XX. GENEALOGIES AND POPULATION
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 more secular side of the life of the people.
The social organisation has been studied largely by means of the genealogical record which is given in Appendix V. Before going to India I had worked out the details of the system of kinship, of the regulation of marriage, and of the social organisation generally of two Papuan communities on the basis of the pedigrees preserved by those communities.
It is a familiar fact that, both in ancient writings and in the memories of peoples to whom writing is unknown, long lists of ancestors may be preserved, going back in some cases to mythical times. Among existing peoples good examples of such genealogies are found in Polynesia and Uganda, but such a genealogical record is of little value for the investigation of social organisation.
The records which I obtained in Torres Straits were of a different kind; they only extended back for three or four generations, but included all collateral lines, so that a man was able to tell me all the descendants of his great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather, and knew the descent of his mother, his father’s mother, his mother’s mother, and his wife as fully as that of his father. By this means I was able to collect [188] a record of the great majority of marriages which had taken place in the community for the last three or four generations, was able to work out the laws which had regulated these marriages and to study in detail the system of kinship.
On going to the Todas, one of my first objects was to discover if their pedigrees were preserved with the same completeness and fidelity as among the Papuans of Torres Straits.
It seemed at first as if I was to be disappointed. Those to whom I first broached the subject professed not to know the names of their own fathers and mothers. Some said they had forgotten them, but their demeanour excited the suspicion that reticence, and not ignorance, was the cause of the failure, and it soon became clear that this suspicion was correct.
There was a taboo on the names of the dead, and especially on those of dead ancestors. No Toda liked to speak of the dead by name, but to utter the name of a dead elder relative was strictly forbidden, and to the end of my visit I never heard the name of a dead man from one of his descendants. Thus the last piece of genealogical information which I collected was that of the names of the father and mother of Kòdrner, my constant attendant. The fact that he was always with me had prevented my inquiries into his parentage.
Having discovered the cause of failure it soon became evident that the Todas preserved their pedigrees almost, if not quite, as fully as the natives of Torres Straits. As in the islands, certain men had especial reputations as repositories of genealogical lore, and I began my investigations with the aid of one of the most famous of these, Parkurs (8), an old man almost blind as the result of cataract and so feeble that he had to be carried when he came to see me. With his aid and that of many others I compiled the records given in Appendix V.
Throughout my visit, the collection of this genealogical material was regarded as something which should not be done. I never carried on this branch of my work during what I may call my public hours when I was visited by anyone who chose to come. At these times I sometimes obtained from a man the names of his wife and children, but always left any further inquiries till the time reserved for my investigations into more esoteric matters, when only one man was alone with me and was not subject to the restraints imposed by auditors who might disapprove of the utterance of the names of the dead.
One result of the taboo on the names of dead ancestors was that the record of a man’s family was never obtained from one of that family; but this was no disadvantage, for the genealogical knowledge of those from whom I obtained my data was so wide that it covered the families of the whole or nearly the whole of the Toda community. I have no doubt that I could have obtained the whole of the material given in the tables from two men, one of whom would have given me the genealogies of the Tartharol, and the other those of the Teivaliol, and if I had chosen my informants wisely, I believe that their information would have been as full and accurate as that obtained from my many sources of information. Further, I found that the Teivaliol had a wide knowledge of Tarthar genealogies, and vice versâ, though a man of one division usually refused to guarantee the accuracy of anything he told me about the other division, and would often disclaim knowledge which some chance observation later showed that he possessed, at any rate in some measure.
Although certain Todas had special reputations for their knowledge of pedigrees and were undoubtedly more proficient in this respect than the general mass of the community, I believe that the knowledge was very widely spread throughout the people. My guide Kòdrner never professed to any special knowledge of genealogies, and yet chance observations would often show that his acquaintance with the pedigrees of the community was far more extensive and accurate than his professions would have led one to expect.
The results of the inquiry are given in Tables 1–72. This large accumulation of genealogical material was obtained from people who professed at first not to know the names of their own fathers and mothers. It would have been quite easy for me to have come away from the Todas and reported them as a people who did not preserve their genealogies.
The pedigrees are recorded in exactly the same manner as those which I have published in the Reports of the Torres Straits Expedition, with the modifications rendered necessary by the presence of polyandry and infant marriage among the Todas. In any one table the descendants in the male line only are given, descendants in the female line being recorded in the genealogies of the husbands. Thus, if one wishes to ascertain the descendants of Pilivurch in Table 1, it is necessary to turn to Table 20 recording the genealogy of Teithi, the husband of this woman. The names of males are in capital letters, those of females in ordinary type, and the name of a wife always follows the name of her husband or husbands. Under the name of each individual is placed, in italics, the name of the clan to which the individual belongs, or, in the case of a married woman, of the clan to which she had belonged before marriage. The names of those now living are given in Clarendon type, of which Mudrigeidi and Savdur in Table 1 are examples. The abbreviation i.m. stands for “infant marriage.” The abbreviations d.y. and d.n.n. stand for “died young” and “died before being named” respectively. The latter implies that the child died within a few weeks of birth.
When the names of men are enclosed in square brackets, polyandry, and when the names of women are so enclosed, polygyny, is indicated.
In the Torres Straits Reports I have shown that there are definite reasons why the people should have preserved their pedigrees so fully. The pedigrees are not preserved for amusement nor out of idle interest in the doings of ancestors or neighbours. In Torres Straits the complex and far-reaching nature of the marriage regulations form the chief motive for the preservation of the pedigrees, while the transmission of property is perhaps of almost equal importance.
Among the Todas we shall see that the marriage regulations are far simpler than among the Papuans of Torres Straits, and in their case the chief motive is probably connected with the inheritance of buffaloes, the only form of property in which the Toda takes much interest. In the succeeding chapters we shall find several examples of social transactions in which the knowledge derived from the genealogical record has determined the issue.
THE VALUE OF THE GENEALOGICAL RECORD
In the succeeding chapters I shall show the value of the genealogies in working out the nature of the system of kinship and in providing statistical material for the study of the marriage regulations. The greater part of my work on the social aspect of the life of the Todas is based on material derived from the genealogies; or perhaps I should rather say that most of the information I give has been checked, if not entirely obtained, by means of the genealogies.
I wish, however, to draw attention here to a far wider use of the genealogies in anthropological investigation. They bring a concrete element into anthropological work which greatly facilitates inquiry. The lower one goes in the social or intellectual scale in mankind, the greater difficulty is there in dealing with abstractions. The savage mind is almost wholly occupied with the concrete. Discuss his laws of inheritance with him, and you probably soon become hopelessly entangled in misunderstanding. Take a number of concrete cases, and his memory will enable him to heap instance upon instance showing how property was inherited in given cases. Similarly, in ceremonies, ask the savage to give an account of a given ceremony, and he probably omits many essential points, not because he forgets them, but because they are so familiar to him that he thinks you, like himself, take them for granted. Ask him to tell you exactly what A and B did when they performed a given ceremony, and he forms a mental picture of A and B going through the ceremony, and tells you exactly what they did and how they did it. When another individual comes into the ceremony, he too comes in as a concrete personage, and his sayings and doings are faithfully recorded.
The Todas are so intelligent that the genealogies were not so essential an instrument of investigation as was the case in Torres Straits, but they were nevertheless of enormous value in giving concreteness to the accounts of the Toda ceremonies. The Todas certainly gave fuller and more faithful accounts of their ceremonies when they described actual events, but such descriptions would have been of little value to me if I had not had my pedigrees as a guide. An account of a Toda funeral, for instance, with its many dramatis personæ would probably have baffled my powers of comprehension if I had not had my book of genealogies for reference.
I always worked with this book by my side whenever I was investigating any ceremonial in which the social side of life was concerned. I asked for a description of some ceremony recently performed of which the memories were fresh. The chief actors in the ceremony were always mentioned by name; and whenever a name occurred, I looked up the clan and family of the person in question and noticed his relationship to other persons who had taken part in the ceremony. The actors in the ceremony were thus real people to me as well as to my informants, and the account of the ceremony proceeded with the maximum of interest and the minimum of fatigue both to myself and to my informants.
The method had the further advantage that it afforded me the means of checking the accounts which I was given. An informant inclined to be careless soon found that I had the means of checking his narrative on many points; and some of the people, not knowing the source of my information, credited me with more knowledge than I really possessed, and were in consequence extremely careful not to wander from the truth, or perhaps I should rather say, not to tell me anything of which they were not absolutely certain. I have already stated my belief that the Todas are very truthful and that they err far more often from carelessness than intention, but the fact that I had a fund of knowledge of which the source was somewhat mysterious probably saved me from having much of my time wasted by careless or inaccurate information.
I think that my familiarity with the names and circumstances of the people helped me to acquire their confidence. Among the more simple people of Torres Straits, I used sometimes to let a man know, much to his astonishment, that I was acquainted with some of the affairs of his family. Among the more reticent Todas, it seemed to me unwise to do this, but, on meeting for the first time a man with whom I was already acquainted through the genealogies, I often referred to something I knew he had done, perhaps to the skilful way he had caught the buffalo at such and such a funeral, and the fact that I knew something of him and his doings often helped to put us at once on friendly terms, and at the same time put him on his mettle to give me the best of the knowledge at his command.
THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE GENEALOGIES
Before using the genealogical record as a means of studying the details of the social organisation, it may be well to consider what guarantee we have that the genealogies form a truthful record of the past. In Torres Straits, where I gained my first experience in these matters, I was so incredulous of the accuracy of the record that I obtained almost every particle of information from two or three different and independent sources, and it was only when I had finished that I found the whole mass of material to furnish a record so consistent in itself that it could hardly have been other than veracious.
Further, on investigating kinship and the regulation of marriage, both on the basis of the genealogical record, it was found that the results of one investigation closely corroborated the results of the other, and that the combined investigations gave so consistent and coherent a result that it was incredible that the genealogies on which the investigations were based should have been other than faithful and accurate records.
The Toda community is considerably larger than either of those with which I worked in the islands of Torres Straits, and when I found that the memories of the people extended back as far or nearly as far as in those islands, it became obvious that I was confronted with a task of considerable magnitude, and the question arose whether it was necessary to obtain separate accounts of every family from independent witnesses, as I had done previously, or whether I might not rely on the account of a family given by one witness and only seek corroboration occasionally. I began by following the same procedure as in Torres Straits, but soon found that the accounts obtained independently showed a close agreement, and I therefore contented myself in my later work with one account, though every now and again I went over a piece of a pedigree with a second witness. When I had finished, the consistency of all the parts of the record with one another seemed to afford conclusive evidence that I had obtained what is, on the whole, a veracious record.
Of course, in so large a mass of material there are mistakes. [189] In one family no doubt a child has been omitted, especially when it died young and had no posterity to make its name important; in another case perhaps a child has been added to a family who was really the offspring of another mother. That there are such mistakes is certain, but they are probably few in number, and I have no doubt that, with one exception to be presently considered, such mistakes as have crept in do not appreciably impair the value of the genealogies as a record of the working of social regulations.
There is one deficiency of the record, however, of the existence of which I have little doubt—a deficiency entirely due to my own carelessness. To me the chief interest of the genealogies is that they are a record of the past—a record of the working of social regulations which at the present time may be already affected by the new influences coming into the lives of primitive people all over the world. In my absorption in the records of the past, I have often neglected the present and have omitted to ascertain carefully the children of families at present in process of growth. In several cases I have failed to obtain the names of children of people now living, and I have very little doubt that I have in several or many cases omitted the names of other children of growing families. I had one excuse for this in the fact already mentioned, that I had to obtain my information about a given family from people of some other family. A man would often know all about the members of the given family in the past, but, living perhaps at some distance from the family in question, he was often hazy as to the exact number and names of the children recently born, and it is the record of children under five years of age which I know to be deficient.
If the number of the Todas now living and recorded in the genealogies be counted, it will be found that there are 736 individuals, 419 males and 317 females. In the census of 1901 the total population is given as 805,451 males and 354 females. My record falls short of that of the census by 69 individuals, 32 males and 37 females.
Further, when I arrange the people now living according to age, it is found that there is a distinct deficiency in children under five years of age. Thus, my records of age come out as follows:—
Males. Females. Above 65 years. 9 3 61–65 ,, 4 7 56–60 ,, 19 9 51–55 ,, 20 17 46–50 ,, 26 21 41–45 ,, 26 18 36–40 ,, 26 27 31–35 ,, 40 25 26–30 ,, 40 33 21–25 ,, 38 28 16–20 ,, 32 31 11–15 ,, 41 20 6–10 ,, 54 33 5 and under 44 45 --- --- Total 419 317
The ages upon which this table is based could only be obtained very roughly, and the figures must be taken merely as rough approximations to the truth. The irregularities of the table may be due partly to this defect, but it is very improbable that there are about the same number of children of five and under as of children between six and ten, and we may be fairly confident that but for omissions the numbers of the youngest group, especially of boys, would have been larger.
I have reason to believe, further, that I have not omitted any appreciable number of adults or children over five years of age. I tested 320 males and 183 females for colour-blindness, and as I was anxious to test every member of the community who was old enough, I obtained towards the end of my visit the names of all those who had not been tested. I only attempted to test children when over five years of age, and I have therefore an independent record of the living Todas above this age, so that it is fairly certain that the greater part of the deficiency in the genealogical record is of children about or below the age of five, though it is possible that I may also have missed a certain number of women.
This deficiency does not in the slightest degree affect the value of the pedigrees as a record of marriages or of the working of social regulations, but it does impair the value of the statistics concerning the average size of a family and other matters of biological interest, though only for the last generation.
On looking through my genealogical tables, it will be seen that different clans and families differ very greatly in the fulness of their record. In some cases I have pedigrees going back to the great-grandfathers of men now in middle life; in other cases I have only the names of the fathers of such men. The briefness of the record is especially marked in the case of the outlying clans, such as Kwòdrdoni, Pedrkars, and Päm, which I only visited for short periods. During these visits there was so much to be done that something had to suffer and the genealogies were usually the victims. If I had had more time, I have little doubt that I could have obtained much fuller records in many cases.
BUFFALO PEDIGREES
Marshall has stated that the Todas preserve the pedigrees of their buffaloes in the female line, and when I had found how carefully the Todas preserved their own pedigrees my next step was to endeavour to ascertain if the pedigrees of their buffaloes were preserved with the same amount of care and completeness. I returned to this subject again and again, but with very imperfect success. The Todas always treated my inquiries on this subject as if they were trifling and ridiculous. It is possible that this was one of the points on which they were reticent, but I am inclined to think that I was told all there was to tell.
To a certain extent it is correct to say that the pedigrees of the buffaloes are preserved, and in the female line only. If any given buffalo were taken as the starting-point, the owner could usually tell me the names of the mother of the buffalo and of the mother’s mother, and occasionally I obtained the names of the immediate ancestors in the female line for four generations. Thus, Nertiners of Taradr (24) had a buffalo named Kârstum who was the daughter of Idrsh. Idrsh was the daughter of Persud, who was the daughter of Nerûv, who was the daughter of Kiûd. Another of his buffaloes, Keien, was descended from Koisi, Nerûv, and Kâsimi in the order named.
I could not ascertain that the Todas kept any record of the collateral lines of descent, nor was there, so far as I could find, any idea of kinship between buffaloes descended from the same recent ancestor. Two buffaloes born of the same mother would be known, of course, to be sisters, but no importance seemed to be attached to the relationship.
An obvious reason for the limitation of the pedigrees of the buffaloes to the female line is the fact that only female buffaloes are named, so that there are no means of recording male parentage. We shall see later that among themselves the Todas attach little importance to paternity, and the same indifference is found in their attitude towards their buffaloes. The essential reason for the nature of the record of buffalo-descent is the complete absence of desire to maintain the purity of the breed, even of the most sacred herds, and the complete lack of attention to ties of consanguinity between buffaloes mated together.
THE TODA POPULATION
The chapters on kinship and marriage will furnish object-lessons on the method of application of the knowledge derived from the genealogies to the study of social regulations. In the remainder of this chapter I propose to consider various problems connected with population, of biological as well as of sociological interest. The data derived from the genealogies are here of distinct service, though, for reasons already considered, their value is not so great as in the investigation of social regulations.
Records of the numbers of the Todas have been taken at various times, beginning with what must have been a very rough estimate made by Keys [190] in 1812, in which the number of the Todas or Thothavurs was placed at 179. In 1821, Ward [191] estimated the numbers of men and women at 140 and 82 respectively, of whom the great majority lived in the Todanad district of the hills.
Hough [192] in 1825 found the population to consist of 145 men, 100 women, 45 boys, and 36 girls, altogether 326.
In 1838, Birch [193] gives the population as consisting of 294 men and 184 women, amounting to 478, but elsewhere in his paper he says that the number of the Todas was computed at about 800.
In 1847, Ouchterlony [194] found the number of the Todas to be 337, made up of 86 adult males, 87 male children, 70 adult females, and 94 female children. The proportion of males to females is only 173 to 164, showing a very much smaller preponderance of males than in any other estimate before or since.
In 1856, Grigg [195] gives 185 males and 131 females, altogether 316.
In 1866, Grigg gives the population as 704. If the estimates of this year and that of 1856 were correct, it would show that the population had more than doubled in ten years. It is evident that the census of 1866 is the first which gives anything approaching an accurate record of the Toda population. Even in this year there is one obvious source of error, for it would seem that those living at the foot of the hills, near Gudalur were not included, and probably twenty or thirty, if not more, would have to be added on this account.
For the census of 1871 the records are conflicting. On p. 29 of the Manual, Grigg gives the numbers as 693, 405 males and 288 females. On p. 187 he gives instead of these numbers 376 males and 263 females, making a total of 639. Breeks gives the latter numbers and also a revised result which brings out the total population as 683. This figure, or the earlier of Grigg’s figures, evidently approximates to the correct population, which shows a slight falling off as compared with five years earlier.
In the census of 1881, the numbers would appear to have continued to diminish, the population being put at only 675; 382 males and 293 females.
In 1891, the number had risen to 736; 424 males and 312 females.
In the census of 1901, which was taken with especial care to record all the Todas, there were found to be 451 males and 354 females, making together 805.
The population as recorded in my genealogical tables compiled in 1902 was only 736; 419 males and 317 females. My numbers fall far short of those of the census taken a year previously. As I have already pointed out, my genealogies are untrustworthy as a record of the young children of the community now living, and it is possible also that I have omitted a certain number of women. The excess of men over women is distinctly greater in my figures than in the census of 1901, and this may be due to the fact that I failed to hear of a certain number of widows or unmarried women or girls. If so, it is probable that these defects are in the genealogies of the Teivaliol, and it is in them that the excess of men is greatest.
The earlier records of the population are certainly far below the mark. Captain Harkness, writing in 1832, estimates the attendance at a funeral at 300 men, nearly half that number of women, and about as many boys and girls. Those seen by Harkness may not have been all Todas, since Badagas and Kotas undoubtedly attend Toda funerals, but we may safely call this a total attendance of 500, which would show that the records of Hough in 1825 and of Birch in 1838 are far below the mark, and that Birch’s rough estimate of 800 is probably far more nearly correct, and may even have been too small.
The records have probably been fairly complete since 1866, and if so, they show a falling off in population from this date till the 1881 census. It is, however, possible that the gradual increase in numbers during recent censuses has been due to the greater care taken at each succeeding census. Unsatisfactory as the records are, they seem to point to a diminution of population about the middle of the last century, which ceased between 1880 and 1890, since which time the population has probably increased.
Mr. R. C. Punnett [196] has analysed the data furnished by my genealogical records to ascertain the average size of the Toda family. He divided the families recorded in the genealogies into four groups: (A) those where the eldest child would in 1903 be over 90 years of age; (B) those where he would be between 60 and 90; (C) and (D) those where he would be between 30 and 60 and between 0 and 30 respectively. He has recorded the results for Tartharol and Teivaliol separately in the following table.
Group. Tartharol. Teivaliol. No. of Average size ♂s per No. of Average size ♂s per families. of family. 100 ♀s. families. of family. 100 ♀s.
A 9 3·0 [4·2] 237·5 4 4·5 [6·0] 200 B 49 4·1 [5·0] 159·7 21 3·8 [5·4] 259 C 87 3·3 [3·7] 131·4 40 3·8 [5·0] 202 D 104 2·5 [2·8] 129·2 45 2·3 [2·9] 171
The figures in square brackets give the average size of the family for each generation, making allowance for cases of female infanticide, which we shall see presently to be a Toda custom which is almost certainly diminishing in frequency.
The conclusion Mr. Punnett draws from this table is that there has been a marked decrease in fertility during the period covered by the genealogies.
