionalists but made outcaste for marrying non-Toda. The three Toda Christian settlements accounted for a further 133 people, but only 38 could claim pure Toda Descent; kin and affines of these Toda Christians, living elsewhere in India and abroad, numbered at least 150, but only 35 were of pure Toda descent. Traditionalists, together with Christians and Outcastes of pure Toda descent, therefore totaled 1,119. Female infanticide (officially prohibited in 1819, but continuing sporadically for several decades) probably accounted for ancient population limits. More recently, venereal infections kept numbers low until a drive to eradicate these diseases, begun in the 1950s, succeeded in raising the birthrate.

Linguistic Affiliation. A Dravidian language affiliated with Tamil-Malayalam, Toda may have emerged as a separate language in the third century b.c. It has no written form. Most Toda speak Tamil and Badagu in addition to their mother tongue. Literate Toda mostly write in Tamil; a few use English.

History and Cultural Relations

Despite much amateurish speculation about Toda origins in Greece, Rome, the Danube Basin, ancient Israel, Sumeria, and other unlikely places, the linguistic evidence points clearly to the people's South Indian roots. But because Toda emerged from the mother language before Tamil and Malayalam separated, we cannot be certain whether the community's ancestors ascended the Nilgiris from east or west, although west seems the better guess. (Toda say they were created on the Nilgiris.) Artifacts, seemingly unrelated to the Toda, from stone-circle burial sites in the highlands suggest that Toda were not there before the beginning of the Christian era. The first written evidence for Toda in or near the Nilgiris, an inscription on stone dated 1117, relates in Kannada how a Hoysala general "conquered the Toda" before dedicating the Nilgiri peak "to the Lakshmi of Victory." In 1799 the mountains became a British possession, though unadministered until after 1819. Before that time, Toda may have paid a grazing tax to overlords in the plains, but their physical isolation atop the high Nilgiris permitted a way of life mostly untrammeled by outside interference. After the assertion of British rule, Toda were never again to be quite free of state bureaucracy.

Linguistically, culturally, and economically distinct, the Toda are nonetheless an integral part of a traditional Nilgiri society whose affiliations—despite modifications due to physical isolation—are clearly with the wider civilization of south India. The Toda's traditional Nilgiri neighbors included: an artisan caste of potters, blacksmiths, and leather workers, the Kota; an immigrant group of Kannada-speaking castes with the common name of Badaga, who became the dominant food producers, hence political overlords, of the Nilgiris; and two forest-dwelling communities, Kurumba and Irula. These Nilgiri peoples maintained an interfamilial System of economic, ritual, and social interdependence very much within the tradition of multicaste rural communities throughout India. In typically Indic manner also, they recognized among themselves a social hierarchy based preeminently on considerations of relative ritual purity. In the early nineteenth century the isolation of the Toda homeland was shattered with the coming of the British administration. The resultant growth of an immigrant population, markets, and a cash-crop- and plantation-based economy disrupted the old economic interdependence of the Nilgiri peoples, while intensified contact with mainstream South Indian Hinduism eroded the foundations of the traditional ritual interdependence. Only vestiges of the old order now survive; modern Todas, several of them working in Nilgiri factories and a few college-educated, are as familiar with immigrant peoples as with their traditional Nilgiri neighbors, and they are far more conversant with the market economy than with the former system of intercommunity familial transactions.

