The Todas

1. Toda Man. Full Face 19 2. Toda Man. Side Face 20 3. Toda Woman. Full Face 21 4. Toda Woman. Side Face 22 5. The Village of Taradr, showing two Dairies in the Foreground and t...

The people whose manners and customs I am about to describe live on the undulating plateau of the Nilgiri Hills in Southern India. The hills were visited by a Portuguese mission...

I do not propose to describe at any length the physical characters of the Todas. [8] It must be sufficient to say here that the people differ remarkably in general appearance, a...

The milking and churning operations of the dairy form the basis of the greater part of the religious ritual of the Todas. The lives of the people are largely devoted to their bu...

This chapter will be devoted to a description of the various kinds of dairy which are found at the Toda villages. An account will be given of the daily course of the dairy opera...

The ti is the name of an institution which comprises a herd of buffaloes with a number of dairies and grazing districts tended by a dairyman-priest or priests called palol with...

At certain seasons of the year it is customary that the buffaloes both of the village and the ti should migrate from one place to another. Sometimes the village buffaloes are ac...

Before a dairyman enters upon office he has to undergo certain initial rites, which may fitly be spoken of as “ordination ceremonies.” These ceremonies vary greatly in their ela...

I have so far dealt with the organisation and ritual of the dairy, with the ceremonies accompanying the movements of the buffaloes from one place to another, and with the ceremo...

The ceremonies which have been described in the last five chapters make up a large part of the ritual of the Toda religion, but there is one important feature of this ritual whi...

In the chapters in which the ritual of the dairies has been described, one of the most important features of the ceremonial has been passed over which must now be fully describe...

In the preceding chapters I have given an account of an elaborate ritual wholly connected with the buffalo and with the dairy. This ritual is certainly of a religious character,...

This chapter will furnish a very good example of specialisation of religious and magical functions among the Todas. We shall find that certain Todas have the power of divination...

In this chapter various ceremonies will be described which may all be regarded as examples of propitiation of the higher powers by sacrifices or offerings. We shall see later th...

The ceremonies connected with childbirth begin before the birth of the child. These ceremonies are only performed for the first child or when the woman obtains a new husband, so...

The funeral ceremonies of a Toda may be prolonged over many months. Soon after death the body is burnt and the general name for the ceremony on this occasion is etvainolkedr, th...

The second funeral may be held little more than a month after the etvainolkedr, or there may be an interval of a year or more, and in the case of a child both funeral ceremonies...

nipa), and if he is not re-appointed, his duties then cease. The new wursol, or the old wursol who has undergone new ordination ceremonies, takes the mani from the stream and pu...

We have seen that nearly every Toda ceremony has its appointed day or days, and that the choice of these is often dependent on another Toda institution, the sacred day, either o...

The Todas show undoubted signs of reverence to various material objects. Many of the objects so reverenced have been mentioned incidentally in the account of the dairy ritual an...

The last seventeen chapters have been almost entirely devoted to the religious institutions and ceremonies of the Todas. In the earlier chapters I have described the ritual of t...

ceremonial into definite relation with the Toda gods. In Chapter XI I have described practices and beliefs all of which stand in some relation to religion, though most of them m...

The power of the gods is believed to show itself in various ways. In several cases dairies have been disused because the dairymen have died in office, and this was said to have...

The preceding chapters have dealt with the ceremonies and religious aspect of the life of the Todas. This and succeeding chapters will deal with the social organisation and the...

The system of kinship was studied chiefly by means of the genealogies. The Todas are sufficiently intelligent to be able to give satisfactory definitions of their terms expressi...

The custom of infant marriage is well established among the Todas, and a child is often married when only two or three years of age. When a man wishes to arrange a marriage for...

In this chapter I propose to bring together a number of matters connected with the social organisation; to consider the various sections into which the clan is divided for socia...

connexion with the irnörtiti ceremony, the whole regulation of which is dominated by the division into kudr. So far as I could ascertain, the kudr has now no other significance,...

The list of offences given on p. 295 includes quarrelling between people of the same clan at a festival and quarrelling in the dairy. In both cases the quarrelling is an offence...

The arts of life among the Todas are extremely simple. The fact that their agriculture is done for them by the Badagas and that all the objects they use in their daily life are...

My chief purpose in writing this chapter is to give information which, I hope, may increase the value of the linguistic material which is scattered throughout this book, and esp...

The ceremonies of name-giving have already been considered, the chief point of interest being that the name of a boy is given to him by his maternal uncle, while that of a girl...

In this chapter I propose to put together the chief facts with which I am acquainted which throw light on the very difficult problem of the relations between the Todas and the o...

In this chapter I propose to give a short account of each of the Toda clans with any special features which characterise its ceremonial and social organisation. The chapter will...

The existence of these two divisions of the Toda people raises one of the most interesting problems of their social organisation. The fact that the Todas are an Indian people at...

I have now given the whole of the material which I have collected on the institutions of the Todas. In describing these institutions I have discussed various general problems su...