The defects in my record as regards young children make any conclusions about the last generation very inconclusive, but since the record for very young children is certainly defective, and since many families now existing will certainly increase in size, it is probable that any progressive decrease in the size of a family has now been arrested, and the details of the genealogical record would therefore agree with the Census Reports in showing the presence of a distinct tendency of the Toda population to increase.
None of the previous records have given any indication of the numbers of the two chief divisions of the Toda people. According to my genealogical records, there were living, in 1902, 528 Tartharol and 208 Teivaliol. The defects in my record are probably somewhat greater for the Teivaliol than for the Tartharol, but any difference there may be is certainly not great, and I think we may conclude that, though these figures are not accurate, they represent approximately the true proportion of the numbers of the two divisions. It is quite certain that the Tartharol are more than twice as numerous as the Teivaliol. Mr. Punnett’s table does not show any great difference between the two divisions in the average size of the family, so that the proportion between the numbers of the two divisions has probably not altered during the period covered by the genealogical record. It is probable that the Teivaliol have always or for a very long time been the smaller division.
The Census Reports and the genealogical record then agree in pointing to a diminution of the Toda population about the middle of last century which has now ceased, the probability being that the Todas are increasing slightly in numbers.
There can be little doubt that any decrease in the Toda population about the middle of last century was the direct result of the changes brought about by the advent of Europeans to the Nilgiri Hills. The adverse influences which came into the lives of the Todas probably owe their origin to the large immigration of native servants and to the development of the bazaar. Though Europeans first began to come to the Nilgiri Hills about 1820, it was not till twenty or thirty years later that they arrived in any considerable numbers, so that it was probably the middle of the century before the injurious influences made their effects felt to any great effect.
The especial influences injurious to fertility have probably been syphilis and sexual immorality, for the Todas do not appear to have fallen to any very great extent under the influence of alcohol or opium. They certainly take both, and especially after the market day at the Ootacamund bazaar, I have seen Todas obviously under the influence of drink; but I believe this to have been only an influence of minor importance on the health of the people. Syphilis, on the other hand, has undoubtedly affected them to a considerable extent. At the present time its ravages are not very obvious, though, without looking for it especially, I saw several examples of its effects. There can be little doubt, however, that it has been a potent factor in the past. In a note in a book by A. C. Burnell, [197] it is mentioned that in 1871 thirty-one Todas were treated at Ootacamund for venereal disease, and of these thirty were syphilitic. This means that in one year over 4 per cent. of the total Toda population were treated for syphilis at one place, and we may be fairly confident that all those suffering from the disease did not apply for treatment.
Another factor working towards the diminution of the population has probably been sexual immorality. I shall have to return to this subject again later, and must be content here to point out that the Toda women have a very bad reputation, though perhaps their laxity is not as great as is usually supposed. Still, there can be little doubt that the women of some villages are extremely immoral, and it is probable that this has distinctly tended to produce sterility.
If the diminution in the size of the Toda family is due to these adverse influences, it should be found to be greatest in those sections of the Toda community which have been most subject to these influences. The best way of throwing light on this question is to compare the fertility of the different clans of the Tartharol. Some of these, such as Nòdrs, Pan, Taradr, and Kanòdrs, either live in outlying parts of the hills or are sufficiently remote from the chief centres of the European population not to have been influenced very greatly.
The chief village of the Kars clan is situated close to Ootacamund and has suffered greatly from its neighbours, but many of the villages of the clan are more remote, so that the clan may be put down as one partly influenced. The people of Päm and Nidrsi, on the other hand, are more influenced than any other of the Toda clans, as is shown by the alterations in their villages and the neglect of the ritual of their religion. The villages of the Pämol are, or were, near to Wellington Barracks, and it is certainly the most degenerated of all the Toda clans. The following table, taken from Mr. Punnett’s paper, shows the average size of the family in each case, and though the figures are somewhat irregular, they bear out the view that sterility is greater the more the people have come into contact with Europeans and their followers.
Name of clan. No. of No. of Average size Average size families. offspring. of family. of family for group.
Nòdrs } 14 54 3·84 } 3·59 Pan } (uninfluenced) 8 21 2·37 } Taradr } 9 43 4·77 } Kanòdrs } 11 33 3·00 }
Kars (partly influenced) 25 76 3·04 3·04
Päm } (much influenced) 10 22 2·20 } 2·60 Nidrsi } 10 30 3·00 }
PROPORTION OF THE SEXES
The records of the Toda population in the past all show an excess of men over women, and with the exception of the record of Ouchterlony, which is certainly untrustworthy, the excess is considerable. In view of their untrustworthiness no importance can be attached to the records taken earlier than that of 1866, and in the report for that year I have been unable to ascertain the proportions of the sexes. In 1871 there were 140·6 men for every 100 women; in 1881, 130·4 for every 100; in 1891, 135·9, and in the census of 1901, 127·4 men for every 100 women. My figures, derived from the genealogical record, give for 1902, 132·2 men for every 100 women, a proportion distinctly greater than that of the census, which suggests that it is in the female portion of the community that my records are most defective.
In the table on p. 474 taken from Mr. Punnett’s paper, it is seen that the data derived from the genealogical record agree with those of the Census Reports in showing on the whole a progressive decrease in the excess of men over women. The number of families in the first group is too small to give them much importance, but for the three succeeding generations of the Tartharol, the numbers of males for every 100 females are 159·7, 131·4, and 129·2, while for the Teivaliol the figures are 259, 202, and 171 respectively.
The Census Reports and the genealogical record thus agree in showing a progressive diminution in the excess of men over women.
There can be little doubt as to the cause of this. All accounts of the Todas agree in attributing to them the practice of female infanticide, though, at the present time, the Todas are very chary of acknowledging the existence of the practice. They deny it absolutely for the present, and they are reluctant to speak about it for the past.
I do not think that there is the slightest doubt that it was at one time very prevalent, and that it has greatly diminished in frequency, but that it is still practised to some extent. The chance remarks of children to my interpreter, Samuel, had shown him that the practice is still followed occasionally, and I think it far from unlikely that it is even now not a very rare occurrence.
In Mr. Punnett’s table, it will be seen that the genealogical data show that the excess of men is far greater in the Teivaliol than in the Tartharol, and the excess in the former is so great as to leave little doubt that the practice is still followed in this division not infrequently. If this is so, it is probably due to the fact that the Teivaliol chiefly inhabit the more outlying parts of the hills, so that, on the whole, they have been less affected than the Tartharol by the various influences which have come into the lives of the Todas. An accessory factor may have been the priestly functions of the Teivalioi, which have probably tended to make them more conservative.
Previous writers on the Todas have differed considerably in their accounts of the method of infanticide, and I regret very much that I cannot contribute any facts towards the settlement of the question. The subject was one about which the Todas talked so unwillingly that I made no great endeavours to arrive at the truth. A method which has been commonly attributed to the Todas is that of placing the infant at the gate of the buffalo-pen before this is opened in the morning, the herd rushing out and trampling on the child. Another less likely method has been said to be that the infant is drowned in buffalo milk.
The most probable account is that given to Marshall [198] by an aged Toda, who stated that the child is suffocated by an old woman, who receives a fee of four annas, and that the child is then buried, which, as we have seen, is the method of disposing of the bodies of still-born children.
There is little reason to connect the practice of female infanticide among the Todas with any deficiency in the necessaries for existence. It seems clear that at one time the Todas supplemented their food of milk with berries, roots, &c., but it is improbable that they were ever in such straits for food that they would have resorted to infanticide on this account. Marshall’s informant ascribed infanticide to the poverty of his people, but this was probably said in order to excuse the practice.
In an earlier part of this chapter we saw that there is evidence of a former diminution of the Toda population. At the same time we see that there is evidence of a diminution of the practice of female infanticide, which would, of course, tend to increase the population. It would thus seem that there have existed among the Todas, during the last fifty years, certain factors tending to diminish the population and one factor tending to increase it. We may conclude that, but for the diminution of infanticide, the falling off in numbers would have been greater, and that the tendency to increase which seems at present to exist may be due, wholly or in part, to the diminution of infanticide.
There is one indication that female infanticide has almost entirely ceased during the last five years, and even that there may now be an excess of female births. In the table of ages given on page 469, it will be seen that the pedigrees record more girls than boys of five years and under. There is no reason why my record of such young children should have been more defective for one sex than for the other, and the proportion here may be approximately correct.
TWINS
Twins are called ömumokh and it is the custom to kill one of them, even when both are boys. If they should be girls, it is probable that both would be killed, or, at any rate, would have been killed in the past.
There is one case of twins in the genealogies. Iraveli, the wife of Kwötuli and Nudriki (8), gave birth to twins about twelve years ago. Both were boys, and I was first told that one had died shortly after birth, but later inquiries made it almost certain that the boy had been killed. Some time after the birth of the twins, one of the buffaloes of Kwötuli and Nudriki is said to have had a calf with one body, two heads, and four legs. The buffalo died before the calf was born, and the monstrosity was found by the Kotas, to whom the body was given. It was generally expected that something would happen to Kwötuli or Nudriki, but they have since been very prosperous.
THE DETERMINATION OF AGE
This is a suitable place to say a word about the method I adopted to ascertain the ages of the Todas. Like all people at a low stage of culture, the Todas are very uncertain about their ages, though their knowledge is more accurate than that of many peoples. Every Toda knows, however, whether he is older or younger than another, this fact determining the names and salutations they give to one another, as we shall see in the next chapter. A few of the younger men seemed to have accurate knowledge of their ages, and building up on this basis, and with a knowledge of the relative ages of the different members of the community, it became possible to arrive at estimates which probably do not deviate very widely from the correct ages; even in the case of the older people, I do not believe that my estimated ages are likely to be more than five years out in any case. As already mentioned (see p. 416), the Todas make use, in the estimation of age, of their belief in the eighteen-year period of a flower, and the ages so estimated in a few cases agreed fairly with those arrived at in other ways.
Among those now alive, it seemed that the usual time which separates the birth of two children of the same mother is about three years, and I have taken this time as the rule in estimating the ages of all those whose names are included in the genealogies. Similarly, so far as I could tell, women begin to bear children when about eighteen to twenty years of age.
The ages of the four groups given in the table on p. 474 were calculated on the assumptions that a woman had her first child when twenty years old, and that the interval between the births of two children was three years.
The oldest Toda now living is Kiugi (57). He looks an extremely old man, and is said by the Todas to be nearly a hundred years of age. There is evidence which makes it probable that he is at least eighty or ninety. Kòrs, the father of Kiugi, performed the pursütpimi ceremony before the birth of Teitchi (52) (see p. 564). Teitchi’s grandson, Kuriolv, is now about fifty-four years of age. When Kòrs gave the bow and arrow he may have been only a young boy, and if we assume that he was fifteen years old, that Teitchi and Pareivan had their first children when twenty years old, and that the interval between the birth of Pilzink and that of Pareivan was six years, it would make the age of Kòrs, if he were still alive, 115. If Kiugi was born when his father was twenty years old, it would make his age ninety-five. If, on the other hand, we assume that Kòrs gave the bow and arrow when only ten years of age, and that he did not have his first child till he was thirty, it would make Kiugi’s age eighty. Kiugi’s eldest child, if alive, would now probably be about sixty, and this supports the view that the lowest possible estimate of Kiugi’s age is eighty, and he is not improbably a good deal older.
XXI. KINSHIP
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 expressing different kinds of relationship, but the genealogies were very useful in checking these definitions and in working out several points in detail.
The Toda system of kinship is of the kind known as classificatory with several interesting special features. Perhaps the most important of these is the use of the same terms for mother’s brother and father-in-law on the one hand, and for father’s sister and mother-in-law on the other hand. This is a natural consequence of the regulation which ordains that the proper marriage for a man is one with the daughter either of his mother’s brother or father’s sister.
Another important feature of the Toda system is the existence of two well-marked groups of terms expressing bonds of kinship; one used when speaking of relatives, and the other when speaking to relatives and in exclamations. The latter, which may be regarded as vocative cases of the former, are fewer in number and used in a much more general sense; and if the two are not distinguished, it is easy to understand that one may find only “inextricable confusion in Toda ideas as to relationship.” [199] I will first give a list of kinship terms, together with the forms used in direct address, and the approximate definitions, and these will be followed by a discussion of the exact meaning of each term. The vocative forms are enclosed in brackets.
Pevian, great-grandfather. Peviav, great-grandmother. Pian (pia), grandfather. Piav (piava), grandmother. In (aia), father. Av (ava), mother. Mokh (ena), son. Kugh (ena), daughter. Mokh pedvai mokh (ena), grandson. Mokh pedvai kugh (ena), granddaughter. An (anna), elder brother. Egal (egala), brother of same age. Nòdrved (enda), younger brother. Akkan (akka), elder sister. Nòdrvedkugh (enda), younger sister. Mun (mama), mother’s brother and wife’s father. Mumi (mimia), father’s sister and wife’s mother. Manmokh (ena), sister’s son. Mankugh (ena), sister’s daughter. Matchuni, child of a mother’s brother or father’s sister. Òl (òl or òlia), husband. Kotvai or tazmokh (tazmokh or tazmokhia), wife. Paiol, general name for male relatives of wife. Motvilth (ena), son’s wife.
A general name for those of the same clan is annatam, but I am not sure that this is not properly a borrowed word.
In giving a more detailed account of these terms of kinship, it will perhaps be convenient to begin with the relationship of in, or father.
In. A person speaks of his father as “en in,” “my father,” while “his father” would be “tan in.” An in is addressed as aia. These names are applied not only to the father, but also to the father’s brothers, whether they are husbands of the mother or not.
The names in or aia are also given to all the males of the clan (madol) who are of the same generation as the father; also to the husbands of the sisters of the mother, sisters here including both own sisters and clan-sisters, i.e., to the husbands of all those who are of the same clan and generation as the mother. Elder brothers of the father (either own brothers or clan-brothers) are often addressed as perudaia, while younger brothers are called karudaia, and in speaking of such men the expressions “en in perud” and “en in karud” would be used. When a man speaks of one of his more remote fathers, and it may be doubtful of whom he is speaking, he may add the name of the man; thus Siriar (20) would speak of Paniolv (26), the husband of his mother’s sister, as “Pani in.”
Av. A mother is spoken of as en av or tan av, and addressed as ava. These names are also applied to the wife of a father other than the actual mother, to the sisters of the mother, to the wives of the father’s brothers, and to the sisters of the wife’s father. Every woman of the same clan and generation as the mother is an av. In general the wife of an in is an av. As in the case of the in, a distinction is made between the elder and younger sisters of the mother, the former being addressed as perudava and the latter karudava. Similarly the wife of an elder brother of the father is perudava and of a younger karudava. Such relatives may be spoken of as “en av perud” and “en av karud.”
Mokh and Kugh. Every one whom a man calls in or av calls the man mokh, and every one to whom a woman gives these names calls the woman kugh. In direct address, both mokh and kugh are called ena (? enna).
In speaking of his brother’s children, a man may make clear whether he is speaking of the child of an elder or younger brother; thus he may say “en nòdrvedvain mokh,” “my younger brother’s son.” Mokh is often used as a general term for “child” and may be applied to persons of either sex.
Pian. This name is given to both paternal and maternal grandfathers and to their brothers, certainly in the narrow sense and probably in the wider. Every male of the speaker’s clan of the same generation as the father’s father would certainly be called “en pian.” The brother of the father’s mother is also called pian, but I am doubtful whether the term is used for all the clan-brothers of the father’s mother Similarly I am uncertain how far the clan-brothers of the mother’s father and mother’s mother receive this name. A pian is addressed as pia.
Piav. This is the name of both paternal and maternal grandmothers, and in general the wife of a pian is a piav. A piav is addressed as piava.
All those addressed as pian or piav will address the speaker as ena. When speaking of his grandson, a man will say “en mokh pedvai” or “en mokh pedvai mokh,” literally “my born to my son” or “my son born to my son,” and there were no less elaborate terms.
The son of a daughter is called en kugh pedvai mokh, “my daughter who born to son,” taking the words in order, or “my son born to my daughter.” A daughter of a son is called en mokh pedvai kugh, and the daughter of a daughter, en kugh pedvai kugh. Since, however, mokh is often used as a general name for “child,” I believe that this word usually takes the place of kugh, and that in consequence a grandchild of either sex is called en mokh pedvai mokh.
Pevian and peviav. These words for great-grandfather and great-grandmother have a similar wide connotation. The word pef is an ancient term for “great” which is used in some of the magical incantations (see p. 267).
An. This is the name for elder brother and for all members of the clan of a man or woman who are of the same generation as, and older than, the man or woman. An an is addressed as anna.
Nòdrved. This is the name for younger brother and for all members of the clan of the same generation as, and younger than, the speaker. En nòdrved or nòdrped means literally “my born with.” A nòdrved is addressed as enda.
Egal. A corresponding relative who is of the same age is called en egal and is addressed as egala.
These terms are used both by men and women of and to men.
Akkan. This term is applied by both men and women to an elder sister, and is also given to all female members of the same clan who are of the same generation as, and older than, the speaker. An akkan is addressed as akka.
Nòdrvedkugh. A younger sister is spoken of by this name, which is also given to all the female members of the same clan and generation, but younger than the speaker. Such a relative is addressed by the same term as is applied to a younger brother, viz., enda. Two sisters of the same age are egal and egala to one another.
These terms for “brother” and “sister” are also applied to one another by the children of two sisters. Thus a man would call the son of his mother’s sister an, and address him as anna if the latter were older than himself, and would be spoken of by the latter as en nòdrved and addressed as enda. If of the same age they would be egal or egala to one another. Similarly a man addresses the daughter of his mother’s sister as akka or enda according to age. I am doubtful how widely the terms for brotherhood and sisterhood are applied in this case. I do not know whether the children of two women of the same generation in a large clan like that of Kars would call one another brother and sister.
Thus the children of two brothers are brothers and sisters, and the children of two sisters are also brothers and sisters, while, as we shall see shortly, the children of brother and sister receive another name. The children of two sisters belong to different clans except in those cases in which the sisters have married men of the same clan. Thus a man may have brothers and sisters in several different clans.
Mun. This is the name of the mother’s brother, of the father’s sister’s husband, and of the wife’s father. The last is also spoken of as paiol together with other relatives of the wife. In the case of the orthodox Toda marriage, in which a man marries the daughter of his mother’s brother, or of his father’s sister, the mun is at the same time both wife’s father and either mother’s brother or father’s sister’s husband, but the wife’s father is still called mun even when a man marries a woman to whom he is unrelated.
The term mun is not only applied by a man to the own brothers of his mother, but also to her clan-brothers. When a man has many mun, he may show to which he is referring by mentioning his name; thus Siriar (20) would say “Karsüln mun” if he referred to this relative, the husband of his father’s sister, and he might speak in the same way of a clan-brother of his mother.
A distinction is often made between older and younger mun; thus, if a man’s mother had two brothers, the elder would be called en mun perud and the younger en mun karud. A mun is addressed as mama.
Mumi. This is the name of the father’s sister, of the wife of a mother’s brother, and of the wife’s mother, the terms brother and sister being again used in a wide sense. In general, the wife of a mun is a mumi. A mumi is addressed as mimia.
Manmokh. A person would apply the term manmokh to his sister’s son and his wife’s brother’s son. It is a term reciprocal to mun in so far as this term is one for mother’s brother and father’s sister’s husband. I am not quite certain whether it would be used for a son-in-law who was not also a sister’s son, but I am almost certain that this would be done.
The term is also applied to the sons of clan-sisters, and when used in this more distant way a distinction is sometimes made. En manmokh would mean “my (own) sister’s son,” Em manmokh, literally “our sister’s son,” would be used for children of a more distant sister.
Mankugh is used in exactly the same way as manmokh for sister’s daughter, &c.
Matchuni. This is the term applied to one another by the children, both male and female, of brother and sister. While the children of two brothers are brothers or sisters (an, egal, akka or nòdrved) and the children of two sisters are also brothers and sisters, the children of a brother and sister are matchuni. In other words, the children of an individual’s mother’s brother or of his father’s sister are the matchuni of the individual.
When a man addresses his male matchuni he calls him anna, egala or enda, according to their relative ages. Similarly when a woman addresses her female matchuni, she calls her akka, egala or enda, according to age.
When a man addresses his female matchuni, he calls her either tazmokhia or kughia (see below). He gives her the former name because he is allowed to marry her; she is a woman who might normally be his wife and he therefore addresses her as wife.
Similarly a woman addresses her male matchuni as òlia; she calls him husband because he may become her husband.
As in the case of other relationships, a man may define more exactly of whom he is speaking when he refers to a matchuni, and may say instead en munkugh, the daughter of my mun. Two kinship terms are thus used which resemble one another closely, but have very different meanings:—en munkugh, my uncle’s daughter, and en mankugh, my sister’s daughter.
Òl, husband. A woman speaks of her husband as en òl and addresses him as òlia.