Settlements

In 1988 there were 64 permanently occupied Toda hamlets (including the three Christian ones). Two dry-season Hamlets also were still being used. Seasonal hamlets in the wetter parts of the highlands used to be occupied from December through March, when regular grazing grounds are parched. At least 26 have been abandoned in the past twenty years. The 61 non-Christian hamlets contained 214 households and 1,078 people, giving means of 4.7 houses and just under 16.5 persons per settlement. (Two Christian settlements follow the normal Toda pattern; the other has 18 households and 91 people.) A traditional Toda hamlet comprises 1 to 5 barrel-vaulted houses, a buffalo pen, calf sheds, and sometimes a separate calf pen. The site must have ample grazing ground for buffalo, running water, and a shola nearby for firewood and building materials. Most hamlets, until recently, had at least one sacred dairy building; a few had up to three. Toda house styles and settlements have been changing for more than a century and in 1988 only 13 of the 214 houses were of the traditional barrel-vaulted style. The dairies, where they exist, retain the traditional architecture, but as many as 26 hamlets (43 percent of the total) have no dairy building at all, or only a ruin. Buffalo pens mostly remain, but often only a fenced-in portion is still being used. Much of the surounding pasture has been dug up for potato and vegetable cultivation and several sholas have been felled. All hamlets now have electricity.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. Traditional Toda economy revolves around their herds of female, longhorned, short-legged, and rather ferocious mountain water buffalo. Being vegetarians, Toda keep these animals for their milk and milk products, selling most male calves to Nilgiri butchers. In pre-British, premarket days, Toda exchanged milk products for grain (various millets) from Badaga, for pots and jewelry from Kota, and for forest products, mostly from Kurumba. These exchanges (involving also ritual and social obligations) took place between hereditarily linked families of the different communities, as is typical of Hindu jajmani relationships. Today, with the old economic interrelationships defunct, Toda who still keep enough buffalo mostly sell their milk through two cooperatives or directly to coffee shops, and they use cash to buy rice in the Nilgiri markets. Almost all Toda families are today involved in agriculture, if only as landlords. Growing numbers till the soil themselves, a radical departure for a proud pastoral people who once despised the agriculturalist's way of life. The principal crops are cabbages, carrots, and, above all, potatoes. Apart from their buffalo, traditional Toda, as vegetarians, had no need of Domestic animals other than dogs, to watch over their settlements, and a few cats as house pets and vermin catchers. Toda Christians began to replace their buffalo with cattle early in this century; some traditionalists now also keep a few cows.

Industrial Arts. Toda obtain their clay pots, metal utensils, and textiles from outside their community (formerly through exchange, now in the markets). They are expert builders of their traditional (but not modern) houses and dairy temples, and they are skilled manufacturers of dairy appurtenances: herding and walking sticks, milking vessels, and churning sticks.

Division of Labor. Traditionally, care for the buffalo is an exclusively male concern and women are the principal housekeepers (although men cook on ritually important occasions). Women also devote much time to embroidery. When Toda take up agriculture, both men and women work in the fields.

Land Tenure. As buffalo pastoralists, Toda used rather than owned land. In 1843, however, the British administration began allocating land to the Toda, and by 1863 had alloted a little over 18 hectares to each hamlet and religious site. Patta (land titles) issued to Toda listed the names of household heads but stated that rights were communal, not individual. From 1871, the deeds also stipulated that Toda must not alienate their patta lands and, from 1881, that they could not lease them. These stipulations remain, although all along many Toda have leased land covertly to people more willing than themselves to farm. In 1975, the Hill Area Development Programme provided financial assistance to each Toda household to cultivate a maximum of 2 hectares of Toda patta land; the cultivated land was, for the first time, registered in the name of an individual, the family head. Since patta lands remain tied to the patricians, any division for agricultural purposes has had to be made between household heads of the same patrician. Not all patricians have sufficient lands to permit every family its 2-hectare maximum.

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. The typically Dravidian classificatory system operates independently of any particular Society's descent system. In the Toda case, it is found together with double-unilineal descent, for these people have a full-fledged patrilineal and matrilineal descent system, such that each Toda has both patrician and matriclan membership, each one being exogamous.

