Toda

Toda, pastoral tribe of the Nīlgiri Hills of southern India. Numbering only about 800 in the early 1960s, they were rapidly increasing in population because of improved health facilities. The Toda language is Dravidian but is the most aberrant of that linguistic stock.

The Toda live in settlements of from three to seven small thatched houses scattered over the pasture slopes; built on a wooden framework, the typical house has an arched roof in the shape of a half barrel. The Toda traditionally trade dairy products, as well as cane and bamboo articles, with the other Nīlgiri peoples, receiving Baḍaga grain and cloth and Kota tools and pottery in exchange. Kurumba jungle people play music for Toda funerals and supply various forest products.

Toda religion centres on the all-important buffalo. Ritual must be performed for almost every dairy activity, from milking and giving the herds salt to churning butter and shifting pastures seasonally. There are ceremonies for the ordination of dairymen-priests, for rebuilding dairies, and for rethatching funerary temples. These rites and the complex funeral rituals are the major occasions of social intercourse, when intricate poetic songs alluding to the buffalo cult are composed and chanted.

Polyandry is fairly common; several men, usually brothers, may share one wife. When a Toda woman becomes pregnant one of her husbands ceremonially presents her with a toy bow and arrow, thus proclaiming himself the social father of her children.

Some Toda pasture land has come under recent cultivation by other peoples and much of it has been reforested. This threatens to undermine Toda culture by greatly diminishing the buffalo herds. A separate community of Toda (numbering 187 in 1960) converted to Christianity during the 20th century.