Kotvai and tazmokh, wife. A man speaks of his wife as en kotvai, and addresses her as tazmokhia.
Paiol. This is a general term for the male relatives of the wife. It is applied especially to the wife’s father, the wife’s brothers, and the brothers of the wife’s father.
It seemed that this term should only properly be applied to the near relatives of the wife. Those whom the wife would address as aia, anna, or enda, because members of her clan, need not be called paiol by the husband.
Paiol is a reciprocal term, and it is therefore applied by a man to the daughter’s husband, the sister’s husband, and to the husband of the brother’s daughter.
A paiol is addressed as anna, egala, or enda, according to age.
Motvilth. This term is the equivalent of daughter-in-law and is applied by a man to his son’s wife. A woman is also the motvilth of the brothers of her husband’s father. A motvilth is addressed as ena.
There did not seem to be any brief term for the sister of a wife, and a man would speak of her as en kotvai akkan if older, or as en kotvai nòdrved if younger than the wife.
Sometimes the Todas add to some of the kinship names the word potch, which is said to have the meanings “begetting” or “begotten.” I met with this especially in the lamentations used at funerals. A man would say, “en potch aia”—“O my father which begot me”; “en potch anna”—“O my elder brother begotten with me.” For a younger brother, however, this word would not be used; a man would not say, “en potch nòdrved ia,” because ved has the same significance as potch, nòdrved meaning also “born with” or “begotten with.”
Every male of a man’s own clan is either his pian; his in; his an, egal, or nòdrved; his mokh, or his mokh pedvai mokh. In most cases a clan consists of several families, and these families may be unrelated to one another so far as the evidence from the genealogical record goes. Nevertheless, every Toda knows exactly the proper kinship terms to apply to all the members of his clan. I inquired in detail into the basis of this knowledge in the case of the Taradrol, consisting of six pòlm or divisions. All the members of each pòlm trace their descent from a man whose name is known, and the pedigrees of the six pòlm are given in the genealogical tables 20 to 25.
It was known that three of these pòlm were closely related to one another, and that the other three were also closely related. The following table expresses the relationship in the first case:—
| | | | ♂ ♂ TEITHI | | | NASIDZ PERATUTHI (See 20) | | (See 22) (See 21)
It was not perfectly certain whether Teithi and the two men whose names were not remembered were own brothers, but it was known that they were closely related and of the same generation. They were certainly clan-brothers and possibly own brothers. The kinship names applied by members of the three pòlm to one another were all in accordance with this scheme; thus, there was no one living in these three pòlm whom Siriar (20) called aia; he would have given this name to Nasidz or Peratuthi if they had been alive. He calls Arthothi and Parkeidi anna; they are the sons of Peratuthi, who was of the same generation as Siriar’s father. The following are called mokh or ena:—Püldenir, Keinodz, Idrshkwòdr (21), Polgar, Pundu, Keinmuv, and Pushtikudr (22), although at least one of these men is older than Siriar, and several others are approximately of the same age. Similarly, Muners (21) is the mokh pedvai mokh, or grandson of Siriar.
The other three pòlm of the Taradr clan are known to be related in a similar way: Kiusthvan (23), Pachievan (24), and Pungut (25) being either own brothers or men closely related and of the same generation. I was thus able to ascertain definitely how each member of the first three pòlm knew the appropriate name to be given to members of these families, and similarly how members of the other three pòlm knew the exact terms of kinship to apply to one another.
Each member of the first three pòlm also knew, however, the proper kinship terms to apply to members of the other three pòlm, although I could not obtain, and there seemed to be no record of, the way in which the two groups of families were connected. Thus Siriar addresses as aia Paners and his brothers (23) and Irkiolv (24). He addresses as anna: Teitukhen, Idjkudr and Kandu (23), Tòleidi, Nertiners, Mogai, Teimad and Orguln (24), and Kudeners and his brother (25). The children of these men are the mokh of Siriar, and are addressed by him as ena.
The explanation seems to be that the mode of relationship is handed down from generation to generation; thus Teithi, the grandfather of Siriar, called Kiusthvan (23) brother, and in consequence Ircheidi and Paners, their sons, also call one another brother, and so Siriar, the son of Ircheidi, knows that he has to call Paners father. In this way a man would know the correct term to apply to every member of his clan, though the links by which their pedigrees are connected may have been completely forgotten.
I also worked out the relationship of the different divisions of the Kuudr clan in the same way, and may perhaps give the record briefly.
Teitnir (52) calls the following Kuudr men aia:—Mutevan (52), Punatvan (53), Keitas (55), Tüliners (56), Kiugi (57), Tütners, Etamudri, Madsu, and Koboners (58), Ishkievan (60).
He calls the following anna:—Kuriolv and Ivievan (52), Targners (53), Keinkursi (54), and Mudriners (57). The following are his nòdrved, and are called by him enda:—Kwelthipush and his brothers, Piliar and Piliag (52), Pungusivan, Tevò, Karov and Pòl (53), Pöteners (54), Sinar and Katsog (55), Erai, Kil, Kanokh (56), Onadj and Kwòdrthotz (57), Kishkar and Tormungudr (59). All the sons of these brothers are the mokh of Teitnir.
In the above list Teitnir omitted Tikievan and Tushtkudr (56), who according to the genealogies are his pia or grandfathers, while their sons, though much younger than Teitnir, are his fathers, and are addressed by him as aia.
The other kinship terms are used in the same wide way. If a man’s mother belonged to Kuudr all those Kuudr men would be his mun who were the an, egal, or nòdrved of his mother; and all the children of those men would be his matchuni.
The terms used for the relatives of a wife are also used for the corresponding relatives of a sedvaitazmokh. This is the name of the woman in the Toda institution according to which a woman consorts with one or more men in addition to her husband or husbands (see p. 526). The man, or mokhthodvaiol, calls the fathers and brothers of the woman paiol, and calls her father mun and her mother mumi.
Relatives are often spoken of by the Todas in a way that defines their relation to the speaker more exactly than is usual in the classificatory system. Thus, a man may call his brother’s son “en nodrvedvain mokh”—“my younger brother’s son”; or he may speak of his wife’s elder sister as “en kotvai akka,” an abbreviation of en kotvai tan akka—“my wife her elder sister.” Similarly, a wife’s younger sister may be called “en kotvai nòdrved.”
It seemed to me that the Todas afford an interesting example of a people who are beginning to modify the classificatory system of kinship in a direction which distinctly approaches the descriptive system. The essential features of the system of kinship are those known as classificatory, but the Todas have various means of distinguishing between the near and distant relatives to whom the same kinship term is applied. Two examples of this have already been given; the son of an own sister may be called “my sister’s son,” while the son of a clan sister is called “our sister’s son,” and the own brother of a mother is simply called mun, while in the case of a clan brother of the mother, the name of the man is added. Further, a term which is definitely descriptive may be used in the examples quoted above.
The Todas have reached a stage of mental development in which it seems that they are no longer satisfied with the nomenclature of a purely classificatory system, and have begun to make distinctions in their terminology for near and distant relatives.
Another point of interest about the Toda system is that the two sets of kinship terms—those used in direct address and those used when speaking of a relative—do not correspond closely with one another.
The terms used in direct address are few in number compared with the kinship terms used when speaking of a relative. Brothers of all kinds, matchuni and some paiol (brothers-in-law) are all addressed as anna, egala or enda, according to age. Children, grandchildren, sisters’ sons and sons-in-law are all addressed as ena. If exclusive attention were paid to the kinship terms used in address we should seem to have a kinship system which is almost wholly based on relative ages and generations, all other distinctions being ignored.
The Toda system distinguishes widely between elder and younger members of the family and clan. This feature, which is of very general occurrence in connexion with the classificatory system, has been highly developed by the Todas, and their system differs from any other with which I am acquainted in having a special term for relatives of the same age.
When two members of a clan or two men related in other ways address one another as brother, the terms employed depend altogether on their relative ages, and are not influenced by the relative seniority of the branches of the family or clan to which they belong.
The Toda system appears to be closely related to that of the Dravidians of Southern India. In several cases the names for certain kin are identical with or closely resemble those of other South Indian languages.
The three most characteristic features of the Toda system are (i.) the use of the same term for mother’s brother and father-in-law, &c.; (ii.) the marked development of vocative forms of the kinship terms; (iii.) the marked development of distinctions according to age. These three features are also found in Tamil, and as far as my information goes in Telugu and Canarese. The Toda system appears to be a simplified form of the Tamil system with many points of identity. The resemblance between the Toda and the Tamil names seems certainly to be closer than that between the Toda names and those of the Telugus and Canarese.
I do not wish here to consider these resemblances and differences in any detail, but in the Table on the opposite page I have given a list of those kinship terms in which the Todas resemble other inhabitants of Southern India. The Tamil terms I owe to Mr. K. Rangachari of Madras; the others I have taken from Morgan’s System of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Race.
KINSHIP TABOOS
A man never mentions the name of his mun. If he wishes to make clear of whom he is speaking he will give the name of the place at which his mun lives, as “Tedshteiri ithvai en mun podchi,” “My uncle who lives at Tedshteiri.” This restriction only applies to the own brothers of his mother. Other more distant mun may be spoken of by name, and as we have already seen, if a man wishes to make it clear of whom he is speaking, he mentions the name in addition to the kinship term.
A man is also prohibited from uttering the name of the man from whom he has received his wife—i.e., to whom he has done kalmelpudithti (see p. 502). This man, who is called the mokhudrtvaiol, is usually the father of the wife and would normally be also a mun, but sometimes the place of the mokhudrtvaiol is usurped by somebody else and in such a case there might be no restriction on the name of the wife’s real father. In the only case of this kind of which I have a record, the marriage of Siriar (20) and Pupidz, the place of mokhudrtvaiol was taken by Kuriolv, who was living with Pilimurg (7), the girl’s mother, and though he was no real relative of the wife, Siriar might not mention his name. In spite of the fact, however, that Kuriolv had become his mokhudrtvaiol Siriar went privately to Patirsh (35), the real father of his wife, and did kalmelpudithi and would also refrain from saying the name of this man.
TODA. TAMIL. TELEGU. CANARESE.
Son mokh maghan Elder brother an (anna) aṇṇan (aṇṇa) anna anna Elder sister akkan (akka) akkal (akka) akka akka Mother’s brother mun (mâmâ) amman or maman mena mava (mama) mama Father-in-law mun (mama) mamaner (mama) mama mava Father’s sister mumi (mimia) attai Wife of mother’s brother mumi (mimia) ammami Wife’s mother mumi (mimia) mamiyar (ammami) Sister’s son manmokh maruman or marumakan Mother’s matchuni maittunan (?) brother’s son Father’s matchuni attan or sister’s son maittunan Wife’s brother matchuni or machchinan or paiol maittunan
A man is prohibited from saying the name of his wife’s mother (mumi), but my notes do not make clear whether he is also prohibited from saying the names of other mumi—i.e., father’s sisters, but probably this is so. In any case this restriction only applies to near relatives.
A man may not utter the name of his pian or piav.
There seemed to be some reluctance to say the name of a wife, but there did not appear to be any definite prohibition against it. It was probably part of a reluctance to utter personal names in general of which the Todas show some traces, though it is less marked among them than in the case of many uncultured people.
The taboo on names was far wider in the case of dead relatives. No one was allowed to utter the name of a dead relative, and this rule appeared to be especially stringent in the case of relatives who had been older than the speaker. As I have already mentioned, this taboo was for some time a great obstacle in my way when trying to obtain the pedigrees of the people. If a man had to refer to a dead relative, he did so by mentioning the name of the village at which he had died; thus, if the father of a Taradr man had died at Taradr, the man would say, “en in Taradr pon,” while, if he had died away from home, say at Kuudr, he would refer to his father as “en in Kuudr odthavai,” “my father who died at Kuudr.”
In the funeral lamentations, each mourner mentions the deceased by the name indicating the bond of kinship between himself and the dead, and does not utter the personal name.
KINSHIP SALUTATIONS
There are certain well-defined salutations which are regulated by kinship.
The characteristic Toda salutation is called kalmelpudithti, in which salutation one person kneels or bows down before another, while the latter raises each foot and touches the forehead of the other. In general this salutation is only paid by women to their elder male relatives; a woman places her head beneath the foot of her pian, in, an, or mun, using these terms in their widest sense. The salutation seems to be very largely one connected with kinship. In everyday life the salutation is only paid by women to men, but under special circumstances, men may bow down before men, and women before women, and men even may bow down before women (see p. 502).
Since, owing to the mokhthodvaiol connexion, a Tarthar woman may have a Teivali mun and vice versa, the kalmelpudithti salutation takes place between people of the two divisions, and I have often seen a woman of one division placing her head beneath the foot of a man of the other division.
When a person meets one of his kin, he uses a form of greeting which depends on the nature of the relationship. Most of these greetings consist of some form of the word iti or itvi, which was said to mean “blessing” or “bless,” together with the kinship term.
A man would greet an elder brother or anyone whom he would call anna by the word “tioñ,” cut very short so as to sound like a single syllable. This is a corruption of iti anna. A person greets a younger brother or one whom he would call enda by uttering his name followed by the word ers, as in “Sakari ers,” “Pakhwar ers.” A father is greeted as itiai, a mother as itiava. An elder sister as itiakka; a younger sister as itvena, and this latter form is used for any female relative younger than the speaker. It is the duty of younger female relatives to perform the kalmelpudithti salutation, and as soon as a man says itvena, the woman at once bows down and places her head beneath the raised foot of the man, helping him to raise it at the same time.
A mother’s brother or father-in law (mun) is greeted by itimoñ and a mumi is greeted by itimimia, but so slurred as to be hardly recognisable. The grandfather and grandmother are greeted in the words itin pia and itin piava.
Whenever a new Toda came to join people who were with me, there would be a chorus of greetings, and the newcomer would look round carefully to see who was present, giving to each his proper salutation and obviously taking the greatest care that no one was overlooked. Since the relationship of brother is the most frequent, the greetings heard most often on these occasions were “tioñ” and “... ers.”
The regulation of salutation by kinship applies also to the salutation of the dead. When the body first reaches the funeral place it is saluted by all present, and in the case of kin, the mode of salutation varies with the bond of kinship. Those related to the deceased as in, av, pian, piav, mun, mumi, an, or akkan, bow down at the head of the corpse and touch the body with their foreheads, while all those whom the deceased would have called enda or ena bow down at the feet. The place saluted by those who are not kin is determined by age, but in the case of kin, the bond of kinship is more important than the age, so that the former condition determines the mode of salutation. Thus at the funeral of Kiuneimi (3), Kòdrner (7) saluted at the head of the dead woman. He was the younger, but was her mun owing to the fact that Kiuneimi’s step-mother Kureimi, was a Kars woman whom Kòdrner called sister.
THE DUTIES OF KIN
The funeral ceremonies provide the greatest number of examples of kinship duties, the parts taken by many of the mourners being determined largely by their bonds of kinship to the deceased. The place of chief mourner is taken by the brother or son of a dead man, by the husband of a dead woman, and by the father of a dead child, though, at the funeral of a girl, the husband plays the most important rôle.
Various duties fall to relatives of the same clan or of the same family of the clan. The earth-throwing at the funeral of a male, the smearing of butter on the buffalo, lighting the pyre at the first funeral and the two fires at the azaramkedr, and ringing the bell at the final scene, are all performed by near relatives of the same clan and family as the deceased.
Cutting off a lock of hair and mixing food are acts performed by the chief mourner, who is of the same clan as the deceased, whether brother, son, husband, or father.
The manmokh, or sister’s son (who may be also son-in-law), has certain definite duties. Formerly, when many buffaloes were killed, one was always given by the sister’s son, and he still gives a thread cord, called pennar. Many other relatives give these cords, but that given by the manmokh is especially honoured in that it is put round the body of the dead man inside his cloak, and not merely laid on the covering of the body as are the others.
The mun does not appear to have any duties at a funeral, though in old days he contributed a buffalo, and, at the present time, one of the two buffaloes slaughtered may be given by the mun or other representative of the mother’s family.
The matchuni (child of a maternal uncle or of a paternal aunt) has several duties, of which the most important are those at the irsankati ceremony of the azaramkedr. The other duties are the secondary result of the marriage regulation which makes the matchuni the natural bridegroom or bride, and, in consequence, it is the matchuni who performs the pursütpimi ceremony at the funeral of an unmarried girl. Similarly, the matchuni may take the place of a paiol at the cloth-giving ceremony.
The duties which have, however, the greatest social interest are those performed by the relatives by marriage. At the funeral of a woman certain ceremonies, such as that in which leaves of the tiveri plant are put in the dead woman’s armlet, the urvatpimi ceremony for an unmarried girl, rubbing the relics, lighting the fire at the azaramkedr, and burning the funeral hut, should be performed by the daughter-in-law of a woman or the mother-in-law of a girl. These relatives are, however, of the same clan as the deceased, owing to the fact that a woman becomes a member of the same clan as her husband; and I am therefore doubtful how far these relatives perform the duties in question as members of the same clan, and how far as relatives by marriage. Some of the duties, such as lighting the funeral fires, are done by men of the same clan at the funeral of men; and I am therefore inclined to believe that they are performed by a woman for this reason and not because she is mother-in-law or daughter-in-law, but this point is one which must remain indefinite with our present information.
Similarly the duty of covering the head is a little difficult to understand. The head of a widower is covered (see p. 365) by one of his paiol—his father-in-law or his brother-in-law—and in this case it is clearly a duty which falls to a relative by marriage, but the head of a widow is covered by her own father or by someone of his clan who takes his place. The plausible explanation appears to be that the covering is performed by the father of the woman, not as father of the widow, but as father-in-law of the dead man.
Those who have married into the family of the deceased, the paiol, have to make certain contributions towards the outlay for the funeral, and it is in connexion with one of these contributions that the interesting ceremony of cloth-giving occurs.
The essential feature of the ceremony seems to be that a cloth passes between a relative or representative of the dead person and those who have married into the family of the dead person, and the ceremony involves a money payment to the family of the dead person from those who have married into the family. The ceremony is one which links the funeral ceremonies to those of marriage.
In other ceremonies of the Todas the parts played by different kin are far less conspicuous. The mun or mother’s brother has, however, several important functions. To him falls the duty of naming a child, on which occasion he has also to give a calf. He takes the chief part in the tersamptpimi ceremony, in which he cuts the hair of the child with a special ritual. In the ear-piercing ceremony the maternal uncle pierces one ear, and in the special case of which I have a record, he gave two buffaloes towards the expenses attendant on the ceremony.
It is probable that a girl is named by her mumi, or father’s sister, but this is a point on which I am not quite sure.
Under certain conditions matchuni, when associated together, have to perform certain ceremonial acts. When two male matchuni eat rice and milk together, they must first ask each other, “pa tòr tinkina?” “Milk food shall I eat?” and if they eat honey together, they must say “tein tinkina?” Two female matchuni eating together must also use these formulæ, but they are not said when a man is eating in company with his female matchuni, though possibly the two would never actually eat at the same time.
Male matchuni have also to go through a ceremony when they pass in company over either of the two sacred rivers of the Todas, the Paikara (Teipakh) and the Avalanche (Pakhwar). As the two men approach the river, they pluck and chew some grass, and each man says to the other “pò tûdrikina, pò kudrikina?”—“Shall I throw the river (water), shall I cross the river?” or, instead of the second sentence, they may say “pò pûkhkina?”—“Shall I enter the river?” They then go to the side of the river and each man dips his hand in the water and throws a handful away from him three times and then they cross the river, each with the right arm outside the cloak as is usual when crossing these sacred streams.
If the matchuni cross on a Tuesday, Friday or Saturday [200] they do not throw water, but are content with chewing the grass, and if the funeral ceremonies of a person belonging to the clan of either are not complete the water will not be thrown.
This ceremony performed by matchuni when crossing a sacred river was said to be connected with the legend given on p. 592, in which two matchuni are concerned.
XXII. MARRIAGE
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 his son, he chooses a suitable girl, who should be, and very often is, the matchuni of the boy, the daughter of his mother’s brother or of his father’s sister. The father visits the parents of the girl, and if the marriage is satisfactorily arranged he returns home after staying for the night at the village. A few days later the father takes the boy to the home of his intended wife. They take with them the loin-cloth called tadrp as a wedding gift and the boy performs the kalmelpudithti salutation to the father and mother of the girl, and also to her brothers, both older and younger than himself, and then gives the tadrp to the girl. Father and son stay for one night at the girl’s village and return home on the following morning. Sometimes the girl returns with them to the village of her future husband, but, much more commonly, she remains at her own home till she is fifteen or sixteen years of age.
If a man has not been married in childhood he may undertake the arrangement of his marriage himself, and visit the parents of the girl unaccompanied by his father; and in this case the girl may at once join her husband if she is old enough.