Kinship Terminology. The Toda kinship system follows the classificatory principles common to most Dravidian-speaking peoples. Most importantly, a parent's siblings of the same sex as one's parent are classified as "parents"; those of opposite sex are termed "uncles" and "aunts" and belong to a completely different category of relative. The offspring of one's actual and classificatory parents are his or her siblings; marriage or sexual relations would then be incestuous. The children of uncles and aunts are "cousins," who are preferred marriage partners. All children of one's same-sex siblings, actual or classificatory, are classificatory children, a large category. A more restricted category in this first descending Generation is that of the actual offspring of one's actual siblings of the opposite sex, the "nephews" and "nieces," who are the preferred spouses for Ego's own children. The Toda system thus distinguishes in three crucial generations two very Different categories of relatives: parents, siblings, and children constitute the kin group, while uncles and aunts, cousins, and nephews and nieces (potential parents-in-law, spouses, and children's spouses) are the affinal or, more strictly, "potentially affinal" group.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. In Toda terms "marriage" must be defined as an alliance by which a female of any age, preferably a mother's brother's daughter or father's sister's daughter, is incorporated into the patrician of a male, who is thereafter considered her husband, whether or not they live together. Marriages are negotiated and initiated usually before the partners are 2 or 3 years old and are completed at maturity, when the husband takes his wife from her home to his own hamlet. In ritual terms the children are as truly married as the adults. Traditionally, Toda practiced fraternal polyandry, younger brothers becoming cohusbands to the eldest's wife. Now abandoned, polyandry was necessary because of the sexual imbalance caused by female infanticide (also abandoned long ago). Some Toda, usually the wealthy older men, take a Second or third wife. In the past this could result in two or more brothers sharing two or more wives. Some polygynous unions still exist among Toda, but monogamy is now the norm and, for most younger Toda, the ideal as well. Another consequence of the past shortage of women is the continuing institution of "marriage by capture," enabling men to take the wives of others and have the union regularized by payment of compensation in buffalo to the former husband. When a young man takes his wife from her parental home, they Usually live first in his father's house. Subsequently they may build a house of their own in that hamlet or in another of the same patrician. Inaugurated in infancy and easily broken by elopement, Toda marriages are rather brittle. Nonetheless, formai divorce (a man returns his wife to her father's home, proclaiming the union terminated) is a very rare event that brings disgrace to a woman and insults both her father and her children.

Domestic Unit. At the present time, the occupants of a single dwelling usually comprise a nuclear family: husband, wife, and their unmarried children. Except in the case of a widow with small children, the household head is always an adult male. In the past, with both polyandrous and polygynous marriages, households were often more complex.

Inheritance. The household head is custodian of the household's property: the house itself, domestic equipment, family heirlooms (personal jewelry, and ornaments and bells for buffalo), the buffalo, and, in recent times, a portion of the patrician's patta lands as well. Some of this property, especially buffalo, may be distributed to a man's sons when he retires from active herding. On his death, all that remains is Divided equally among his sons. Daughters receive nothing except a dowry. A widow with young sons is merely the guardian of the household property until her eldest son reaches manhood.

Socialization. Children are much desired and infants treated with indulgence by parents and elder siblings. Breastfed for up to three years, they may have to be weaned by the mother applying the juice of an astringent plant to her nipples. Swaddled in pieces of old cloth, the infants are slowly toilet-trained. After a year or so, if they misbehave they will be reprimanded and perhaps stung on their buttocks with a nettle. For good behavior they are rewarded with candy and biscuits. From very young ages boys begin to play at being Buffalo herders and girls at being mothers and housewives; slowly play merges into the real thing. More and more Toda children now attend school, but education is not compulsory.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. Toda society is divided into two endogamous and hierarchically ordered subcastes, with differing relationships to the community's sacred dairy cult: one ritually higher subcaste owns the most sacred of the dairies and the other subcaste alone may operate them. Each subcaste is again divided into named exogamous patricians, which own the hamlets, funeral places, and sometimes an isolated dairy site. A patrician has four subdivisions: kwï·r, a Ritual bifurcation; po·llm an economic section, of which there may be more than two; hamlet and family. The two subcastes are also divided into exogamous matriclans, important Descent categories for marital and ritual purposes but lacking corporate unity.

Political Organization. Toda society functions without formal headmen at any level, except the household, where the eldest male is dominant. A caste council makes political decisions affecting the whole community: all adult males may participate, debating each issue until a consensus is reached. Matters concerning one subcaste alone, or one patrician, are debated by the subcaste or patrician council respectively, comprising all adult male members who wish to participate. Because Toda have long recognized the politicoeconomic (but not ritual) dominance of the Badaga, they sometimes ask certain Badaga leaders to participate in their caste council.

Social Control. The household head is responsible for the good behavior of all who live under his roof. Disputes Between households are mediated by the patrician council; unresolved cases may be taken to the subcaste or, finally, caste council. Each patrician oversees its own members, but disputes between patrician members may go to a subcaste or ultimately a caste council for resolution. The subcaste also operates through its subcaste council to regulate its members, with the possibility of taking unresolved issues before the caste council. The caste council has the power to deal with any infringement of social conduct within the community and can fine or excommunicate offenders.

Conflict. The Toda have no weapons of war or martial Institutions. Conflicts, either between individuals or groups, only occasionally provoke physical violence rather than the vitriolic verbal confrontation that is common. The various councils—clan, subcaste, and caste—are quick to intervene, defuse emotions, and argue for compromise.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs and Practitioners. Traditional Toda cosmology identifies two worlds: that of the living, ruled by the goddess Tökisy, and that of the dead, where her brother, Ö·n, reigns supreme. There is no conception of an eternal Hell, but those who have led unmeritorious lives are said to suffer many indignities before they too eventually reach the other world. Toda also have appropriated much of the world-view of their Hindu neighbors, and concepts of ritual purity, pollution, hierarchy, and ritual specialization underlie even the most indigenous of Toda ritual practices. Pilgrimage to Hindu temples, no recent innovation, is increasingly popular among younger Toda. Toda religion finds ritual expression principally in the cult of the sacred dairies and their associated buffalo herds. Buffalo are categorized as secular (the mainstay of the traditional economy) or sacred (with several gradations). For the latter, ritual surrounds every task of the dairyman: herding, milking, churning, and preparing ghee (clarified butter) from butter, as well as seasonal or occasional activities such as burning the pastures (now discontinued), naming a buffalo, giving salt to the herds, driving them to dry-season pastures, and rethatching or rebuilding a dairy building. Dairies, which Toda themselves identify as temples, are buildings kept in a state of ritual purity so that dairymen-priests (of comparable ritual purity) can process inside them the milk from associated herds of sacred buffalo. Ranked in a hierarchy, each grade of dairy has its associated grade of sacred buffalo and dairyman-priest. The higher the grade of a dairy, the greater is the need for ritual purity and the more elaborate the rituals that surround the daily tasks of the dairyman. Another category of religious specialist are the "god men," who in trance become mouthpieces of particular deities, frequently Hindu rather than Toda ones. Christian missionaries of several denominations have proselytized among the Toda, the most successful being those of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, whose first Toda convert in 1904 marked the beginning of a breakaway Toda Christian community. Now denominationally affiliated to the Church of South India, this community has churches in two of its three hamlets. Because of widespread intermarriage with non-Toda Christians and the use of Tamil, not Toda, as its principal language, this Christian community retains few traces of traditional Toda culture, although some of its Members remain proudly conscious of their Toda ethnicity. The Toda populate their supernatural world with several anthropomorphic deities generically termed "gods of the Mountains," because most of them are said to reside on Nilgiri peaks. The most important is the goddess Tökisy, creator of the Toda and their buffalo and ordainer of their principal Social and ritual institutions. Other deities, the "gods of the sacred places," represent the divine essences of the more sacred of the dairy complexes; they too are sometimes conceived anthropomorphically. Most modern Toda worship Hindu deities, displaying lithographic icons of Shiva, Vishnu, Murugan, Aiyappan, etc. in their homes and sometimes even keeping an elaborate "gods' room" such as one finds among the Hindu mainstream.