From the time of the child-marriage the boy has to give a tadrp twice a year until the girl is ten years old, when its place is taken by a putkuli. The tadrp which is given at first is very small, worth perhaps only four annas, but as the girl becomes older it is expected that the garment shall become larger and more valuable.
If any member of the girl’s family should die it is expected that the boy’s family shall on each occasion give a sum of eight annas or a rupee. This gift is called tinkanik panm ûtpimi, or “we give a piece of money to the purse.”
Formerly the boy’s family had also to contribute one of the buffaloes killed at the funeral, but this custom is now obsolete. The contribution of buffaloes and money from the boy to his parents-in-law is called pödri. The boy has to take part in a ceremony at the funeral in which a cloth is laid on the dead body, and with this ceremony there is associated a further gift of one rupee, paid to the relatives of the dead person by the family of the boy who has married into the family of the deceased (see p. 358).
Certain ceremonies are performed shortly before the girl reaches the age of puberty. One is called putkuli tâzâr utiti, or “mantle over he puts,” in which a man belonging to the Tartharol if the girl is Teivali, and to the Teivaliol if she is Tarthar, comes in the day-time to the village of the girl and lying down beside her puts his mantle over her so that it covers both and remains there for a few minutes.
Fourteen or fifteen days later a man of strong physique, who may belong to either division and to any clan, except that of the girl, comes and stays in the village for one night and has intercourse with the girl. This must take place before puberty, and it seemed that there were few things regarded as more disgraceful than that this ceremony should be delayed till after this period. It might be a subject of reproach and abuse for the remainder of the woman’s life, and it was even said that men might refuse to marry her if this ceremony had not been performed at the proper time.
It is usually some years later, when the girl is about fifteen or sixteen, that she joins her husband and goes to live with him at his village. The parents of the husband announce that they will fetch the girl on a certain day, which must be one of two or three days of the week, [201] different for each clan. The husband, accompanied by his father and a male relative of the same clan, goes to the village of the girl, and the three are feasted with rice and jaggery. The husband puts five rupees into the pocket of the girl’s mantle and then takes her home. There is no ceremony of any kind, not even the salutation such as was performed at the original ceremony.
If the youth does not wish to live with the girl when the time arrives, he may annul the marriage by giving one buffalo as a fine (kwadr) to the girl’s parents; but, on the other hand, the parents of the girl have to return as many buffaloes as he may have given as pödri at funeral ceremonies.
If the girl refuses to join her husband the fine is heavier, and at the present time usually amounts to five or ten buffaloes, the number being settled by a council according to the circumstances of the people. The girl’s family must also return any buffaloes given as pödri. According to Harkness the fines were in his day much heavier; three buffaloes when the man annulled the marriage, and as many as fifty when this was done by the woman (see p. 538), and the Todas acknowledge that the fine for refusing to fulfil the marriage contract is now lighter than it used to be.
When a girl goes to join her husband she may be given clothing or ornaments by her parents or brothers, and their gifts are known as adrparn or dowry, but I could not learn that there were any definite regulations prescribing what should be given. It seemed also that occasionally buffaloes might be given as adrparn.
THE REGULATION OF MARRIAGE
The Todas have very definite restrictions on the freedom of individuals to marry. One of the most important of these is that which prevents intermarriage between the Tartharol and the Teivaliol. These groups are endogamous divisions of the Toda people. Although a Teivali man is strictly prohibited from marrying a Tarthar woman, he may take a woman of this division to live with him at his village, the man being known as the mokhthodvaiol of the woman. This connexion, which will be more fully considered at the end of this chapter, may be regarded as a recognised form of marriage, but it differs from the orthodox form in that the children of the union belong to the division of the mother. They do not, however, belong to her clan, but to that of her legal husband. Similarly, the same kind of connexion may be formed between a Tarthar man and a Teivali woman, but in this case the woman is not allowed to live at the village of the mokhthodvaiol, who may either visit her occasionally or go to live at her village.
It has already been mentioned that each of the two divisions of the Toda community is divided into a number of septs or clans, and these are definite exogamous groups. No man or woman may marry a member of his or her own clan, but must marry into another clan. This restriction applies even to the members of clans which are known to have separated from one another in recent times. Thus, among the Tartharol certain members of the Melgarsol separated from the main group, and their descendants have formed a separate group or groups known as the Kidmadol and Karshol (see p. 664), but although the separation took place many years ago there still remains a definite prohibition against a marriage of members of these clans with the Melgars people. The clans of Pedrkars and Kulhem among the Teivaliol are offshoots of the Kuudrol, but here the separation seems to have occurred so long ago that the common origin is not regarded as a bar to marriage.
In the whole of the genealogical record given in the tables at the end of the volume there is not a single case in which marriage has occurred between two members of the same clan.
Among many races at or below the stage of culture of the Todas prohibition of marriage within the clan is usually accompanied by prohibition of sexual intercourse, and such intercourse is regarded as incest and often as the greatest of crimes. It is doubtful whether there is any such strict prohibition among the Todas. In the qualifying ceremony for the office of palol known as tesherst, it is ordained that the woman who takes part in the ceremony shall be one who has never had intercourse with one of her own clan, and I was told that it was far from easy to find such a woman. The fact, however, that this restriction should exist in connexion with a ceremony suggests that even to the Todas there is something reprehensible in intercourse between man and woman of the same clan (see also p. 530).
There are certain special prohibitions against marriage between members of certain clans. Among the Tartharol the Panol are not allowed to marry the Kanòdrsol, a prohibition said to be due to the murder of Parden by Kwoten, and it is said that since that day no marriage has ever taken place between the clans of the two men. In the genealogical record there is no case in which these two clans have intermarried.
I was also told that the people of Melgars and Kwòdrdoni might not intermarry, but there are three examples of such marriages in the genealogies. I could not obtain any reason for the restriction, and the information is probably incorrect. The restrictions on marriage between the people of Melgars and those of Kidmad and Karsh have already been considered.
Among the Teivaliol there are also prohibitions against intermarriage between certain clans. The people of Piedr may not marry those of Kusharf. Judging from the genealogical record, the prohibition is not strictly followed, for three such marriages have taken place in recent times. In one of these cases, however, in which a Piedr man married a Kusharf woman, the woman soon became seriously ill, and the marriage was annulled. I could obtain no reason for the prohibition of marriage between these two clans. Marriage was also prohibited between the Piedrol and the Pedrkarsol, this being due to a comparatively recent quarrel between members of the two clans, of which an account is given in Chapter XXVIII.
I have analysed the genealogical records with the view of ascertaining whether certain clans intermarry with any special frequency. Among the Tartharol, I find that the people of Nòdrs marry most frequently those of Kars and Taradr. The Karsol, the largest of the Tarthar clans, distribute their marriages widely over the whole Tarthar division. The Panol chiefly marry with Kars and Melgars. The Taradrol have married most often with Nòdrs, Kars and Melgars. Keradr, a very small clan, shows no special predilection. The people of Kanòdrs have intermarried most often with Kwòdrdoni, Päm, Kars and Melgars. The people of Kwòdrdoni marry most often people of Kanòdrs, Kars and Nidrsi. The Pämol have married chiefly with Kanòdrs, Kars and Melgars. Most of the Nidrsi marriages have been with Kars. The Melgarsol have married in fairly equal proportions people of Nòdrs, Kars, Taradr and Päm.
These facts are interesting in that they show that there is a tendency for the three clans of Nòdrs, Kars and Taradr to intermarry. These are not only the most important Tarthar clans, but they occupy the same district of the hills, in the centre and towards the north and north-west. Similarly, the clans of Kanòdrs, Kwòdrdoni and Päm, situated towards the north-east and east, show a distinct tendency to intermarry. Further, the Melgarsol, who form a special group standing somewhat apart from the rest, distribute their marriages fairly equally, but have often married with Päm, a clan seated near them geographically.
The analysis of the genealogies shows that the geographical distribution of the Tartharol on the hills has had a definite influence on the intermarriage of the different clans.
Among the Teivaliol, intermarriage has been greatly influenced by the enormous size of the Kuudrol as compared with the other clans of the division. In order to marry outside their own clan, the people of Kuudr have married nearly all the available members of the other clans of the Teivaliol, leaving very few to intermarry with one another. Thus the genealogies record 161 marriages between Kuudrol and members of the other five Teivali clans, leaving only sixteen marriages between the members of those five clans. Owing to the enormous development of one clan, the Teivali division has almost come to be in the position of a community with a dual marrying organisation in which every member of one group must marry a member of the other group, but there is no reason whatever to think that this is due to any other reason than the excessive development of one clan in numbers.
On studying the marriages in detail, it is found that the Kuudrol have married members of the Piedr clan most frequently, but this is chiefly because the Piedrol stand second to the Kuudrol in point of numbers, although it is also furthered by the restriction in marriage between Piedr and Kusharf. The marriages of the Kuudrol with other clans seem to be determined more by the numbers available than by any predilection for special clans.
Both Pedrkars and Kulhem are said to be offshoots of the Kuudrol, but apparently the separation is so remote that the common origin is not regarded as a bar to marriage. It is possible that the necessity of providing spouses for the Kuudrol has tended to break down a restriction which probably once existed.
The Todas have never married people outside their own community, and a strong prejudice against such marriages still exists. This may be illustrated by two recent cases.
A woman, married in the usual way, was divorced by her husband because she became ill. She returned to her own home, where she was visited by a Tamil blacksmith. The latter was very anxious to marry the woman and on one occasion took her away to the plains, but she was followed by her relatives and brought back to her home. Later she married two Toda brothers and was taken by them to their village, but she was followed by the blacksmith, who brought her back to the village of her parents. The Todas seem to have no strong objection to her relations with the stranger so long as she remains among themselves.
In the other case a woman about twelve years ago was visited by a rich Mohammedan who gave money to her husbands, and it was said also that he bribed the chief Toda people, i.e., the members of the council. The Mohammedan wished very much to marry the woman and for a sum of money the Todas consented. After the woman had lived for a few days in the bazaar with her new husband, her relatives came and took her away, and I was told that the Mohammedan took the loss so much to heart that he died of grief, but my informants were doubtful whether his grief was due to the loss of his wife or whether it was because he had impoverished himself by the bribes which he had given. Here again the people appear to have had no objection to the relations of the woman with the Mohammedan so long as she remained in the community.
KINSHIP AND MARRIAGE
The members of his own clan are not the only kin whom a man is not allowed to marry. The Todas have a general term, püliol, for those relatives whose intermarriage is prohibited. The term is applied by a man not only to the women whom he may not marry, but also to the families in general into which he may not marry; thus a man may speak of other men as his püliol, meaning by this that he may not marry their sisters. This, however, is only a loose way of using the word, and, putting on one side this sense in which the word may be used, the following are the püliol of a man:—
(i.) The daughters of his father’s brothers, whom he would call akka or enda, according to age.
(ii.) The daughters of his mother’s sisters, also akka or enda.
(iii.) The sisters of his father and conversely the daughters of his sisters, i.e., his mumi and his mankugh.
(iv.) The daughters of the sisters of his father’s father, i.e., of the sisters of his pian.
The relatives under the first head will be members of the same clan as the man, and the prohibition of marriage between püliol under this head may be regarded as a restriction dependent on either clanship or kinship.
There seemed to be no doubt, however, that in connexion with marriage, a man always thought of these relatives as püliol, a term which denotes certain kin, to whatever clan they may belong. So far as I could ascertain, if a man thought of a given woman, he thought of her as one, or not one, of his püliol, and it seemed to me in several cases as if it came almost as a new idea to some of the Todas that his püliol included all the people of his own clan.
If I am right in this, it means that it is the bond of blood-kinship which a Toda has chiefly in his mind when he considers whether he may or may not marry a given woman. He has not two kinds of prohibited affinity, one depending on clan relations, and another on relations of blood-kinship, but he has only one kind of prohibited affinity, to which he gives the general term püliol, including certain kin through the father and certain kin through the mother, and there is no evidence that he considers the bond of kinship in one case as different from the other as regards restriction on marriage.
The fact that the Toda includes all those kin whom he may not marry under one general term, and that the kin in question include members both of his own and other clans, goes to show that the Todas recognise the blood-kinship as the restrictive agency rather than the bond produced by membership of the same clan.
The analysis of the genealogical record has shown that these restrictions on marriage are enforced. I have already stated that the genealogies show no single case in which marriage has occurred between members of the same clan, i.e., between püliol who come under the first head in the list given above.
I have also failed to find a single case in which marriage has taken place between the children of two own sisters, or of marriage between the children of two women who would call each other “sister” whose names occur in the same genealogical table. Thus I have found no case in which a marriage has taken place between the children of two women so closely related to one another as Punzueleimi and Nasturs, of Table 3, these women being first cousins according to our system of kinship.
It would be a prolonged task to ascertain whether marriage ever takes place among the Tartharol between the children of two clan-sisters in the widest sense, and I do not know whether such marriage may not sometimes occur.
Among the Teivaliol marriages between clan-sisters even in the widest sense must be very rare owing to the fact that nearly all marriages take place between people of Kuudr on the one hand and members of the five other Teivali clans on the other. Since in most cases two women of any one of these five clans marry men of Kuudr, marriage between their children would be restricted under the first prohibition, and similarly the children of two Kuudr women could only intermarry in those cases in which members of the other five clans have married one another. Among the Teivaliol, I do not believe that marriages take place between the children of sisters in the widest sense, and I have little doubt that they are very exceptional among the Tartharol.
There is no case in the genealogies in which the third restriction has been broken, in which a man has married his father’s sister or his sister’s daughter, his mumi or his maukugh.
There is at least one case in the genealogies in which there has been an infringement of the fourth restriction given on page 509. The marriage of Nargudr (62) with Tolveli (58) is an example of the marriage of a man with the daughter of his grandfather’s sister. I believe that this restriction is part of a wider regulation. Using Toda terms of kinship the law would run: a person must not marry the child of his matchuni. The marriage of a man with the daughter of his grandfather’s sister, such as that of Nargudr with Tolveli, would be an infringement of this law. I have only found one other case in the genealogies in which this law would have been broken, i.e., in the marriage of Teitnir (52) and Tersveli (63). Tersveli’s father, Teikudr, is the son of Kavani, the sister of Pareivan, Teitnir’s father. Teikudr is therefore the matchuni of Teitnir, who has married his daughter.
I was told that though a man might not marry the daughter of his sister, he might marry the children of this woman. I do not know of any such marriage and it is improbable that it would often come about, since it would involve the marriage of a woman with the brother of her grandfather. There is, however, at the present time an example of the marriage of a woman with her father’s mother’s brother, whom she would therefore call pia, or grandfather. This is the marriage of Kaners and his brother Kudrievan (63) with Edjog (56), the daughter of Tüliners, the son of the sister of the two men. I was told, however, that this marriage met with a good deal of disapproval among the Todas, but I could not learn that there was any definite prohibition against it.
THE MARRIAGE OF MATCHUNI
While marriage with the daughter of a father’s brother and a mother’s sister is prohibited, the daughter of a father’s sister or a mother’s brother is the natural wife of a man. The orthodox marriage is marriage between matchuni, the children of brother and sister. Thus it is obviously not nearness of blood-kinship in itself which acts as a restriction on marriage, but nearness of blood-kinship of a certain kind.
I have analysed the genealogies to ascertain the frequency with which marriages between matchuni occur. The genealogical tables record about 550 marriages, of which 373 are Tarthar and 177 Teivali. Only a small proportion of these are marriages between children of own brother and sister. Among the Tartharol there are 40 and among the Teivaliol 25 such marriages, making together 65 or 11·8 per cent.
Since, however, the matchuni of a man include a much wider circle of relatives than the children of his mother’s own brother and father’s own sister, the number of marriages between matchuni is very much larger than this.
Nearly all the Teivali marriages are marriages between matchuni in this wider sense, while among the Tartharol there are also many other marriages of this kind.
One of the reasons why the orthodox marriage custom is not still more commonly followed is the existence of the practice called terersthi, to be considered later in this chapter. According to this practice wives are transferred from one man to another, and in this transference no attention appears to be paid to the kinship tie. The woman, or rather girl, originally married to a man may have been his matchuni, but the woman who finally becomes his wife by the working of the terersthi custom may not be and probably in most cases is not his matchuni. In many cases in the genealogies, the original infant marriage may have been forgotten, and the marriage recorded may be the result of the terersthi custom. If I had a complete record of all infant marriages, I have no doubt that the proportion of marriages between matchuni would have been larger.
In some families marriages between matchuni in the near sense occur much more frequently than in others. Thus out of the forty matchuni marriages among the Tartharol, the husband or wife belonged to the Taradrol in fifteen cases, and in one large Taradr family, that of Parkeidi (21), six out of eight children married their matchuni in the near sense. It is perhaps significant in this connexion that the Taradrol have been comparatively little affected by outside influences. They are a clan which might be expected to keep up the orthodox Toda custom.
Another example of a family in which the orthodox marriage custom has been frequently followed is that of Table 52, where there may be found eight cases of the marriage of matchuni in the near sense, and several others where the matchuni relationship is more distant.
In some cases marriages have taken place between the children of matchuni. Thus the marriage of Uvolthli (15) with Sinmundeivi (20) among the Tartharol, and of Pangudr (66) with Nelbur (54) and Kanokh (56) with Sanmidz (63) among the Teivaliol, are all cases in which marriages have taken place between the children of two men who called one another matchuni. There may be other cases, but these examples are perhaps sufficient to show that these marriages may be held to take the place of the orthodox matchuni union.
While marriages between matchuni are the rule and marriages between the children of matchuni certainly not unlawful, we have seen that marriage with the child of a matchuni is prohibited. From our point of view, this means that while marriage with a first cousin is orthodox, marriage with a first cousin once removed is unlawful, while again it seems that marriage with a first cousin twice removed may be lawful. The more distant tie of kinship from our point of view is unlawful, while the nearer is commanded.
Marriage with a matchuni may often involve considerable disproportion of age. In one case at the present time a boy of about two years of age is married to a woman of about twenty. The woman, Nulnir (10), was still unmarried when she reached this age, so she was married to her matchuni, Kagerikutan (25), the son of her mother’s brother. In this case the orthodox marriage was resorted to when the woman had failed to obtain a husband in any other way, although it involved marriage with a baby.
In another case, the marriage of Keitkarg (38) and Pötoveli (49), in which the woman is considerably older than her husband, the husband and wife are matchuni.
There is one ceremonial marriage in which the husband always stands in the relation of matchuni to the wife. This is in the performance of the pursütpimi ceremony at the funeral of a girl unmarried at the time of her death. The boy who is chosen to give the bow and arrow and to act as the husband is always, so far as I could discover, the matchuni of the dead girl.
Similarly, if an unmarried boy dies, the girl who is chosen to act as his widow should be his matchuni. In one case of which I have a record, the son of Tütners (58) died and Sotidz (66) was chosen to act as widow. None of the brothers of Puvizveli (65), the mother of the dead boy, had at that time a son, so the duty was undertaken by the daughter of Pangudr, of the same clan as Puvizveli, but belonging to a different family. In this case the matchuni was the daughter of a clan-brother because there was no nearer matchuni available.
Keinba, who acted as husband at the funeral of Sinerani (see p. 394), was the matchuni of the dead girl in two ways, as the son of her mother’s brother and as the son of her father’s half-sister.
A matchuni may be either the child of a mother’s brother or of a father’s sister, and I have examined the genealogies to see if a man marries the daughter of his mother’s brother or of his father’s sister the more frequently, and find that there is no great difference, though the former marriage is somewhat the more frequent. There are among the Tartharol twenty cases in which a man has married the daughter of his mother’s brother, two of marriage with the daughter of a stepmother’s brother, and one with the daughter of a stepmother’s half-brother, making twenty-three cases in all. On the other hand, a man married the daughter of his father’s sister in fourteen cases, twice he married the daughter of his father’s half-sister, and once the stepdaughter of his father’s sister, making seventeen cases in all.
Among the Teivaliol marriages with the daughter of a father’s sister are the more frequent, there being fifteen of these as compared with ten cases of marriage with the daughter of a mother’s brother. There is evidently no special preference for either kind of marriage.
POLYANDRY
The Todas have a completely organised and definite system of polyandry. When a woman marries a man, it is understood that she becomes the wife of his brothers at the same time. When a boy is married to a girl, not only are his brothers usually regarded as also the husbands of the girl, but any brother born later will similarly be regarded as sharing his older brothers’ rights.