Ceremonies. Apart from the intricate observances of the sacred dairy cult, the principal Toda ceremonies mark the passage through life. Pregnancy and birth traditionally involved periods of physical isolation for the women to prevent ritual defilement of a hamlet and particularly of its dairy. Paternity is a social fact determined by ritual rather than biology; a man acknowledges fatherhood of an unborn child by presenting the pregnant woman (in her seventh month) with a stylized bow and arrow. Important childhood ceremonies, more highly ritualized for boys than girls, are: the first uncovering of an infant's face outside the house and its subsequent naming; the marriage of infants; and the piercing of a boy's ears to mark ritual (not physical) maturity. Symbolic and actual defloration once initiated adulthood for a girl, but these customs probably have been abandoned. Ceremony also attends a man's taking of his mature wife from her parental home. Death occasions the greatest elaboration of Toda Ritual (see below). Modern Toda actively participate in Hindu temple rituals, while Toda Christians follow the liturgical practices, mostly Anglican-derived, of the Church of South India.

Arts. The principal Toda arts are oral poetry, often but not necessarily sung to accompany dance, and embroidery. Women alone are the embroiderers, embellishing with geometric designs the large cloaks that Toda wear and producing tablecloths, placemats, etc. for sale. Both men and women compose songs about any noteworthy event in a rigidly conventionalized poetic language that uses parallelism to great effect. Practically every detail in Toda life has its special phrase that, in song, must be followed by a parallel phrase, either synonymous with or linked by convention to the first phrase: "all the hamlets / all the sacred places," "European in the courts / important man in the places," "child in the lap / calf in the pen," etc.

Medicine. Toda may attribute sickness to natural causes, the malevolence of supernatural beings, or the sorcery of Humans (especially Kurumba, traditionally feared for their supposed magical powers). They may take traditional herbal or modern pharmaceutical medicines, offer vows to Toda dairies, Hindu temples, Muslim mosques, or Christian churches, or seek the services of a Kurumba in countersorcery.

Death and Afterlife. The death of an unnamed infant receives no public recognition, that of a named child some, and that of a respected elder a great deal. Traditionally two Funeral rites were held and it was believed that the deceased could not enter the Land of the Dead until the second was complete. At the first funeral, the body was cremated; at the second, a relic (lock of hair or fragment of bone) was burned. The rituals of the two were very similar, the relic substituting for the corpse in the second. Today second funerals are no longer held, their concluding rites having been appended to the first ceremony. At a funeral, every major division of Toda society and every principal kinship and affinal role comes into play, and buffalo are sacrificed to accompany the dead to the afterworld: secular animals for females, sacred and secular ones for males. Reformists recently have opposed buffalo sacrifice and have, on occasion, prevented it. The Toda locate the world of the dead to the west and below the Nilgiri Plateau, possibly indicating Toda origins in Kerala. The several routes to this afterworld can actually be followed to the edge of the Nilgiri massif. Toda say that the world of the dead is much like that of the living, except that it has a harder surface. Instead of people and buffalo eroding the land, they wear down their own legs, and when their shortened limbs make life in "the other-side place" impossible, their spirits are reborn as Toda or Toda buffalo of the Nilgiri highlands.

See also Badaga; Kota; Kurumba

Bibliography

Emeneau, Murray B. (1967). Dravidian Linguistics, Ethnology, and Folktales: Collected Papers. Department of linguistics Publication. Annamalainagar: Annamalai University Press.

Emeneau, Murray B. (1971). Toda Songs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Emeneau, Murray B. (1974). Ritual Structure and Language Structure of the Todas. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 63, no. 6. Philadelphia.

Nambiar, P. K. (1965). Census of India 1961. Vol. 9, Madras, pt. 5-C, Todas. Delhi: Manager of Publications, Government of India.

Rivers, W. H. R. (1906). The Todas. London: Macmillan.

Walker, Anthony R. (1986). The Toda of South India: A New Look. Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation.

ANTHONY R. WALKER