In the vast majority of polyandrous marriages at the present time, the husbands are own brothers. A glance through the genealogies will show the great frequency of polyandry, [202] and that in nearly every case the husbands are own brothers. In a few cases in which the husbands are not own brothers, they are clan-brothers, i.e., they belong to the same clan and are of the same generation. Instances of such marriages are those of Toridz (65) with Kulpakh (52) and Kiladrvan (60), and of Sintharap (68) with Kuriolv (52) and Ònadj (57).
There is only one instance recorded in the genealogies in which a woman had at the same time husbands belonging to different clans, viz., the marriage of Kwelvtars (60) with Nidshtevan of Piedr (64) and Tütners of Kusharf (67), and in this case the men were half-brothers by the same mother, the fathers being of different clans. While I was on the hills, there was a project on foot that three unmarried youths belonging to three different clans should have a wife in common, but the project was frustrated and the marriage did not take place.
It is possible that at one time the polyandry of the Todas was not so strictly ‘fraternal’ as it is at present, and it is perhaps in favour of this possibility that in the instance of polyandry given by Harkness [203] the husbands were obviously not own brothers. It must be remembered, however, that this case came to the notice of Captain Harkness because the polyandry had led to disputes, and, as we shall see shortly, it is in those cases of polyandry in which the husbands are not own brothers that disputes arise.
The arrangement of family life in the case of a polyandrous marriage differs according as the husbands are, or are not, own brothers.
In the former case it seemed that there is never any difficulty, and that disputes never arise. The brothers live together, and my informants seemed to regard it as a ridiculous idea that there should ever be disputes or jealousies of the kind that might be expected in such a household. When the wife becomes pregnant, the eldest brother performs the ceremony of giving the bow and arrow, but the brothers are all equally regarded as the fathers of the child. If one of the brothers leaves the rest and sets up an establishment of his own, it appeared, however, that he might lose his right to be regarded as the father of the children.
If a man is asked the name of his father, he usually gives the name of one man only, even when he is the offspring of a polyandrous marriage. I endeavoured to ascertain why the name of one father only should so often be given, and it seemed to me that there is no one reason for the preference. Often one of the fathers is more prominent and influential than the others, and it is natural in such cases that the son should speak of himself as the son of the more important member of the community. Again, if only one of the fathers of a man is alive, the man will always speak of the living person as his father; thus Siriar (20) always spoke of Ircheidi as his father, and even after Ircheidi is dead, it seems probable that he will so have fallen into the custom of speaking of the latter as his father that he will continue to do so, and it will only be when his attention is especially directed to the point that he will say that Madbeithi was also his father.
In most of the genealogies, the descent is traced from some one man, but there can be no doubt whatever that this man was usually only one of several brothers, and the probable reason why one name only is remembered is that this name was that of an important member of the community, or of the last surviving of the brother-husbands.
When the husbands are not own brothers, the arrangements become more complicated. When the husbands live together as if they were own brothers there is rarely any difficulty. If, on the other hand, the husbands live at different villages, the usual rule is that the wife shall live with each husband in turn, usually for a month at a time, but there is very considerable elasticity in the arrangement.
It is in respect of the ‘fatherhood’ [204] of the children in these cases of non-fraternal polyandry that we meet with the most interesting feature of Toda social regulations. When the wife of two or more husbands (not own brothers) becomes pregnant, it is arranged that one of the husbands shall perform the ceremony of giving the bow and arrow. The husband who carries out this ceremony is the father of the child for all social purposes; the child belongs to the clan of this husband if the clans of the husbands differ and to the family of this husband if the families only differ. When the wife again becomes pregnant, another husband may perform the pursütpimi ceremony, and if so, this husband becomes the father of the child; but more commonly the pursütpimi ceremony is not performed at all during the second pregnancy, and in this case the second child belongs to the first husband, i.e., to the husband who has already given the bow and arrow. Usually it is arranged that the first two or three children shall belong to the first husband, and that at a succeeding pregnancy (third or fourth), another husband shall give the bow and arrow, and, in consequence, become the father not only of that child, but of all succeeding children till some one else gives the bow and arrow.
The fatherhood of a child depends entirely on the pursütpimi ceremony, so much so that a dead man is regarded as the father of a child if no other man has performed the essential ceremony. [205]
In the only case in the genealogies in which the husbands of a woman were of different clans, it happened there were only two children, and that one father gave the bow and arrow for the first child and the other for the second.
If the husbands separate, each husband takes with him those children who are his by virtue of the pursütpimi ceremony.
There is no doubt whatever as to the close association of the polyandry of the Todas with female infanticide. As we have seen, the Todas now profess to have completely given up the practice of killing their female children, but it is highly probable that the practice is still in vogue to some extent. It has certainly, however, diminished in frequency, and the consequent increase in the proportion of women is leading to some modification in the associated polyandry.
It has been stated by most of those who have written about the Todas that the custom of polyandry is dying out, but a glance at the genealogies will show that the institution is in full working order even in the case of the infant marriages which are being contracted at the present time. There is, however, some reason to believe that it is now less frequent for all the brothers of a family to have one wife only in common. A study of the genealogies shows that often each brother has his own wife, or that several brothers have more than one wife between them. It seemed to me, however, almost certain that in these cases the brothers have the wives in common. In compiling the genealogies, one informant would give me the names of two or more brothers each with one wife, while another would give me the name of one brother with two or three wives, and would say that the other brothers had the same wives. When I pointed out the discrepancy and asked which was the true account, they usually said it made no difference and were almost contemptuous because I seemed to think that there was any disagreement between the two versions. I think it probable that it has become less frequent for several brothers to have only one wife in common, but I am very doubtful whether this indicates any real decrease in the prevalence of polyandry.
It seems to me that the correct way of describing the present condition of Toda society is to say that polyandry is as prevalent as ever, but that owing to the greater number of women, it is becoming associated with polygyny. When there are two brothers it does not seem that each takes a wife for himself, but rather that they take two wives in common.
It is probable that this will lead in time to a state of society in which each brother will come to regard one wife as his own; and in a few cases it seemed to me that there was already a tendency in this direction. If this forecast should be fulfilled, the custom of monogamy among the Todas will have been developed out of polyandry through a stage of combined polyandry and polygyny.
One case happened during my visit which seemed to indicate that though several brothers might be regarded as husbands of a woman, the part of husband for ceremonial purposes might be taken only by one or two of them. In this case I was told that four brothers had one wife, but when the wife died only two of the brothers acted as widowers and performed the ceremonies associated with that condition. When I asked for an explanation of this, I was then told that the other two brothers were not husbands, but I strongly suspected that this was a mere device to enable two of the brothers to avoid the disabilities attendant on the condition of widowerhood. I have very little doubt that while the woman was alive, all the four brothers were her husbands, but after her death it became convenient to assume that only two had been husbands, leaving the others free from the restrictions of widowerhood.
Many writers have believed that the widely spread custom of the Levirate is a relic of polyandry. If it were true that the custom of polyandry is dying out among the Todas, this people might have provided material for the study of the relations of polyandry and the Levirate. It will be obvious, however, from the account already given, that polyandry is still strongly established among the Todas. Still, there are a few cases in the genealogies which seem to show that when two brothers had different wives, and one brother died, the widow might be taken by the surviving brother. Thus, in Table 34, two brothers, Matovan and Kemners, had one wife, Sargveli, while Atcharap had his own wife, Puners. When Matovan died, Sargveli was regarded as the wife of both Atcharap and Kemners. [206] Again, after the deaths of Mulpolivan and Peigvan (3), the widow of Nersveli was married by Perol, the clan-brother (first cousin) of the husband.
In other cases, the widow of one brother has not become the wife of her husband’s brothers, but has married elsewhere; and though the evidence is necessarily very unsatisfactory, it seems on the whole probable that the Todas show no special relation between polyandry and the Levirate custom.
If the widow marries a man who is not one of the brothers of her dead husband, the new husband has to pay a certain number of buffaloes. He does not, however, give these buffaloes to the brothers of the dead man, but to his children; thus, when Karnisi of Päm (37) died, his widow, Nersaveli, married Mutthuvan (34) of Kanòdrs, who paid fourteen buffaloes to Pungievan, the son of Karnisi. This payment of buffaloes is known as terkudrichti, “compensation he gives,” and it is the custom for the number of buffaloes in this case to be twice the number given by the dead man for his wife; in this case Karnisi had taken Nersaveli from another man for seven buffaloes.
In relation to the Levirate, the important point here is that the buffaloes are paid to the sons of the dead husbands, not to his brothers.
I do not think that the Todas provide any definite evidence towards the solution of the vexed question of the relation between polyandry and infanticide. It is possible that at their first arrival in the Nilgiri Hills, the Todas had few sources of food, and had a severe struggle for existence; that they therefore adopted the practice of female infanticide, and that polyandry followed as a consequence. At the present and during recent times there has certainly been no economical motive for infanticide, and I am very doubtful whether it has ever existed. I think it far more probable that the Todas brought the practice of polyandry with them when they came to the Nilgiris; but if this view should be adopted, there is still no evidence to show whether they also brought infanticide with them, or whether this custom developed owing to the fact that polyandry diminished the need for female children.
POLYGYNY
In the last section we have seen that there is a tendency for the polyandry of the Todas to become combined with polygyny. Two brothers, who in former times would have had one wife between them, may now take two wives, but as a general rule the two men have the two wives in common. In addition, polygyny of the more ordinary kind exists among the Todas, and is probably now increasing in frequency, as one of the results of the diminished female infanticide.
One example of polygyny is the marriage of Kuriolv (56) with two wives, one of about the same age as himself, the other a young wife whom he shares with Onadj (57). In another case Odrkurs (1), has two wives, the second wife being a young girl recently married in the hope of obtaining a son (see p. 550).
There is one example of polygyny in the genealogies in which a young boy, Mokudr of Nidrsi (42), has two wives, both young girls. He has been doubly married in order that he may get rid of one of his wives by the terersthi custom and so become rich. He has been married to two wives in order that he may sell one.
When a man or a group of men have more than one wife, the two wives usually live together at the same village, but sometimes they live at different villages, the husband or husbands moving about from one village to the other.
EXCHANGE OF BROTHER AND SISTER
Although I was not told that it was the custom for a brother and sister of one clan to marry a sister and brother of another, examination of the genealogies makes it clear that this frequently happens. A good example which may be cited is the marriage of Kuriolv (52) with Punaveli (65), while Sinkòrs, the sister of Kuriolv, married the three brothers of Punaveli. Two other similar instances may be found in Table 52, and they are of general occurrence throughout the genealogies.
In some communities this custom of exchange is definitely connected with the bride-price, which may be so large as almost to compel a man to give his sister in exchange for the wife he takes from another clan. In the case of the Todas the bride-price is so inconsiderable that it is unlikely that it would form a motive for exchange, and I think it improbable that in such marriages as those cited above, the idea of exchange is even definitely formulated, but that the combination of marriages comes about for such obvious reasons as may occur in any community. The marriage of matchuni, if widely practised, would obviously lead to an appearance of exchange, and it may be that among the Todas this is the chief cause of its occurrence.
Similarly, instances will be found in the genealogies of two brothers (or two groups of brothers) marrying sisters. An example may be given from Table 53, where Orzevan marries one woman and his two brothers marry her sister. Another instance may be found in Table 58.
In several cases in which a man or group of men have had two wives, the wives have been related. Thus, Kutthurs (12) and his brothers first married Tedjveli (16). After her death, Kutthurs, the only surviving brother, married Sabnir (34), the daughter of Arsner, Tedjveli’s sister. Again, Paners (23) and his brothers first married Pergveli, and when she died they married her brother’s daughter. Pungusivan (53) married his matchuni, Sinodz (68), and when she was taken from him by the terersthi custom, he married Sintharap, her sister.
There is often very great disproportion of age in Toda marriages. I have already given two cases in which the woman is the older, in each of which the disproportion of age is due to the custom of marrying a matchuni. More commonly the man is much the older, and there are at the present time many cases in which elderly men are married to young girls. This is partly due to the practice of infant marriage. Unless a widower can take advantage of the terersthi custom, which is always expensive, he may have to marry a child and wait till she has reached a marriageable age. Thus, Kòdrner, my guide, lost his wife some years ago, and then married a girl whose present [207] age is only thirteen, Kòdrner being forty-two. The girl is still living with her parents, and will probably not go to her husband for another three or four years.
THE CUSTOM OF ‘TERERSTHI’
The marriage tie among the Todas at the present time has become very loose. Wives are constantly transferred from one husband, or group of husbands, to another, the new husband or husbands paying a certain number of buffaloes to the old. The amount of the compensation or ter is settled by a council, and from this the transaction has received its name of terersthi, or “compensation he tells (decides).” [208]
There is much reason to believe that this custom has altered its character in recent times. I was told that formerly the custom only applied to cases in which a man had lost his wife by death. If he wished to marry a woman who was already the wife of another or others, he went to the father of the woman and asked for his consent. The father would consult with two other elders, and if they were in favour of the proposed transaction the three elders would go to the woman, and if they obtained her consent they then went to her husband for his. If husband or wife were unwilling to be parted nothing was done, but if both consented, the new and the old husband, the father of the woman, and the two elders met and decided on the number of buffaloes to be given as ter or compensation. This meeting was called terersthi. The ter had to be paid within a month, and all the buffaloes given had to be females. The man who was giving up the woman went to the village of the new husband and received his buffaloes, of which he was allowed to choose a certain number. If he had been awarded more than four buffaloes, he might choose three, if four or less, he might only choose two. Among the Tartharol, a man would usually choose wursulir, and among the Teivaliol, pasthir.
At the present time the number of buffaloes given as ter varies very greatly; the most frequent number is three, but often more are given, and in one case, about ten years ago, a man had to give twenty-five. The number seems to depend largely on the size of the herd possessed by the man taking a new wife. The more buffaloes he has, the more he has to pay.
When the buffaloes are given, the new husband has to give a feast, after which the old husband drives away his buffaloes. In a recent case Teigudr of Nòdrs (4) had taken Uwer from Nertolvan and Palpa of Pan (16) for nine buffaloes. These two men went to the village of Tedshteiri, where Teigudr was living, and were feasted, the food being cooked on nine ovens, corresponding to the number of the buffaloes. This correspondence between the number of the ovens and of the buffaloes given as ter, suggests that there may have been some definite ceremonial in connexion with this feast of which I failed to obtain an account.
The custom of terersthi has some reason on its side. Wherever infant marriage exists in a small community, it must often happen that a widower finds all the women of his community married, and without some machinery by which he is allowed to take the wife of another, he must remain unmarried or be content with marriage to a mere child. Even at the present time, we have seen that an adult man who has lost his wife may marry a girl only a few years of age. [209]
At the present time the custom of terersthi has a far wider range. It is obvious that when a widower takes the wife of another he is simply transferring his difficulty, and the man whose wife he has taken will have to seek a new partner. It often happens that a man takes the wife of a boy married, perhaps, to a girl of about the same age as himself, and when this boy reaches manhood he will have to seek a wife and will naturally try to obtain the wife of another rather than be content with a child perhaps only three or four years of age. It would be impossible that such a custom as that of terersthi should remain limited in scope, but there is no doubt that at the present day it has become the custom for any man who takes a fancy for the wife of another to endeavour to obtain her for himself, and I was told that he would give large bribes to the elders of the Todas to attain his object. It seems quite clear that, at the present time, it is not considered necessary to obtain the consent either of the wife or of the husband, and in some cases the wife has been taken from her husband by force. [210]
In some recent cases the aggrieved parties in such disputes have appealed to the Government, and during my visit a petition was being drawn up for presentation to the Governor of Madras, asking that the abuses of the terersthi custom should be remedied.
DIVORCE
Divorce exists among the Todas quite apart from the transference of wives just considered.
I was told that a man divorces his wife for two reasons, and for two only, the first reason being that the wife is a fool and the second that she will not work. Barrenness is not generally regarded as a reason for divorce, though I was told of one case in which a man had sent away his wife on this account. It seemed more usual in such a case to take a second wife. In some cases the illness of the husband has been regarded as a ground for divorce. Intercourse between a wife and another man is not regarded as a reason for divorce but rather as a perfectly natural occurrence.
When a man divorces his wife, the woman’s people usually complain to the naim or council, but if it is decided that the man shall take his wife back, there appears to be no way of compelling him to do so. In any case the husband pays a fine (kwadr) of one buffalo to the wife’s people, just as he would have done if he had refused to take her when she reached the marriageable age, but he receives back any buffaloes he may have given as pòdri. Even if the council decides that the man ought to take his wife back and he refuses, a fine greater than one buffalo cannot be inflicted.
If the divorced woman re-marries, the previous husband does not receive anything, and any buffaloes given become the property of the woman’s family.
THE MOKHTHODITI INSTITUTION
In addition to the regular marriage, there is another recognised mode of union between men and women, which is called mokhthoditi. The man who becomes the consort of a woman in this way is called her mokhthodvaiol—viz., “man who keeps mokh,” [211] and the woman is called sedvaitazmokh—viz., “woman who joins.” The mokhthoditi union differs from the regular marriage in one important respect. It may be, and usually is, formed between Tarthar men and Teivali women, or between Teivali men and Tarthar women. The great majority of instances of which I heard were of this kind. One woman might have more than one mokhthodvaiol, the largest number of which I heard being three. Similarly, a man might have more than one sedvaitazmokh, but as the custom entailed considerable expenses on the man, this was not common, and I did not hear of any instance in which a man had more than two.
The mokhthodvaiol has no rights over any children who might be supposed to be his; they are regarded as the children of the regular marriage. This would be the case even if the husband were dead or separated from his wife. If a Teivali man took a Tarthar widow as sedvaitazmokh, and a child were born, the child would belong to the Tartharol, and would be regarded as the son of the dead husband of the woman, and would belong to his clan. The child might live with the mokhthodvaiol, and be spoken of ordinarily as the child of this man, but yet for all social and legal purposes, the child would be a member of its mother’s husband’s clan. The dead husband is regarded as the father because it was he who last performed the pursütpimi ceremony.
There are two forms of the mokhthoditi union. In one the woman lives with the man just as if she were his real wife, almost the only difference being that any children would be legally the children of the legal husband of the woman or of some man of her division called upon to perform the pursütpimi ceremony. In the other and more usual form the man visits the woman at the house of her husband.
Owing to the restriction on the visits of Teivali women to Tarthar villages, there is a difference in the nature of the mokhthoditi union in the two divisions. A Teivali mokhthodvaiol may take his wife to live with him at one of the Teivali villages, but in those cases in which Tarthar men live permanently with Teivali women, the mokhthodvaiol must live at the woman’s village. There are two examples of this practice at the present time in which Tarthar men live altogether at Teivali villages.
When a man wishes to have a given woman as his sedvaitazmokh he goes to the husband or husbands of the woman and asks for his or their consent. As a sample of the kind of negotiations which ensue, I will give a definite instance. A Tarthar man wished to become mokhthodvaiol to the wife of two Teivali brothers. He went to them and asked for their consent, which they gave, but said they should like to have the agreement confirmed by a third party (nedrvol), and they settled on a nedrvol to whom all went. The nedrvol asked each if he consented to the arrangement, and it was decided that the Tarthar man should give a putkuli worth three rupees annually to the woman’s husbands, and the former became mokhthodvaiol to the woman on that day.
A few days later the two husbands and the mokhthodvaiol went to the woman’s father and brothers (called collectively paiol), and the mokhthodvaiol promised that he would give the woman either a keivali (necklace) or a sin (gold earrings), each worth about thirty rupees. [A poorer man might only give a pulthi (bracelet), worth about twelve rupees]. He also promised that he would give a three-year-old buffalo to the son of the woman, this being called mokh ir kwadrti, i.e., “son buffalo he gives.” After making these promises, the mokhthodvaiol performed the salutation of kalmelpudithti to all the paiol, i.e., he bowed down before each, and placed his head beneath their feet.
As we have seen earlier, not only are the relatives of the sedvaitazmokh called paiol, the term in use for the relatives of a real wife, but the father of the woman is called mun and her mother mumi, names which are also terms of blood-relationship.
When a man or woman dies, the mokhthodvaiol of the woman and the sedvaitazmokh of the man have definitely assigned duties at the funeral ceremonies. Each wears a ring on the ring finger of the left hand and has to put various things with the left hand into the pocket of the putkuli of the dead person. [212]
The mokhthoditi institution was first described by Ward in 1821, [213] the man being called by Ward the coombhal (the kumbliol, cloak or blanket man). This is the Badaga name, and it has usually been adopted by those who have since referred to the institution.
The custom is said to have originated with the god Kulinkars, who was the mokhthodvaiol of the goddess Nòtirzi, but I could obtain no details of the way in which the custom is supposed to have arisen.
The ceremonial connected with the process of becoming a mokhthodvaiol is very much like that of the real marriage. A garment is given or promised and the salutation of kalmelpudithti is paid to the woman’s relatives. The chief difference is that the gifts are more numerous and expensive for the mokhthodvaiol than for the husband. Further, in some cases the sedvaitazmokh of a Teivali man may live with him exactly in the same way as a wife. Except for the prohibition against Teivali women living at Tarthar villages, and the important difference in the mode of descent of the children there seems to be little essential difference in some cases between the mokhthoditi union and marriage. In describing the institution, one of my informants laid great stress on the disability of a man of one division to perform the pursütpimi ceremony for a woman of the other division and treated this as the essential point of difference. He seemed to regard this ceremonial disability as primary and the other differences as the secondary results, but I do not know how far this is the general Toda view.
SEXUAL MORALITY
From the foregoing account it appears that a woman may have one or more recognised lovers as well as several husbands. From the account given of the dairy ritual, it appears that she may also have sexual relations with dairymen of various grades—that, for instance, the wursol, on the nights when he sleeps in the hut, may be the lover of any Tarthar girl. Further, there seems to be no doubt that there is little restriction of any kind on sexual intercourse. I was assured by several Todas not only that adultery was no motive for divorce, but that it was in no way regarded as wrong. It seemed clear that there is no word for adultery in the Toda language. My interpreter, Samuel, had translated the Commandments shortly before my visit, and only discovered while working with me that the expression he had used in translating the seventh Commandment really bore a very different meaning.
When a word for a concept is absent in any language it by no means follows that the concept has not been developed, but in this case I have little doubt that there is no definite idea in the mind of the Toda corresponding to that denoted by our word ‘adultery.’ Instead of adultery being regarded as immoral, I rather suspected, [214] though I could not satisfy myself on the point, that, according to the Toda idea, immorality attaches rather to the man who grudges his wife to another. One group of those who experience difficulty in getting to the next world after death are the kashtvainol, or grudging people, and I believe this term includes those who would in a more civilised community be plaintiffs in the divorce court.
In nearly every known community, whether savage, barbarous or civilised, there is found to exist a deeply rooted antipathy to sexual intercourse between brother and sister. In savage communities where kinship is of the classificatory kind, this antipathy extends not only to the children of one mother, but to all those who are regarded as brothers and sisters because they are members of the same clan or other social unit. In some communities, such as those of Torres Straits, this antipathy may extend to relatives as remote as those we call second and third cousins, so long as descent through the male line from a common ancestor and membership of the same clan lead people to regard one another as brother and sister.
It is very doubtful whether this widespread, almost universal abhorrence is shared by the Todas. I was told that members of the same clan might have intercourse with one another, and in the preliminary ceremony for the office of palol, a special part was taken by a woman who possessed the qualification that she had never had intercourse with a man of her own clan, and it was said it was far from easy to find such a woman. When I collected this information, it seemed clear that this meant that a woman who, before marriage had belonged to a given clan, had never had intercourse with a man of that clan. But since a woman joins the clan of her husband, and since, marriage taking place at an early age, the woman belongs to her husband’s clan from this early age, it has since occurred to me that an alternative explanation of the restriction is possible, though it does not seem to me to be likely. It is possible that what is meant is that the woman should never have had intercourse with any of her husband’s clan except those who are properly her husbands. If this explanation were the correct one, the prohibition would seem to be directed against practices resembling communal marriage, and would be interesting evidence in favour of the existence of this type of marriage, since there are no prohibitions against what does not exist nor has ever existed. As I have said, however, I think it very unlikely that the prohibition is to be interpreted in this way, but I regret very greatly that it did not occur to me to inquire carefully into this point on the spot.
So far as I could tell, the laxity in sexual matters is equally great before and after marriage. If a girl who has been married in infancy, but has not yet joined her husband, should become pregnant, the husband would be called upon to give the bow and arrow at the pursütpimi ceremony and would be the father of the child, even if he were still a young boy, or if it were known that he was not the father of the child. I only heard of one case in recent times in which an unmarried girl had become pregnant. In this case a man who was a matchuni of the woman was called in to give the bow and arrow, but he did not regard himself as married to the woman and did not live with her. That some stigma was attached to the occurrence may possibly be shown by the fact that this woman remained unmarried for some years, and then only married a man who was certainly below the general standard of the Todas in intelligence. The child, a daughter, of the woman died soon after birth, so that I had no chance of ascertaining whether the irregularity of her birth would have had any influence on her position in Toda society. If, however, a child is born without the pursütpimi ceremony having been performed, it is called padmokh and an indelible disgrace attaches to it throughout life.
From any point of view, and certainly from the point of view of the savage, the sexual morality of the Todas among themselves is very low. It is an interesting subject of speculation how far this laxity is the result of the practice of polyandry, for since low sexual morality brings in its train various factors which tend to sterility, we may have here, as Mr. Punnett has suggested elsewhere, [215] a reason why polyandry is so rare a form of marriage. The practice of polyandry must almost inevitably weaken the sentiment of possession on the part of the man which does so much to maintain the more ordinary forms of marriage.
The low sexual morality of the Todas is not, however, limited in its scope to the relations within the Toda community. Conflicting views are held by those who know the Nilgiri Hills as to the relations of the Todas with the other inhabitants, and especially with the train of natives which the European immigration to the hills has brought in its wake. The general opinion on the hills is that in this respect the morality of the Todas is as low as it well could be, but it is a question whether this opinion is not too much based on the behaviour of the inhabitants of one or two villages near the European settlements, and I think it is probable that the larger part of the Todas remain more uncontaminated than is generally supposed.
That the Todas are perhaps not so black as they are painted is suggested by two considerations. There is little evidence of the existence of many half-breeds. I examined in one way or another over 500 Todas and must have seen nearly the whole of the 800 people who form the Toda population. I saw few who suggested Tamil or Badaga intermixture and only one boy whose appearance suggested European parentage. A more careful examination than I gave might, however, have revealed other suspicious cases, and perhaps in a race which practices infanticide the absence or paucity of half-breeds may not carry much weight.
The other consideration is of a different kind and tends to show not only that the Todas are not so black as they are painted, but that they are not so black as they paint themselves.
By means of the genealogical record I was able to work out the relationship to one another of forty-three individuals suffering from colour-blindness. Since this condition runs mainly in the female line, it does not afford very cogent evidence of paternity; but a full examination of my records seems to show that colour-blind men, or rather males of colour-blind families, had colour-blind descendants more often than perhaps might have been expected if the Todas are in practice quite as promiscuous as their social regulations allow them to be. The record of the affinity of the colour-blind suggests that in spite of the theoretical promiscuity, the husbands are, in practice, very often the fathers of their children.
A few histories of individuals may be given as examples of the various marriage customs which have been described in this chapter. One of the most married of Toda women is Puvizveli of Kusharf (65). She was married in infancy to Singudr (55), of the same clan as Sinkòrs, the mother of Puvizveli, and the two were probably the matchuni of one another, though only in a distant way. Puvizveli was taken from Singudr by Madsu and Koboners (58), who gave for her three buffaloes. From them she was transferred to Kangudr of Piedr (62), it being arranged that he should pay eleven buffaloes. Soon after joining Kangudr, Puvizveli became ill, and since there is a prohibition of marriages between the clans of Piedr and Kusharf, it was agreed that the pair should separate, and the woman was taken by Tütners and Etamudri (58). The eleven buffaloes had never been paid by Kangudr, so Tütners and his brother gave their buffaloes directly to Madsu and Koboners, but only four instead of eleven. All these transactions took place while Puvizveli was still young, but by her new husbands she had a son who died soon after birth. During her second pregnancy, she was taken by Perpakh and Tebkudr (68), who gave six buffaloes. The transference took place before the pursütpimi ceremony had been performed. Perpakh gave the bow and arrow, and the daughter since born is regarded as the child of Perpakh and Tebkudr. Puvizveli has also a Tarthar mokhthodvaiol.
Edjog of Kuudr (56) was married in infancy to Nargudr (62), the son of her mother’s brothers, and therefore her matchuni in the nearest sense. From him Kiudners (70) and his two brothers took her for five buffaloes, Kiudners died before the buffaloes had been paid, and Edjog was taken by Mavòdriners (65), who arranged to pay the five buffaloes to Nargudr. He did not do so, but after having a son by Edjog, he sent her back to the father, paying a kwadr of one buffalo. So far, Nargudr had not received his five buffaloes, but he now obtained them from Kaners and Kudrievan (63), who took the woman although she was the granddaughter of their sister Narskuti. The marriage met with disapproval among the Todas on this account, though there does not appear to be any definite regulation against such a marriage; and at the time of my visit Edjog, a young woman of about twenty-seven, was still the wife of the two old men, aged about seventy and sixty-seven respectively.
Kuriolv of Kuudr (52) first married Punaveli (65), by whom he had two children. He then took to live with him Pilimurg (7), a Tarthar woman, giving to Pepners (44), the husband of the woman, fifteen buffaloes. Though Pilimurg is only legally his sedvaitazmokh, Kuriolv treats her as a wife. She lives at one of the Kuudr villages, while Punaveli lives at another. Pilimurg has had one son, Meilitars, since she has been living with Kuriolv, and Kuriolv always speaks of the boy as his son, though legally he is the son of Pepners, and his name will be found in the genealogies among the children of this man.
Recently Kuriolv has also married Sintharap (68), sharing her with Ònadj (57), of the same clan as Kuriolv, but belonging to a different family. Sintharap has had three children, for the first of whom Kuriolv performed the pursütpimi ceremony, and since no one has performed this ceremony for the succeeding children, they are also regarded as the children of Kuriolv. One of these children was Sinerani, whose funeral ceremonies have been described.
Kuriolv’s son, Kulpakh (52), married Toridz (65), sharing her with Kiladrvan (60), of the same clan as Kulpakh, but of a different family. At the first pregnancy Kulpakh gave the bow and arrow, and was regarded as the father of that child and of two succeeding children who were born while Kulpakh was alive. After the birth of the third child Kulpakh died, and Toridz has since continued to live with Kiladrvan and has had two more children. Kuriolv, the father of the dead man, succeeded in preventing Kiladrvan from performing the pursütpimi ceremony before the birth of either of these children, and consequently they are regarded as the children of the dead Kulpakh and belong to Kuriolv’s division (pòlm) of the clan and not to that of Kiladrvan. Here, by virtue of the pursütpimi ceremony, a dead man is the legal father of two children who are known to be really the sons of his fellow-husband.
In the preceding cases the people belong to the Teivaliol. Among the Tartharol there are similar histories.
Pupidz of Kwòdrdoni (35) was married in infancy to two brothers, Kalgeners and Kinagudr, belonging to the same clan as the mother of Pupidz, so that she would probably have called them matchuni, though they were not nearly related. From these boys Pupidz was taken by Patser (26), who gave for her three buffaloes. From Patser she was taken by Siriar (20) for five buffaloes. Some time later Pepob (44) wished to marry Pupidz, but both she and Siriar were unwilling to be separated. Pepob, however, persuaded the council to arrange that he should have the woman for three buffaloes, and soon after five or six men carried off the woman by force, entering Siriar’s hut at night. Two of the men held Siriar while the others carried off his wife, who became pregnant by Pepob, but Siriar, who had been trying to get back his wife, succeeded when she was about at the sixth month. The hand-burning ceremony had already been performed, but Siriar gave the bow and arrow, and is therefore the legal father of the boy born afterwards, although Pepob is known to have been the real father. Siriar had to give Pepob eleven buffaloes, though he had only received three, and had given five to the previous husband.
Nanbarvan of Kars (7) first married Pothenir (47), by whom he had one son. Nanbarvan went to England with a party of Todas, and Pothenir then married Kutadri, Nanbarvan’s first cousin. On his return from England, Nanbarvan married Sindod (38), by whom he had a second son. Then he fell ill, and in consequence sent Sindod away, and since that time he has had no wife, though he claims that Iraveli, his brother’s wife, is also his. There seems to be no doubt, however, that he does not live with his brother in the same way as in most cases of polyandry, and is a wanderer with no regular home of his own, but I could not discover the cause of this.
A dispute about a marriage was in progress while I was on the Hills, which I did not understand completely, but it appeared that Oselig (24), who had been first married to Teigudr (4), was then taken by Punog (14). Punog was said to have treated his wife badly, and to have failed to perform his duties when there was a funeral in the family of Nertiners, the brother of Oselig. He had not given the proper pödri, nor had he taken part in the cloth-giving ceremony, so Oselig ran away from him and took refuge with her brother. After a month Punog demanded back his wife and also twelve buffaloes which he had left with Nertiners for grazing purposes. Nertiners refused to send back his wife, and returned only eight of the buffaloes. He also proceeded to arrange that Oselig should marry Udrchovan (36), and Punog accused Nertiners of having got up the whole quarrel in order that Oselig should make this marriage. The matter was referred to the council, and it was decided that Oselig should become the wife of Udrchovan, but I did not hear for how many buffaloes, nor how the other disputes about buffaloes and pödri were settled.
At this time Udrchovan had another wife, Pandut (45). She had been the wife of Udrchovan and his brother Popners from infancy, and after having three children, who died young, she had been sent away and Udrchovan married Kavener (3), while his brother married Silkot (10). Later Kavener was taken from Udrchovan by Kudrvas (11), and Udrchovan remarried Pandut, who in the meantime had had two other husbands.
To the foregoing accounts, which I give as exceptional and not as typical examples of the uncertainty of Toda married life, I add one taken from the book published by Captain Harkness in 1832, p. 121. The notes are added by myself.
THE HISTORY OF PINPURZ KUTAN
“I was not seven years old, when my father, taking a child’s garment, in value about a quarter of a rupee, and selecting one of the best of our herd, desired me to accompany him to the morrt [216] of Kinōri. This Kinōri had, a month or two before, a daughter born to him. Soon after we had arrived at the morrt, it being understood that Kinōri gladly consented to the propositions which had been made by my father, I was directed to bow myself down, and in the presence of the whole family to ask his foot. This I did; and touching it with my forehead, the buffalo and the garment were presented him, and I was considered to be affianced to his daughter. We remained there for some days, during which period it was agreed upon, what number of kine I was to receive in dower, on my intended spouse coming of age, and we again set out to return to our own morrt. I had no brothers, or they also would have been affianced to my intended, as this was part of the agreement, in case of my father having any more sons born to him. In this case Kinōri’s daughter would have been wife to us in succession as we arrived at manhood, and we should have formed one united family—the supreme authority, however, still resting with me. The next year, my father presented to my intended bride a garment, double in value to the first which he had presented, and in each succeeding year, one proportionately increasing in value. We also sacrificed a buffalo, and presented a kutch [217] on every occasion of a death among any of the relations of my intended’s family, and one also at their obsequies. In case of any accident of the kind in our family, we expected the same to be observed towards us, except the presenting of the kutch, from which my bride’s father was exempted on account of the dower he had to give with her, which would greatly exceed in amount any expense which I could be to my father. My father died, and when I had attained man’s estate, I was not pleased with my betrothed; and presenting her father with three kine, the contract was by mutual consent dissolved. Had the reverse been the case, and the bride or her father had declined to allow of consummation, I could have claimed of the latter a fine equal to fifty kine, and till this fine was paid the former could not marry any other. Freed from my contract with my first bride, I sought to affiance myself in a manner more to my own inclinations, and wishing to be connected with the family of my present wife, Pilluvāni, who was then only six years of age, I spoke to her father, and, obtaining his consent, presented her with a garment in value, according to her age, of about a rupee and a half, and a milch buffalo. I continued to present her with a garment every succeeding year; and on the occurrence of a death among any of the relations of her family, and at the obsequies, I always sacrificed a buffalo, and presented the kutch. Pilluvāni was afterwards betrothed to two others, Khakhood and Tūmbŭt. When she had arrived at a certain age, and had for eight days been living with one of her female friends in a dwelling separate from those of the family, [218] intimation was sent to me, and I went to her father’s morrt, that is, Kerjwan’s, her second father, the first one being dead. I was feasted and bedded; and after a few days, Kerjwan, laying on his hands, gave us his blessing, and I returned with my wife to my own morrt, receiving with her in dower four buffalo kine; her father also presented to her on this occasion a pair of ear-rings, a pair of armlets, a necklace, a brazen salver, and five rupees.
“Now, according to our customs, Pilluvāni was to pass the first month with me, the second with Khakhood, and the third with Tūmbŭt; and the two latter, waiting in succession on the father-in-law, were to ask his blessing and claim their privilege in right. I was to give her raiment the first year, Khakhood the second, and Tūmbŭt the third. I had the option of claiming the first three children, Khakhood the second three, and Tūmbŭt the third three; when the option again revolved to me. It was my place to go to her father two or three months prior to the birth of a child, and, delivering to him a small piece of wood, which we call a billu, [219] to claim the forthcoming infant, whether male or female, and acknowledge before him and his relations that I would protect and nourish it; and that, whatever might happen, I allowed this to be in satisfaction of one of my claims. On this occasion, also, I was to present him either five or ten rupees, and in return he was to allow me to select, if I presented him five rupees, three; if ten rupees, six of the best kine of his herd. If the child proved a boy he would have to present me with a heifer, and another one also on the birth of each son, but not on the birth of a daughter, as it is supposed that she will soon be betrothed, and that a fortune will accrue to her in that way.
“After the third birth the same observance and privilege would have fallen to Khakhood and Tūmbŭt successively, or if I chose to give up any of my rights the two latter would successively have had choice of adoption, &c., &c. We all three should have been equally bound to protect the whole of the children, to marry, and to give them in marriage; but the superior authority would always have rested with me.
“The case of Pilluvāni and myself, however, was at variance with this custom. We were very fond of one another and determined not to separate. I offered to pay the usual fines, but the other party would not accept of them. I had been unfortunate. A murrain had attacked my herd; the greater part of Korrorr, [220] and which belonged to my fathers, had been forsaken by the Marvs and Cūvs, [221] from the oppression of some of their rulers, and from being a leading man among my own people I was now reduced, but principally by the oppressions of my wife’s relations, to comparative poverty.”
XXIII. SOCIAL ORGANISATION
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 social or ceremonial purposes, the method of government, the laws concerning property and inheritance, and the position of women.
We have already seen that the primary fact in the social organisation of the Todas is the existence of two divisions, the Tartharol and the Teivaliol, [222] and the last chapter has shown that these divisions form endogamous groups, each of which is divided into a number of exogamous septs or clans. In some respects the clan is a definite unit in the social organisation with a certain amount of power in regulating its own affairs, owning property and having in many cases social or religious usages peculiar to itself.
THE CLAN
The clan system is territorial, and I could discover no trace of its ever having been totemic. The clan owns a number of villages and takes its name from the chief of these, the etudmad. The connexion of the clan with the village is so generally recognised that in some cases in which the etudmad of the clan has disappeared, or is rarely visited, there is a tendency to name the clan after the chief village still in use. Thus the people of Pirspurs have now become the Pämol and the Kusharfol are often named after Umgas, a village in more frequent use than Kusharf. In general the villages belonging to a clan are situated in the same part of the hills, but a clan often possesses outlying villages at a considerable distance from the chief group. Sometimes these outlying villages are of comparatively recent origin, and in other cases they have been established on account of grazing necessities; thus several clans which have their chief seats near Ootacamund have villages in the Kundahs or in the district near Makurti Peak, which are visited in the dry season.
The members of a clan have many common rights and privileges which bind them together, so that the clan-tie has a very real meaning. Property, however, as we shall see shortly, is largely centred in the family or the individual, and the Todas are in a state of social evolution in which the common bond constituted by membership of the clan has been largely replaced by the bond constituted by the family. They are in an intermediate condition between the state of society in which the clan is the social unit and that in which the family has taken this position.
Nearly all who have previously written about the Todas have described them as divided into five clans—viz., the Peiki, Pekkan, Kenna, Todi, or Tothi, and Kuttan. These are the five divisions recognised by the Badagas, and a Badaga knows each Toda as belonging to one of them. The Todas are also perfectly acquainted with these divisions, and they could always say, if asked, to which of them a given village or a given man belonged. If a Toda is asked by a European to which clan or division he belongs, he will probably give one of these names, but I do not believe that they are in use among themselves, being reserved for their intercourse with Badagas and other Indian castes and with Europeans.
The Peiki of the Badaga classification are the Teivaliol; the Pekkan correspond to the Melgarsol, the people of Kidmad and Karsh being also usually included in this group. Kenna is the Badaga name of the Karsol; the Todi or Tothi include two clans, the Nòdrsol and the Panol, while the Kuttan comprise the remainder of the Tarthar clans—viz., those of Taradr, Keradr, Kanòdrs, Kwòdrdoni, Päm and Nidrsi. I could obtain no direct information from the Todas which would explain why the Badaga classification should differ from their own. It is possible that it is an old classification of the Todas, but this is unlikely, since it is probable that the intercourse with the Badagas is not very ancient. It seems to me possible that it may have arisen out of the constitution of the naim or council. This has four Toda representatives belonging to Kuudr (representing the Teivaliol), Kars, Nòdrs and Taradr. This would correspond to four of the Badaga divisions, and the fifth, the Melgarsol or Pekkan, would certainly be well known to the Badagas through their privileges as mòrol. It is possible that the Nòdrs representative used also to represent Pan, and that the Taradr member represented the remaining clans, and, if so, it would point to there having been some old five-fold division of the kind believed in by the Badagas. It is quite clear that the five-fold division has no influence on the marriage regulations and Peiki, Todi and Kuttan all marry freely within their divisions. Except in connexion with the naim, I could learn of nothing which would show that the five-fold division has any social significance, and I know of no other way in which the Panol are associated with the Nòdrsol nor of any other way in which the six clans included in the Kuttan are associated together. It is possible that the five-fold division is connected with some customs regulating the payment of the Badaga tribute to the Todas, but I could learn nothing of such customs.
Each clan has divisions of two kinds called kudr and pòlm. The kudr is a division of ceremonial, the pòlm of practical, importance.
THE KUDR
Normally each clan has two kudr and two only, and, as we have seen in Chapter XIII, these divisions become of the greatest importance in 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, and I do not know whether the division is one which formerly possessed a social significance which it has now lost, so that the kudr only persists in ceremony, or whether it is a mode of division of the clan which has arisen purely in connexion with the irnörtiti and other allied ceremonies.
In one or two cases there was some doubt as to whether a certain division of the people was a clan or a kudr. This was especially the case with the Kwaradrol, now extinct, who were said by some of my informants to have been a clan, but it seemed clear that they only formed a kudr of the Keadrol, and were not properly a distinct clan. This is one case in which a kudr has a distinctive name, and another example occurs in the Panol where the kudr have separate names, one the Panol or Pandar, the other the Kuirsiol or Peshteidimokh. In general, each kudr is named after its leading man, thus the two kudr of the Nòdrsol are spoken of as the kudr of Mudrigeidi (1) and Kerkadr (2). The man who gives his name to the kudr is probably responsible for the general management of the ceremonies in which the kudr is concerned.
In a few cases a clan was said to have more than two kudr, but on cross-examination it turned out in each case that the statement was due to the fact that the clan contained a section which had no part, or only a subordinate part, in the irnörtiti ceremony and that this section might sometimes be spoken of as a kudr. Thus, in the Kuudr clan there are three sections, two which have reciprocal relations in the irnörtiti ceremony, and a third consisting of the family of Tövoniners (61) which lost certain privileges owing to a dispute many generations ago (see p. 675). This family could perform the irnörtiti ceremony, but in such a case the buffalo would go to the members of the two other divisions and Tövoniners would receive nothing if either of the other divisions performed the ceremony. Another example of a clan said to have three kudr is that of Piedr, where the family of Nongarsivan (62) stands in the same relation to the other divisions as is the case with the family of Tövoniners in the Kuudrol. In this case Nongarsivan’s exceptional position is probably due to the fact that his family lives at Kavidi in the Wainad.
When a kudr becomes extinct a new division of the remaining kudr may take place, but, as a rule, this is not done till an occasion for the irnörtiti ceremony arises. There are several cases in which one kudr of a clan has now been extinct for several years, but though the re-division is often a subject for discussion, it is not probable that a new kudr will be instituted till the necessity arises. Occasionally, however, it would seem that a new kudr may be decided on apart from an occasion for the irnörtiti ceremony, for about the time of my visit the people of Keadr, who had lost one kudr by the dying out of the Kwaradrol, decided that the family of Karem (69), of which the sole living representatives are three boys, should form a new kudr. I could not learn what had been the motives for the decision. Some unimportant clans which have arisen by fusion from other clans, such as those of Kidmad and Kulhem, have no kudr, and do not appear ever to have possessed these divisions.
THE PÒLM
The word pòlm means ‘portion,’ and is the name of the section of the clan by means of which is regulated the sharing of any expenses which fall on the clan as a whole. Any expenses which the clan may incur as a whole are not equally divided among the individual members of the clan, but are equally divided among the pòlm. The chief occasion on which such expenses arise is in the repair or rebuilding of a dairy.
When a clan owns a ti and a dairy of the ti needs to be rebuilt or repaired, the expense also falls on the clan, and is equally divided among the pòlm, as in the case of the village dairy.
The outlay is equally divided among the pòlm, however much they may vary in size. Thus in the Kars clan one pòlm has sixteen adult male members, while another has only one, but this one man would contribute exactly the same amount as the other sixteen.
Occasionally a pòlm is so poor that it cannot pay its share, and in one such case at the present time the pòlm, in this case consisting of two boys only, has been incorporated into another.
The number of pòlm in a clan varies greatly, from ten in the case of Kars to one only in the Pedrkars clan. There is no definite relation between the kudr and the pòlm as regards numbers; thus, one kudr of a clan may consist of one pòlm only, when the other kudr is divided into many pòlm. When there is a great degree of inequality in the sizes of different pòlm, a redistribution may take place, and this is probably the more likely to happen the more influential are the members of the smaller pòlm.
I believe that redistribution in the case of both pòlm and kudr is usually decided by the members of the clan itself, but in cases of doubt it is probable that the general council may have a voice in the matter.
Each pòlm has a headman and is spoken of as the pòlm of this man. He is responsible for collecting the amount due from it, but as the pòlm often consists of a number of brothers, who hold much of their property in common, the collection is not usually a matter of difficulty, and I never heard of any disputes arising from this source.
The Todas recognise the existence of the family (kudupel or kudubel) within the clan, meaning by this a group of people bound together by near blood kinship. As a general rule, the family corresponds with the pòlm, but sometimes there may be more than one pòlm in the same family. It seemed to me that the term kudupel had not the same clear meaning as the pòlm. The family has no important function in the social organisation except in so far as it corresponds with the pòlm, but it is taken into account when the pòlm and kudr are readjusted.
The term was chiefly used when the Todas were speaking of certain families as being noted in certain ways or as having certain privileges. Thus, some families are noted for their powers as sorcerers, and these are called pilikudupel; others are known as manikudupel, or chief families, whose members are important in government and can hold the office of monegar and serve on the naim. Other families important in government whose members can serve on the naim or council are called tinkaniputitth kudupel or tinkani kudupel and palutth kudupel. The members of certain other families have certain duties of a lower order in connexion with the naim. They take messages and act generally as servants at the meetings, and the families with these functions are called kavòdiputipol kudupel, or servant families. They are also sometimes called armanol or palace people, because at one time the Rajah of Nelambur in the Wainad put his buffaloes into their charge.
LAWS OF DESCENT
Descent among the Todas is always reckoned in the male line. A man is always of the same clan as his father, if by his “father” we understand the man who has given the bow and arrow to his mother at the pursütpimi ceremony. In the case of the offspring of a mokhthoditi union, there is at first sight an appearance of female descent. The child of a Teivali mother and a Tarthar father belongs to the Teivaliol and vice versâ, but on further inquiry it is found that the child does not belong to his mother’s clan, but to that of her legal husband. The child of a Teivali mother in such a case is not Teivali because his mother is of this division, but because a Teivali man only is allowed to perform the pursütpimi ceremony with a Teivali woman and become the legal father of her child. If, in such a case, the pursütpimi ceremony had not been performed, the child would belong to the division and clan of neither father nor mother, but would be a padmokh, of no division and of no clan. [223] I did not definitely inquire into the point, but from my general knowledge of the position of such an individual, I have little doubt that he would not be allowed to perform the pursütpimi ceremony, and could therefore never become the legal father of a child.
In this as in all cases the clan to which a child belongs is determined entirely by the pursütpimi ceremony. If in a polyandrous marriage the husbands belong to different clans, a child belongs to the clan of the husband who has last performed this ceremony, and, as we have already seen, in the case of the death of one of the husbands, the dead man may become the legal father of several children, if the surviving husband does not perform the ceremony of giving a bow and arrow to the wife.
Again, in the case of a woman becoming pregnant while still unmarried, the father of the child is the man who is called in to give the bow and arrow, although he may have had nothing to do with the woman before the ceremony. Further, if for any reason the husband of a woman should be prevented from performing the pursütpimi ceremony, some other man is called upon to give the bow and arrow and he becomes the father of the child. Lastly, in the numerous cases of transference of wives from one man to another by the terersthi custom, one man may be the real father of a child, but another will become the legal father if the transference should take place in time for him to perform the essential ceremony.
The Todas show few traces of mother-right. In some communities there is little reason to doubt that such acts as are performed by a Toda towards his sister’s son are survivals of a condition of society in which the mother’s brother was responsible, largely or altogether, for the welfare of the child. Among the Todas, however, the mun stands in two relations to a child. He is the mother’s brother, and he is also the prospective or actual father-in-law, and we have no means of telling in which of these two rôles he performs his duties. If the duties of a man towards his sister’s son among the Todas be a relic of mother-right, there can be little doubt that this condition must have been very remote.
The Todas have a special name for the village of a man’s mother—viz., karuvnòdr, or “honoured place,” and when a manmokh gives a buffalo or other contribution on the occasion of a funeral, he speaks of it as a gift to his karuvnòdr. When a man visits his karuvnòdr, he goes to the door of the dairy and bows down with his head to the ground at its threshold, and then goes to the huts, where he is greeted with the appropriate greeting, but this differs in no way from the procedure of a visitor to any etudmad.
Marshall in his book [224] on the Todas has suggested that the existence of female succession among the buffaloes of the Todas may be a relic of female descent among the people themselves. He suggests that at one time the scheme of descent and kinship was the same for the Todas and for their buffaloes, and that with the introduction of polyandry there came in inheritance through males among themselves, while they continued to reckon the descent of the buffaloes in the female line.
We have seen (see p. 471) that the method of reckoning descent among the buffaloes is due superficially to the absence of names for male buffaloes and more deeply to the lack of interest in paternity. Nevertheless, Marshall’s suggestion, wild as it may seem, should not be utterly scouted. The Todas regard their buffaloes so much as fellow creatures that any of their ideas concerning the relations of their buffaloes to one another should not be without interest to the student of social regulations.
If one may speak of social organisation among buffaloes—and in the case of the Toda herds we are justified in doing so—we have a state of society in some ways analogous to that which many sociologists suppose to have existed at one time in the early stages of human society. We have various groups of buffaloes, and each buffalo—certainly each female buffalo—belongs to the same group as its mother. There is complete promiscuity, and the buffalo belongs to its mother’s group because paternity is unknown or disregarded.
It is true that this condition is artificial, but it is this very artificiality which gives it its interest, for it shows that people like the Todas, whose whole lives are devoted to the buffalo, to whom the breeding of the buffalo should have the deepest interest, have allowed this state of things to come about. If they had attached importance to paternity nothing would have been easier than to regulate breeding, to record paternity, and even to have developed a system of male descent among their buffaloes such as exists among themselves.
The nature of what may be called the social regulations of the buffaloes shows that the Todas take little interest in the part played by the male in the process of mating, and, as we have seen, this lack of interest is almost as great among themselves. Side by side with the strictest regulation of marriage as a social institution, such great laxity prevails in regard to sexual relations that the Todas may almost be said to live in a condition of promiscuity, though, as I have endeavoured to show, the degree of promiscuity is in practice perhaps hardly as great as their statements would lead one to expect.
ADOPTION
It is clear that the custom of adoption of children is not practised by the Todas. They denied its existence emphatically, and I met with no instance which led me to suspect its presence in compiling the genealogies.
If a child is left an orphan, it is looked after by the people of its clan, but it is always clearly recognised that the child retains the father’s property, and belongs to the madol and pòlm of the father.
There is, so far as I could ascertain, no religious custom which makes it necessary that a man should have children. The duties of a child at the funeral ceremonies can quite well be performed by some other member of the clan.
There is a social reason which makes it inconvenient in some cases that a man should die without male issue. If a man is the only representative of his kudr, and has no children, the kudr will become extinct, and the clan will be put to the trouble of rearranging the families of which it is constituted. If such a man is childless he may take another wife in the hope of having a son to carry on the kudr, but the adoption of a child for the purpose is never thought of. A good case is that of the two brothers Mudrigeidi and Odrkurs in Table I. They are the last two representatives of one kudr of the Nòdrsol. They have had two wives, one of whom has had a daughter and a boy who died, and in the hope of having a son, one of the brothers had recently married a young girl, Obalidz, as his third wife, the others being still alive, though one had been taken by another man.
GOVERNMENT
The most important feature of Toda government is the naim, or noim, [225] a council having a definite constitution. The naim proper has to do with the affairs of the Todas in general, and, in addition, more informal councils, [226] consisting of the chief members of a clan, may be held to settle matters arising within the clan. It seems, however, that the supreme naim may sometimes be called upon to settle the internal affairs of a clan.
The naim of the general body of Todas should have five members, or, if more than five members, they should be drawn from five sources. Four of these sources are the Tarthar clans of Kars, Nòdrs, and Taradr, and the Teivali clan of Kuudr. The fifth source is the Badaga village of Tuneri, from which a Badaga man may be sent to take part in the naim. He is only called upon to sit, however, on special occasions; and in the many councils which I saw during my visit a Badaga was rarely present. He probably only sits, as a rule, when questions arise which involve the relations between the Todas and Badagas.
The Toda representatives should be drawn from certain families of their respective clans. The Kuudr representative should belong to the family known as the manikudupel, and the representatives of Kars, Nòdrs, and Taradr to the families known as tinkanikudupel. A few years ago the Toda representatives were Kuriolv of Kuudr (52), Parkurs (8) and Piutolvan (10) of Kars, Kudòdrsvan (3) of Nòdrs, and Ircheidi (20) of Taradr, though there was some question whether Ircheidi was on the naim, or whether his place had not been taken by Piutolvan, the second Kars representative. All these men are at present living, but, with the exception of Kuriolv, they are too old or infirm to serve. Kuriolv is still on the naim, and his influence is entirely predominant, and it appears that he has been instrumental in altering the constitution of the council very largely. The number of representatives has been increased, and the following were the members in 1902:—Kuriolv and Ivievan (52) of Kuudr, Perner and Tebner (68), of Keadr, Parkeidi (21), Paners (23) and Siriar (20) of Taradr and Pidrvan (9) of Kars. Thus several members of the Kuudrol and Taradrol are serving, while there appears to be no representative of the Nòdrsol; and I was told by several Todas that Perner and Tebner are on the council because they are friends of Kuriolv, though, as members of the Keadr clan, they have no right whatever to the position.
On the slopes below the hill called Mirson, near Paikara, there are the remains of ruined walls marking a place where the naim used to meet. This place is called Idrgûdipem, and seems to have been at one time the chief meeting-place.
At the present time the naim meets anywhere. I have seen the council sitting in the compound of the bungalow at Paikara and on one occasion, when I was working in a bungalow at the Ooty Club, the naim sat in the grounds of the club. In general, they now meet at the places which happen to be most convenient for the chief members.
The members usually sit in a semicircular row. If they are considering a dispute between two parties, representatives of the parties take part in the sitting, and in these cases the members of the naim sit in the middle of the row while the representatives sit on either wing.
During my visit the council was chiefly occupied with the various complicated transactions which are always arising out of the custom of transferring wives from one man to another. This custom is the chief source of disputes among the Todas, and at times the naim may sit for several days before one case is settled.
I am doubtful whether the naim should have a definite head, but at the present time it certainly has such in the person of Kuriolv of Kuudr. He is the senior representative of the manikudupel of Kuudr, and is therefore the natural representative of this clan on the naim. He is highly intelligent, and gave me the impression that he might have risen to a high place in any community. He has the reputation among the Todas of being very eloquent and of having great persuasive powers. When persuasion fails, there is very little doubt that he resorts to intimidation of some kind, though I could not discover what his means of intimidation are.
On one occasion the naim spent a whole day discussing a marriage case in the compound at Paikara. On the following day they met in a distant part of the hills to continue the discussion of the case, and I was told that this was arranged by Kuriolv because he hoped to enforce his wishes in some secluded spot more effectively than in the publicity of Paikara where the evidences of the ‘government’ probably lent moral support to his opponents.
However Kuriolv effects his purpose, there is no doubt that he almost entirely dominated the Toda people at the time of my visit. We have already seen that he has succeeded in altering the constitution of the naim, and several examples are given in this book of his interference in the normal course of Toda affairs; interference usually in favour of his own family or friends. In at least one case (see Chap. XVI) during my visit he considered himself superior to ceremonial laws.
He seemed to me to afford an excellent example of the process by which one man may bring about considerable changes in the laws and regulations of a community; though I was told in several instances that the Todas would revert to their old customs as soon as Kuriolv died.
I did not obtain a full account of the duties of the naim and of the affairs which come under its jurisdiction. There is no doubt, however, that it is largely concerned with the settlement of civil disputes arising between individuals, families, and clans. As I have already mentioned, it seemed to me that it was almost exclusively engaged during my visit in the regulation of the disputes arising out of the terersthi custom. In one such case the question of funeral contributions was involved, and I have no doubt that the settlement of any dispute arising from this source would come within the province of the naim, and probably any doubtful point in the working of the social regulations would be submitted to it.
In addition to its functions in disputes between individuals, the naim has wide functions in connexion with Toda ceremonial. It decides when many ceremonies take place, and has the chief word in regulating the affairs of the ti dairies. Thus it appeared that the various arrangements and alterations of arrangements in connexion with the migration of the buffaloes of the Nòdrs ti which were made during my visit were the work of the naim, or, at any rate, of its chief members.
CRIME
I have no knowledge about the power of the naim in criminal as opposed to civil matters. I never heard of inquiry by the naim into any criminal offence committed by one man against another or against the community. It is, however, doubtful whether crime can be said to exist among the Todas.
Acts such as infanticide are committed which would be regarded as crimes by others, but since these are the outcome of custom they are not crimes from the Toda point of view. Again, we have seen that the Todas have a code of offences against the dairy, but these must be regarded as sins rather than as crimes, for they are neither investigated nor punished by the civil authority, the naim, but are punished directly by the gods, and the various ceremonies described in Chapter XIII are expiatory and not punitive.
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 against the dairy, and I have no information to show whether quarrels ever lead to acts of violence which might in other places become the subject of criminal investigation. So far as I could learn, any investigation by the naim would only deal with the causes which had led to the quarrel; it would deal only with the civil and not with the criminal aspect of the case.
Again, the custom of terersthi, or transference of wives, which is the chief subject of the deliberations of the naim, sometimes leads to acts of violence. A woman who has been transferred by the naim from one man to another may be carried off by force from the home of the former, but, however such an act may be regarded from our standpoint, it is not a crime from the Toda point of view, but merely the carrying out of the decision of the judicial authority. So many Todas are, however, discovering that such an act is regarded as a crime by Europeans that there will probably soon come about a state of public opinion which will regard such abduction as a crime, and possibly the same idea may become attached to the whole custom of transference of a woman from one man to another unwillingly. It seemed not unlikely at the time of my visit that this conversion of a custom into a crime might be assisted by the action of the Government.
In the legend of Kwoten, this hero kills Parden, but so far as I know this is the only example of murder, either legendary or historical, among the Todas. The Todas may take part in the murder of a Kurumba who has been working magic, but this is of course no crime from the Toda point of view, but an obvious method of self-defence, for it is believed that the only way of stopping Kurumba sorcery is to kill the sorcerer.
With the exception of the occurrences accompanying the transference of wives, which I have already considered, I heard of no case of assault by one Toda on another.
Similarly, I heard of no offence against property except in connexion with the dairy. So far as I know, ornaments or clothing are never stolen. In the list of offences against the dairy, stealing ghi is included, but it was clear that this is regarded as sacrilege, as an offence against the dairy and not as an offence committed against the individual.
SUICIDE
In the legend of Kwoten there is a record of suicide by strangling, and since the suicide of Erten and his confederates this is said to have been a recognised custom among the Todas. Several instances have occurred in recent times; thus, about four generations ago, at a village called Podzkwar, near Taradrkirsi, a woman and her husband had a dispute and the woman strangled herself. About three generations ago a man strangled himself in the dairy at Melgars, and when a Toda is very angry he will threaten to commit suicide, saying “on mêdr kati kêdraividikin”—“my neck tying, I will die.”
Another way of committing suicide, said to have been borrowed from the Badagas, is that of taking opium. There has been a recent case of suicide, by this means, and when angry, a Toda sometimes says, “mud tid kêdraividikin”—“Opium eating, I will die.”
THE MONEGAR
The Todas have a monegar, or headman, who is responsible for the assessment which the Todas pay to Government for their grazing rights, &c. (see below).
The earliest monegar whom the Todas remember is Teitchi or Teiti (52). He was succeeded by his fourth son, Mutevan, who is still alive. The two eldest sons had died before their father, and Persevan, the third son, was said to be weak-minded, and Mutevan was therefore chosen to succeed.
Mutevan is now a very old man, probably about eighty years of age, and his office was taken over some years ago by his eldest son, Ivievan. Though Ivievan is the monegar he is not the chief representative of his family on the naim, this position belonging to Kuriolv, the son of Pareivan and Persevan. Ivievan is helped in collecting the assessment by an assistant monegar, and till lately this place belonged to Parkurs of Kars.
It does not appear that the monegarship is a real Toda office, but that the earliest monegar was appointed by Mr. Sullivan, the first British official of the Nilgiris. The family, however, to which the monegar belongs is called the manikudupel, which may mean the monegar family, but I could not discover definitely whether this title is older than the institution of the monegarship. It is possible that Teitchi was one of the chief men of the naim when the Europeans first came to the hills and that he was therefore appointed as monegar.
It is quite clear that at the present time the monegar, Ivievan, is not the most important man among the Todas, but that the predominant position belongs to his cousin, Kuriolv, the representative of the family on the naim.
HEADMEN
Though it is very doubtful whether the institution of monegar is not an innovation, and whether the Todas as a whole have properly any true chief, it is fairly clear that the clan and its divisions have definite leaders.
Each clan has a headman or etudol; usually, it seemed to me, one who had come to the top by virtue of his character and ability. I did not learn how far his position was generally recognised nor by what means he was chosen. It was quite clear, however, that the leading man of a clan might lose his position in old age or as the result of illness, and at the time of my visit there were several men who had been the heads of their clans but no longer occupied those positions.
Similarly, as we have seen, both kudr and pòlm have their leading men, who give their names to the divisions and are probably responsible for the conduct of their business.
PROPERTY
Among the Todas, property may be held by the clan, the family or the individual. I am not clear whether there is any case in which property is held to belong to the Todas as a whole, or to either of the two divisions. There were two villages, Padegar and Ki Perththo, said to be common property, so that any one might live at them. At the time of my visit both were occupied by Melgars people, and I could not satisfy myself as to what was meant by saying that they were common property.
In general, land, the dairies of the chief villages, and some buffaloes may be said to be the property of the clan. The house, and probably also some villages, are the property of a family, and most buffaloes, household goods and ornaments are the property of the individual.
Land.—The relation of the Todas to the land has been a much discussed theme, and for many years after the first settlement of the hills by Europeans it was a subject of controversy. The fact that the Badagas paid what seemed to be a tribute of grain to the Todas was held to show that the latter were regarded as the “lords of the soil,” and the view was strongly upheld that they should be so regarded by the Indian Government. The other view taken of the matter was that permanent rights in the soil throughout India belong to the State. The controversy [227] was not settled till 1843, when it was decided that the Todas should have the privilege of pasturing their herds on the State lands on payment of a small tax. At the present time the Todas receive an annual sum from the Government as compensation for land taken from them in Ootacamund and elsewhere.
Although the Todas have thus had much difficulty with the Government in relation to the ownership of land, it does not seem that they have trouble in this matter among themselves, and I heard of no disputes between members of different clans or different villages about grazing rights.
In the account of the marriage dispute between Punog and Nertiners (see p. 536) the former had evidently put many of his buffaloes in the charge of his brother-in-law for grazing purposes, but it was quite clear that no question of grazing rights came into this dispute. The buffaloes only came into the quarrel because Nertiners happened to have them in his charge when the marriage dispute arose.
I did not ascertain definitely how grazing rights between two clans or families are regulated, but I think it is quite clear that there is no individual ownership in land.
Certain dairies, and probably all the chief villages (etudmad), are regarded more or less as the property of the whole clan. There probably never arises any real question of ownership, but as regards the dairies, it was clear that any expenses incurred in the repair or rebuilding of a dairy fall on the whole clan, each pòlm of the clan contributing an equal share. [228]
The buffalo herds of the ti are also regarded as the property of the whole clan, but the rights of ownership are in these cases very shadowy. It does not appear that the owning clan derives any pecuniary benefit from its possession of the herd, while, on the other hand, the possession involves considerable expense, chiefly owing to certain feasts which have to be provided, and these expenses are given as the reason why certain of the sacred dairies are unoccupied. The people of the owning clan have, it is true, the right of choosing the palol, but as the choice is limited, and there is, in most cases, little competition for the office, this is a very empty honour.
Houses. Each house belongs to a certain family. The normal Toda family consists of a number of brothers with one wife, and each house belongs to a family of this kind, and is handed on to the children of the brothers.
If the brothers quarrel, the affair is settled by the naim, and it is usually decided that one brother or more than one of the brothers shall occupy the house for a certain period, usually a year, and that at the end of this period he (or they) shall move to another village, when another brother or brothers will occupy the house.
Such disputes do not seem to be frequent, but one was in existence during my visit. The two younger of three brothers had taken a wife without the knowledge of the eldest. The latter did not approve of the choice, and wished his brothers to send the wife away, which they refused to do. As the dispute had not yet been settled, the eldest brother at the time of my visit was living in the house, while the other brothers were living at the village of their newly chosen wife.
If a family dies out, it seems that the house is not, as a rule, taken on by another family. It falls into disuse, and in time disappears. As a village may sometimes consist of one house only, villages may disappear in this way, and the ruins of some villages were pointed out to me which had fallen into disuse owing to the dying out of the families which formerly occupied them. A really important village, i.e., one with an important dairy, would of course never disappear in this way, but it is possible that the reason why some villages, such as Nasmiòdr and Kanòdrs, now consist of a dairy only, is that the families which possessed the houses at these villages became extinct. I do not, however, know positively that a house at such an important village may not, in some cases, be taken over by another family.
Breeks has stated that the Toda custom is that the house shall pass to the youngest son. It seems quite clear that this is wrong, and that this custom is absolutely unknown among the Todas. It is, however, a Badaga custom, and among them I was told that it is due to the fact that as the sons of a family grow up and marry, they leave the house of the parents and build houses elsewhere. It is the duty of the youngest son to dwell with his parents and support them as long as they live, and when they die he continues to live in the parental home, of which he becomes the owner.
Buffaloes. These are to a very large extent individual property. In practice, owing to the fact that brothers usually live together, a herd of buffaloes is treated as the property of a family of brothers, but whenever the occasion arises there are definite rules for the division of the buffaloes among them.
I have already referred to the fact that certain herds of buffaloes, such as the ti herds and the kugvalir of Taradr, are the common property of a clan, but the great majority of both sacred and ordinary buffaloes belong to families or individuals. [229] When a man who owns a certain number of buffaloes dies, the buffaloes are not necessarily divided among his sons. If the sons are all living together, the buffaloes may be treated as if they were common property. The milk of the ordinary buffaloes is churned in the dwelling-hut, and that of the sacred buffaloes in the dairy, and the produce in each case is regarded as the property of the whole family. It is only when dissensions arise, or when some reason makes it desirable that the brothers should separate and live in different villages, that the laws regulating the partition of buffaloes come into force.
When such an occasion arises the buffaloes are equally divided among the brothers, with the exception that the eldest son and the youngest son each receive one buffalo in excess of the rest. This custom is known as îrvâkhtnûdr meilkûdr, or “if divide buffaloes, superior portion.”
If there are only two sons, each will get meilkudr, and the buffaloes are equally divided; but if there should be an unequal number of buffaloes, the odd buffalo is taken by the elder son.
If there are more than two sons, the buffaloes are equally divided with meilkudr to the eldest and youngest, and any odd buffaloes are in this case sold and the proceeds equally divided, or, more commonly, one of the brothers takes the odd buffaloes and gives the right proportion of their value to the other brothers.
Thus, if sixteen buffaloes are to be divided among four brothers, the eldest and youngest would each take four, the second and third brothers would each take three, and the remaining two buffaloes would either be sold and the purchase money equally divided, or taken by one of the brothers, who would divide three-quarters of the value of the buffaloes between the other three men. If there should be only fourteen buffaloes, the eldest and youngest sons would each take four buffaloes and the others three.
The meilkudr is also operative if a man divides his buffaloes among his sons in his lifetime. In this case a man usually keeps some buffaloes for himself; thus I was told that a man who had sixteen buffaloes and three sons might give four buffaloes to the eldest, three to the next, and four to the youngest son, keeping five for himself.
The Todas told me of one apparent exception to the law of meilkudr. If, in a family of four brothers, the two elder brothers marry one wife and the two younger marry another and the two groups separate, the buffaloes would be equally divided, but this is because each would receive a meilkudr. If, on the other hand, the eldest and youngest son married one wife, and the other two sons married another woman, the first group would receive two buffaloes in excess of the second. The former example is, of course, an obvious consequence of the law of meilkudr. I only mention it because the Todas told me of it especially, and seemed to regard it as a case which might be thought to be a departure from custom.
I gave the Todas a number of hypothetical problems of buffalo division, and all were solved in accordance with the law of meilkudr. I have not been able to learn of any exact parallel in other parts of the world, and it seems possible that it is an independent invention of the Todas. The division is called kudr, or horn, and it seems to me quite possible that at some time it occurred to an ingenious Toda that the two extremities of the family should be regarded as the two horns of the family, and that this fact should be recognised in the division of property, or, it may be, that the custom of endowing the eldest of the family above his fellows existed among the Todas as among so many other races, till it was pointed out that this was like a buffalo with one horn, and the youngest son was therefore similarly endowed to restore the symmetry of the family. The buffalo influences the Toda mind so much that I do not think this is a far-fetched explanation of a custom which appears to be the unique possession of this people.
The word kudr is also the name of one of the divisions of the clan, and it seemed clear in this case that the proper number of kudr in each clan is two.
There is much transference of buffaloes from one man to another, or from one family to another. Many ceremonies involve gifts of buffaloes, and these are usually presented by a member of one clan to a member of another. Marriage is one of the chief occasions of such gifts. Refusal to fulfil the marriage contract and divorce involve the payment of buffaloes, and the terersthi custom is a great source of the passing of buffaloes from one clan to another. Similarly, buffaloes are given at the ceremonies of naming, ear-piercing, &c., and as I have already pointed out, these transferences have led to great confusion in the classification of the different kinds of sacred buffaloes, as a man may have in his possession animals belonging to several named groups.
In the case of ordinary buffaloes, or putiir, it seemed that a distinction is made between buffaloes which have been acquired by a man and those descended from animals which had been in the possession of his father and grandfather. My attention was drawn to this point by the occurrence at the funeral of Sinerani. The recalcitrant buffalo on this occasion was one of the latter kind, and I was told that it should not have been killed at the funeral of a girl because, being descended from a buffalo which belonged to Kuriolv’s grandfather, Kuriolv’s heirs had a right to it of which they were deprived by its slaughter for a girl. If the dead child had been a boy the slaughter of this buffalo would have been proper, for the dead child in this case would have been one of the heirs.
Transferences of buffaloes also take place between Todas and Badagas, as we have seen in connexion with the ear-piercing ceremony described in Chapter XIV. In this case the gift appeared to be nothing more than a friendly compliment, but it is possible that transferences of buffaloes may in some cases be connected with the other complicated relations between the two tribes.
Household Goods. These are equally divided among the sons, though, as in the case of the buffaloes, they are used in common so long as the sons live together. If household goods have to be divided among the members of a family they are shared as equally as possible, and this is also the case with any ornaments. If the man had only one ring, it was said that this ring would either be broken up and shared equally, or its value would be divided. Money is shared equally among the sons.
If one of several brothers who has his own wife should die and leave children, the sons would take their father’s share at any division of property. Thus, at the time of my visit, Piutolvan and Püljeidi (10), two very old men, were thinking of dividing their buffaloes among their descendants. In this case Menkars would receive the number which his father Tagners would have received if he had been alive. If Tagners had left two sons, the portion which their father would have received would be divided between the two boys or devoted to their common use.
Daughters inherit nothing. They only receive from their parents what they are given as dowry (adrparn).
Any property given to a woman as dowry goes with her if she changes husbands, but any ornaments or other property given to a wife by her husband are kept by the husband if the wife is transferred to another man or group of men.
Harkness records a case in which a dispute about property arose. In this case a woman bore two children to three husbands. One of the husbands died and the other two husbands married other wives. The two children claimed one-third of the property of the mother and her first husband, and Harkness was told that this was generally recognised to be a just claim. I did not inquire into this special case but according to the laws of inheritance of property which I have given, it would seem that the children were entitled to one-third of the whole of the property of the three brothers. If the property had been divided among the three brothers, the man who died would have received one-third, and the children should have received his share.
In all cases of distribution of property, inheritance depends on descent as determined by the pursütpimi ceremony, and not on the real descent, even if this should be well known. Thus the boy Meilitars (44), who is really the son of Kuriolv, but is legally the son of Pepners, should not inherit any of Kuriolv’s buffaloes, but will receive those of his legal father, Pepners, of whom at present he is the only son.
If the whole of a family, such as is given in one of the genealogical tables, should die out, the inheritance of the buffaloes and other property is determined by the nearest links of descent, of which a tradition may be preserved, even if the actual relationship cannot be definitely traced.
Several interesting features of Toda law are illustrated by a case out of which a lawsuit may one day arise. If the family of Kiugi (57) should become extinct, there would arise a dispute about the succession to the property, which would turn largely on a case in which the pursütpimi ceremony was performed several generations ago. When the eldest child of Tudrvan (52) was about to be born, Tudrvan was away from home, and had not performed the pursütpimi ceremony. There was a danger that the delivery might take place before the ceremony could be performed, and Kòrs (57) was therefore called in to give the bow and arrow, and Teitchi, who was born soon afterwards, was, according to Toda custom, the child of Kòrs. When Teitchi grew up, however, he decided to regard himself as the son of his real father, Tudrvan, and being a powerful and influential person like his grandson Kuriolv, he appears to have had his way, and his descendants have been regarded as the descendants of Tudrvan. Tudrvan himself gave the bow and arrow in the succeeding pregnancy, and there is therefore no doubt about the legitimacy of Pusheiri and his younger brothers and sisters.
Owing, however, to the part played by Kòrs before the birth of his grandfather, Kuriolv has lately directed that Kiugi, the son of Kòrs, should belong to the same pòlm as himself in order that he or his family may succeed to the buffaloes of Kiugi’s pòlm if this should die out. It is known, however, that Kiugi’s pòlm is closely related to that of Tüliners (56), so that should the pòlm of Kiugi become extinct, there would arise a lawsuit between Kuriolv and Tüliners or their representatives for the possession of Kiugi’s buffaloes.
The essential point of the situation is that Kuriolv is trying to make use of his double position as the descendant of Tudrvan by real paternity and of Kòrs by virtue of the pursütpimi ceremony. According to the latter he is of the same pòlm as Kiugi, but if equity prevails in the decision of the naim which may have to settle the dispute, Kuriolv or his representative will have to decide whether he is descended from Tudrvan or Kòrs, and will not be allowed to take advantage of both lines of descent.
As a matter of fact, I was assured by several Todas that though they have apparently fallen in with Kuriolv’s wishes, they still regard Kiugi’s pòlm as most closely allied to that of Tüliners, and if Kuriolv should die before the extinction of Kiugi’s family, I have little doubt that the naim would decide that the buffaloes of Kiugi should go to the family of Tüliners.
This potential lawsuit is important as showing the rôle played by the genealogies in the social regulations of the Toda community. We see that an eventuality which may never arise and probably will not arise for many years to come is already the subject of consideration and discussion, that the crucial point upon which the lawsuit will turn is an event which occurred probably about 120 years ago, and that the ties of kinship which will be involved in the dispute are carefully preserved in the memories of the people.
The history is also very interesting in showing that a century ago a man of force was able to set aside a fundamental regulation of Toda society, and that his grandson, who has apparently inherited the powerful character of his ancestor, is following in his footsteps, and, as we have seen frequently during this volume, is able to put on one side Toda customs or laws when they conflict with his interests or desires.
DEBT AND SERVITUDE
It seems to be not uncommon for a Toda to die in debt, and it is the duty of the sons to pay off the debts of their father. If there are no children, the payment of the debt is regarded as the duty of the brothers of the dead man.
When children have to pay the debts of their father, they may give their services to others, receiving in return money and other recompense. The usual pay is six rupees a year, two cloaks, and food. To this is often added the loan of a milking buffalo.
This custom of working for another is called kûlvatkerthchi or kûlvatkerthiti. Several of the eight sons of Pushteidi and Keitan (6) are now working to pay their father’s debts. Two of the sons are married to one woman and live at one of their own villages, where they look after the buffaloes of the family. Another brother is unmarried, but lives with a Teivali woman. The other five sons are unmarried and work for various people. One is employed on a tea estate, and the others are working for different Todas, who reward them in the manner already described. The milking buffaloes lent to them are handed over to the charge of the brothers who are married.
It is very exceptional to find a family in which so many of the men are unmarried, and this was said to be due to the necessity of paying off their father’s debt. In this case the two eldest brothers have remained unmarried, but this was said to have been due to their own choice. It seems that it is left to the family to decide which of them shall marry and which shall undertake the duty of paying the debt. As soon as the debt is paid off, all the sons are allowed to marry.
THE POSITION OF WOMEN
There is no doubt that women have a subordinate position in the Toda community. The ceremonial of the dairy has a predominant place in the lives and thoughts of the people, and the exclusion of women from any share in this ceremonial must have influenced the attitude of the community towards the sex. The laws regulating the relations of the dairymen with women also can hardly have contributed to raise the esteem in which they are held. The special ceremonies in which women are concerned involve various disabilities due to the ideas of impurity connected with these ceremonies. The seclusion-hut of a woman has attached to it the same ideas of impurity which attach to a corpse or its relics.
Not only are women excluded from any share in the work of the dairies connected with the sacred buffaloes, but they are also prohibited from any part in the milking of the ordinary buffaloes or in the churning of their milk, which is performed solely by males in a part of the hut with which women have nothing to do. It seems that at one time women had the one function of tending the buffaloes at the time of calving, but even this is no longer allowed them.
In other household matters, the duties of women are very limited in scope. Their chief work is the pounding and sifting of grain, the cleaning of the hut, and the decoration of clothing. I am doubtful whether they are allowed to cook, at any rate to cook food in which milk forms one of the ingredients. With such occupations as divining and sorcery they have nothing to do, but one woman has the reputation of possessing the powers of healing which belong to the utkòren.
I could not learn of any matters of social importance in which women are consulted. When collecting genealogies in Torres Straits, I found that women were often repositories of this important branch of knowledge, but I received no indication that this was the case with the Toda women, though I cannot say definitely that they may not have possessed some knowledge of this and cognate subjects.
Though thus unimportant in ceremonial and of little influence in the regulation of social affairs, women have nevertheless much freedom. In general social intercourse the two sexes always seemed to be on the best of terms, and I never saw or heard anything to indicate that women are treated harshly or contemptuously.
In my psychological tests it certainly seemed to me the general intelligence of the women was very much lower than that of the men. Some of the younger women were as acute and intelligent as the men, but the older women seemed to me hopelessly stupid. They did not try to give their minds to the tasks I set them with anything approaching the keenness and interest shown by the men, and again and again I failed to obtain results of any value in tests which men understood readily.
It seems probable that the intelligence of the two sexes is not appreciably different in youth, but that the social life of the women does nothing to develop this intelligence and everything to force its exercise into the narrowest channels.
It might, I think, be expected that polyandry would be associated with a subordinate position of woman, and there can be no doubt that the Todas show the association of the two conditions.
When a woman marries she becomes of the same clan as her husband, and this is a matter of some importance in connexion with religious and social ceremonial. Thus, in the funeral ceremonies of a woman, the choice of appropriate day and place, of the people who are to take part in the funeral rites and other features of the ceremonial are determined, not by the clan of the woman’s father, but by that of her husband, and this even when the marriage itself forms part of the funeral ceremonies.
While I was on the hills, the widow, Kiuneimi (3), who had been living with her father at Nòdrs, died. Her husbands had belonged to Kanòdrs, and as a member of this clan she should have been taken to its burning-ground. This was, however, so far from Nòdrs that it was decided not to go there, but to hold the funeral ceremonies near the place where she had died. The proper funeral place for Nòdrs women could not, however, be used, for she belonged to another clan, and the body was therefore taken to a village which was not a true funeral place, and so no laws were infringed.
The funeral of Sinerani (p. 391) is an excellent example which shows how all the details of a funeral ceremony are dependent on the transference of a young girl to the clan of a boy who acts as husband to the corpse. By her marriage to Keinba, the dead girl became a member of the Keadrol, and her funeral should have been held at the burning-ground of this clan. Many of the features of the ceremonies were in accordance with this change of clan, and since all were not so, the various mishaps which occurred at the funeral were ascribed by the Todas to the departure from prescribed custom.